Day 6 - Wight Flight

Day 6 - Ryde to Brighton

After the ghostly creakings of the Angel Inn the night before I should have been ready for a good night’s sleep. But anticipation kept me awake.

I can't think of a more odd, a more exciting form of public transport than a hovercraft. I'd blithely assumed that these eccentric machines – something between an aircraft and a boat - had been consigned to history years ago and it was only when I began researching possible routes for my journey that I discovered that one service - between Ryde and Southsea - still operated. So obviously I had to try one.

The hovercraft was the brainchild of Christopher Cockerel who had been experimenting with the unlikely theory that a large vehicle could be made to float on a cushion of air which would enable it to pass from solid ground onto water, or mud, or pack ice, or desert – or any combination thereof – with no change in speed or control. He experimented first with an empty cat food tin, a hair dryer and a pair of kitchen scales and quickly reckoned that not only was such a craft possible but that it would need only a quarter of the power required to get a helicopter off the ground. 

However, like many great British inventors before him - Frank Whittle, for example, the inventor of the modern jet engine – his ideas were met with scepticism and indifference. He pitched his hovercraft idea to the Royal Navy but they rejected it because they said it was a plane, not a boat and of course the Royal Navy don't do planes (apart from the Fleet Air Arm, but then that's different. Stop quibbling.) He then tried the Royal Air Force but they too rejected it because they said it was a boat, not a plane. And the Army, said Cockerell, were just 'plain not interested'. However, disinterested or not, that didn't stop the military from designating his idea an official secret and consigning it's design concept to a locked filing cabinet where nobody – including Cockerel – could touch it. 

Eventually he managed to get it de-classified and began working with the Isle of Wight aeronautics firm of Saunders Roe. Together they came up with the world’s first working hovercraft, the SR.N1, which grabbed the headlines in June 1959 with a much-publicised crossing of the English Channel – appropriately, on the 50th anniversary of Louis Bleriot’s first aerial crossing of the Channel. Development was then swift, as indeed were the hovercraft. By 1962, the first passenger-carrying hovercraft was entering service with cross Channel services starting four years later. The service I am travelling on today flew its first commercial service in July 1965, making this by far the world’s longest, continuously operated hovercraft service as well as the very last in the UK.

Rising fuel prices in the 1990’s and the opening of the Channel Tunnel combined to make passenger hovercraft uneconomic and they began to disappear from British shores. But not entirely and Cockerill had the last ironic laugh. Hovercraft are still built on the Isle of Wight and continue to be sold for commercial, military and rescue uses. Even the British Army now uses them.

Hovercraft at rest at Ryde

So, it was the chance to fly on one of the last passenger hovercraft in Britain, on the very last commercial hovercraft service in the UK, that had brought me to Ryde. It was therefore with some excitement that I make my way on foot – thereby marking today’s 125th anniversary of the invention of the mass-produced shoe (no really, I kid you not) - to Ryde's hovercraft terminal. 

Boarding a hovercraft is not unlike boarding an aircraft - they even talk about hovercraft 'flights'. First, you hand over your boarding pass to a neatly-uniformed officer then make your way across the broad concrete apron to your waiting hovercraft (but without any tiresome airport security checks). Heavy bags are expertly slung into a sort of metal box attached to the side of the hovercraft, and then you mount the wheeled steps and enter the craft itself. 

The interior looks much like a wide-bodied aircraft, right down to the 129 aircraft-style seats ranged across the interior. But don’t expect a steward to wander by checking you’ve got your seat belt on – there aren’t any.

The main door closes, the engine noise builds and the hovercraft rises vertically into the air. That’s bizarre enough, but to feel this huge vehicle then gradually slide backwards and sideways onto the beach, seemingly out of anyone’s control, is positively unnerving. We are soon heading in the right direction though, galloping across the beach and gathering speed until we are absolutely hurtling towards the open sea. There is no bump, no change in engine note, nothing but a slight misting of the windows to tell us that there was nothing now between us and the bottom of the Solent apart for a cushion of air.

