Last Saturday one bus route on the edge of east London disappeared and another quadrupled in length. I didn't fancy spending my birthday in Upminster so left it a few days before taking a ride on the end result.
• The 346used to be one of London's shortest bus routes, a brief curl around the estates east of Upminster linking Cranham to the tube. It's grown.
• The 347is London's least frequent bus route, operating just four times a day and never on a Sunday. It continues.
• The 497was London's most unnecessary bus, introduced in January 2020 to connect not many people to Crossrail at Harold Wood. It's vanished.
I wrote a detailed analysis of the changes a couple of months so you should read that if you're interested. But in short, what happened last Saturday is that the 346 extended north from Upminster station along the remote rural route of the 347, then swallowed the 497 whole. New 346 = Old 346 + 347 + 497
Route 346: Upminster Park Estate to Harold Hill Location: London east, outer Length of bus journey: 10 miles, 50 minutes
346: The 346 starts where it always did, beside a large patch of grass in the middle of the Upminster Hall estate. TfL thought they'd have to add a toilet here to make the new route work but have made do without, to residents' relief if not drivers'. Buses used to depart every 15 minutes but under the new arrangements it's every 20 so local residents alas now have a worse service.
It's an odd start, first heading round a four minute loop back to almost where we started. A 248 is looping just in front of us, hoovering up most of the passengers, but we do attract a couple. One's an elderly man who addresses the driver with a smiley hello and a look that says "you're the first person I've spoken to today, I wish you had more to say". Queens Gardens is seriously potholed and leads to some private woodland on the very edge of east London. If you live out here, near the Cranham Brickfields, you're either very grateful for the 346 bus or more likely your front garden is full of cars. Switchbacking past the bungalows we reach the centre of Cranham by the tube depot, pausing briefly outside the Pie and Mash Cafe with its obligatory England flags. From here we're a faster route to Upminster than the 248 so by the time we reach St Mary's Lane there are ten passengers on board.
Hello TfL: The bus stops along this section of the route still have tiles which say '346 Monday-Saturday' whereas the service is now daily (hurrah), so they should have the plain 346 tiles the new bit of the route has.
346/347: From here we shadow the route of the two-hourly 347, the local irrelevance that occasionally links to Ockendon. We're approaching the centre of Upminster from the east, past the British Legion and eventually Waitrose where some of our passengers scarper. If I were to try to summarise the contrasting demographics hereabouts in just two cafe names, they would be Upminster Tandoori and Essex Grill. At the crossroads we turn right and hit the high street, where retro Upminster still boasts a department store and a Wimpy. Outside the latter is where driver changeover normally takes place, but only in the opposite direction so thankfully we speed through. By the time we reach the station, where the 346 formerly terminated, there's instead been a complete changeover of passengers (myself excluded).
347: Beyond the station the houses get bigger, grander and villa-ier. They're adding 35 more where the pitch and putt course used to be, whereas the proper golf course where the serious adults play has avoided being five-bedroomed. Upminster Tithe Barn Museum is alas closed until next year due to roof repairs but still has a bus stop named after it. So contortedly-spiralling is our route that if you'd missed the 346 at its departure point you could easily have walked to the River Drive bus stop and caught it here - I managed it in 12 minutes whereas the bus has taken 20. Just one more stop remains before we hit the edge of town, named after a veterinary centre founded in 1908, and then the Green Belt hits with a vengeance.
Hello TfL: What follows is one of the longest gaps between bus stops in Greater London, a full 1.4 miles, as we skip over a major junction on the Southend Arterial and skirt fresh woods. It perhaps made sense not to stop here when there were only four buses a day but now there are 66 and everyone who lives inbetween is missing out. And people do live here - there's Martin's Cottage and Summerhill Terrace for a start, then everyone up Cornlands Close and the incredibly worthy cause of the Meadowbanks Care Home. London Loop section 22 passes through too, plus there's the car park for Pages Wood, but buses simply speed by missing all this out. It shouldn't be difficult to add a bus stop here, even if it was just a flag on a pole and not an all-perfect drop-kerb accessible node, and it'd barely slow the service down. Having gone to all the effort of vastly improving the local bus service, not stopping for a mile and a half is a serious wrong that needs seriously righting.
