Greenwich is world famous as the point on the Earth's surface which defines the zero line of longitude. But London's line of latitude is far less numerically satisfying, hence much less well known. The 51st parallel passes well to the south of the capital, somewhere around Haywards Heath, while the 52nd parallel passes well to the north through Milton Keynes. Greater London lies slap bang between the two, indeed the line for 51½°N slices the capital pretty much in half.
So my intention is to undertake a journey along this fifty-one-and-a-halfth parallel, the line of latitude also known as 51.5°N or 51°30'N. I'm not walking it, not least because this particular line crosses the Thames as many as six times, and only one of these has a bridge. But I will be stopping off at numerous locations which happen to lie precisely on this imaginary line, i.e. exactly 103 one-hundred-and-eightieths of the angular distance between the equator and the North Pole.
Because this is essentially a random east-west line, it traverses some utterly mundane parts of London and just misses several places of genuine interest. But sometimes the mundane bits can be the most fascinating, and don't worry, there are some amazing direct hits along the way. I'll be starting out east, on the edge of Thurrock, and crossing at least a dozen London boroughs on my way to the river Colne in almost-Buckinghamshire. I promise not to blog about my journey every day, but let's see if I can tick off all thirty-one miles by the end of the month. [map]
Places on the 51½°N parallel outside London: Slough, Bristol, Cardiff, southern tip of Ireland, mostly-uninhabited Canada, one of the Aleutian Islands, Russia, very-northern China, Russia again, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Poland, Germany (Dortmund), Netherlands (Eindhoven), one Belgian village, Thames Estuary, Thurrock Thameside Nature Park, North Stifford, Aveley.
Wennington interchange [51.5°N 0.229°E]
Bang, right at the very edge of the capital we have a direct hit on a major road junction. I'm standing above the A13 dual carriageway, on a bridge between two feeder roundabouts, amid a Ballardian landscape of marshland and central reservations. Immediately to the east the A13 passes into Thurrock, and sweeps round towards M25 J30, where the London orbital makes a break for the QE2 Bridge. And to the west the A13 rises up onto the Wennington Viaduct, which is currently paralysed by a three mile tailback caused by an accident involving a spillage of Coca-Cola cans somewhere near Barking. I'll be heading into London long before any of the poor bastards down there.
The dominance of road transport in this location is astounding. The roads are busy, obviously, but so are the pavements from parked-up lorries seeking a space to rest, including several on the bridge itself. What's more, all the local businesses are auto-related in some way, including a significant cluster of car dealers just beyond the slip road to the north. Whether you're after a £30K BMW or a sub-thousand runaround, the Essex Car Company or the grimly-named Car Realm have a guaranteed finance deal for you. Here too are Rainham Motor Caravans, and the greasy breakfast hub of Noakes Kebab and Burger, and the engine-tweakers at Track N Road Powerformance. Passing through on foot I felt borderline unworthy.
Unsurprisingly the bridgetop is scattered with litter, from bleached crisp packets to empty bottles of Lucozade chucked from the cab. A single white butterfly flits between the detritus, pauses awhile on some concrete crushed beneath the front wheel of a Tesco delivery lorry, then flies away. A motorcycle cop watches over the entrance slip on the Thurrock side of the border, advising traffic it may not want to join the logjam below. And I am strangely heartened by the skyline of central London being plainly visible on the horizon, behind the lampposts, pylons and a giant rotating wind turbine. How fortuitous that the precise alignment of a line on a map should afford such a perfect view of the journey yet to come.
It's not possible to stand on the 51½th parallel for the next mile and a half, because not a single road or public footpath cuts across. First it's dual carriageway, then a tiny wedge of fenced-off fields, then the High Speed One railway line dividing the wetland landscape as it speeds Kentward. On the other side of the tracks are the Rainham Marshes, but these are the private parts the boardwalks of the RSPB reserve never reach, so only birds and other wildlife are allowed inside.
Coldharbour Lane [51.5°N 0.192°E]
Welcome to one of London's least hospitable thoroughfares. Coldharbour Lane started out as a track across the marshes to serve sheepfolds and firing ranges, and links the foot of Ferry Lane in Rainham to the Thames foreshore near Purfleet. It's long and initially perfectly straight, and a useful if unlikely shortcut if you don't want to follow the bleak estuarine footpath via Coldharbour Point. Alas Coldharbour Lane is even worse for sightseeing purposes, as it doesn't have a view, and is accompanied by a relentless procession of rumbling lorries. These juggernauts and tipper trucks are on their way to the Freightmaster Estate, a seriously remote riverfront corral where pallets are stacked, road sweepings reprocessed and goods of all kinds stashed for safe keeping. Many of the vehicles crawling by are emblazoned with wholly generic company names, like General Express Services or Economic Waste Management, while others represent inconsequential empires run by two-bit scrap entrepreneurs. This truly is a side of London you never see unless you work here.
I thought I was going to have to follow the traffic, past a shuttered sentry box labelled Smile, You're on CCTV, but thankfully there's a separate footpath to one side. This squeezes between barriers to deter motorcyclists, ducks beneath a overhead pipeline and heads bleakly ahead with no escape for the next mile. Thankfully I only have to go a fraction of that distance before reaching 51½°N, a point which my GPS also informs me is two metres below sea level. I'm prevented from switching to the road by a reedy ditch (Steep bank! Soft Mud!), and from trespassing elsewhere by an interminable bank covered with brambles, nettles, convolvulus and hawthorn bushes. Somewhere over the other side is an enormous Veolia landfill site, and quite possibly decades of your discarded trash. And all along the side of the path are red posts marking the presence of stumpy vertical pipes, their caps padlocked and numbered, restraining any gassy discharge within. Out of sight, out of mind.
Havering Riverside [51.5°N 0.182°E]
The only other point where you can stand on the 51½th line of latitude in Havering is immediately alongside the Thames, at the very tip of Rainham's riverside industrial estate. You'll know the spot if (and probably only if) you've walked the final section of the London Loop - it's where a scrappy footpath escapes from beneath the concrete wall around the Tilda Rice factory and emerges beside a muddy bay filled with peculiar treasures. There's also a tiny car park, for pensioners who want to drive to the edge of beyond and sit in their vehicles whilst staring across the ditchwater estuary towards Erith. It is simultaneously an abominable and an amazing place.
The precise spot I'm trying to find is marked by a wooden signpost pointing to Coldharbour Point, and a graffitied council information board confirming that one day the footpath will extend further to Purfleet... which it did in 2009. The tide has dumped chunks of polystyrene, packaging and plastic on the foreshore, while unseen humans have added lager cans to the mix. Hundreds of seagulls have perched along the metal jetty, and launch off sequentially with a choreographed flourish as I approach. Some settle on the dozen concrete barges dumped here in 1953, now silently rotting at a variety of attractive angles, and which rumour has it took part in the D Day assault. The other other-worldly structure is The Diver, a skeletal sculpture of the perfect height to be covered and uncovered by the tide twice a day. Lovers of oddball London should make a beeline here post haste.
I can see my next destination on the other side of the river amid the silos and chimneys of the Belvedere Industrial Estate. But I can't get there direct, not since the medieval ferry from Coldharbour to Erith was closed down in the 19th century. I fire up Citymapper, for a laugh, which informs me it's a 5 hour walk via the Woolwich Ferry, or at best a two hour journey by rail. What's more they're right, the train journey to Belvedere taking just 48 minutes, hugely prolonged by the schlepp I now have to make back across the marshes to Rainham station.
