Prologue - A Slight Dampness in the Trouser Department

Prologue

It’s strange what passes through your head when you stare certain death in the face.

Take my own experience. From what I can recall, what astonished me most wasn’t the fact that a huge double decker bus was inexorably bearing down on me but rather the fact that, at the very point of my imminent and painful destruction, the only thing that popped into my mind was “Oh look - that bus goes to Durham”.

No panic, no scream, no hurried mental check whether I’d donned clean underpants that morning (it was a Tuesday - I had), not even the traditional whole-life-passing-before-my-eyes-in-glorious-Technicolor bit. Not even the highlights – either of them. Just those seven little words.

What was bewildering was the fact that I should have been terrified, yet I plainly wasn’t - instead, I was focussed entirely in a slightly perplexed sort of way on the fact that the bus which was just about to crush me to death was in fact en route to Durham.

Then it all got a bit stranger. 

I was sitting down by then, in an oily puddle flecked with cigarette butts at the side of the road, contemplating those seven little words which seemed to ignite a firestorm of random thoughts.

“Durham,” I thought, dizzily. “Oh. I used to live in Durham.”

My mind was instantly transported back to Durham in the 1970’s, to the quaint medieval streets at the heart of this tiny, picturesque and, if you were a teenager, utterly boring city. But before I could take in the sight of Durham’s cathedral perched picturesquely on a scenically tree-lined loop in the river, my synapses snapped and crackled again; this time I was in Durham's North Road Bus Station, one of the city's less obvious attractions. 

Hey, I’d forgotten all about North Road Bus Station. This is where I used to catch the bus home after school, alongside my mates who were also catching buses to places like (crackle, snap, snap) Medomsley, Chester-le-Street, Bishop Auckland, Darlington…

“Coo, Darlington,” I thought. “That’s just a short bus ride from Yorkshire. I wonder if you can catch a bus to Yorkshire from there...?” 

Now, I should point out that all of these thought-processing fireworks occurred in a mere fraction of an instant, in the brief moment between me spotting the bus and jumping backwards out of its way, then losing my balance and parking myself rear-first in a puddle at the side of the road. Actually, it was at this point I realised that the bus was actually slowly crawling to a stop (well, it was a bus station).

Later, as the chilly, diesely water in my Y-fronts began to dry, I found that something was nagging at the back of my mind. The only problem was I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was. 

There was something in all those random, rapid-fire thoughts about Durham and buses and things... I knew it was something that had never occurred to me before, but what was it...? 

I mentally retraced my steps. Let's see. If you get on a bus in Gateshead and then get off in another quite different town – OK, let’s say Durham – then as well as quaint medieval streets and a winding river you’re also likely to find a completely new set of buses to take you even further away. So if you catch a bus in Durham to, say, Darlington...

That's it! That's the thought that had wandered uninvited into my head. 

It was the realisation that buses serve their own distinct and local area, yet all these services are almost bound to overlap, which meant you could - in theory - join up all the hundreds and thousands of overlapping bus services serving the British Isles to make one huge, patchwork quilt of services covering the whole country. And then travel right across it! Couldn't you?

OK, so not much of a eureka moment, then. But it still felt like I'd stumbled on something new. I mean, I couldn't recall anyone ever talking about Britain’s local bus services as one vast network before – could it be that it had lain there all this time but nobody had ever noticed it? 

I began to speculate on what it would be like to navigate this huge, unexplored network of bus services Where would I go? Where could I go? Would it really cover the whole country? And just how far can you travel in a day simply by standing at a bus stop and hopping off one local bus and on to another?

Hmm...

In common with practically every other person in the British Isles, once I’d passed my driving test I promptly turned my back on public transport and set out to take my place in what Margaret Thatcher called ‘the great car-owning democracy'. As a result, I’d probably been on a bus no more than a handful of times during the last 25 years. 

I also had a slightly jaundiced view of public transport derived solely from the view you get from behind the steering wheel of a car. To me, buses were large, noisy slow-moving things you got stuck behind, or which cruise arrogantly past you down unnecessary bus lanes as you wait for hours for the flipping lights to change. Grrr.

