Route 59: Smithfield to Streatham Hill Location: London south, inner Length of bus journey: 6 miles, 55 minutes
It's traditional around every birthday that I take a numerically significant bus journey. Seventeen years ago I took the 42 to Dulwich, then subsequently the 43 to Barnet, the 44 to Tooting, the 45 to Clapham, the 46 to Farringdon, the 47 to Bellingham, the 48 to Walthamstow, the 49 to Battersea, the 50 to Croydon, the 51 to Orpington, the 52 to Willesden, the 53 to Whitehall, the 54 to Elmers End, the 55 to Oxford Circus, the 56 to Smithfield, the 57 to Kingston and most recently the 58 to Walthamstow. This year it's back to the heart of town for a southbound safari aboard the 59 to Streatham Hill.
When it comes to riding birthday buses, some places draw you back. I was here at Smithfield for the 56 just three years ago, and the only other bus route which starts by the meatmarket is the 46 from ten years earlier. Interestingly the blinds on the 46 describe it as Bart's Hospital, on the 56 as St Bartholomew's Hospital and on the 59 as Smithfield St Bartholomew's Hospital, because naming conventions evolve. Bad luck if you want to know where any of these three buses stop because all that's been provided is a temporary dolly stop, no timetables, no shelter, no nothing.
The 59 didn't used to start here, it was diverted last Easter to make up for the death of the 521, whereas previously it used to plunge due south from Euston. It also operates with Boris buses, which may or may not be what you'd want to spend the best part of an hour on. I make my way up to the front of the top deck, for which there is zero competition, and brush a lot of bits of crisp off the seat. Someone's left a hoodie on the floor a few seats back, but you can't expect every driver to check everywhere around the bus between shifts. Let's do this.
We emerge into the City by the Old Bailey, cross the Fleet valley via Holborn Viaduct and touch back down by Hatton Garden. That's already more famous sights and history than along the entirety of the 58 last year. All around us office latecomers are striding purposefully to work, some in shiny black brogues, others in bright boxfresh trainers. On our climb up High Holborn we trail behind a nemesis cyclist, dawdling behind him until we eventually manage to overtake, then losing ground again every time we pull into a bus stop. The need to improve the cycling experience on the approach to Holborn station has led Camden council to steal one lane for bikes, but they're still segregating it at present so it takes three attempts to get past the lights at the roadworks. This paragraph should have taken five minutes but the constriction's made it ten.
There's only one bus stop on Kingsway and it overlooks the fruit stall where BestMateFromWork used to buy his minneolas. At the far end a flock of hire bikes lines the road above the exit from the underpass - some red, some green, and both species taking a break between rush hours. We wait awhile to turn into Aldwych, now a seethingly broad vehicle-dominated expanse because something had to counterbalance the pedestrianisation of the Strand. Top class musicals can be glimpsed up Drury Lane, and (rather closer) two bearded police officers outside the Indian High Commission. To cross over into south London we ride above a misty Thames, enjoying an iconic panorama from the dome of St Paul's round to the spike of Big Ben. As many as ten different bus routes cross Waterloo Bridge but somehow this is the first time a birthday bus has passed this way, and hopefully I have twomore to go.
At the IMAX roundabout the enormous yellow wrap is plugging Sky's new bespoke tennis channel. Outside the side entrance to Waterloo station a Chelsea Pensioner is shaking a charity bucket with a winning smile. A dozen copies of yesterday's Evening Standard lie unread in the hopper beside Bus Stop D. A shelter-top roundel reminds punters they can catch the Superloop from here, but the timetable confirms you can't do this before four o'clock so don't hang around. We turn right by the Old Vic, this one of the last turns of the journey because there's a heck of a lot of 'straight ahead' over the next four miles. The brief run down to Lambeth North tube is the only section of the route that the 59 serves alone. Waterloo Millennium Green is abuzz with daffodils, if not yet with bees. The Duke of Sussex would rather you bought food than beer. According to a banner 'Waterloo is where fringe meets falafel', and would somebody please sack the branding team.