TfL have just launched a big campaign to encourage us to go travelling and explore more of the cultural delights London has to offer. In particular they're nudging us beyond central London to enjoy some of the treasures to be found further out, and even more particularly they're encouraging us to travel off-peak.
Off-peak travel makes sense because it's less crowded, and more importantly cheaper. A cornerstone of the campaign is that tube travel in zones 2-6 only costs £1.50 off-peak, which is indeed a bargain, and can help family budgets stretch further than journeying into the middle of town. Throw in the fact that buses and trams only ever cost £1.50, and that under 11s always travel free, and potential days out only get better. All in all, it's a cracking idea for a promotion.
But TfL have thrown so much collateral at this campaign that the message is starting to get slightly muddled.
This is such a good idea it's amazing nobody's thought of it before. An official webpage with an interactive tube map, where you click on a tube station that interests you and up pops one or more places of interest nearby. Why not have a go here before continuing.
Time Out are the information providers, and have "curated" the "expert content" which appears throughout. It's impressively varied, from parks to nightclubs, nature reserves to theatres and museums to sports facilities. The Greenwich Foot Tunnel's in there, and the National Jazz Archive, and the Church of St Cyril of Turau, it's that eclectic. As a source of inspiration for getting out and about, it's top notch. Just take care if you decide to act on any of the ideas, though, because there are a number of 'issues' lurking underneath.
i) Some of the places are closer to another station, not the station indicated.
For example, the Natural History Museum is shown as being closest to Gloucester Road, but everyone knows you get there via South Kensington. For another example, the Art Pavilion in Mile End Park is shown as being closest to Bow Road, but is actually much closer to Mile End. Meanwhile Tower Hamlets Cemetery is shown as being closer to Devons Road DLR, but is actually closer to Bow Road. I suspect some of this shuffling has been done to make the map look more impressive, but apply caution if visiting.
ii) Some of the places are misspelled, or wrongly categorised.
My favourite misspelling is "The Painted Hall at Old Royal Navel College". Meanwhile at London Fields, the Lido has been categorised as 'Shopping'. And Woolwich Arsenal is allegedly on the District line.
iii) Some of the places are a long way from the station.
For example, Bentley Priory Museum is listed as 48 minutes walk from Stanmore, with no mention of the big hill you have to climb to get there, nor the 142 bus that'd ease your journey. For another example, Copped Hall is listed as 50 minutes walk from Epping or a ride on the number 13 bus, but the number 13 bus doesn't run on Sundays which is the only day Copped Hall is open.
iv) Several of the places are described as wheelchair accessible, but the closest station isn't wheelchair accessible.
For example, Tooting Market is described as wheelchair accessible, but wheelchair users cannot exit Tooting Broadway station. For another example, Sadler's Wells Theatre is described as wheelchair accessible, but wheelchair users cannot exit Angel station. There are dozens of such examples.
v) The map has not "ensured that no corner of this buzzing city is left untouched".
Certain parts of the capital are very much missing, for example Kingston, Sutton, Bexley and Bromley, because the tube and Overground don't go there. Other parts of the capital are very much missing because nobody found anything of interest, for example the entire tram network, the Overground north of Hackney, and the 'cultural desert' between Ruislip and Ealing. There again, Time Out have found some belters for Elverson Road, Elm Park and Eastcote, so let's not complain too much.
vi) Some of the suggestions are a bit nuts.
For example, Croxley Green is described as a "postcard-perfect English village". It very much isn't, even though it has nice bits, and I should know because I grew up there. Amazingly Time Out have two places to recommend in Croxley, the first being The Artichoke, "a rambling historical pub with an impressive flower basket selection. It has an exhaustive drinks list and serves up hearty pub classics." I've had some very nice lunches there, but seriously, do not drag yourself out of London for this. Secondly there's the Croxley Green Skate Park, a "wheelchair accessible" facility with "state of the art concrete ramps", which is indeed a much-loved hub for local youth but again, don't rush. Perhaps Time Out should stick to London and leave Hertfordshire to the professionals.
Which brings us to the second prong of the campaign, launching officially this Friday. Perhaps you remember the lovely line map which used to appear in Piccadilly line carriages showing the line snaking across the capital with various tourist hotspots highlighted. They updated the design a few years back, and now they've done a similar map for every other Underground line. These are intelligent, and diverse, and inclusive, and generally beautifully illustrated, and you can see the full set on Flickr here. [Bak][Cen][Cir][Dis][H&C][Jub][Met][Nor][Pic][Vic][W&C][Over]
I say beautifully illustrated, but Winston Churchill never looked like a shifty Mafioso, and I'm not convinced Brixton Market is best known for its Oriental food and pizzas, and Highgate Cematary is not spelt like that, and neither Maida Vale nor Kilburn High Road are the best stations for the Abbey Road zebra crossing, and the Crystal Palace dinosaurs look much less convincing than that, and the designers seem to have given up on finding much of interest in the east of the city, but overall these are charming, gorgeous, covetous posters. As multi-artist commissions go, this is a winner.
However, the Off-Peak slogan which appears in the top right corner of each map has been overlooked in the compilation of places to visit. Every map contains at least one venue in zone 1, and most of them contain several, so the message about off-peak travel in zones 2-6 costing only £1.50 has had to be ditched. The Circle line poster talks about "unlimited pay as you go travel for no more than £6.80 in zones 1-2", the District line poster mentions £8.00 for zones 1-3, the Hammersmith & City line says £9.80 for zones 1-4, the Bakerloo line is up to £11.60 for zones 1-5, and the Piccadilly line has to mention £12.50 for zones 1-6 on the off-chance you might want to go to Heathrow Airport. These are maps governed by the rules of daily capping, which isn't reduced for off-peak travel, so have ended up making tube travel look really expensive rather than appealingly cheap.
What we seem to have here are two different campaigns in collision, a "Wow there are so many places to visit by tube!" and a "Blimey in the suburbs it's only £1.50 to travel off-peak!" These are both great messages, but by including zone 1 venues one message has managed to invalidate the other. Whatever, there are indeed some brilliant places in London to visit cheaply by public transport, so keep your wits about you and get out there.
Proper fish and chips, from a proper fish and chip shop, unwrapped from paper, pre-sprinkled with salt and condiment, an excess of chips tumbling forth, all gobbled down with greasy fingers.
It's getting harder to find.
When I moved to Bow at the turn of the century, I had two chippies almost on my doorstep. Mam's Fish Bar on the main road was ruled over by a wire-haired harridan, and was no place of culinary excellence, then closed without warning in 2005 and reopened as a Kebabish. That left Bow Fish and Chips, under the arches in Stroudley Walk, with its jar of pickled eggs on the counter and a photo of Princess Diana pinned to the wall. But I became increasingly unconvinced their cod was actually cod, so drifted away, as did the rest of the clientele and last summer this too closed its doors. It swiftly metamorphosed into the Stroudley Grill, a halal eatery with sitdown tables, whose sole nod to maritime cuisine is a £5 fish meal concealed well down the menu. It's often packed out.
This left my fish and chip options somewhat limited, indeed there's no longer a single fish and chip shop within ten minutes walk of my home. You may be similarly bereft where you are, and therefore unimpressed by my plight, but I live in the East End of London so might have hoped for better. I have therefore gone round scouting out a slightly wider area, up to one mile distant, to see whether any proper chippies survive. I found six.
