Dublin Bus Routes Poster

This manual route-scroll for an old Dublin Bus has been a favourite in the Little Museum of Dublin collection for some time now. Familiar yet exotic, the scroll was seldom seen unrolled to its full length. It is a functional object, but the scroll also has a sacred quality, as the sudden appearance of one of these numbers (around a corner, late at night, in the rain) brought comfort to thousands of Dubliners over the years. 

For example, the 78A – now replaced by the 40 – was the backbone of public transport in North Clondalkin and Ballyfermot for four decades. It went between Aston Quay in the city centre and suburbs such as Kilmainham and Inchicore.

Bus services have their origins in the first horse-drawn tram in 1872. When new housing estates were built, buses started to provide serious competition to the trams, and by the 1940s the bus was king. Tram routes were numbered clockwise: route 1 went from Nelson’s Pillar to Ringsend, while route 31 went to Howth. Present-day bus routes 2, 3, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 18 and 19 trace their origins to tram routes of the same number. 

500mm x 700mm print on 170gsm uncoated paper packaged in a cardboard tube.