Worcester buses nostalgia: the 144 double decker and Newport Street

Perhaps because as a teenage schoolboy in the late 1950s/early 60s travelling home out of Worcester you were often hanging around the Newport Street terminus hoping, purely by chance of course, to bump into girls from the Alice Ottley, St Mary’s Convent or Girls’ Grammar. 

In my case, it was to catch the 144 double decker that ran through Powick, where I got off, and on to Great Malvern.

In 1931 AD McQuirk was commissioned by the Department of Public Health to take a series of images of the slum area of Dolday as part of a collection of Worcester’s vanishing streets This is looking up the road towards Broad Street

Whether any of the romances that flickered along the way among the scholastic hoards ever reached the bonfire stage I have no idea, but news recently that the remains of the 144 service are to be pensioned off because not enough people now use it, certainly brought back memories, because those three numerals are iconic in bus service history. 

The original Newport Street pictured in 1905 looking up towards All Saints church

In truth the Worcester to Malvern section was renumbered just 44 way back in 1989, but now the remainder of the route to Birmingham is likely to go too. Just like Newport Street bus station disappeared back in the late Sixties when the Blackfriars development, the predecessor to Crowngate, emerged from the rubble. 

One of the last parts of old Dolday to be demolished, taken in the late 1960s

Newport Street bus station didn’t, in fact, last long. It was opened in July 1946 by Worcester Corporation to cater for the increasing number of routes operating to points outside the city. 

It was built on the western end of the former slum area of Dolday, most of which had been knocked down in the 1920s and 30s as part of a slum clearance scheme that had been a long time coming: the official Act of Parliament having been passed in 1868 – more than 50 years earlier.

The good old 144 double decker waits at a Newport Street stand in 1949

The idea was to create a terminus for the county services, while the city services continued to operate mostly from Angel Place. As such it became the main stop-off point in Worcester for the 144, which ran between Birmingham and Great Malvern.

The service was first introduced by Midland Red in August 1914 and was extended to Malvern Wells two years later.

It was originally numbered 25, then 125. The number 144 was used from 1928.

Sadly the architecture of Newport Street bus station hardly did justice to the legendary 144, which was one of the longest running double decker bus routes in England.

A Newport Street station scene familiar to all bus travellers in the 1950s

Functional would be a good description. Angular concrete stands and seemingly acres of open tarmac.

Not a place to warm the cockles of a schoolboy’s heart on a wet and windy winter’s afternoon. Especially with the prospect of Latin homework in the evening.

A flooded Newport Street bus station in December, 1965. Probably the only time it looked vaguely artistic

But while the emergence of Newport Street bus station was hardly the crowning glory of Worcester’s slum clearance programme, it did give archaeologists a chance to have a dig around before the brickies got going and put things back up again.

And lo and behold what did the excavations around Newport Street uncover, but signs of an old Roman road. So all those years ago Spartacus and his 144 chariot might have come thundering down Castle Street looking to pick up fares to take to Malvern.

That’s when Latin would have come in handy. I knew there must have been a reason.