East:Olympic Fish & Chips[2 Leywick St, West Ham E15] Cod £4.70 + Chips £1.80 = £6.50
This corner shop near Abbey Road DLR just scrapes into a one mile radius from my home, although the River Lea is in the way so it's a lot further to actually walk there. Back in 2012 the owner was slapped with a prohibition order because the name 'Olympic' contravened brand guidelines and international sponsors needed protection. Ha, they've since changed it back again and not a single prissy marketing executive cares, nor will ever visit. This area of West Ham retains a core chippie demographic my part of Bow now lacks, so this shop has a genuine 'wooden fork' feel with low prices to boot. If I lived nearer, I'd definitely give it a punt.
East:Station Fish Bar[2 Memorial Avenue, West Ham E15] Cod £6.00 + Chips £2.20 = £8.20
Just down the road from the Olympic, facing the entrance to West Ham station, is this fast food travesty. Despite retaining the word 'fish' in its name, one glance at the menu reveals that its priority is dispensing bundled meals containing grilled meat and fizzy drinks in various combinations. Anywhere that has a chicken in its logo, promotes ribs and has sufficient queueing space to house two football teams is unlikely to produce light fluffy fish in freshly crisp batter. I note from the helmeted learner-moped parked outside that they do deliveries, but at those prices I'm definitely giving it a miss.
South:Barry's Fish Bar[222 Devons Rd, Bow E3] Cod £4.95 + Chips £1.75 = £6.70
This is now my closest fish and chip shop, just over half a mile from home. Alas, other than the name, there's nothing particularly 'Barry' about it. The menu is a lot broader than simply fish, as can been seen from the strip above the window plugging 'Kebab Burger Fried Chicken Pizzas', and the emphasis seems very much on Turkish grilling rather than battered cod. Further signs of underwhelm come from fish being in the last column on the backdrop menu, not the first, and 'Fish & Chips' being the eleventh item on the online dropdown menu, after pasta dishes and pies. I'm sure this place thrives on its diversity, but for fish and chips I've decided against.
West:Britannia Fish Bar[101 Grove Road, Mile End E3] Cod £5.40 + Chips £1.80 = £7.20
Yes, this looks genuine. Everything about the signs above the door and the stencils in the windows screams sea-sourced food options, including a substantial amouunt of blue background and a splashy cartoon fish to make the point. Inside is a proper counter with crisp fish behind glass, and a well-presented menu someone's taken time to produce rather than playing around with scrappy plastic letters. OK, so the lowest panel on the shopfront features cutout burgers and chunks of unfeasibly perfect fried chicken, but these days diversification is key and I'll not hold it against them. It's on my list to sample, just a little far away.
North:Gary's Fish House[440 Roman Road, Bow E3] Cod £?.?? + Chips £?.?? = £?.??
As an East End bastion, Roman Road in Bow retains two fish and chip chops, one at each end. This is the furthest one, but the closest to being a little sit-down cafe with plastic tables and a tiled floor, as well as serving up fried goods to take away. Though not quite boasting an adorably Cockney pie'n'mash ambience, it is very much what you'd hope for in this neck of the woods. Unfortunately its shutters are currently down, with two sheets of A4 paper stuck to the front apologising for a two week holiday, because who the hell wants fish and chips in a summer heatwave anyway?
North:Saucy Kipper Fish Bar[626 Roman Road, Bow E3] Cod £5.50 + Chips £1.90 = £7.40
So this is where I ended up, at a chip shop at the right end of Roman Road for me to reach most easily, and which has at least attempted to come up with an amusing name. Inside is a proper counter with rear access via sliding glass doors, supplied by Rangetek of Sevenoaks, with stacks of battered sausages and fishcakes gently warming within. A choice selection of medium-sized cod fillets is lined up neatly at one end, and punters can also plump for rock salmon, haddock, plaice or skate if they're willing to wait. Hell yes, there are even individually wrapped Pukka Pies, and some appropriately dubious cans of soft drink on display in the chiller cabinet behind, plus a tureen for ladling mushy peas. Sure, the menu also extends to kebabs, but they're in the last column not the first, so that works for me. The chirpy server added two extra scoops of chips to my paper baglet, placed gleaming cod on top and liberally sprinkled seasoning over everything (including the counter). My bounty was wrapped in paper, then slipped into another paper bag, then dropped into an unbranded plastic carrier for safe transport. And when I got it home it was indeed splendid, the fish thick and flaky and the multitude of brownish chips just the right side of soggy, indeed it was no problem to gobble every last one down.
I like fish and chips.
I hope I don't lose my last few sources to chicken and kebabs any time soon.
Spontaneous roaming on trains can get very expensive, unless confined to major cities where special one-day fares are available. So it's good to know that certain rail companies offer Day Rovers which permit unrestricted travel across a portion of their network for a single up-front fee. [full list]
Most cover parts of the country far-flung from the capital, but I was seeking something closer to home, so stumped up for a Thames Branches Day Ranger. For £20.60 this allows unlimited travel on the line from Paddington to Reading, plus all intermediate branches, plus a few brief extensions at the Reading end. Given that an ordinary off-peak return from London to Reading costs only 30p less, and that railcard holders get an extra one-third off, this is an absolute bargain. [info][map]
On Saturday I set myself the challenge of travelling on every available section of line, to each of the seven extremities, and taking a quick look round before travelling back again. Here's what I found...
Reading West (09:08)
Yes, it was an early start. Reading West is nothing like its mainline counterpart, a sparse pair of platforms with half-dismembered canopies rather than a swish shiny interchange with escalators and coffee. Fresh silver gantries span the tracks, recently installed for the benefit of fast services that never stop, and whose hulking dimensions have also forced the removal of the footbridge due to inadequate clearance. I exit the station via newly-installed steps, teetering down to a very ordinary-looking Oxford Road, where gothic Victorian villas stretch off in one direction and a parade of lowly shops in the other. Trade in your motorbike at MTC, grab some Italian shoes from De Dora's Lovely Fashion, or it's still early enough for breakfast at McDonalds. It's also less than a mile to Reading station so I decide to walk, because when else will I ever get the opportunity?
Winnersh (09:51)
For reasons inadequately explained, a Thames Branches Day Ranger allows travel three stops down the SWR line towards Bracknell and London Waterloo. Winnersh is the last of these, a dormitory suburb in the A329(M) corridor, abutting the blandly modern Winnersh Triangle industrial estate. I've done my research on Wikipedia, which implies that the only other place of interest in the village is Winnersh Crossroads, and this is only a short walk from the station. Here I discover a road junction brimming with traffic cones and roadworks, overlooked by two screamingly-ordinary office blocks and a smashed Transport Information noticeboard. Apparently the far corner used to be Hewlett Packard's UK HQ, and before that a Crimpy Crisps factory, but today it's an extensive Sainsbury's and an even more extensive car park. I had only nine minutes in Winnersh, but this proved more than enough.
Tilehurst (10:26)
Tilehurst looked a lot more promising, at least on the map, because the station's alongside the River Thames. Unfortunately it's screened behind a thick row of trees, and the entire riverbank is cut off from the adjacent settlement by the railway, so living here must be the equivalent of paying extra for a hotel room with a sea view during a foggy spell. I have almost half an hour spare to explore the suburb by the station, which proves to be the epitome of everyday Berkshire living. Parallel avenues lined by big semis and parked cars feed off a shrubby roundabout up either side of a dry valley, past a modern geometric parish church, an overpriced corner shop and a multi-cuisine Chinese restaurant. The next two stations up this line are the delightful Pangbourne and Streatley & Goring, but the TBDR ticket stops woefully short... so basically that's my third "no really, don't bother".
