Bus Shelter

Bus Shelter, Whitley Road, Eastbourne

This bus shelter was erected in the first decade of the 20th century at the corner of Seaside and Whitley Road. It is believed to have been constructed by the firm Bolton and Paul. The building does not appear on the 1899 Ordnance Survey map, when the area was still largely agricultural, but is shown in its current location on the 1910 map following extensive suburban development in the locality during the first decade of the 20th century.

The shelter is an oblong building constructed on a brick plinth with timber weather-boarding walls and painted wooden pilasters at the corners and at the central opening. The north-east side features a large central opening flanked by two oval-shaped and keyed oculi. The roof is peg-tiled with a hipped form and cast iron ogee guttering. The interior has a soldier-laid red brick step with a tiled floor, cement rendered ceiling, and timber seating that was removed around 1996.

The shelter served as a passenger stop on one of the routes of Eastbourne's municipal bus service. The Eastbourne motor bus service, inaugurated in April 1903, is historically significant as probably the world's first, and certainly Britain's first, municipally run motor bus service. This represents a landmark in urban transport history at a time of rapid transformation. The first buses operated by Eastbourne were Miles Daimler 32-seater, 16-horsepower double-deckers. Eastbourne's last horse-drawn omnibus ran in August 1903. The shelter's decorative sub-classical architecture is well-suited to its location beside a park in a new suburban development near the seafront, and it can be considered a work of seaside resort public architecture as much as transport architecture. No other bus shelters of comparably early date in Eastbourne are known.