London's next dead bus 414: Putney Bridge to Marble Arch Location: southwest London, inner Length of journey: 5 miles, 35 minutes
It's only the third week of February but it's already time to kill off another London bus route. Route 347 and 118 have already been extinguished this year and at the end of this week it's time for the 414 to join them at the big terminus in the sky. It does nothing special, the only surprise is that TfL let it linger so long.
The 414 was introduced in 2002 at the height of Ken Livingstone's expansion of the bus network. The intention was to provide additional capacity on a busy section of route 14 and also to create new connections between Fulham Road and Edgware Road, connections which with hindsight probably weren't needed. Amongst Men Who Like Buses, especially those who mutter online, the 414 has for many years held the title of London's Most Despisedly Unnecessary Bus Route. The first inevitable cut came in 2021 when TfL decided to curtail the northern terminus from Maida Hill to Marble Arch, a significant two mile chop. Since then the 414 has been an even pointlesser route which essentially mirrors route 14 for 90% of its length, so it's no bad thing it's being binned for good on Saturday.
That was my map, which is considerably simpler than the poster TfL's Let's Make This Bus Map Unnecessarily Complicated department have stuck up at bus stops.
They've muddied the waters here by including route 74 which also links Putney Bridge to Marble Arch but runs via Earl's Court rather than the Fulham Road. Most ex-414 passengers don't need to know it exists, they only need the extremely simple advice "Catch the 14 instead'. The exceptions are those who use the 414 to reach Marble Arch, and they'll be able use either the 74 or the 137 when bearing off from Knightsbridge to Park Lane. According to consultation data only 8% of the 414's passengers actually do this, but the poster focuses entirely on them and not on the 92% of passengers who don't need to know, and who will likely be baffled by the superfluous advice.
When TfL's Let's Make This Bus Map Unnecessarily Complicated department eventually invites me in to deliver my Powerpoint presentation Why Do You Keep Making Such Unnecessarily Complicated Bus Maps? I shall be pleased to explain why multiple simpler bespoke maps can be better than one abomination with everything shoehorned onto it. In the meantime I have been for a last ride.
The 414 is one of eight routes that terminate outside Putney Bridge station, so if nothing else its demise will free up some stand space in the vicinity. You don't get dropped off outside the station entrance at the end of the route but you do get picked up there at the start so that's convenient. The 414 picks up quite frequently too, departing every 8 minutes during the day, whereas the more important 14 only runs every 11. They intend to increase that to every 8 minutes from next week so the service should cope, but the overall scrappage enables TfL to divert sixteen existing vehicles elsewhere thus saving some cash.
Escaping from the area round the station is a bit of a squeeze, nudging past the second hand bookshop and The Eight Bells pub. But it's really not far to the traffic lights opposite All Saints' where, oh look, there's a 14 sailing by so the unique part of our our journey is already over. This is one reason why the 414 will not be missed. We arrive at the first stop behind it and it hoovers up all our potential passengers, who it turns out are making a terrible mistake. At the second stop we'll be overtaking the 14 and then we'll leave it behind, never seeing it again all the way to Hyde Park Corner, so they should have come with us.
We've just entered one end of the Fulham Road and it'll be over two miles until we reach the other, so buckle up. The road wiggles its way towards Kensington as a country lane might do, indeed once did, now long built over by aspirational suburbia and yuppie retail. This means that if I were to describe what you can see along the 414 it would essentially be a roll call of posh shops, indeed brace yourself for precisely that. An Italian/Croatian wine bar, a boutique hotel, an ironmonger, a ski shop, a cigar emporium, a gourmet grocery, a secret spa, a wine bar, multiple organic bakeries and umpteen opportunities to purchase elite household fittings. Your local shops probably include a chippie but Fulham Road has a seafood restaurant & aperitivo bar called Fish and Bubbles so they win. Admittedly there's a Greggs and also a Shell forecourt, but even that turns out to be an EV charging station with a ribbed timber canopy and a Waitrose so is remarkably on trend.
Our 414 is sailing along which is one of the benefits of riding on a Sunday morning, though I guess things run slower in the week. Even so we are still three minutes behind schedule according to the timetable posted up at the start of the route (Fulham Broadway in 7?) which appears to have been written by a mega-optimist. Someone at Hammersmith & Fulham council should take down the Christmas twiddles, by the way, we're long past Candlemas. A sequence of lamppost banners heralds our approach to Stamford Bridge, home of Chelsea FC, where several blue shirts and a lot of flats shield the fortress where football is occasionally played. And then we're over the boundary into actual Chelsea, which you'd think would look posher but the strip past the hospital is nothing like the Kings Road.
A group of European tourists with bleached ponytails and tans like crème brûlée stop the driver and ask him if we're going to the Museums. He seems unsure, but after the fourth exchange it turns out he's been trying to work out which museum they want rather than simply saying 'yes, obviously, please get on'. We've wasted 3% of our journey time waiting for these ditherers to board. Onwards past a wall of mansion flats, a 50 year-old delicatessen, several securely fenced gardens and the third branch of Gail's to be found along the Fulham Road. We finally escape it just after an ambulance has turned into the Royal Brompton, hugging one edge of Onslow Square to find ourselves as if by magic outside South Kensington station. "That's been damned fast," I think to myself, whereas we are in fact now six minutes behind that ridiculous fictional timetable.
Now for Cromwell Road where the Natural History Museum's new geological plaza looks surprisingly anodyne from the upper deck, and where the long promised 74 bus joins us. That yellow poster advised passengers to change anywhere between here and Hyde Park Corner, whereas in fact you should wait until Hyde Park Corner because that stop has more than twice as many connecting buses, which is yet another reason why the aforementioned map is wilfully inadequate. In bad news we're about to hit bad traffic on the Brompton Road because the lights ahead at Knightsbridge always take an age to change. In good news hardly anybody is being inconvenienced - I'm the only passenger left on the upper deck and downstairs is emptying out fast.
A single badly-parked VW Polo blocks our access to the bus lane that should have sped us past Harrods, and that's another two minutes wasted. All around us the immaculate are tracking down the impeccable, be that in Ugg, Rolex or Harvey Nicks, as the flagship stores of Knightsbridge awaken for Sunday trading. Then after what seems like an age we're finally out of the queue and West End bound, crossing from Kensington into Westminster by the casino. Hyde Park looks sparkling, perhaps because the snowdrops are out, although a heck of a lot of the grass is currently behind green netting as remediation following Winter Wonderland. And at Hyde Park Corner we reach the last of 23 consecutive bus stops shared with route 14, with just three more to go, which as I keep saying is why route 414 is no longer necessary.
We make speedy progress up Park Lane, at least once a confused Audi gets out of the bus lane and merges with the ordinary traffic. One last passenger decides to join us rather than walk the last half mile, and only because we were the first of ten different bus routes to turn up. Next week there'll still be nine and nobody will even notice we've gone. The final stop is by Speaker's Corner, where nobody seems to speak any more, and then the driver heads off round the gyratory to a bus stand on the far side. That'll be going spare next week too as TfL extinguish yet another central London bus route. Checking my watch I see we got here in 36 minutes flat, which feels good but is actually 50% longer than the deranged innumerate timetable posted up at Putney Bridge. At least they'll be chucking that in the bin on Saturday, along with route 414 which will not be mourned.
