London has a handful of free bus routes if you know where to look. Possibly the most peripheral are these two regular shuttles which service an isolated business estate at the lakier end of Bedfont, just south of Heathrow. One collects staff from the Piccadilly line, the other National Rail at Feltham, and the fare is officially zero.
It's a strange place, a 1990s commercial development built across former gravel pits, originally with IBM as the lead tenant. It's a bit like Stockley Park in that it's surrounded by landscaped grassland and water but this is much more regimented, a giant rectangle surrounded by chunky three-storey office buildings. The largest tenant is currently Cisco, the software infrastructure people, bringing a futuristic dash of Silicon Valley to outer Hounslow. Wherever you walk security will be watching. And although it used to be known as Bedfont Lakes it's recently been bought out and rebranded Bloom Heathrow, so that's the guff plastered across the outside of the buses.
BL1 runs every 12 minutes during the peaks, i.e. when most staff are commuting, widening to hourly over lunch. It's a quick there-and-back to Feltham, no stopping inbetween. BL2 serves Heathrow Terminal 4 as well as Hatton Cross and runs half-hourly at best, again hourly in the middle of the day. Until last year the service was run by London United but the new operator is Diamond Bus, which I thought was fabulously appropriate, so I attempted to go for a ride.
Again it's not 100% obvious online if anyone can ride the BL1 and BL2 or only staff, so I took no chances and turned up with a briefcase. I let a proper worker board first and she appeared to flash something at the driver which got me worried, although I'm not entirely sure what it was. I gave it my best shot and asked "Is this the bus for Cisco?" I was nodded aboard, either deception achieved or because everyone's allowed to do that. And then I endured a jaunt down the A30 between runways and grazing horses, perched on leatherette, alighting when the other worker did because I wasn't sure if the bus carried on all the way into Bloom itself. Just the once, I think.
More of London's Free* Buses
• H30 Heathrow T4 - Heathrow T5 [every 20 minutes] (and all the way round to T2/T3 overnight after the tube stops running)
• 849 Putney - Roehampton University [every 20 minutes] (for students and staff but also the general public)
• KU1/KU2/KU3 Kingston University [every 20 minutes] (for students and anyone else)
• ?
* n.b. must be free to all, must be a regular service (no one-offs for special events)
