The London village with a better bus service than Mayfair
We've all been to Mayfair, the most valuable property on the Monopoly board. Within its 0.996 square kilometres can be found some of the most valuable real estate on the planet, not to mention London's most prestige shopping experiences, most luxury brand showcases and most fine dining establishments. Even if we're not lucky enough to be able to afford four houses or a hotel, we can always hop on a bus and strut our vibe in the swankiest of neighbourhoods, right?
(sorry, I'm auditioning again for a job writing bus-related clickbait)
But in a genuine mindblowing twist it turns out there's a village in outer London, an actual proper village with farms and horses, which gets a BETTER bus service than top-of-the-pile Mayfair. It doesn't even have a shop, this village, whereas Mayfair has a dense multitude of chic boutiques, five star hotels, private members clubs, designer collections and even a Tesco Express. And yet you can stand by the village sign on the village green in this remote rural hideaway and your chance of flagging down a red London bus is somehow much greater. Priorities, much?
Before I get to the big reveal, let's bash some data.
According to the Ordnance Survey, London has 25 villages.
Bexley: Coldblow, North Cray Bromley: Berry's Green, Chelsfield, Cudham, Downe, Hazelwood, Horns Green, Keston, Leaves Green, Luxted, Maypole, Pratt's Bottom, Ruxley, Single Street, South Street, Upper Ruxley Enfield: Botany Bay, Crews Hill Havering: North Ockendon, Wennington Hillingdon: Harefield, Hill End, South Harefield Kingston: Malden Rushett
A lazy journo might assume Marylebone to be a village, and a deluded developer might claim some godforsaken estuarine reclamation is a village, and a geographer might argue Harmondsworth shows multiple features expected of a village, but I'm going with the official Ordnance Survey definition because even a greedy traffic-obsessed website should base its clickbait on facts.
We can ignore Hill End because it doesn't have a bus service. We can ignore Maypole because it lost its bus service last month. We can ignore Cudham, Hazelwood, Horns Green and Pratt's Bottom because they're on the peripheral loop served every 2½ hours by routes R5 and R10 in an alternating manner. And we can ignore Berry's Green, Luxted and Single Street because they're served by the R8 which runs every hour and fifteen minutes at best. Which leaves just 16 better-served villages to investigate, one of which totally smashes Mayfair.
2 buses an hour: Chelsfield (R7), Crews Hill (456)
Both of these get a half-hourly bus service terminating in the village so you can only depart twice an hour. It's a far better service than many provincial villages get but it's very low for London.
3 buses an hour: Downe (146 & R8)
Downe may be served by two bus routes but the R8 is infrequent and the 146 terminates here.
4 buses an hour: Malden Rushett (465), North Cray (492), South Street (246)
These lie on half-hourly bus routes with services in both directions, which is by no means a poor service but they can't hold a candle to our winner.
6 buses an hour: Botany Bay (313), Coldblow (B12), Keston (146 & 246), Upper Ruxley (233), Wennington (372)
Three buses an hour in both directions, now we're talking, but these are still some way off the top spot.
9 buses an hour: Harefield (331 & U9), North Ockendon (347 & 370),
The only London settlement beyond the M25 really shouldn't be getting 9 buses an hour, one of which is the minimally infrequent 347 and the other mainly ferrying shoppers to Lakeside. Meanwhile Harefield is London's most populous village so it's only fair it gets a decent bus service.
10 buses an hour: Ruxley (233 & 492)
Arguably Ruxley is just the linear strip past the medieval church and the garden centre, which'd be 6 buses an hour, but if you embrace the roundabout by the BMW showroom that boosts the total to 10.
12 buses an hour: South Harefield (331 & U9)
In the runners-up slot it's all the houses strung out along Church Hill and Harvil Road to the south of Harefield who get a very decent service overall.
12 buses an hour: Mayfair (22)
The amazing reason for Mayfair's thrashing, it turns out, is because it's served by just a single bus route. Sure two dozen routes run round the edge of Mayfair, but only the 22 threads through any of the central streets and we reckon that's what counts. Amazingly only the 22 serves shirt-tastic Savile Row and only the 22 crosses globally-renowned New Bond Street and only the 22 spins round nightingale-filled Berkeley Square. What's more it only makes this essential double decker pilgrimage six times an hour in both directions, totting up a miserly dozen buses through Mayfair altogether. A total opportunity missed, we say, but TfL's loss is totally Uber's gain.
So who's the daddy?
18 buses an hour: Leaves Green (246 & 320 & R2)
Leaves Green is a linear village on the main road south of Keston, population one thousand tops, so doesn't deserve the excellent bus service it gets. But it benefits from being on the way to Biggin Hill, a much bigger settlement, thereby piggybacking on the trio of bus routes targeted there. In particular it benefits from the 320 which runs every 12 minutes between Catford and Biggin Hill Valley, and this one bus route by itself beats every other London village except Ruxley and South Harefield. Throw in the 246 on its way to Westerham and the R2 weaving down from Orpington and you have a village with a bus service exceeding many parts of central London.
The bumper bus-loving village that totally thrashes Mayfair is called Leaves Green. No we'd never heard of it either because we're totally London-focused so Bromley falls beyond our blinkers. But Wikipedia insists it exists and we had a look on Google Maps from our office and it actually looks quite nice.
Leaves Green is basically a lot of big houses set back around a village green in the middle of the countryside. It has a cul-de-sac called Milking Lane, how cute is that, and nudges up against the top end of Biggin Hill airport. It has two pubs, only one of which has ever been crashed into by a Spitfire, and only one of which sells Turkish humus kavurma and peynirli salata. It has a riding school, should straddling a horse be your weekend passion. It has a genuine K6 telephone box for taking proper selfies. It has a white coal tax post they're so proud of they've stuck it on the village sign. And it has, count them, EIGHTEEN buses an hour so it crushes Mayfair into the ground public-transport-wise.
Leaves Green also has more buses than the British Museum, and more buses than Southwark Bridge, and more buses than Leadenhall Street, and also more buses than the Tower of London if you take a very limited view of where access to the Tower of London actually is.
We fail to understand TfL's priorities here and demand they reroute Leaves Green's buses to serve central London immediately, because it pays to end your clickbait post with a wild inflammatory opinion to ignite online debate. Whatever Leaves Green's got it's got too much and Mayfair totally needs more of it.
