Photo Location

A Memory of Thorpe Bay.

This picture shows the beach and the Eastern Esplanade at the Thorpe Hall Boulevard Junction. The elaborate shelter was built as the Thorpe Bay Terminus Waiting Room for the Southend Corporation Tramways before the Esplanade Line was linked with the Bournes Green Southchurch Rd. Line by a double track running between the two points, along what is now the green-way centre of the Boulevard past the Thorpe Bay Golf Club.
When I was attending Thorpe Hall School, I used to be very glad of that Bus Shelter on winter days when the weather was bad. It wasn't heated, but it was dry and out of the wind, and it was also lit during darkness when the Corporation transport was running.
I think the Conductor of the last bus on the route locked it at night, and the conductor of the first bus on the route unlocked it each morning.
The Corporation stupidly started to scrap the trams in circa 1937, removed the lIne through the Boulevard in 1938, and got rid of the last trams in 1941, in favour of the "tracklesses" or trolley-buses. The tramlines throughout the town had mostly been lifted by 1945 during wartime Scrap Metal Drives. The Old tram Station remained a protected stop for would-be passengers on the Trolley Busses and diesel buses that ran via the Boulevard, -and also the ones that ran along the esplanade to and from Shoeburyness.