Why London doesn't have trains on Christmas
Christmas Day Tube service ran until 1980, when London Transport shut it down
If there’s one thing Brits love, it’s Christmas. Christmas is a national pastime, a holiday that officially spans Christmas Eve to Boxing Day but is preferably celebrated for all of December. I grew up in a family that celebrates Christmas in a place (Boston, Massachusetts) that is colder and more wintery and Christmas-y in aesthetic than much of the UK, certainly moreso than London in December, and yet there is simply no competing with the British Christmas spirit, something I suspect has to do with Christmas in the UK serving the role of Thanksgiving and the winter holidays combined in the U.S.
Because Christmas is a national pastime in the UK, almost everything shuts down on the day. London is of course a huge international city, but unlike in New York City, you will not find an abundance of restaurants and corner stores open, or plentiful activities should you not observe. Even if there were things to do, you probably couldn’t get to them, because there is no public transport in London on Christmas.
That’s right, you read that right. There are no trains or buses, no Overground or Underground. The only ways to get around London on Christmas Day are to walk, to cycle (you can still rent a Santander Cycle), to hire a cab, or to have a car and drive. Should none of those modes appeal or be accessible to you, you do what most people in London do, which is not travel on Christmas Day.
It wasn’t always like this. Until 1978, London Transport operated a limited Christmas Day service, the details of which were faithfully chronicled by one P.R. Creswell in Underground News, a monthly magazine published by members organization London Underground Railway Society.
In 1977, despite a “popular rumour” that London Transport would do away with Christmas Day services, the Tube was still running and our Mr. Creswell busy documenting it (with evident delight—he wrote in that year’s “Christmas Comes But Once a Year” dispatch that the amended Tube schedule made Christmas Day “a very special one and well worth the while in spending it on the system rather than watching the nth. re-run of a film on T.V.!”) Christmas 1977 Tube traffic was, per Mr. Creswell, “relatively light,” though he did encounter one train “with a standing load in the afternoon period.” Most trains ran every 30 minutes, finishing around 4pm. In total, 92 stations were open for part of the day that year, continuing a decades-long decline in Christmas Day services.
The trains kept running for Christmas 1978 and 1979—and, better yet, they were free. Those years, London Transport waived fares for Tube and bus rides but continued to curtail its holiday network. The 1978 and 1979 services were relatively similar, and both years our intrepid Mr. Creswell was out to document things. Of the 1978 service and its free fares he writes:
This sounds, to the layman, quite a bargain, until you remember that only 27 trains were running over less than half the usual mileage with only about one-third of stations opened. The situation on the buses was worse, as only 38 routes operated, many of these being short of the full length. It was to be expected that the abolition of fare collection would lead to a heavier patronage and this did appear to happen – though not to a particularly great degree; it is also a fact that there were people travelling who should not have been! This is explained by the old gentleman at Harrow who wanted to get to Northwick Park (closed) and did not feel up to walking (he used a stick) from Harrow – he postponed a visit to his nephew and went home for a drink, taking the philosophical view that he had, at least, ‘had a trip out’ (and free at that!)
Then came Christmas 1980, and with it no Underground service from the close of Christmas Eve until mid-morning on Boxing Day. The two-part report that followed in the 1981 Underground News was penned not by Mr. Creswell but by editor Brian Hardy and titled grimly, “Christmas Used to Come But Once a Year.”
“It has taken 35 years to close down London’s Underground system completely on Christmas Day,” Hardy wrote, explaining that the Christmas train closures began in 1938 with only four stations. A few years earlier, London transport services had come under the management of the London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB), a newly created government agency that effectively bought out private bus and Tube operators in a stock and cash deal. For its first few years, the LPTB operated a normal Sunday service on Christmas Day.
The “actual decline of Christmas Day services and stations,” in Hardy’s words, started in 1945, the first Christmas after VE Day, when 11 stations closed. That number would increase, sometimes steadily and sometimes in leaps and bounds, over the next three decades. For Christmas 1955, 31 stations closed all day; in 1965 there were 104 full-day and 24 part-day closures; by 1975, 165 full-day and 112 part-day closures. (These numbers are bigger than the ones Mr. Creswell had previously reported, but I’d imagine more accurate.)
In retrospect, those final two years of free Christmas Day travel were a warning sign. Writes Hardy:
For the last two years, travel on the Underground system on Christmas Day (or what little remained of it) was given free to the public to reduce the number of staff required to work (booking clerks and ticket collectors), to allow more staff to have the day off, and to reduce the high bill claimed each year by staff who had to work, but had no transport facilities to get them there, and for public goodwill. It is thought that the remaining service was ‘killed off’ this year as part of the cuts and economies currently being made by London Transport, under the new chairmanship of Sir Peter Masefield.
So there you have it, 1980 marked the end of Christmas Day transport services in London, beginning our current era of holiday non-travel and resigning poor Mr. Creswell to a Christmas at home with film re-runs. Or, as Hardy concluded: “The writer hopes that Paul found something to do this Christmas Day!”