But still...could I make a trip through Britain just by getting off one bus and onto another. 

Nah, it would never work. You’d never be able to connect up the whole of Britain, there’d be huge gaps. I'd get stranded somewhere dangerous and have to sleep in a bus shelter or in a bush on a roundabout. Besides, any normal person would probably run out of patience long before they ran out of buses. Bad idea – forget it.

But it wouldn’t go away. So what if it was difficult? Wouldn't that just make it more interesting? More of a challenge, surely? I mean, I’m not given to bragging but in a previous life I believe I became the first person to cycle up Ben Nevis on a mountain bike, and challenges don’t come much bigger than that (I still have the grazes to prove it). 

Over the following weeks, I found myself looking at buses with a little more interest, noting their size and where they were heading to, and was surprised by what I discovered. Buses, it seemed, appeared to go to all kinds of useful and convenient places. They seemed a lot more colourful and shiny than I remember, too, and some of them even looked quite comfortable. 

Of course, travelling by bus is nothing new. As a kid, a shiny yellow Newcastle Corporation bus was the only way we got around the city to visit grandparents, to go swimming or to pop into town for shopping. Almost everyone I knew used the bus as their principal means of travel. Oh, yes, we had a car all right, but only my Dad had a driving licence so when he wasn’t there – like, when he was at work - we still used the bus and were quite happy to do so.

Ironically, my not-so-near-death encounter with the double decker might never have occurred at all if I hadn’t already partly abandoned the car. After years of relying on my ancient brown Mini to get me to work and back, I found myself living in an area of Tyneside served by Tyne and Wear’s excellent Metro system. I tried it one morning and was converted. No longer was I bludgeoning my way through traffic jams that each day seem to get a little worse, fretting about the rising cost of petrol or whether I’d make that 8.30 meeting on time. Instead I could amble gently across our local park in the morning, sniffing the flowers and enjoying the merry bird song, before taking my seat on a comfortable train to enjoy being pleasantly whooshed through green fields and woody suburbs to my place of work, without ever having to snarl at anyone, make rude hand gestures or even so much as lift my eyes out of my book. 

The problem, of course, is that I still occasionally have to take my car to work and as I am now totally unaccustomed to heavy traffic it's been known for me to react badly to the rush hour. The neat rows of teeth marks around the edge of the steering wheel will generally tell you all you need to know about my journey home by car through Tyneside at five in the evening.

Or maybe because I no longer have to endure this nightmare on a daily basis I can appreciate the utter madness of commuting by car? Is it mad? Is there an alternative,?

I was beginning to think that perhaps this bus trip idea might have a slightly more important undertone. This might be more than just a bus ride. Maybe it could be an exploration of local public transport, of the experience of being a passenger and whether a journey really is better by bus.

The more I thought about it, the more I began to relish the idea of taking it on, to travel from one end of the country to the other by local bus and have a really good look round. Mind you, I couldn't just take a few weeks off work and disappear into the distance on the top of a double decker. I have family, commitments, a wife. I ought to at least mention it to her.

There are one or two things you should know about my wife. She makes the best cheese scones in the known world, she occasionally forgets how much she enjoys Pernod (with entertaining results) and she’s the epitome of the brave, restless traveller. In this, she has an enviable track record. For example, she visited the Soviet Union as a tourist when it was still quite emphatically the Soviet Union. She also spent time in America long before it was a mere hop across the pond, when the word 'pizza' was in the Italian dictionary but certainly not the Oxford English, when the British definition of ‘fast food’ was a cheese wad at a roadside caff, and the name ‘McDonald’ was associated more with an elderly farmer than with a glassy hamburger joint.

As a couple, we shackled her love of travel and adventure to my own love of cycling and wilderness camping to make long cycle trips deep into the remote Highlands of Scotland, the West Country, and through Sicily and Greece, with little more than a tent strapped to our saddle bags and a rough, two-week circular route in our heads. 

“ Erm.. I’ve had this idea… ,” I ventured. “For a journey I’d like to make.”

