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Catch the last tram
FROM aninauspicious introduction by George Francis Train in the 1860s up to Ken Livingstone’s plans to revive the tram as a panacea to the city’s travel problems, trams have been falling in and out of favour with London crowds for well over a century.
Likewise, the art-work used to advertise trams and their destinations is now expected to reach auction prices in the region of £1,000 each when they go under the hammer at Christie’s auction house this month.
Horse trams reached Kentish Town in 1871 and further, to South End Green, in 1887. The line was popular with daytrippers to the Heath, who came for the famous Hampstead Heath fairs on Bank Holidays or the athletic displays of the Highgate Diving Club.
Two of the vintage posters for sale at Christie’s feature Art Deco depictions of Kenwood – the high diving board of the Highgate Ponds prominent in one; an idyllic Heath lake in the other.
Hampstead residents opposed the trams, regarding them as a working-class form of transport, and prevented them from moving further into the parish.
Electrifying the trams gave them an edge of glamour, but after the Second World War they were replaced by trolley buses and the Tube, and that familiar rumble, which George Orwell wrote about when he lived and worked in South End Green, was heard no more.
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