I barely have time to settle back and do all the usual aircraft stuff - fiddle with the sick bag, turn my personal light on and off eight or nine times, accidentally summon the stewardess – before we are on the beach and up the concrete ramp to the Southsea terminal. It is a fast and exhilarating trip, though disappointingly brief. 

Off the beach and heading back across the Solent

I clamber down from the slowly deflating hovercraft, retrieve my rucksack, and my first ever journey on what must be one of the oddest forms of public transport is over. But I can’t completely tear myself away yet, so I make for the adjacent beach where I sit in the morning sun and watch it disappear back over the Solent with more passengers, wishing I was among them.

It is but a short step from the hovercraft terminal to the bus stop for the 700 Coastliner service, which will take me all the way from Southsea, Portsmouth and along the south coast to Brighton. The bus I am travelling in turns out to be a Scania Enviro 440 double decker; I'm not usually this observant, but the superb 20-page Coastliner guide which I pick up from a display just behind the driver tells me so. I notice a pair of seats just inside the door and settle down for an almost-driver’s eye view of the road ahead.

As I wait at the terminus, I glance quickly through my free Coastliner guide and find the whole three-hour journey laid out in detail, with information about places to visit en route, discount vouchers for tourist attractions we would be passing, and two whole pages devoted to the 100th anniversary of Shoreham Airport, apparently the oldest operational airport in the UK. It is a thoroughly useful and entertaining read and the perfect accompaniment to a long journey.

700 Coastliner service   Photo: ©Gobbiner

The engine starts and we are soon heading for the centre of Portsmouth. Our first stop is at The Hard in one of the most picturesquely-positioned bus stations I've ever seen, with the sea sparkling in the distance and the masts of the mighty three-masted warship HMS Warrior providing a suitably naval backdrop. A long line of passengers shuffle forward. This looks like it’s going to take a while, but once again proves to be a surprisingly speedy process because everyone has a concessionary pass. There are still small delays, however.

“Excuse me, driver,’ asks one elderly passenger as he helps his wife up onto the platform. “Is it long to Brighton?”

“Oh, it’s about three hours from here,” replies our driver.

“Three hours!” exclaims the lady, appalled. “I’m not sure we can make that. Better make it Bognor, Gerald, don’t you think…”

“Nah, nah,” says Gerald. “We’ll be alright,” he mutters doubtfully.

The Hard, Portsmouth

Half-full now, we set off into the centre of Portsmouth. I’m becoming aware for some time now that we have been running alongside a vast brick wall and I finally realise that these are the walls to Portsmouth’s vast naval dockyard. As they tower over us and seemingly run on for mile after mile along the road, they underline just how huge the navy’s presence is in the city, and how significant a part in Portsmouth history the Royal Navy has played. Some of the walls are topped with modern razor wire so this is clearly not just part of the city’s heritage. Significantly, despite the huge acreage of flat and inviting brickwork, there is not the merest smear of graffiti.

Out of the city now and along the road to Hillsea where our driver halts at an old fashioned lido. It’s in full cry with dozens of children and parents splashing about in the open air or lying on sun loungers to catch the sun, a view straight out of the 1930’s, though tarnished slightly by the vast motorway flyover that now over-shadows it.

Our next stop is Havant where a long, expectant queue of more than 40 people get on, not one of them paying a penny to the driver. Everyone appears to be a pensioner apart from two who seem to be heading for work and have bus passes. I can’t help feeling that the driver is becoming bored with it all and longing for a passenger to get on with a five pound note in one hand and a complicated address in the other. Instead, he simply looks, nods morosely and stifles a yarn.

I like Havant. It has an attractive, self-contained feel to it, but it’s not without its surprises. As we leave, we pass a pavement sign advertising the nearby ‘Spooks Psychic Café’, which boasts ‘coffee and tarot readings’. This must be useful - for example, being able to foresee the future probably means they never accidentally over-order on the cream cakes.

Chichester Cathedral

We are now barrelling towards Chichester through farmland fringed with elms and poplars and with clear views of the Downs beyond – a classic, elegant English landscape. We eventually pull up outside Chichester’s beautiful Norman cathedral and I break my journey to take a closer look. 