The first big attraction on the Kennington Road is the Imperial War Museum, indeed not much else compares. I can now see a long way straight ahead, past splendid three storey terraces with attic rooms, basements and gardens bursting with magnolia. The peak of gentrification comes at Kennington Cross where one parade of shops is painted in four shades of pastel blue and the locals duly descend to browse and graze. A number of the shops here combine neighbourhood essentials, so one does wine and cheese, another does coffee and books, and the pop-up tent outside St Anselm's is called Bouquets and Beans because you're bound to need some wrapped flowers with your soy macchiato. Thinking of the friends I know who live round here, it's appropriately pitched. That gasholder you can see rising beyond Kennington Green is indeed the same as overlooks the Oval, but here viewed from the other side.
We're half an hour down when we turn into Kennington Park Road, joining buses that've come straight from the Elephant. I take the opportunity to admire the narcissi bobbing in Kennington Park outside Prince Consort's Lodge. We don't quite pass Oval station, instead veering left past a large traffic island with the geometrically uncomfortable name of Oval Triangle. The bobbly rock in the centre is part of a 27 ton sculpture by British artist Peter Randall-Page. It's called Touchstone, comprises two carefully balanced granite boulders and, confirming you should never read the artist's blurb, is "something both monumental and playful". Our bus isn't aiming for Stockwell so we take the Brixton Road, where the food offer is instantly more eclectic and includes Eritrean, Venezuelan and Japanese. It's telling that the spicy takeaway at number 12 is now Tennessee Peri Peri Chicken, no longer merely Fried.
Charlie Chaplin has a blue plaque at number 76 because he lived there, but only for two years and well before his film debut. Flats old and new line the road ahead, but also more of those tall marvellously-characterful terraces because we're seeing inner south London at its best. Northbound and southbound bus lanes have commandeered half the street because four other routes head this way and they need the space. The sudden smell of something sharply floral heralds the arrival of an over-perfumed passenger in a seat behind me, the first fellow traveller I've felt compelled to mention after six full paragraphs, indeed only now is there a chatty buzz on the upper deck. Shops called Brixton Butchers, Brixton Cycles and Brixton Beds confirm that a fresh town centre is approaching; a shop called Doris Exotic suggests that some shopkeepers have peculiar tastes.
Sometimes you can sense the moment when a bus driver has stopped trying. Ours starts lingering slightly too long at the stop by Max Roach Park, then does it again by the police station, as if he has a deadline he's trying not to meet. When it comes to naming local landmarks to suggest civic vibrancy, Electric Avenue is a heck of a lot better than Barnardo's Corner. I note that Brixton still has an M&S, not to mention an H&M, plus two different Morleys - one a department store, the other a chicken shop. We'll be taking the right fork up Brixton Hill, a gentle ascent, along with eight other bus routes because it's left to double deckers to take the strain once the tube runs out. Lambeth Archives have just relocated underneath a newbuild block of flats, because that's how council services work these days, and it's not an attractive look.
If I were trying to make Brixton Hill sound archaic I'd mention the lengthy linear greenspace to our left (Rush Common) and the nearby windmill, and if I were trying to quash that idea I'd focus instead on the blocks of flats, the entrance to the prison and the cafe that's written its name in Comic Sans. The bus garage at the top of the hill is a former LCC tramwaysdepot which opened 100 years ago this week, but we're not stopping there. We're going two stops further, across the South Circular, to the proper Brixton bus garage, not the adjunct. The three of us still aboard are turfed off at a special stop reserved for terminating services, just a few feet before buses swing off to enter the depot. I am immediately accosted by three leaflet-wielding missionaries intent on claiming me for Jesus, but swiftly shut them down so they shuffle off and try to convert a driver on his fag break instead.
No further birthday buses will trouble Streatham Hill until 2074, and I doubt I'll still be around in 50 years for that, but do join me this time next year as I make a break for Purley and the deep south.
Route 59: Smithfield to Streatham Hill
