Route 26 from Hackney Wick to Victoria is the bus of the year.
And if you ride it on New Year's Day you see different things to normal.
1) The first stop on the 26 is outside Besi Food Centre, a convenience store so retro it still prioritises Oyster on its awning. Out front are grapes and garlic, brooms in buckets with tinsel attached, two leftover succulents, more bottled water than any sane human would buy and a rack of Instant BBQs. 2) Beside the gates to Victoria Park a cherry tree is in full blossom. It's obligatory to mention flowering cherries in any New Year bus blogpost, and also obligatory for a commenter to point out that this isn't special it's just what certain varieties do. 3) Pubs in Homerton are silently shuttered after New Year's Eve. The Eagle is advertising an upcoming Karaoke Night but The Kenton Arms has gone one better and has 'Karaoke Room' stencilled in gold on its front window. Hire costs increase to £119 per hour on New Year's Eve. 4) A dog squats beside a tomb in a former cemetery. 5) The nearest gasholder to the Regent's Canal is half scaffolding, half covered in white plastic sheeting, as its conversion into tiny homes for rich bastards continues. 6) In New Year sights repeated across the country, a hungover male in a grey hoodie is standing with a fag in hand in the front garden of a House In Multiple Occupation. 7) On Mare Street I spot a Tesco Express with 'Est. 1998' out front, which gets me wondering if this is Tesco's oldest 'Est. ????' in London. (It's not, because ten minutes later I spot an 'Est. 1988' on Bishopsgate)
8) Hackney Road is essentially shuttered, there being no commercial need to open on New Year's morning. Only convenience stores and a few tentative takeaways are giving it a try. 9) Rick Astley is the joint owner of that bar which serves pints of Birdbarker Sparkling Cider, Nimble Like A Treefrog and Grandma's Fridge Cake. 10) A dozen athletic types jog by, broadcasting very strong 'we didn't go out and party last night' vibes. 11) In entrance foyer after entrance foyer, a lone security guard sits at a small desk inside an enormous atrium beside a bank of security turnstiles nobody'll be walking through until tomorrow, at the earliest. 12) Liverpool Street station's entrances are all closed while they fiddle with the dodgy glass in the roof over Christmas and New Year. [Reopens today, might look a lot brighter] 13) Patrons disappear through a small door so they can be whisked up to the 40th floor for a posh waffle with some duck on it. 14) On Leadenhall Street another lofty office skyscraper is close to opening, its perimeter religiously surrounded by bollards so that the architects could get away with a rim of glass windows at ground level. 15) Over 100 red, white and black bollards weave across Bank junction, strategically positioned along every twisty pavement edge so it looks like a Bollard Convention may be taking place.
16) Traffic lights patiently wait for absolutely no other traffic to pass through, whilst keeping our bus on red for a full minute while the entire cycle completes. 17) A streetsweeper, who hopefully got paid extra if their shift started overnight. 18) The dome of St Paul's Cathedral gleams in the winter sun while umpteen tourists board the bus downstairs. I can see little people circumnavigating the Stone Gallery while even smaller people huddle on the Golden Gallery, and just imagine the windchill up there. 19) A European dad arrives up top, appalled that I'm in the front seat where he'd like his family to be. Later he'll phone his wife at the back of the bus and urge her to relocate up front, only to alight the bus two stops later because it wasn't going where he thought it was. 20) Oh god so many people have squeezed onto this bus since Bishopsgate that all its windows are steaming up... first a faint smear, then general blurriness, then a more opaque sheen... and I'm worried because I can't complete a post called 26 things I saw on route 26 if everything outside the bus has essentially vanished. 21) Sightseers in designer winterwear wondering why they came to a closed capital city on New Year's Day. 22) Two announcements at Aldwych: i) No standing on the upper deck or stairs ii) This bus is on diversion.
23) The trouble with riding the 26 on New Year's Day is that Trafalgar Square and Whitehall are closed for the London Parade, so the bus has to go the long way to Victoria via Waterloo Bridge and Lambeth Bridge. It takes forever (not technically forever but it took our bus 26 minutes which was grim but appropriate). The roadworks either side of Lambeth Bridge were the worst because it took at least eight goes to get through all the lights. Pretty much all the other passengers had piled off by Waterloo station, having correctly realised they really didn't want to go this way. 24) One bonus of the detour south of the river was that you got two world-class views of the Thames, in both cases including the London Eye which had been the world's focus just twelve hours earlier. All the accoutrements of crowd control were still present, including large green metal barriers to block the view from inappropriate locations and multiple banners directing arriving/departing spectators via the approved route. It must've been bloody cold waiting on that riverbank for hours before ten minutes you could have watched on TV. 25) And all that detour turned out to be for just two normal stops on Victoria Street, the penultimate and final, which made me question whether it was all worth it. 26) I walked back along the 26's normal route to watch some of the London Parade, the annual razzmatazz Americans go nuts for but Londoners barely notice. Freezing spectators sat in the VIP stands waiting for the parade to arrive, having spent a full hour watching big screens showing its approach. When it finally arrived it was led by a plumed marching band, because nothing says 'London at New Year' like feathered Pennsylvanians with euphoniums playing Kool & The Gang. If you've never seen the London Parade all three and a half hours is already on YouTube, and this may convince you not to watch it again.