“Oh, yes?”, she replied brightly. Worryingly, she appeared to begin packing immediately.

“Yes, I’ve been thinking about, er... about making a bus journey.”

“A bus journey?”

She paused, holding a lightweight camping stove in one hand and a bottle of insect repellent in the other.

“From one end of Britain to the other. You know, Land’s End to John O’Groats, sort of thing…”

“By bus?”

I could see she was having trouble with this. By bike or boot she could understand, but by bus? An expression of bewilderment drifted across her face. 'Buses?' she seemed to be thinking. I waited for the question I knew was coming.

“Why would you want to do that?”

There it was. Oh, God….

“Well,” I said, hesitantly. “There’d be lots to see. And experience. About buses and... and that…”

No response. I'd have to try harder.

“And the people I’d meet. You know, pensioners and bus drivers and… and...”

This wasn’t going well.

“Besides,” I rallied. “I’ve always felt there was a travel book inside me, so maybe this could be it. You know, journey through Britain on the back of a bus… don’t think that’s been done before. At least, not written about.”

Her expression changed from confused to thoughtful. I was beginning to find my feet.

“And there’d be lots of history to explore… you know, buses and that….”

She paused, thinking. “I suppose you’d be visiting transport museums on the way…” she said.

“Oh, yes, definitely”, I enthused. “Lots and lots of them!”

I could relax - I was on terra firma now. ‘Museum’ is something which my wife definitely understands. We are, after all, a museum-visiting family to our very core. If there is a museum in the area, then we will visit it. Often twice.

“Hmm…” she pondered.

Our family’s fascination with museums has a long history. It's a dyed-in-the-wool family tradition now, but it was my wife who was the original museum fanatic and I seemed to gradually acquire it from her. Now it is an intrinsic part of any Lynn family holiday. When our children came along, they grew up thinking that a whole afternoon in a museum was an afternoon profitably spent. We, and they, devoured them.

The family’s fascination with museums has led us to visit some pretty rum places over the years, though. Among the less-than-mainstream visitor attractions we have found ourselves wandering around is Keswick's Pencil Museum, which in fact is considerably more interesting than it sounds. Then there's one of London's little-known treasures, the Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising, and the Land of Lost Content in Shropshire which is brilliant, bizarre and slightly unnerving.

We’ve also found ourselves wandering around our fair share of totally crap museums, too. You know the ones - dim, damp-smelling and dusty, and that’s just the volunteer on the till. These generally have a warning above the door cunningly disguised as a sign saying either ‘Heritage Centre' or (whisper it) ‘Folk Museum’. In most cases, the dead bluebottles littering the ancient glass display cases comfortably outnumber the visitors even in the height of summer. The inexplicable farm machinery displays look exactly like pieces of hand-painted scrap metal, and the joyously lop-sided circa 1940s ex-minor department store mannequins depicting costumes from yesteryear will be a good deal more diverting than the slightly moth-eaten dresses they’ve been clothed in for our entertainment and instruction.

But we’ve visited some absolute corkers, too. The National Motor Museum in Beaulieu, for example, is spectacular. John Lennon’s former home in Liverpool is not only a superb recreation of 1950s suburbia, it gives you the willies to think that one of the 20^th century’s most important musicians grew up there. And let's not forget the Beamish Open Air Museum in County Durham which allows you to literally step back in time. Then there's the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden which brilliantly explains how the development of the capital is so intrinsically linked with the story of its transport.

I could go on. You’ll have noticed I mentioned two transport museums there, but I could easily have mentioned loads more. Glasgow’s old Museum of Transport at Kelvinside, for example, or Manchester’s Museum of Transport located in one end of a vast, glass-roofed (and still operational) bus depot, and let's not forget the British Commercial Vehicle Museum in Leyland, Lancashire which despite being run by amateurs puts many a professional museum to shame.