Gahhh, the connections on these Thames Valley branches can be appalling. My train from Tilehurst is timetabled to arrive at Twyford one minute before the half-hourly shuttle to Henley departs, so all I can do is watch it depart as we pull in. Worse, my train had a scheduled five minute pause inserted at Reading, so could have got here in time, but nobody appears to have done any joined-up thinking. I use my enforced twenty-nine minute wait to explore Twyford, which I can report is a charming commuter village on the Old Bath Road with a Victorian parish church and a Waitrose, but don't think that means you need ever visit.
Henley-on-Thames (11:49)
Henley's a well-appointed Thames-side town, and a proper destination at last. Multitudinous daytrippers are milling along the riverbank, or grabbing urgent refreshment in a hostelry, or hiding from the sun in a designer boutique, or clambering aboard a tourist boat for a cruise, or stopping by the parish church to pay their respects to Dusty Springfield (OK, that last one may have been just me). Better still, the Town & Visitors’ Regatta was in full swing, this the only day of the year when the public are allowed to soil the pristine lawns of the riverside enclosure without adopting the official dress code. Inaudible announcements describe the scene as eights and quads jostle for position, although there are still seven hours before the Peter Sutherland Cup is awarded and I still have other places to be.
Meh, the next branch after Henley only has an hourly service, and connections down the line to Maidenhead mean I'll be arriving nine minutes too late. So on the return trip I take the opportunity to alight at Wargrave and spend half an hour of my enforced hiatus there. Wargrave is a sought after village, and knows it, comprising vast commuter homes in spacious gardens around a historic high street heart. Its riverside frontage is jealously guarded by the motorcruising community, and mere mortals have to walk all the way up to The George and Dragon's car park to gain access. I look very out of place waiting for the next train to depart.
And then I get twenty minutes to waste in Maidenhead, so take to opportunity to go exploring here too, although the ticket barriers don't recognise my ticket and the staff have to let me in and out. I have never seen an attractive side to Maidenhead town centre, and this brisk circuit fails to change my mind, especially when I hear a racist insult hurled from a car misjudging the pedestrian crossing by the multi-storey. An entire block on Queen Street is to be demolished in readiness for Crossrail's arrival, although they'll have to get a move on, even to hit next Christmas. The gentlemen's club across the road will alas live on.
Marlow (14:01)
Well that took forever. Thankfully Marlow is also charming, and properly on the river, if not quite in Henley's league. A new 3-bed house is up for sale at Signal Walk, on the site of the town's former railway station, for any rail-obsessed commuter with £725,000 to splash. The High Street is garlanded in red, white and blue bunting, and boasts an outpost of The Ivy, whose covers look fully booked. At the farmers' market one of the traders is trying to shift rabbit and venison pie, whereas anything chilled or in liquid form is selling better. Many of the cars parading towards the suspension bridge are open-topped, their owners having long been praying for a summer such as this. I check my watch.
The next station back down the line is Bourne End, which my smartphone assures me is 3.0 miles away, and its next train departs in 63 minutes time. That should be doable, shouldn't it, especially given I've walked this stretch of the Thames Path before and so know where I'm going. I locate the wiggling alley past the churchyard, survive an unexpected detour round a ploughed-up sports field, and enjoy a route march through a chain of open Thamesside meadows. Most of the tiny inlets are occupied by merry folk who've arrived by river, either in a canoe or motor launch, and are enjoying splashing in the water with picnic food and alcohol. Otherwise it's relatively quiet, despite peak summertime weather, and I'm well chuffed I decided to do this stretch on foot. There again, the outbound service to Marlow has already passed by the time I reach the ice cream van by the boatclub, so I ruefully decide I don't have time to pause for a 99 before it returns. Even speeding up my pace only just works, and if the driver hadn't had to reverse at Bourne End I'd have missed the train.
Windsor and Eton Central (15:55)
I'm giving myself twenty minutes between trains to explore Windsor, much of which is wasted trying to extricate myself from the horribly tourist-centric shopping centre jammed into the area around the old Victorian station. A kerfuffle on Castle Hill draws my eye, where there appears to be a drunken pirate shouting at the crowds. Ah no, this is the annual National Town Crier Championships, being held here this year by express permission of Her Majesty The Queen, and already well underway. Every few minutes an over-feathered man steps up, rings his bell, unscrolls a proclamation and then bawls towards the judges' tent, while his bonnet-topped wife stands decoratively beneath a lace parasol, and the next contestants are wheeled into position behind. An entire marquee of Town Criers and their spouses is overheating beneath the castle entrance, and praying for 6pm when they can all escape to the pub. Congratulations to the HaslemereTown Crier on his booming victory, long after I'd fled for the train.
The next leg takes absolutely ages because absolutely nothing connects. The Windsor train pulls into Slough just as the Paddington train departs from a platform nobody could have reached in time. This means twenty minutes to waste, plus the depressing knowledge that not a single train from Slough also stops at West Ealing. I have to change again at Hayes and Harlington, and even then the next TfL Rail service just misses the half-hourly connection I need at West Ealing, and sheesh that isn't an interesting place to hang around either. Altogether by the time I've finished my journey I'll have spent three hours waiting for connections which, sorry, isn't actually a very good advert for using Thames branch line services.
Greenford (17:43)
This runty decapitated spur is a poor way to end a long day out, as is proven when only three passengers board at the start of the ride, and absolutely nobody is waiting along the way. But it is included on my ticket, so I grab this rare opportunity to venture inside the graffitied Drayton Green tunnel and to gawp out from the South Greenford viaduct. Just past a set of antiquated semaphore signals we pull into the central platform at Greenford station, where there must be almost two people waiting, and the driver strides up to the other end ready to head back. I could pop ouside the station to tour the local hotspots, except there aren't any, and also I'm knackered after riding eighteen trains (plus twelve miles walking to boot). You wouldn't want to follow in all my footsteps, but the Henley, Marlow and Windsor branches are winners, and a well-played Thames Branches Day Ranger is well worth the money.
If you enjoy this kind of thing, and are on Twitter, you might want to follow @ToursByTrain whose four-strong team regularly go out riding trains for the sake of it and reporting back regularly along the way. They even had their own go at a #ThamesValleyTransit on Friday, but didn't quite get all the way round.
ENGLISH HERITAGE:Ranger's House Location: Blackheath, London, SE10 8QX [map] Open: 11am-5pm (closed Thu, Fri, Sat) (closed Oct-Mar) Admission: £9.00 Website:english-heritage.org.uk/rangers-house-the-wernher-collection Five word summary: a diamond geezer's art hoard Time to allow: about an hour
Here's one from the "I can't believe I've never visited before" list. It's located at the back of Greenwich Park, facing Blackheath, so not exactly hard to get to. It's a mansion-slash-museum overlooking the Rose Garden, for heaven's sake, so not exactly easy to miss.
Although actually there are reasons. It's usually closed, opening only during a narrow definition of summer, and even then staying locked up three days a week, Saturdays included. And it used to be open for guided tours only, so every time I walked past I'd never booked on one, so I never went in. But following a major overhaul this year, the building's been reinterpreted for individual perusal rather than collective tours, so now you can simply turn up and take a look round for yourself. A lot of work has taken place over the winter to get things ready, hence the delayed opening this season, indeed the new set-up's only been operational for a fortnight.
Ranger's House is exactly what you think it is, i.e. the house where the ranger for Greenwich Park used to live, although before that it's been a naval officer's pad and home to the 4th Earl of Chesterfield. By the time it was given to the nation it was empty, hence not the most thrilling of prospects for a tourist attraction, so English Heritage have coupled it up with an otherwise 'homeless' collection of antiques to provide a raison d'être.
