Day 8 - Lost in the City
Day 8 - Leatherhead to Gant's Hill
You really have to be ‘not from London’ to fully appreciate how confusing the capital and its sprawling suburbs can be. To start with, there’s the names.
I mean, where the heck is Erith? Or Anerley? Or Hither Green? The bus to Shrublands via Shirley sounds vaguely pleasant, but I haven’t a clue if its going anywhere near where I want to be. Why isn't there a bus just to 'Central London'?
My aim is to find my way to Trafalgar Square by bus, calling at Croydon so I could take a ride on a tram. Simple enough. Placing myself in Leatherhead, still technically in Surrey but on the very fringes of London was, I thought, pretty clever. But now trying to find a route from Leatherhead to Central London via Croydon looks as simple as re-wiring a 1950’s radio set. How do I know which connections to make? Should I catch a bus to Pratt’s Bottom, or Foots Cray? Elmers End, perhaps? Should it be Whyteleafe or Blackfen? And where the heck were any of these places anyway?
This, I decided, is not going to be easy.
Luckily, the first part of my journey finds me back on familiar territory - last night’s Countryliner bus, only this time heading for its terminus in Epsom. London still feels some way off as we pass through Ashted, a pretty village which has miraculously retained its village pond and has a leafy, Edwardian atmosphere. The Bentleys and the Jags aren’t much in evidence, though – instead, the place seems infested with neatly track-suited and lycra-clad joggers. We even pass a boutique called ‘Run to Live – Live to Run’ which it seems local people may have taken to heart. Somehow our driver avoids knocking any of them down, despite their best efforts, and we duly arrive in leafy Epsom.
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| Epsom |
Epsom comes as a bit of a surprise. Busy and crowded, yes, and a foretaste of what I can expect nearer central London perhaps, but Epsom town centre is rather attractive, with a sinewy and sloping marketplace which today sadly seems mostly used for car parking.
I change over to the 470 to Colliers Wood (and, no, I don’t know where that is either) and our minibus is soon barreling along through a curiously familiar streetscape of curving avenues, mock Tudor houses and monkey puzzle trees. I appear to have arrived in Reggie Perrin Land with elegant and well-groomed semi’s as far as the eye can see. I am now en route to Sutton to pick up a 407 to Croydon and I’m making reasonable progress. Not for long, however.
We seem to be arriving in Sutton - though without a sign saying “Welcome to Sutton, Iain get off here” it is difficult to be certain – so I decide to hop off early. Looking out of the side window I 've spotted that the stop we are pulling up at also caters for the 407. So, hey, why bother going any further – why not jump off here, just short of Sutton, and catch my 407 to Croydon a little sooner?
I'm soon on the pavement checking the timetable inside the bus shelter to see how long I would have to wait. It is then I discover that none of the 407’s, or indeed any other buses, actually go to Croydon. Eventually, it dawns on me that, silly me, I am simply standing on the wrong side of the road and the buses on the other side are the ones going the Croydon. So, taking care to dodge Sutton’s ferocious traffic, I cross the road and begin searching for a bus stop going the other way.
But there isn’t one. Worse than that, the traffic seems to be going in one direction only – away from Croydon. What is going on?
It slowly dawns on me that the road I am looking at is one-way, and I am effectively standing in the middle of a sort of huge, built-up roundabout. All I have to do, then, is to continue around the roundabout until I come to the other side and that’s where I’ll find my bus to Croydon. Simple.
It takes 20 minutes or more to discover that my bus to Croydon does not leave from a bus stop on the other side of this vast, housing estate-sized roundabout, so I reverse my steps and peg it back down the road to Sutton to see if I can spot it anywhere down there. Its a hot day by now and frankly I’m inclined to catch a bus to anywhere just to get out of the sun and the traffic fumes.
After walking for what seems like 30 miles, I somehow find myself back where I first confidently got off and I promptly admit defeat. I then catch a bus to Sutton - where I was originally heading, remember - so that I can catch the Croydon bus at its terminus. Except there isn't really a terminus at all. The driver just shoves everyone off and parks up to have a fag and a sleep. However, I do at least get him to tell me where I should go to catch a bus going in the right bleedin’ direction. He’s obviously catching something of my mood and is cautiously helpful.
