London, once home to the world's largest tram network, squandered it all — and has stood aside as a global tram renaissance gathers pace, argues Nicholas Boys Smith, founder and chairman of Create Streets.

London, the city of lost trams

Londoners made 280 million tram journeys as early as 1895, and by the 1920s the capital operated the largest tram network in the world. The system was created with private capital and municipal borrowing and largely paid for itself from passenger fares — public transport for the public good, with little public subsidy.

Then disaster struck, thanks to over-centralised state control. In 1933, private and municipal tramways were nationalised and amalgamated into the London Passenger Transport Board. The London County Council, having bought the network at considerable cost, then destroyed it.

The 1929–30 Royal Commission on Transport had proposed removing trams as obsolescent and inflexible, suggesting buses and trolleybuses in their place. In what Boys Smith calls London's greatest single act of infrastructure destruction, the city's tramways were ripped up. The last tram ran from Woolwich to New Cross on 6 July 1952; Blackpool's seafront line, open since 1885, would become the only first-generation British tramway to survive the closures.

London destroyed the world's greatest tram network in the belief that buses and cars would free its streets. Instead, it exchanged permanent capacity for permanent congestion — a trade-off that weighs on a capital of nearly nine million people today.

A flawed case for removal

The Royal Commission's argument was flawed, Boys Smith contends. Flexibility can become fragility: a bus route is easier to alter, but it offers less capacity, less certainty and less power to shape investment. Ironically, trams were abolished to relieve congestion, yet congestion remains.

The global tram renaissance

Globally, a tram renaissance is underway. In 40 countries, 148 cities have built new tramways, laying 2,550 miles of track — enough to cross the United States from coast to coast. The revival gathered pace from the 1980s, when Nantes opened France's first modern tram in 1985 and cities from Strasbourg and Bordeaux to Paris, with its orbital T3 lines, followed; Melbourne, whose network is today the world's largest, never abandoned trams at all. Cities are recreating trams because of their higher capacity, popularity, environmental benefits and the prosperity boost they can engender.

Trams carry three times more people than buses and 15 times more than cars. Their greater reliability and comfort lead to greater use: Munich's new trams have 50 per cent more passengers than the buses they replaced. Trams' steel wheels limit particulate emissions, and those living near trams can have 65 per cent lower personal carbon footprints. By supporting urban movement, trams boost local productivity and urban agglomeration. They have most of the benefits of metros at little of the cost — cheap trains, not expensive buses.

London, however, has missed the renaissance. While Manchester, Sheffield, the West Midlands, Nottingham and Edinburgh have all opened modern systems since 1992 — Edinburgh's line was extended to Newhaven as recently as 2023 — the capital's one modern tramway, the Croydon Tramlink, opened in 2000 and carries tens of millions of passengers a year. In the 25 years since, London has studied, consulted on and abandoned every proposed successor. A dozen schemes have hit the buffers. London is the loser from this inability to execute.

Too expensive, too slow to build

Britain makes it too expensive to build trams. Create Streets' co-authored report, Back on Track, calculated that it costs £87 million per mile to build trams in Britain, compared with a European average of £42 million. The causes: long and centralised approval processes, extensive diversion of buried utilities, bespoke designs, fragmented procurement and the tendency to load wider public-realm works onto tram budgets.

There is no continuous programme. Teams are assembled and then disbanded, so the next scheme starts again without retained knowledge, common designs or economies of scale. Britain, almost uniquely, requires central approval for each new tram — a process that takes many years, costs millions to draft in consultant and legal fees, and places unnecessary burdens on every project. Unsurprisingly, most fail, even though Coventry's new trams show how to side-step HM Treasury's rules. Coventry's Very Light Rail programme, run by the city council with the University of Warwick's manufacturing group, is betting on a smaller, lighter vehicle and simpler track installation to cut costs through engineering rather than process reform.

There was no such nonsense when Britain built trams: the Tramways Act 1870 authorised local authorities to grant concessions to private tramway operators to construct and operate tramlines.

A taskforce to untie the knot

The government has created a Mass Transit Taskforce to untie this knot — a move Boys Smith regards as right, though he suspects its focus will be on northern towns. The question to watch is whether its remit, and any powers that follow, reach the capital as well. If London wants to be cleaner, better and easier to move around, he writes, it should ensure that it too wins back the freedom to make trams and move free.

Nicholas Boys Smith is the founder and chairman of Create Streets.