Streamlined transport : Green Line Coaches : Dorking, Surrey : nd [c.1935]

A found photo that is, I am sure, an 'official' London Transport image and shows, I suspect, the then Green Line Coaches offices and garage at Dorking in Surrey but I am open to corrections! The site at Dorking was opened in 1932, the year before the Underground Group controlled bus and coach operations of Country Bus Services and Green Line Coaches became, along with the rest of the Group, part of the new London Passenger Transport Board, best recalled as London Transport.

 

The Board is internationally known for its Underground architecture of the period; the new and reconstructed bus garages, both Central and Country Areas, to help modernise and support growing road services are less well know. In addition they have no been recognised for their own architectural importance and few, if any, of merit were heritage 'protected' and almost all have now been demolished. Whereas Adams, Holden & Pearson are connected with the Underground the equally influential partnership of Wallis, Gilbert & Partners were to undertake much work for LT. This is not, I'm sure, by them but it can be seen as a prototype of the streamlined 'thirties style that was adopted for many LT bus garages with extensive use of carefully chosen and bonded brick. This was a move away from a more 'monumental' style of semi-Georgian brick facades with stone or reconstitued stone details that the LGOC and its associated bus companies, such as Green Line, had largely adopted in the 1920s.

 

To the side can be seen a glimpse of what looks to be very much like a Green Line AEC coach of some type with side mounted running boards.

 

The garage and offices closed in 1990, twenty years after Green Line and Country Area operations passed to the new National Bus Company, and have been demolished replaced, I think, by housing at the corner of Horsham Road and South Street.

Done