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| Croydon Tram |
Another walk to another bus stop and then my 407 finally hoves into view and I am on my way to Croydon. Soon I am stepping onto a tram at the exotically-titled Centrale, one of 39 tram stops on the Tramlink system. Croydon’s swish and shiny tram system runs on a mixture of on-road track and disused railway lines and it’s all terribly European. Trams positively waft their 200 passengers along on what feels like a carpet of air which, after all the bumping, lurching and stop-starting of the bus, feels rather luxurious.
We arrive at Tramlink’s north-easternmost terminus at Beckenham and I begin looking for a bus to somewhere I recognise. I find one to Woolwich. With the benefit of hindsight, this was not the most obvious destination for someone heading for central London. Frankly, even Beckenham is in the completely opposite direction to where I want to be traveling. Still, I've enjoyed a nice sit down in an air-conditioned tram so its been worth it.
It's now early afternoon and the traffic is really building and its taking my bus to Woolwich ages to get anywhere. At Blackheath, where we slow to a crawl, and I have to fight back the rising fear that I’m never ever going to get off this bus, I finally see some evidence of progress as the glass towers of Canary Wharf appear on the horizon.
We eventually arrive in noisy, congested Woolwich and I spend another 10 frustrating minutes looking for a bus along the Old Kent Road. This involves yet more walking – did I mention it was a warm day?
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| Old Kent Road |
I eventually clamber aboard a number 53 but it’s already bursting at the seams and I can’t find a seat. Clinging to an overhead rail, we begin to drag our way slowly along the Old Kent Road towards central London. The traffic is horrendous and we are moving at little more than walking pace, but however long the journey our driver’s temper seems to be shortening with ever mile, especially when his Oyster Card reader suddenly expires. Even the occasional stretches of bus lane don’t speed us up much because they are invariably peppered with parked cars and taxis. The bus is absolutely rammed by now and we’ve stopped picking up passengers for the last five miles or so. It’s dreadful, and I’m relieved when I can abandon the 53 near Tower Bridge.
I am determined to arrive in Central London via Tower Bridge, partly for the drama of crossing such an iconic structure, but mostly because there is a remote chance that I might just take part in a piece of public transport history.
The evening of 28 December, 1952 was probably much like any other in gloomy post-war Britain, but for London bus driver Albert Gunter it would turn into an evening he would never forget. At 9.35 in the evening, as he was driving his number 78 bus (fleet number RT 793, if you’re interested) south over Tower Bridge on route to Dulwich as he had done countless times before, he was dismayed to find that the bridge completely without warning was slowly starting to open. Normally, a watchman was on duty to make sure all was clear before a bridge lift began, but the relief watchman on duty that night somehow failed to spot the brightly-illuminated red double decker bus barreling its way over the bridge as he ordered the bridge to tilt.
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| Postcard depicting Albert's leap |
Albert was forced to make a split-second decision – slam on the brakes and hope he’d stop before the bus toppled into the increasing gap and thence into the river, or accelerate hard in a bid to leap across the widening chasm. At first, he brake hard - well, you would, wouldn’t you. Then, convinced now that he’d never stop in time, he accelerated and prepared to jump his bus across the gap.
"I had to keep going otherwise we should have been in the water,” Albert later recounted to a reporter for The Times. “I suddenly saw the road in front of me appear to be sinking. In fact the bus was being lifted by one half of the bridge. The other half was stationary as the bus crashed on to it on four wheels."
Albert's bus dropped about three feet onto the south side resulting in a jolt hard enough to throw the conductor and all of his passengers into a heap in the front of the bus, injuring ten of them seriously enough for them to need hospital treatment. The bus was in pretty poor shape, too, with a broken spring, a bent chassis and a dozen or so seats thrown out of their frames.
London Transport thought that Albert’s quick thinking probably prevented a more serious accident and, despite the damage to their bus, rewarded him for his quick-thinking with a ten quid note. His exploits were later commemorated in a painting which is now available throughout London as a postcard.
