At their peak there were well over 100 tram systems in Britain. Every major city and many small towns had a network carrying millions of people each week. They were cheap and popular with workers – often bringing them right to the door of their factories.

But they had few defenders among the middle classes, who thought they got in the way of cars, which were seen as the future. The systems that were not shut down during the second world war by disuse or enemy action were soon closed in the aftermath. It was one of the great transport policy mistakes of the 20th century.

Trams were a marked advance on their predecessors: horse-drawn omnibuses had been slow, inefficient and expensive because of the cost of the horses, doomed to live short miserable lives as a result of the harsh nature of the work. Omnibuses – too expensive to be a genuine mass form of transport – were the preserve of the middle classes.

Trams were able to cater for the masses, and since the roads were so bad, laying tracks enabled far more efficient progress. The first horse-drawn trams appeared in London along the Bayswater Road between Marble Arch and Notting Hill Gate in 1861. They were a failure, but by the end of the decade tram systems had been laid in Liverpool, Glasgow and Edinburgh too. London saw its first regular tram service running in south London between Brixton and Kennington in 1870.



It was the electrification of trams – which began in the 1880s – that enabled them to reach their full potential. Even in those early days, electricity proved to be far cheaper than horses, so fares could be reduced at the same time as services improved. Trams enjoyed a boom and were widely used by the working class, who had hitherto been unable to travel distances of any great length unless they were lucky enough to live in areas with suburban railways and cheap “workmen’s trains”. Yet unlike railways, tram systems offered cheap fares throughout the day.

A tram on Westminster Bridge in 1910. Photograph: Roger Viollet/Rex/Shutterstock

Trams were an early version of a partnership between local authorities and private enterprise since they were dependent on installing rails in municipally owned streets – over time most tram systems became municipally owned. This was initially beneficial for their growth but, eventually, hastened their postwar demise.

Trams were not universally welcomed, precisely because they catered for the working classes. The City of London refused to allow trams on its streets, arguing that they “catered for an undesirable class of person”. It was an attitude that was not confined to the City.

With the rise of the car, public transport was reckoned to be of little relevance. Suburban rail networks were pared back, bus networks were thinned out – and all of Britain’s tram networks, with the exception of Blackpool’s famous seafront route, were closed by the early 60s. They were seen as getting in the way of cars and of being irrelevant to the needs of the second half of the 20th century.



Manchester’s last tram ran in 1949, London went in 1952 and Birmingham stumbled on until the year after that. Liverpool’s system was scrapped in 1957. Dozens of systems in smaller towns, nearly all of which had become municipally owned, had gone already.

Workmen pulling up an old tram line in Birmingham in 1923 as a trolleybus passes. Photograph: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

Trolleybuses – a quiet form of public transport that was cheap and did not emit fumes – were also culled. There were roughly 50 systems around the UK at their peak; because they required less investment, and were not perceived to be getting in the way of cars quite so much, they survived longer. Many were not closed down until the 1960s – and the schemes in Walsall and Cardiff survived until the start of the 1970s – but in the end they too closed.



The situation was different in many towns and cities in Europe – particularly eastern Europe, where car ownership was low under communism, and in its northern countries, which had a more enlightened attitude towards public transport. Many European cities also saw the value in the quiet (if slightly cumbersome) trolleybuses, and they too survive to this day.

Trams reborn

It wasn’t until the 1980s that trams began to be recognised again as a very effective form of urban transport.

France, which closed all its systems in the postwar period, led the way in Europe with new tram systems in Grenoble and Nantes in the middle of the decade. It now has 27 networks, including in modest-sized cities such as Valenciennes (population just 43,000) and Caen (109,000). Even in car-dominated North America, systems began appearing in cities as diverse as Calgary, Portland and San Diego.

The City of London refused to allow trams on its streets, arguing that they ‘catered for an undesirable class of person’

Britain was slow off the mark, however. The UK opened its first schemes in Sheffield and Manchester in 1992, while London got its only tramline, the Croydon Tramlink, in 2000. If the historic Blackpool system (which has now been given new rolling stock) is included, eight urban areas now boast systems. The latest one is in Edinburgh, but the massive cost overruns and delays have probably killed off any hopes of new systems being built for a generation.



In France and most other European countries, local authorities are able to draw up plans and drive them through, usually with some support from central government. Their UK counterparts, by contrast, are weak both financially and administratively. This means that the initiative has to come from central government, where the zeitgeist can change all too quickly.

A tram passing the Savoy Hotel in Zurich’s city centre. Photograph: Mark Williamson/Getty Images

Small is beautiful

There is no doubt which country has the most well-thought through and coherent transport policy: Switzerland, where buses meet trams that are then timed with trains.



At the urban level, Zurich encapsulates the truly integrated Swiss approach. The city has been through many of the same issues as London but has produced very different answers. In the 1950s, the municipal authorities began to suggest that trams were getting in the way of motorists and needed to be put in underground tunnels. The plan to make this radical change was put to a vote in 1962 but, despite the support of local planners and councillors, was rejected by the public because of the cost. A second attempt was made a decade later and failed again.

Gradually, an alternative suggestion emerged, inspired by the “small is beautiful” concept of EF Schumacher. Instead of being held up by cars, trams would be given priority. Put to a public vote in 1977, this passed narrowly – and changed the whole focus of Zurich’s transport policy that remains to this day.

A plan for urban motorways to be built into the city centre was also rejected around this time, and an overtly pro-public transport ethos came to dominate. The crucial aspect is that the whole transport system works in an integrated, seamless way. All rail lines were provided with regular interval services and were coordinated so that connections were easy and guaranteed. Trains wait for each other when there are delays. Even small outlying towns and villages are given a guaranteed connection, which leads to very high levels of usage.

So Switzerland has the best tram systems in the world, and Zurich has the lowest modal share of car transport of almost any global city of comparable size. This is not happenstance but the result of a coherent, long-term transport policy that has made it a highly liveable city.

In Britain, we are addicted to big projects such as HS2. Instead, we need to focus on smaller urban schemes within the framework of reducing car use and encouraging walking, cycling and public transport. Trams should be at the heart of this programme.

Christian Wolmar’s new book, Are Trams Socialist? Why Britain has no transport policy, is available now