New acquisition - Coventry Corporation bus destination blind

Coventry Transport Museum recently acquired an intriguing object, which was kindly donated by Mr Crick.

This impressive object is a Coventry Corporation Transport bus destination blind, from 1962.

The item would have been situated on the front of a bus, and features many prominent locations from around Coventry such as Earlsdon, Keresley Road, Baginton Civic Airport and Foleshill. 

The blind is shown here completely unrolled, and measures over 10 metres in length!

Unlike the digital destination displays on buses today, to change the destination display the bus conductor would have to manually turn the blind with a winding handle. We believe that this particular blind was used on the Coundon - Kingsbury Roard - Wood End - City route, since the fabric is slightly discoloured and worn around those particular place names.

What is particularly interesting about Coventry Destination Blinds is the tapered writing - many of the destination names were too long to fit on the blind, so this style of writing was used to allow for the entire place name to fit.

The blind is currently held in our Small Objects Collection store, but it looks likely that it will go on display in the fairly near future, in one of our newly redesigned galleries.

Find out more about our Redevelopment project.