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| Tower Hill, with Routemaster |
I make my way to Tower Bridge Road and catch a bus over the bridge, secretly hoping that history might repeat itself. It doesn’t and I arrive at Tower Hill disappointed but unscathed in time to catch one of the few London Routemaster buses still running. These iconic double deckers were withdrawn from service around the turn of the century, but a small fleet have been retained for so-called' heritage services' and I'm hoping to catch one from here past St Paul's Cathedral to The Strand.
The Routemaster is the eponymous London bus. As red as a guardsman’s jacket, with a driver in a cab at one end and a chirpy conductor on the open platform at the other, it’s as British as a Carry On film. It’s also an international design icon whose very appearance has become a kind of shorthand for London, it's shape, it's colour, and even it's sound evocative of the Swinging Sixties. It’s appeared in countless TV shows, in films, and in fashion shoots. It’s on thousands of tourists’ t-shirts, on shopping bags, mugs, I even have one on a key ring. There are Routemaster-shaped wall clocks, Routemaster purses, badges, ties, even a Routemaster piggy bank. It’s on a million picture postcards, and you will find whole fleets of model Routemasters in every London gift shop. It’s quaint, friendly, a loveable uncle of a bus which has been part of London’s DNA for 40 years. To some, it is London.
In 1933, public transport in London was brought together under one organisation, the London Transport Passenger Board. London General was a major component in the newly-formed London Transport but continued pretty much as before, with their Chiswick Works and AEC jointly turning out refined, robust and efficient passenger vehicles for the city’s masses. By the end of the 1930’s they were preparing to build the RT, by far the most modern London bus yet seen - and, incidentally, the bus that Cliff Richard and his pals took on their ‘Summer Holiday’. But only 150 had been built before the Second World War halted bus production. Chiswick’s workforce instead turned their hands to constructing Halifax bombers and it was not until hostilities ended in 1945 that bus production could begin once more. But by then, the world was a very different place.
As London got back on its feet after six long years of war, the pre-war designed RT bus was put back into production, but Chiswick’s engineers had made good use of their time as aircraft manufacturers. For a start, they’d had the chance to work with fancy lightweight alloys and were quick to see their potential in vehicle construction. They had also been using modern assembly line techniques, using components designed to be easy to fit and fully interchangeable. These would all have an effect on the way the post-war RT was built.
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| RT in service. Photo: John Heighway |
London Transport soon set about replacing their tired and war-weary bus fleet, which had made it through the war with only the barest of care and maintenance, with the new RT - but this time using their newly-acquired skills to build better, lighter vehicles more quickly and more cheaply.
The RT was an immediate success, but by 1954 London Transport was already thinking about its replacement and were asking their operations managers to forget everything they knew about buses and, starting with a clean sheet of paper, to list all the features they would like to see in their ideal bus of the future. The outcome came as a bit of a shock.
What their managers came back with were the features and components of a bus which, when taken together, would look remarkably like the existing RT. London Transport began to wonder if their managers were an unimaginative bunch who knew only what they liked, or whether the basic design of the RT – driver in a half-cab, front engined, open rear platform – was just too good to alter.
In fact, the operations managers understood pretty well what London’s bus passengers wanted. Open platform buses might have been draughty but they were convenient; they made loading and unloading quick, passengers who had just missed a bus could probably catch up with it at the next set of traffic lights and hop on there, or hop off before their stop. With both the entrance and the stairs located at the back of the vehicle, there was nowhere for unruly youths to congregate. Of course, the conductor was also there to stop anything getting out of hand, as well as to offer advice to travellers and generally lend a hand. In short, it was a popular configuration with the public.
Armed with this conventional pre-war arrangement of half-cab and open platform, the designers set about completely updating the RT. They thought tomorrow’s bus would need to be lighter, so they abandoned the traditional chassis and coachbuilt body construction in favour of a lighter monocoque design – something which car manufactures had already embraced but which was untried on buses. Steel and wood, which even in the 1950’s were the traditional coachbuilder’s materials, were out – the new vehicle would use only lightweight alloys. It would therefore have a lively turn of speed, and a lower centre of gravity and, with the help of independent front suspension, greater levels of passenger comfort.