I'm soon exploring the Cathedral grounds but there is a lot more than a cathedral here. Behind the main church there is a whole complex of religious buildings – the Deanery, the Treasurers House, a row of attractive little priests' houses, and more besides. It’s gorgeous, full of quaint dusty corners and sudden views through gateways. There are lots of tourists though, and parties of foreign students lounging boisterously on the grass, but it’s sunny and idyllic and nobody seems to be getting on anyone’s nerves. 

I finally tear myself away and take a wander around the main shopping area which has a delicious ‘country town’ feel to it, then retrace my steps to the bus stop for my onward bus to Brighton. This is where I finally nail that great international myth about the British being a nation of queuers. 

I discover I have a ten minute wait for the next bus, but I'm puzzled there were not more people waiting. The minutes pass and still there's hardly anyone behind me in the queue which, given how crowded this bus was when I got off, is surprising. There seems plenty of people around me – older people mostly, sitting on benches and on stone walls a little further down the pavement – but only a handful of us actually waiting for the bus. 

Until the bus pulls into view, that is. Immediately, the pavement is awash with printed cottons and sensible shoes, a surge of bodies swirling dangerously around the bus stop sign, threatening to topple headlong into the road. Amazingly, we all somehow manage to board the bus with that peculiarly British combination of politeness, pointy elbows and grim determination. It was all a bit... well, European, which is rather odd.

Our road to Brighton takes us through Bognor Regis, a resort benighted by a curiously comic name, and one which has its own unwelcome place in transport history. 

Bognor Regis

Until the 1980’s, local bus services had been centrally regulated but this didn’t wash with Margaret Thatcher's incoming Conservative government. She and her Transport Secretary Nicholas Ridley wanted to create a free market and introduce competition and innovation into the industry. Their resulting Transport Act came into force in October 1986 and abolished the licensing of bus services altogether, encouraging competition between bus operators for the first time since the 1930s.

The effects were quickly felt. Dozens of new operators appeared, hundreds more buses of all shapes and colours took to the streets, and a multitude of services were offered to the sometimes bewildered passengers. Ticket prices fell as operators undercut one another, some even running free services to try to bankrupt a rival or force it to withdraw. Allegations of dirty tricks were common – it’s said that some drivers were instructed to watch their rear view mirrors to ensure that they ran just in front of a rival so they could pinch all their customers, or to box in a competitor at a bus stop to delay them. New operators sometimes used the same service numbers as their larger competitors just to confuse passengers. All of this was, for the most part, legal and a new phrase entered the English language – ‘bus war’.

One of the first was centred on Bognor Regis, where local services had been taken over by a company whose name was to become synonymous with war-like tactics – Stagecoach. Since deregulation, the company had begun to accumulate a large number of bus services, sometimes by out-competing the established local operator and taking over their old routes, or by taking over the company itself. Such was the case with Southdown, an old established bus and coach firm whose distinctive apple green buses had been serving the public throughout Sussex and Hampshire since 1915. Nationalised in 1969, Stagecoach bought it in August 1986 when it was privatised by the government.

Prior to Stagecoach arriving, a small local operator had begun running a few local services with a modest fleet of four minibuses under the name Easy Rider. His routes broadly mirrored two of the old Southdown services, though he also ventured off-route to seek custom on nearby housing estates. At first, Southdown and then Stagecoach left him alone. But in July 1990, Stagecoach began running identical bus services just ahead of their little rival in a bid to deny him custom. And it worked. After 18 months, Easy Rider finally gave in and sold what was left of his business to Stagecoach.

The Office of Fair Trading, however, was not impressed and accused Stagecoach of operating against the public interest, an accusation they roundly denied. The matter was referred to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission who took a year to deliberate and then effectively did little more than give Stagecoach a telling off. 

By this time, a local TV documentary had broadcast allegations of Easy Rider’s buses being deliberately boxed in by Stagecoach buses so that they couldn’t leave until 20 minutes after their departure time, their timetables mysteriously torn down from bus stops. It was even alleged that a ‘spy’ had been briefly planted in the Easy Rider ranks. You can see why they called it a war..