The Wehrner Collection was amassed over several decades by Julius Wernher, an extraordinarily rich Victorian businessman with a penchant for fine art. As a young man he moved from Germany to London to seek work, but after serving just six weeks as a lowly clerk was asked if he'd like to pop over to South Africa to help oversee some new diamond mines, and started on an inexorably upward entrepreneurial spiral. Ten years later he returned to London an inordinately wealthy man and began acquiring top-level art, focusing on artefacts displaying high-quality craftsmanship. These items were originally displayed around his London residence, then also at his out-of-town mansion at Luton Hoo, and over 700 of them are now on display in Greenwich. They pack a lot of wow.
Ranger's House is a "knock on the door and we'll let you in" kind of attraction. Once inside you'll be nudged towards the ticket desk and then given instructions on where to go, which roughly translate as "upstairs first, turn left and do a complete circuit, then do downstairs". Upstairs begins with a display offering some historical background, including a reminder that most of what you're about to see was ultimately paid for through the exploitation of the press-ganged indigenous population. Here too is the exploding desk which kickstarted Wehrner's collecting bug, with all its secret bits popped out and some fine marquetry on display. And then the proper stuff.
[Ranger's House has a no photography policy, so you'll have to imagine, or buy the guide book, or scan the website, or visit for yourself]
The first room's pretty typical, neatly rammed with over 50 objects in a central glass case and around the walls. You can immediately see that Julius had taste because these are impeccably crafted, in this room most likely carved to within a millimetre of their lives. A high proportion of the objects have a religious bent, because that's the 16th and 17th centuries for you, and most of it is from mainland Europe - there's never a lot of British stuff on show.
Each room has an approximate theme, from the Renaissance to fine jewellery to Dutch Old Masters to Italian ceramics, and essentially you never quite know what you're going to get next. Julius liked to collect the "splendidly ugly", which is why the bronze curio of Hercules shows him drunk and asleep, why many of the paintings show Christ's bloody suffering, and why if you twist round the ivory pendant of a young woman there's a rotting skeleton on her back. But it's by no means all dark - that silver Nautilus cup is exquisite, and I found the lead-glazed oval dish with moulded eel, fish and crab properly mesmerising.
Some exhibits are descriptively labelled, but most simply numbered, and to discover what they are you'll need to pick up the room guide. These are beautifully produced and bound, if a little hard to read in certain rooms where the lighting is deliberately low. Also there are only four books in each room, so if you're the fifth person through the door you may be left wondering. But each description is intelligently written, and as an alternative to being shepherded round on a guided tour it works well.
Downstairs is laid out more like the rooms of a great house, with items displayed in situ, as Julius might have had them on show. Everyone loves a nice bit of Sèvres, or a massive medieval tapestry, or a marble-topped occasional table, it's just that very few of us can ever hope to own them. One particularly striking statue in the long gallery depicts a life-size bare-breasted woman being snogged by an angel, and once stood at the bottom of the main staircase at Luton Hoo - the floor here has had to be strengthened to support it.
The staff are characters too. Stood singly they're helpful and informative, but get two of them together and they'll start discussing the ethics of the ivory trade, or gossiping about shift changes, or bemoaning the fact that English Heritage have run out of new uniforms so the old grey polo'll have to do until next year. But the real stars are the objects in the collection themselves, and the unseen craftspeople behind them, in this miniature privately-sourced V&A at the top of Greenwich Park.
» By coincidence, Ian Visits visited on the same day! Here's his report.
Today I'm completing my bus journey across the capital, riding four routes from the northern edge of the capital to the south. There may be more than one way to complete the feat, but my choice of route was fixed as soon as I spotted that the sequence 279, 76, 77, 280 consists of two pairs of consecutive numbers, lightly shuffled. Now all I have to do is see quite how close to the Surrey border I can get on my final bus...
ACROSS LONDON BY BUS(iv)
Route 280: Tooting - Belmont Length of journey: 6½ miles, 45 minutes
I reckon most passengers waiting for the 280 outside Shoe Zone in Tooting don't even know where Belmont is, let alone have any intention of going there. While I wait I have to listen to several of them collectively shrieking, because that's what they do in the school holidays, or moaning about the awfulness of an acquaintance into their phone. As I board and dash upstairs, I spy a policewoman resting with her eyes closed at the back of the lower deck. We set off past a couple of restaurants which last year inspired Lonely Planet to describe Tooting as one of the world's ten coolest neighbourhoods, but also several dozen minor outlets which suggest they called it wrong.
At Amen Corner a man walks out into the traffic immediately in front of us, then smiles and waves in gratitude after our driver manages not to run him over. The parched strip of grass stretching off beyond the station is Figges Marsh, on which a minor kickabout has just completed as its protagonists disperse. One lad in a Man U jersey boards the bus and climbs to the upper deck, reeking of some pungent aftershave he shouldn't yet be old enough to need. A parked Volkswagen Polo blocks the bus lane ahead, because technically it isn't a bus lane for another hour and a half, so that's alright. Self-descriptive local businesses include Food World, which sells world foods, and The Shed Centre, which sells sheds.
Mitcham town centre has recently been realigned to give buses and bicycles priority, sending other traffic on a less than magical detour. The chief beneficiary is a short semi-pedestrianised shopping street boasting nothing much more exciting than a Poundland, a mural and a couple of pubs. The bus ahead of us appears to be a 280, which it can't be unless the previous service was phenomenally delayed, and turns out to be a 270 with the wrong number displayed in the rear window. A small child drags his family upstairs and is disconsolate to find the front seat taken, and isn't satisfied with the second row so ends up with his parents at the very back. Mitcham Market is not open. The Tag Elezz cafe is very popular.
Mitcham's historic Cricket Green is not currently well named, apart that is from the central square, its outfield looking particularly dry and jaundiced. The two pubs beyond the boundary remain just as empty and boarded-up as they were last August. If you've ever wondered where London's Number 1 Family Sash Window Manufacturer is based, a ride through Mitcham on the 280 means you need wonder no more. At the other end of London Road we pause at traffic lights immediately above the tram tracks, allowing a Wimbledon service to pass directly underneath. The surrounding residential area has become positively semi-detached, with a splash of unprepossessing flats.
Across the River Wandle we enter the St Helier 'cottage estate', a massive out-of-town overspill built in the 1930s by the LCC. The bins on the right-hand side of the road display the Merton waterwheel, whilst those on the left are branded with the Sutton apple tree. Calling a block of flats 'Grosslea' seems an unusual choice. In a cluttered front garden, a topless long-haired pensioner stands with hands on hips and his potbelly drooping, beneath a big sign which reads 'Beware Dogs Running Free'. I bet his neighbours love him. An older man with an even longer grey ponytail overtakes us sat astride a modified Harley Davidson, whose personalised numberplate is attempting to spell BIG GUV.
The shopping parade at the Rose Hill roundabout has an Art Deco vibe, and a barbers shop which brands itself simply as 'Hairdressing For Men' rather than any of this modern grooming rubbish. Here we pass the 7th and final Lidl of my cross-London journey (for comparison, we've only passed two Aldis). Our next road splits Rosehill Park into East and West, with both halves looking conspicuously underused given it's the school holidays (other than a small seated cluster around the car park). Rosehill's bowls club seems overkeen to attract new members, its giant banner urging passers-by to "come in and try for free". And then we dip unexpectedly into cutting, as a faded sign on a footbridge welcomes us to Sutton Town Centre.
