The Tilling Group was one of two conglomerates that controlled almost all of the major bus operators in the United Kingdom between World Wars I and II and until nationalisation in 1948.

Tilling, together with the other conglomerate, British Electric Traction (BET), became the main constituents of the country's nationalised bus industry in the late 1960s and was sufficiently well known to have entered popular culture as part of London's Cockney rhyming slang (Thomas Tilling = shilling).

[1] The company continued as an industrial conglomerate after the nationalisation of its bus interests; it was acquired by BTR plc in 1983.

Tilling was born in 1825 at Gutter's Hedge Farm, Hendon, Middlesex, of parents who had moved there from Gloucestershire.

In January 1850, he purchased a horse bus together with the right to run four journeys a day between Peckham and Oxford Street.

This bus he drove himself, and at the time had only one employee, a conductor named Joseph Eagle, who stayed with the firm until the end of his working life, well into the 1890s.

In addition to bus work, the company hired carriages to individuals and to a range of public utilities.

In 1907, Tilling began the first long-distance motor bus service, running 13 buses between Oxford Circus and Sidcup in Kent.

During the 1920s, the "Big Four" divested themselves of much of the operations of their bus networks by transferring their interests to Tilling and BET in exchange for shares.

[2] In 1935, Tilling took over Royal Blue, which was the premier express coach company in the South and West of England, with a network of routes stretching from Penzance to Margate and Bournemouth to London, having developed tours and local services around Bournemouth and the New Forest in the horse-drawn era and express coach services after the First World War.

[8] The companies in TBAT were split between Tilling and BET, and the two groups continued to operate independently until nationalisation began in the late 1940s.

Tilling sold its remaining holdings to the BTC at the beginning of 1949, as did the Scottish Motor Traction group.