When did London have trams?

On 4 April 1901, the London United Tramway Company opened London's first regular electric tram service on a public road. This was the golden age of the electric tram. The first public tramway had opened in Blackpool in 1885, and between 1900 and 1907 the national tramway mileage doubled.



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The City of Oxford and District Tramway Company and its successor the City of Oxford Electric Traction Company operated a horse-drawn passenger tramway service in Oxford between 1881 and 1914. The tramway was unusual for having a track gauge of only 4 feet (1.219 m).

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An extensive tram network covered large parts of London for several decades during the first half of the twentieth century. By the 1950s, however, trams were seen as old fashioned and were gradually phased out to create more room for buses and cars.

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New routes were needed to serve the growing suburban areas, and buses were not hindered by fixed overhead equipment. The replacement programme began in 1959, and London's last trolleybus ran on 9 May 1962, from Wimbledon to Fulwell. After more than sixty years, electric street transport in London was at an end.

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But the trams had become a political football (in Leeds it was Labour that did for them, in Liverpool it was the Conservatives). They were unwanted clutter from the past at a time when operating costs of public transport networks were rising and meeting housing targets was the big priority for investment.

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Operating systems
  • Blackpool.
  • Edinburgh.
  • South London.
  • Manchester.
  • Nottingham.
  • Sheffield.
  • Tyne and Wear.
  • West Midlands.


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London had streets that were too narrow, unlike continental cities; London's housing developments were too far away from tram routes; authorities were prejudiced against trams.

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It is owned by London Tramlink, an arm of Transport for London (TfL) and is operated by Tram Operations Ltd (TOL), a subsidiary of FirstGroup.

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Trams were seen to impede on the freedom of private car owners in the city: the authorities believed that removing the tramways and replacing them with buses would allow for easier transport in and around Glasgow.

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The advent of buses and large-scale competition meant that buses often ran the same routes as the trams and would jump in front to grab customers, and buses were able to move into Dublin's expanding hinterland more quickly and at less cost than the trams, and the belief that trams were outdated and old technology, ...

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In the late 1980s, Nottingham City Council and Nottinghamshire County Council identified the possibility of using a modern tramway as a means of stimulating urban renewal, as well as tackling road congestion. Plans began from around 1990, by Nottingham Development Enterprise, under Malcolm Reece.

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