Tudorbethan semis make way for the edge of the CBD, and two modern block of flats which'd look normal in inner London but here seem jarringly out of place. Ah, here are the local children, splashing in the sunken fountains in a small piazza outside Sainsburys. The 280 is allowed to follow some of the High Street, at the fish'n'chip and Polish deli end, but is whisked away outside the former Red Lion to follow a north-south access road instead. This has a separate bus slalom lane, which occasionally swings in behind the back of the shops to allow access to the main pedestrianised core. By the fourth swing, almost every passenger has alighted. The final bus shelter contains a long row of ladies in floral blouses.
Even by outer London standards, Sutton often feels like a welcome throwback to simpler times. But a major mixed use development project by the station is bringing an injection of highrise modernity, namely Sutton Point, whose hoarding-blurb describes the rising towers as "Sutton's latest landmark". Well, obviously. We dawdle outside the station for a while because, even though the journey's nearly finished, we're running a few minutes ahead of schedule. Most of the adjacent shops serve sit-down food or drink, but it looks like Beds To Go has already gone. The green-faced clock on a pole slowly ticks round towards quarter past three. And eventually we begin the final climb up the Brighton Road.
The contrast to Hertford Road at the start of my journey is stark indeed, my final mile being along a leafy avenue dotted with private nurseries, dental clinics and retirement flats. Everyone has ample space to live, and shrubbery, and most likely a car rather than relying on an outer London bus. Even here, stubbled youth are sporting topknots with sharply shaved sides, a hairstyle which future historians will use to date photos to the year 2018. A brand new secondary school is being squeezed in on land below the hospital. And dammit, here comes the bus's final stop immediately outside The California gastropub, which is still 100m from the boundary of London I'm trying to reach.
I sit tight, and the bus pulls off, and only then does the driver play the "This bus terminates here" message. Hurrah, I have a legitimate reason to have stayed aboard, as only a regular passenger would have known they were supposed to alight before. It's a very short ride to the bus stand, a sweeping red-tinted apron (plus a toilet for driver relief), where I'm allowed off with a reluctant opening of the doors. And a dozen steps across the tarmac brings me to the edge of Banstead Common, accessed via a short wasp-infested footpath, which means I've just enteredSurrey and my journey is complete. Four buses is all it takes to cross Greater London, if you choose them carefully enough, and oh the contrasts you'll see along the way.
It's Day Three of my bus journey across the capital, riding four consecutive routes from the northern edge of the capital to the south. In a particularly nice arithmetical touch, the bus which follows my ride on the 76 is the 77, which'll take me just far enough south for the the Surrey border to be one ride away.
ACROSS LONDON BY BUS(iii)
Route 77: Waterloo - Tooting Length of journey: 7½ miles, 60 minutes
The halfway point in my cross-London journey is a bus stop named County Hall, a building once full of politicians, now home to sharks. After a short wait my 77 arrives, uncluttered by passengers, although that's not particularly surprising at what is only its third stop. Everyone else boarding has suitcases, so sits downstairs, which means I get the top deck to myself and an uninterrupted view of Waterloo's hotel quarter. It's by no means picturesque. Heading south means missing Westminster Bridge and the queue of sightseeing buses feeding off it, and avoiding the gloomy underpass beneath two dozen terminating tracks. But St Thomas's Hospital brings a welcome splash of colour - notably staff in uniform green and ambulances in dazzling yellow.
The 77 is the only bus to complete a full run down the Albert Embankment. The old brick wall on the left-hand side conceals Lambeth Palace's back garden, the archbishop's resplendent residence eventually emerging, topped off by Tudor chimneys. I remember to look back across the Thames for a fine view of the Palace of Westminster - the last building on this trip that a foreign tourist might recognise. Rather less familiar are the stark Thirties facade of the London Fire Brigade Headquarters, three particularly repellent 'landmark towers' packed with multi-million pound apartments, and ssssh, I think that's MI6.
Everybody loves Vauxhall's twin-pronged bus station, so it is of course to be demolished to make way for a dense commercial redevelopment with a line of bus stops at its heart. The current bus station is not designed to be entered from our angle, so we're required to follow a ridiculous loop round the one way system, passing underneath the railway twice, then all the way back to the pronged end before finally returning to the direction of travel. A snaking line of passengers awaits, impeccable in its diversity, as if the route has finally discovered its purpose. And still, it seems, nobody wants to sit upstairs with me.
We're not going to Battersea Power Station, we're taking the Wandsworth Road, past a gaping hole filled with diggers which will soonarise as 2300 high-end flats and a luxury hotel. The main driver behind Nine Elms' transformation is soon visible on the right hand side - a Sainsbury's car park dug up to create a new tube station, the line of its tunnels clearly visible in the concrete beams exposed across the construction site. The Northern line will be swinging in the long way from Waterloo, all around the Kenningtons, whereas the 77's route has been rather more direct (Vauxhall bus station excepted).
How rapidly the neighbourhood flips. In less than a minute we go from designer towers to municipal estates, and from letting agents to betting shops and pizza takeaways. This is the Nine Elms which existed long before the tube extension was mooted, and whose residents will live alongside richer neighbours they may never see. We park up for a couple of minutes opposite a halal butcher and an Ethiopian restaurant, apparently while the drivers change over, although no announcement is made to confirm. One stop ahead at Larkhall Park, a bereft-looking woman sobs and clutches her head, and is then comforted by a random waiting passenger. Of everything I'll see along the entire journey, I think this scene will stay with me the longest.
Foreign tourists who've booked into the Chelsea Guest House must be somewhat underwhelmed to discover it's a) a house, b) alongside a McDonalds, c) not in Chelsea. The council estate past the Overground station is even less upstanding, but soon the smarter villas of Clapham and Battersea nudge up closer, and we start to ascend Lavender Hill. A couple of pubs on opposite sides of the road have been boarded up and are being used only by 'Guardians in Occupation', but it's not long before the retail offering is heading upmarket again, with shops selling organic jars, cult furniture and parlour drapes. The very concept of a Social Pantry Cafe makes me queasy, but the avocado crowd appear to be enjoying it.
After riding solo for twenty-five minutes, a passenger finally deigns to join me on the upper deck, alas moaning loudly into his phone about a so-called friend. Thankfully he sits up the back. By now we've climbed up quite high, relatively speaking, with intermittent views down immaculate Victorian streets towards the other side of the Thames. Ahead lies the Clapham Junction crossroads, where the level of collective spending power is such that Arding & Hobbs, now Debenhams, still hasn't succumbed and gone under. To prove the point, St John's Road doesn't have barbers, it does grooming, The phalanx of pushchairs heading for Northcote Road is much in evidence.
As the top deck becomes more popular, a mother and her two daughters (lower infants, upper primary) shuffle into the front row. While the younger one pretends to drive the bus, the elder mimics the announcements ("77... to... Tooting") and is sparky enough to point out that the route numbers of the two buses ahead are precisely 100 apart. Our next hill is Battersea Rise, which is technically the A3, although the pubs remain genteel enough to festoon their entire frontage with hanging baskets. We cross over two railway lines, then turn left to follow the tracks southwest, past the memorial stone for the Clapham Rail Disaster.
The 77 is the only bus to serve Spencer Park, the local millionaires row. As it continues it becomes the sole route on Windmill Road, which has an actual (sail-less) windmill at the halfway point. And then it provides exclusive service along Earlsfield Road, a charming street lined with smart villas whose front gardens are large enough for multiple cars and a bit of shrubbery. I think this is the longest we've gone on this journey without seeing a shop, a sequence eventually broken by a single Chinese restaurant, because needs must. Half of the road outside this takeaway is coned off, so we wait at temporary traffic lights while the man in the digger rests his feet on the control panel and takes an early afternoon nap.