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| Prototype Routemaster. Photo: Paul Bateson |
London Transport called on industrial designer Douglas Scott to craft the bus which would eventually become the Routemaster. It was a wise choice. With a reputation for restrained and functional styling, Scott created an elegant evolution of the RT, curvaceous, purposeful but with a sumptuous interior more fitting of a gentleman’s club than a public omnibus. And this was no triumph of style over function. For example, he specified ceiling panels in Sung yellow which looked attractive but also cleverly masked the inevitable tobacco stains. His seats were designed with leather-edges which made them durable, ensured that sliding into and out of them was easy and saved wear and tear on the conductor’s trousers as he brushed against them all day. The tartan moquette he designed to cover the seats included dark red which looked rich and sumptuous but also hid the dirt, and yellow which brightened it and, of course, matched the ceiling.
The Routemaster was launched at the 1954 Earls Court Motor Show, with the first production models entering service some four years later. Eventually, some 2, 875 Routemasters - or RM’s as they would be designated - would roll off the production line in a variety of different forms including lengthened versions, coach-seated models, front entrance versions for BEA’s London Airport service and for Northern General Transport in County Durham, the only operator outside of London to buy the Routemaster. The very last bus to roll off the production line was RML2760 and it was felt right that this should be the vehicle to run the very last RM-operated bus service in London, which it did on the 9 December 2005 – agonisingly, only two months short of the RM’s fiftieth birthday.
Many people felt the Routemaster, even after 50 years of service, wasn’t quite ready to be consigned to the scrapyard. In fact, London Transport had expected to have to replace the RT by 1978 but they kept going much longer than that. Some were withdrawn in the 1970’s and replaced with modern front-entrance Daimler Fleetline’s but these were considered less than successful - disastrous, even. Even twenty years later there was still nothing better to replace them with, so they were re-engined and refurbished.
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| Routemaster remains in a Barnsley scrapyard |
But the end was in sight. The Routemaster’s design meant that it could never be made wheelchair-accessible and there was another equally pressing reason. In his book “The Bus We Loved”, writer Travis Elborough quotes the then chief executive of bus operator Go Ahead, David Brown.
“Thirty years ago when a passenger fell off the back it wouldn’t have crossed their minds to seek litigation,” he said. “Now, it was the second thing they do after receiving treatment.”
So in 2003, the first Mercedes-powered bendy buses began appearing on London’s streets. These huge vehicles would be deeply unpopular with the public and would be withdrawn after barely eight years of service. By then a new Routemaster for the 21st century, designed with the help of Aston Martin, was being championed by London’s Tory mayor Boris Johnson. This new ‘Borismaster’ would combine old-fashioned open rear platforms but with safety doors, as well as a front entrance and ramps to allow disabled passengers to use them. Whether they can be built cheaply enough, though, and in sufficient quantities to make economic sense, remains to be seen. Much of the bus industry, as well as many of the Mayor’s political opponents, regard the ‘Borismaster’ as little more than a Mayoral vanity project. Time will tell.
But the Routemaster hasn’t quite gone. A small fleet of restored Routemasters operate so-called Heritage Routes offering tourists a sense of what it was like to ride through London in one of these stately vehicles. And it one of these services – the number 15 from Tower Hill to Trafalgar Square – that I am making for.
I clamber upstairs and narrowly miss out on the front seat but it doesn’t really matter as the top deck of a Routemaster remains one of the finest and most atmospheric platforms from which to view London. St Paul’s never looked finer, nor Ludgate, nor Fleet Street and The Strand. It's a hugely enjoyable experience which I'd recommend to anyone visiting London. To my mind there can be few finer, or indeed cheaper, ways of seeing the sights.
From Trafalgar Square I make for the London Underground, my first experience of an underground railway on this trip. I’m making for the Central Line which will take me to my bed for the night at Gant’s Hill near Ilford. It’s a sunny evening so before I turn in for the night I take a detour and head off a little further up the Central Line to Chigwell.
As this whole Land’s End to John O’Groats trip is something of an historical odyssey, it’s seems appropriate to pay my respects to the man who basically invented the bus as we know it today, George Shillibeer. It was Shillibeer who launched the very first regular horse-drawn carriage service in London which, unlike private carriages or horse-drawn hackney cabs, were cheap enough for almost anyone to use. It would revolutionise London.