Fortunately, there seems little evidence of war on the streets of Bognor today and our Stagecoach bus leaves the town peacefully before arriving in the attractively-named village of Climping, which I’m sure must be a verb for something – 

‘Excuse me, sir, are you alright?' 

‘Oh, yes. I was enjoying a spot of climping last night so I’m a little stiff this morning, that’s all...'

Littlehampton

This is England in all her majestic beauty, with tree-fringed fields streaming away into the distance to the grey curtain of downland lining the horizon, exhilarating and so recognisably English. It’s stunning, quite unlike any bus journey I have yet experienced apart from Corfe Castle (where I also ran out of superlatives... don't worry, I’ll be alright again in a minute).

Littlehampton, even though I have never been there before, sounds like the kind of place I’d like to keep my yacht (assuming I had one). Unfortunately, my introduction to Littlehampton comes via a long series of messy and interminable roadworks and mile after square mile of bungalow-ed estates. In the circumstances, you might forgive my slightly jaundiced view of the place. I’m sure the bits I didn't see were lovely.

I'd hoped to be able to gaze out onto the sea for much of my journey to Brighton, but in fact I had to wait until we reached Worthing for my first glimpse of the English Channel. This is more like it, though. The beach here runs really close to the road –and indeed vice versa - and is frequently only divided one from the other by shingle bars lined with picturesquely-beached fishing boats and neat rows of colourful beach huts.

Our bus ploughs on past Shoreham's busy harbour and docks and soon arrives in Hove, an elegantly stucco-ed seaside town which appears to morph almost seamlessly into Brighton. Before it does, I quickly get out and change onto a Brighton and Hove bus service for the last few miles into Brighton.

Thus it was that I make my triumphal entry into Brighton sitting on top of Ivor Novello.

I might just as easily have been sitting on Kitty O’Shea, or on top of Sir Winston Churchill, or even Queen Adelaide. And would I be the first man to boast of achieving ‘upstairs, inside’ in the company of Dame Millicent Fawcett...?

I should explain. No person alive or dead was in any way interfered with in the making of that short paragraph; the names in question refer to those given to particular buses by their operator, Brighton and Hove. This delightful if somewhat eccentric practice began in 1999 when the company's operations director suggested that to create a bit of interest in their newly-delivered fleet of smart double deckers, they should give each one the name of a local deceased person who had, in some way, made a contribution to the area. The idea caught on and now pretty much every vehicle in the fleet has a name. 

Sir Charles Barry stops to
pick up passengers in Hove

Ivor Novello pulls into Brighton which I’ve heard criticized for being a little too white and too middle class, but there’s definitely a vibe about the place that I haven’t picked up anywhere else.

I find myself wandering in the Brighton Lanes, a dense warren of narrow Dickensian streets and alleys that have somehow survived the redevelopers. The area is stuffed with interesting and odd little shops and cafes and it is easy to become joyfully lost within its cosy passageways. I wish I could spend more time exploring, but I manage to sneak back later for a pint in a pub that appeared to be straight out of the 19th century. I almost expected them to charge admission – I’d have paid it, too.

My journey along the south coast of England is over and for the most part it has been time well spent. Sumptuous English landscapes, Norman cathedrals, hovercrafts and tall ships – today’s had it all. Even the Coastliner, all three and a half hours of it, proved relaxing and endlessly interesting, and given that a Day Rover ticket allowing you to get off and on as many times as you like costs only £7.30, remarkably good value.

Brighton, of course, has a flourishing Gay Quarter where most of the city's gay pubs, gay nightclubs and hotels are located. And where, incidentally, I find I have inadvertently booked my hotel for the night though you wouldn’t have known it from their website. The owners, though, are friendly and sympathetic and offer to carefully advise me which pubs tolerate non-gays and which ones generally don’t. 

It’s interesting to experience something of what it feels like to be a member of a minority community, and I retire to bed in thoughtful mood.

NEXT Brighton – Leatherhead  At last, my road turns northwards where I discover an unexpected link between staunchly conservative town and a Communist newspaper, listen in on a discussion about women bus drivers, reflect on the beauties of bus shelters and celebrate Guildford's little-known place in public transport history.

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