Earlsfield's main drag is a jolly place, plied by angelic kids on scooters, and appears ethnically mixed but not especially diverse. The launderette still has an 0181 phone number, and does do duvets. Food options include DeRosier (for chocolate and coffee), Kruger's deli (for whom biltong is a speciality) and hallowed belly (a defiantly lower case eaterie). The road we're following is Garratt Lane, a former rural track so long that the house beside the Summerstown bus stop is numbered 777. The local housing's a lot more terrace-y out here, unless you happen to live in the almshouses, or have a detached plot in Streatham Cemetery.
Our bus is a lot busier now as it feeds folk towards the joys of Tooting, with headphones advisable for blocking out the yelling baby, the jabbering teenager and the ranting man. The A1 Dry Cleaners near the leisure centre makes a particular effort to announce that it does wedding dresses, suggesting a high proportion of second hand or second marriage clientele. As we approach Tooting Broadway an announcement I've not heard before urges those intending to change for the tube to check the TfL website for potential disruption, presumably because the onboard system isn't capable. I hold on until the first stop beyond the station, where the next bus I want to catch is just (dammit!) pulling away. So near, but Surrey remains so far. 280>>
It's Day Two of my bus journey across the capital, riding four consecutive routes from the northern edge of the capital to the south. Today, lots of famous bits, and a crossing of the Thames.
ACROSS LONDON BY BUS(ii)
Route 76: Tottenham - Waterloo Length of journey: 8 miles, 70 minutes
I'm starting my second journey at a bus stop called Tottenham Town Hall, not that Tottenham has a town hall any more, the building in question having recently been rebranded The Dream Centre (for Conferences, Weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, Gala Dinners etc). Thankfully I'm not stopping. My next bus is already coming round the corner as I step off my first, and what joy, it's one of those overheating New Routemasters Boris wanted to be remembered by. Don't worry, I had the sense not to make this journey on one of the hotter days of the week. The top deck front seat is mine, indeed the top deck front seat is going to be mine on every journey I take, which is particularly excellent news for narrative perspective.
The High Road is briefly six lanes wide as it careers down to the major junction at Seven Sisters. I spy the 279 I've just alighted from turning off down the Seven Sisters Road, in the shadow of a single concrete liftshaft rising 23 numbered storeys into the sky. By 2020 this'll be Apex House, a residential tower far taller than Haringey is used to, and precisely the kind of thing councils turn their Customer Service departments into nowadays. We're going straight ahead, beneath the railway bridge at South Tottenham, which I notice is six inches higher if you believe the warning sign on the bridge rather than the sign by the roadside.
My first travelling companions are a well-fed trio who, thankfully, spread back to the second row rather than squidge in fully alongside. The largest man's Givenchy-sponsored football top is of such girth that I bet no professional player has even worn one in his size. The bus is now climbing the first hill on my journey, which isn't yet Stamford Hill but leads to the suburb of the same name. The area's Jewish residents are much in evidence, some sporting traditional kippahs, but considerably more the high-crowned black hats worn by the local Hasidic community. A ghost sign on a dirty brick wall promises Costumes To Order, including "Mourning Wear Promptly Measured". Another more modern sign for a minimarket advertises "Polish and Brazilian Products", because these days every niche counts.
From behind me comes the unwelcome sound of my journey's first unplugged video, which some self-centred passenger is evidently enjoying. At the foot of Stamford Hill we're sent off on a tour of the Stoke Newington one-way system, where I see with sadness that punning white goods store Sellfridges has now completely disappeared, not simply renamed itself for copyright reasons. For balance, the West Hackney Recreation Ground now has a circular labyrinth at its heart. As we round the common I notice a strong smell which my nose is convinced must be urine, but my brain reminds me is almost certainly the bus itself, this model being notorious for olfactory pollutant.
We return to the High Road in the midst of a concentration of Turkish restaurants and takeaways. I've been watching for signs of gentrification since Waltham Cross and essentially seen nothing, but as we nudge towards Shacklewell and Dalston the first signs of affluence very gradually appear. The Hackney Peddler would never survive in Ponders End, even with a change of name, while Pelicans & Parrots is targeting a market Upper Edmonton could never support. Harvest E8 is the journey's first hipster eaterie, quickly outdone by La Petit Bretagne, and blimey there's an M&S Simply Food beneath the newbrick apartments at Dalston Kingsland. But thankfully the majority of what lines these streets remains raw and real, and long may it remain.
The bus station behind Dalston Junction has become slightly less useless since the 277 was curtailed to stop there too, I note, but the 76 continues to roll straight past. Instead it turns right, making the first break from the road I've been travelling down since Waltham Cross, to follow the considerably more minor Englefeld Road. This plies through the heart of De Beauvoir Town, a gorgeous neighbourhood of late Victorian villas laid out along spacious geometrical avenues. We pass a garden centre and a craft beer dispensary, then the De Beauvoir Arms and the De Beauvoir Deli, as if we've suddenly entered a different world. You will never live here unless you do already.
Ooh, it's the Regents Canal, which we briefly run immediately alongside to reinforce the allure of a waterside setting. A digital sign on the bridge smiles at us for doing less than 20mph, which it would be difficult to exceed because the traffic lights are on red. Hackney council remain very proud of their three year-old speed limit, and have hung banners praising it from the majority of lampposts. Past Shoreditch Park the vista ahead becomes a peculiar mix of Victorian brick and jagged glass shards, as the despoliation of the City Road continues apace. Dozens of builders are enjoying a lunchbreak on the kerb beneath the latest steel skeleton, which promises future residents concierge facilities and a studio gym. The transition to upstart London is swift indeed.
Wham, we're out onto the Old Street Roundabout (which still is a roundabout, for now, but is scheduled to be de-circulated soon). One corner has already been reborn as the White Collar Factory, which is the kind of travesty which occurs when a burgeoning digital cluster disappears up its own artifice. Nobody earlier in the journey ever needed an Oliver Bonas, but here's one flouting its wares opposite the peace of Bunhill Fields. Finsbury Square appears to be half covered by picknicking workers listening to a brass band, and half covered by a bowling green on which a single intense match is taking place. Welcome to summertime in the City.
Moorgate station, whose new entrance still isn't looking anywhere near complete, is the single point where my Crossbus journey crosses the arc of Crossrail. It's one o'clock, so the pavements hereabouts are thronging with city workers on a quest to find yet another meal which isn't a sandwich. The men are all in white, blue or pink unbuttoned shirts, pushed out either by a pectoral bulge or a beery paunch, depending on their preferred choice of after-work activity. Further staff continue to pour out from modern office blocks overlaid on the site of countless generations of commerce. A few older buildings survive closer to the centre, many of them banks, and one of them the Bank.
Bank junction is supposed to be closed to all but buses and bikes, not that this appears to stop cars, vans and minicabs from sneaking through, and hopefully being slapped by a £65 ticket. Our bus should be heading down Queen Victoria Street, but that's blocked one-way for longterm roadworks, so the on-board display flashes up * for diversion and we tackle Cheapside instead. It too is seething, if not quite so well dressed. Some punters queue for the £4 meal deal at Deli Box, while others are shelling out considerably more on coffee pods in the Nespresso boutique. A Cheapside Ambassador, resplendent in blue-banded bowler hat, checks his phone while he waits for a passer-by to find him useful.