And it’s not just the big collections. We've visited dozens of little privately-owned, volunteer-operated transport museums the length and breadth of the country, everything from Cars of the Stars in the Lake District, the Alyth Museum near Blairgowrie in Perthshire, or the Newburn Hall Motor Museum which is so low-profile that not even people living in Newburn know it's there. All of them are genuinely interesting, frequently quirky and all of them are well worth an hour or so of anyone's time. For this reason, it is the accepted practice that if the Lynn’s go on holiday and there is a transport museum anywhere near, it becomes a definite 'To do'.

The cars are undoubtedly the stars of these museums, be they impossibly glamorous sports coupes, cosy family saloons,or quirky old things with wire wheels and fabric bodies. By comparison, the larger public transport exhibits don’t have quite the same glamour, but what they do have is a clear and unequivocal connection with the places they served. Most will have been running up and down our high streets for countless years, blending into the street scene, becoming part of the very fabric of our communities. They’ll be in a hundred newspaper cuttings, a thousand photographs, a million memories. Look at an E-type Jag in a museum and it will be much like any other E-type Jag – but look at a bus and it will immediately suggest something about the place it served and the lives of the people who used it.

“Hmm... buses....,” murmured my wife, deep in thought.

And people love old buses. Yes, it's true. Watch any family on a visit to a transport museum and you’ll probably see Dad drooling over an Aston Martin whilst the kids are trying their best to con Mum into letting them go upstairs on the double decker bus in the corner. And if Grandad is there, he’ll probably be helping them to sneak aboard, regaling them with tales from the 1950s, of warmly-lit buses on cold winter evenings, of a sneaky fag on the back seat after school, of high jinks on the last bus home after the pubs close, or hanging off the back with your mates when the conductor wasn’t looking…

You wonder whether today’s buses will be remembered with quite the same affection. Will they be cleaned up and put in museums for an army of joyful Grandmas to point at and tell the kids about how their Great Grandad used to drive one like that? Well, possibly not. 

It’s an inescapable fact that the number of people in Britain using buses to get from A to B has been decreasing ever since the 1950s. Back then, when Grandpa was slicking back his hair with a handful of Brylcreem before catching the bus into town with his mates to buy Lonnie Donegan records, his journey there would have been one of more than 13 billion bus journeys made each year by the British public. Now, even though there are some eight or nine million more of us huddled onto this crowded little isle of ours, that number is down to about five billion and with each passing year it gets a little less. Without that personal connection, an old bus is no longer a connection with the past, it's just an old bus.

And you don’t have to look far to see why. It’s a plain fact that just as the number of bus passenger journeys has been gradually decreasing since the 1950s, so the number of homes with a motor car on their drive has been resolutely rising.

It's all happened rather quickly. At the start of the 20^th century, the motor car was definitely something of a rarity. In 1901, for example, an enthusiastic (and presumably quite wealthy) motorist travelled from London to Glasgow behind the wheel of his three and a half horsepower Benz to visit an international exhibition. He then promptly drove back again. Now, given that the maximum permissible speed at the time was 12 mph, and that road conditions would allow little more than that anyway, and the fact that there were no motorways, motels or service stations, this was clearly a lengthy and time-consuming journey. Yet despite a round trip of more than 600 miles, and goodness knows how many toilet stops, he encountered only one other car on the road. 

Even at the outbreak of the First World War, anyone who could boast of owning a car was in very select company. In fact, there were some 388,000 cars registered at that time. By the start of the next World War, though, that figure had already leapt to three million.

It was shortly after the Second World War that cars designed to be cheap enough for almost anyone to own began rolling off the production lines in every increasing numbers. Barely 50 years later, the official number of private cars on Britain’s roads totalled some 22.7m. After ten more years, that figure had risen to 29.6m. One expert reckons that traffic has increased 15 fold since the 1950s, and it’s showing few signs of stopping.

And the outcome of that? Well, you only have to travel by car in a city during the rush hour to see that. Traffic jams, congestion and plenty of it.

But if the practical result of nearly 30 million cars all apparently wanting to travel at the same time is distressingly familiar, it's longer term effects are only now starting to be appreciated. A study commissioned by the East Midlands Development Agency into the economic costs of traffic congestion suggested that it was probably costing the East Midlands area alone, at 2006 prices, something like £825m a year – and the consultants carrying out the survey admitted that this was probably a conservative estimate. And that’s without factoring in such things as the environmental impact of congestion.