When we do finally pause, at Pages Lane, we've zipped across the divide between Upminster and Harold Wood in three minutes flat. Alight here for Tylers Common and the start of a row of cottages, or at the next stop for the Towie-esque Array Brasserie and Grill. Residents on Shepherds Hill are the biggest winners of the 346's upgrade, now with 15 times as many buses per day and a Sunday service to boot, should they ever choose to use it. We cross the river Ingrebourne at Cockabourne Bridge, a smirkable name hilariously immortalised on a bus stop. By the time we reach the church, the clinic and Harold Wood's Neighbourhood Centre, but not yet the shops, two other bus routes have filtered in to help us out. At the station we unexpectedly swing round and pull up on the opposite side of the road before continuing, all the better to serve Crossrail, which is where our four miles of 347-shadowing comes to an end.
Hello TfL: Which begs the question, why haven't you scrapped the 347 yet? It's never performed a useful function between Romford and Harold Wood, no longer performs a useful function between Harold Wood and Cranham and still isn't necessary between North and South Ockendon. Its sole unique bit is now an underpopulated two miles between Cranham and North Ockendon, and OK these people pay London taxes but it's hard to argue they deserve this 12 mile long route. In January it was announced that route 347 remains 'under review', but short of turning it into a brief runty shuttle or pulling a magic rabbit from a hat and extending it somewhere unexpected it probably needs to die. Politically speaking, maybe that's best done after the Mayoral election.
ex-497: From Harold Wood station onwards the 346 follows what used to be route 497 into the remains of a hospital. Its former site is now 800 houses served on a hail and ride basis, with buses the only vehicles allowed to drive straight through. This is the busiest I've ever seen this service, picking up seven passengers on the way through and then dropping off a couple of pensioners from Upminster at the back of the big Tesco. There are still ten of us aboard as we head for the A12 and cross it, numbers I'd never previously have believed, but maybe that's what a more frequent service delivers. Everything round here screams cars cars cars - driving them, selling them, servicing them - so it's good to see so many people not using them.
Only one resident alights on Chatteris Avenue, the tiny gap in the network the 497 was introduced for, because most are waiting for the big shops on Hilldene Avenue. It no longer merits a pub but it does have a poundshop called Bargain Town and a takeaway called Fish'n'chicken. Just one person wants to ride the last stretch up Dagnam Park Drive, another blinks hard and checks the timetable to try to work out what this new bus might be. By the time we've climbed out of the valley and turned right at the trig point I'm the only passenger left, eventually turfed off by the Turdis at Stratton Road Woodland. The edge of Greater London is less than a mile away, as it has been for most of the ride.
The 497 was a total failure of a bus route - introduced without good reason, extended in desperation, persistently underused and scrapped within four years. But given that over 30 passengers in total joined me aboard the extended 346 perhaps a proper solution has finally been found to the problem of how best to serve outer Havering. Quadrupling the length of what used to be the 8th shortest bus route in London has created something people actually want to ride.
London's shortest bus routes (since 09/03/24) 1)389 Western Way → Barnet 1.63 miles* 2)327 Waltham Cross → Elsinge Estate 1.87 miles* 3)209 Mortlake → Castelnau 1.91 miles† 4)379 Chingford → Yardley Lane 2.26 miles* 5)W7 Finsbury Park → Muswell Hill 2.47 miles 6)378 Putney Bridge → Mortlake 2.60 miles† 7)R9 Orpington → Tintagel Road 2.63 miles* 8)399 Hadley Wood → Barnet 3.03 miles* 9)E1 Greenford → Ealing Broadway 3.13 miles 10)323 Mile End → Canning Town 3.41 miles
* Circular route (the given mileage is halfway round)
† Route affected by the closure of Hammersmith Bridge
