ABSTRACT
This chapter examines discourses surrounding both the speed of London buses during the first hundred years of their operation, spanning the transition from horse to motor power, and the excitement, anxieties and frustrations that variously constituted the experience of ‘hurry’ in travelling by bus. It also traces technological, design and organizational changes that were intended to accelerate travel, some of which, such as the introduction of fixed bus stops, constituted a material architecture of hurry. Maps and route numbers made the system more legible to users; safer means of accessing buses potentially speeded up operation. The frequency of accidents illustrates the risks that drivers, passengers and pedestrians were prepared to take in the interests of ‘hurry’. The chapter offers historical evidence to illustrate Cresswell’s thesis that mobility cannot be understood without examination of both representation and ‘material corporeality’; and it also shows how, in the nineteenth century, public transport could be as much an ‘enemy of civility’ as, for Sheller and Urry, automobility became by the late twentieth century.