A little further east, the East of England Development Agency put the total economic cost of traffic congestion across their six counties at around £1bn in 2003 with the reasonable expectation that this would have risen to £2bn by 2021.

Is this sustainable in the long term? Probably not. So what’s the solution? 

Well, don’t even think about trying to build our way out of the congestion problem. Most experts will tell you that new roads don’t reduce congestion, they just move it somewhere else - or more often than not they simply encourage more people to drive and exacerbate the very problem they have been built, at considerable expense, to solve. It sounds crazy, but a by pass can actually make things worse.

For a practical example you need look no further than the pleasant Berkshire town of Newbury, the site of one of the longest and bitterest of anti-by pass protests Britain has ever seen. 

On the face of it, the idea of redirecting heavy traffic away from the narrow streets of this appealing market town and into the wide, empty fields surrounding it seemed a good one. But not everyone wanted to see the green fields torn up and covered in tarmac, and discord soon reigned.

By 1995 when the government was finally able to give the road builders the green light, the good people of Berkshire had been subjected to a government-backed public consultation exercise, no less than two expensive public enquiries, a major review by the Highways Agency, dozens of protestors suspending themselves from trees and burrowing themselves deep into the Berkshire loam, hundreds of TV crews, thousands of journalists… And in the end, people still couldn’t agree.

But the A34 Newbury by-pass was eventually given the go-ahead, protesters were dug up, trees were felled, tarmac was laid and then everyone stood back and watched. Back came the consultants to see what affect the by-pass had actually had, and after a long and careful study they concluded that traffic volumes in the Newbury area had actually grown by 50%, which was a lot more than everyone expected, and more than three times more than the rest of the area as a whole. This, they said, was because the new road was pulling in traffic from right across the south. They also discovered that traffic volumes through the middle of Newbury fell by 28% almost as soon as the new road opened, which sounds good until you realise that this means that out of all the vehicles which used to travel through the centre of Newbury, every fourth vehicle now used the bypass. After all the fuss of the protest, all the students up trees and all the public enquiries, this doesn’t actually sound a lot. 

More worryingly, they also concluded that within 12 months the volume of cross-town traffic was actually increasing again, presumably because that road was quieter now, which seems to lend weight to the ‘increased capacity equals increased traffic growth’ theory.

Many experts suspect that the only real way out of this mess is to attempt to turn back this flood tide of traffic by getting people gently out of their cars and onto public transport. And, in most cases, that means onto the bus. But is switching from car to bus a genuinely viable option? Is bus travel the nightmare many of us suspect, all steamy windows, dotty pensioners and violent, pimple-faced youths. Or is it really as pleasant and convenient as the bus companies want us to believe?

“Hmm…” 

My wife slowly twirled an ice axe in her hand as she continued to ponder. 

“Round Britain... by bus....”

While I'd been waiting by the kitchen door, it had become obvious that this whole enterprise was far from being a fool’s errand. The more I thought about it, the more and more interesting it sounded. 

I was proposing to undertake what appeared to be an impossible – or at least improbable – journey from one end of the country to the other using only local buses. In the process, I would discover what it was like to rely totally on local public transport for the best part of a month, and get a glimpse of what it is we’re all likely to be facing when petrol finally hits Chanel No. 5 prices, as it’s bound to do sooner or later. 

As if that wasn't interesting enough, I'd also be exploring some of Britain’s transport history, visiting museums and other places en route to trace the story of public transport in Britain. The result would be the story of a journey - a real one from Land’s End to John O’Groats, but also a journey back in time. 

I had already made up my mind when I turned to find Kath quietly replacing the mosquito nets and crampons in the cupboard under the stairs.

“You know,” she said, carefully returning the ice axe to its coat hook in the hall just above the wellies, “This might be a trip you just might want to make yourself...”

NEXT: D-Day minus 1 - the End