Back on line of route at St Paul's Cathedral, my fellow front seat passengers are getting almost as good a view as those passing in open-topped sightseeing buses, but for a fraction of the fare. I count seven tour buses going the other way before we reach the foot of Ludgate Hill, one with a man holding a selfie stick aloft, filming himself giving a running commentary into his phone. On Fleet Street we pass a man clutching a pile of legal files wrapped in pink ribbon, and a Big Issue seller snuck in beside the alleyway down to the Temple. And at Aldwych my yakking neighbours finally alight, which means I have the top deck to myself on the final leg over the Thames.
The view from Waterloo Bridge is fantastic, as you'd expect, looking out across the bend in the river towards the City or the Palace of Westminster. The bus stop on the southern side of the bridge remains closed as a result of 'temporary' barriers introduced as a safety measure last year, and has been replaced by an underused dolly stop further along. The IMAX cinema at the Waterloo roundabout is wrapped in a giant advert for Deliveroo, rather than the latest blockbuster. We turn right onto York Road, along the drab edge of the mainline station, and I have to remember to alight at the penultimate stop because that's where my third bus departs. North London complete, South London to go. 77>>
In 2012 I undertook a red bus journey from one side of London to the other, riding four consecutive buses from Dartford to Uxbridge, and tracking a complete cross section of the capital along the way. In 2018 I've decided to cross London by bus again, but this time riding north to south rather east to west. Again I've managed to find a route requiring only four bus journeys, which wasn't easy, starting just beyond the M25 in Hertfordshire and ending up at the Surrey border. Even better, every time I got off one bus I caught the next from the very same stop, so it was an absolute doddle of a trip. Keep your eyes peeled, and here we go.
ACROSS LONDON BY BUS(i)
Route 279: Waltham Cross - Tottenham Length of journey: 7½ miles, 60 minutes
My top deck parade across the capital kicks off in Waltham Cross aboard the stalwart 279, the Lea Valley's uncontested spine route. A squat austere bus station was shoehorned off the high street in 2001, opened by a Mayor, an MP, the council chairs of Herts and Essex and not-yet-Sir Peter Hendy, back when he was merely Director of Bus and River Services. A row of red, turquoise and orangey-black buses are parked up on the far side of the tarmac, and every six minutes a driver on route 279 puts down their phone, revs up and manoeuvres their way towards Stand B. The game is afoot.
Joining me at the front of the top deck are a mum and her two young children - from their height I'd say twins. They're about four years old, and chatty, and quite excited to be making this one-off trip to Nan's. The boy's already demanded to know why they couldn't ride the orange bus, and is now pointing at a drive-thru KFC which he describes as "Chicken Lidl". Mum warns the girl not to lick the bar across the front window "because it's really dirty", then tells the boy that the door underneath is "where the numbers are". This family is narrative gold, and sadly nobody else on the entire journey will come close, meaning I've peaked too early.
After a spin round the bypass, missing the busker playing tunes to Queen Eleanor in the High Street, we swing round onto the historic Hertford Road. The 279'll be following this all the way down to Tottenham, a good seven miles hence, as did marching Romans (on a somewhat straighter alignment) many centuries before. Our first stop is immediately above the M25, not that you'd guess. The motorway passes beneath this peripheral urban landscape in a cut and cover tunnel, and is visible from the top deck only as a long green recreation ground scattered with seagulls. This is also precisely where London begins, and it'll be four hours (and twenty-five miles) before I finally reach the other side.
"Why aren't we going faster?" asks the small boy, and Mum has to explain it's because we're stopped at traffic lights. A grubby green sign welcomes us to the Freezywater and Enfield Wash Shopping Centre, which must be a council term for some intermittent shops strung out along a road. A Polish cash and carry, a nailbar, a carwash, a scout hut, several betting shops and a proper Lidl are but a few of the outer suburban treats. A line of cones marks the journey's first set of roadworks, and has also closed the adjacent bus stop, not that the two ladies waiting have noticed the yellow cover on the flag, and they wave their arms in vain as we sail by.
My excitable neighbours are alighting at Ingersoll Road, just past the Squirrel House Chinese takeaway and the Blessed Laundrette. Each child gets a turn to ding the bell, the girl attempting several times before Mum warns her, paradoxically, that it should only be rung once. My replacement top deck companion immediately digs into his lunch of wrapped croissant and bottle of orange juice, both components of which he will leave neatly on the seat when he departs. Our next green-signed shopping centre is Enfield Highway, which is a little more substantial, and boasts a herringbone brick parade at its heart. Sorry we've closed down, says the sign in the window of the former KFC, but if you can't be bothered to drive to Chingford you always can order on Just Eat instead.
We're still in suburban semis territory, interrupted by the occasional park and kebabbery. A screen of rampantly sexist posters for the local timber merchant disfigures the approach to Ponders End, presumably because the target audience respond positively to well endowed ladies wielding chainsaws. We pull up outside what used to be the White Hart, fenced-off in the heart of a redevelopment zone, leaving The Goat as the last pub standing... until that (very soon) goes the same way. Ponders End High Street has been dramatically repaved as a shared space with low kerbs and different patterns of slab to represent roundabouts and crossings. Cycle lanes ramp up in front of bus stops, presumably to encourage everyone to occupy the space more cooperatively, but are easily blocked by a single badly parked car.
Next to join me at the front of the bus is an old man wearing a yellow hat, who shuffles across to grab the other seat as soon as it becomes vacant. His party trick is to shout "Hello?" repeatedly into his phone, and then to thump the bar in front of him whenever the conversation restarts. A brief Georgian terrace hints that Edmonton might once have been a bit swish, but we're not going to get the chance to see the town centre today because the road ahead is closed and we're off on diversion. This means skipping the bus station and heading round the back of the shopping centre, which is definitely not its best side, unless you like ventilation units, delivery access and cardboard-baling machines.
We return to the main road opposite Küçük Ev, a Turkish restaurant which impressively features three consecutive accented characters, and also serves kebabs. Other eateries nearby include Hot Nuts, Oriental Chef and Lobo Fisheries, because the cuisine along this bus's route is uncommonly diverse. It may or may not be a sign of the times that the former HQ of the Edmonton Labour Party now sells cheap water filters instead, but hasn't yet got round to covering up the sign. Angel Place is the misleadingly delightful name for the grade-separated junction with the North Circular, beyond which the locale is rebranded Upper Edmonton and suddenly there are 'proper' shops, assuming a Peacocks and Superdrug count.
It's taken three quarters of an hour but we have finally reached the other side of Enfield, which is still only borough number one. The transfer point to Borough Two is marked by an arch across the road bearing a small mythical beast in profile, or in a southerly direction simply by a dull sign saying Welcome to Haringey. The gradual appearance of pubs with cockerels in the window is a big clue to what's coming up ahead, as is a lofty silver rim above the rooftops. This is Tottenham's new stadium, utterly dominant on the local skyline, and apparently still due to open for play next month. We pass, sequentially, a hi-vis army taking a break on the pavement for a smoke, an unfinished flight of steps, two cranes, several diggers, a massive glass wall featuring a central sticky-outy-swooshy bit, and a single heritage building miraculously unconsumed.
Next up is Tottenham proper, a considerable linear retail opportunity sourced from a global diaspora, which makes Dewhursts the Butchers look curiously out of place. At Bruce Grove the A10 trunk road swings in from the right, under a blue-painted railway bridge, and for the first time the High Road feels like a proper High Street. It's not giving too much away to reveal that when my journey hits the other side of the capital, south London won't look anything like this. The Tottenham High Cross memorial lies somewhat adrift amid a major road junction, and is also my cue to alight before the 279 diverts off towards Manor House, because I need to keep going straight ahead. 76>>
ACROSS LONDON BY BUS (iv)