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| Shillibeer's Omnibus |
Workers who lived some distance from their places of work - and at that time many did – could now travel to work quickly and in comfort for the cost of just a few pennies. Living in remote villages such as Hammersmith and Camden and travelling into the city each day was suddenly feasible, and the emptying city’s slums could gradually be replaced by much-needed commercial workspace. Shillibeer had inadvertently invented commuting.
In fact, he was merely copying vehicles he had already seen in Paris, though the story is thought to have begun in Nantes where one Stanislas Baudry, a mill owner, opened a steam bath next door to his mill at Richebourg on the edge of town only to discover that he couldn't persuade customers to travel there. But he came up with a plan. He reckoned that if he put on a special carriage for his customers, it would save them the trouble of having to drive all that way out of town and his new steam baths would appear more attractive.
So he began running coaches between Nantes to his steam baths but the exercise wasn’t entirely successful – at least, not in the way he intended. Almost as soon as his coaches began running, he noticed that they quickly filled up with people who were clearly not looking for a bath. Instead, he was carrying people who’d recognised the convenience of Baudry’s coach as a means of getting into and out of Nantes. Baudry had, almost by accident, invented the public bus. He even seems to have invented the very name ‘omnibus’ for it, too, and this might also have been an accident. The story goes that one of his coaches terminated close to a milliner’s shop owned by a Monsieur Omnes, who had wittily called his shop Omnes Omnibus – which is Latin for ‘all for everyone’. In time, Baudry’s coaches and their terminus began to be associated with the shop sign. You can see how this might happen:
Frenchman 1: “Excuse me, monsieur, but where do I catch the coach to Richebourg?
Frenchman 2: “The Omnibus”, my friend.”
Frenchman 1: Oh, pardon me. Where do I catch the Omnibus to Richebourg…?”
However it happened, Baudry was quick to recognize a good thing when he saw it. Within a few years, he was operating a small fleet of ‘omnibuses’ in Nantes, as well as similar vehicles in Bordeaux and in Paris where he set up the grandly-titled Enterprise General des Omnibus.
This is where Shillibeer enters the picture. At the time when Baudry’s first Omnibuses began operating in Paris, Shillibeer had his own coach building business there. He may even have built a coach for one of Baudry’s competitors. It was this design, and the inspiration to create an omnibus service in London, that he brought home with him.
There was one major problem, though –hackney carriages had a virtual monopoly in public carriage within the City of London. The roads were strictly regulated and the only people who were allowed to carry passengers were either hackney carriages, which were expensive to use and really only for toffs, and short-stage coaches which could only stop at inns and usually had to be pre-booked. Shillibeer’s idea for a larger vehicle carrying lots of people and making lots of stops would probably not have received a license to operate, especially as it would be too big for some of the city’s narrow streets.
But Shillibeer too had a plan. The hackney carriage monopoly extended only as far as 'the stones', the old 17th century limits of the city, and London had continued to grow since then. Large areas of housing had been built just outside of the city and a new road – pithily entitled New Road but now more commonly known as Marylebone Road and Euston Road – had been built right through this area. That, reckoned George, meant plenty of potential customers.
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| Shillibeer's Omnibus, London Transport Museum |
So on 4 July, 1829 George Shillibeer’s ‘Omnibus” (no prizes for guessing where he got that name from) began operating between Paddington Green right along the New Road to the Bank, to a regular timetable at a charge of less than threepence a mile. The rest, as they say, is history.
Shillibeer’s success would depend on his vehicles carrying a full load of passengers, so right from the start he made sure he employed respectable, well-dressed conductors to ensure that the usual proprieties were observed and that women would not feel unduly threatened by the sudden close companionship his vehicles forced upon them. Conductors would also collect the fares whilst the vehicle was underway, which helped to speed up journeys and, of course, he (and it was always a he) was there to supervise the starting and stopping of the carriage to pick up and drop off passengers along the route. Together, this helped to ensure that Shillibeer’s Omnibus was quick, punctual and convenient - and popular with its passengers.
However, if he had only stayed in Paris a little while longer he might have had some warning about what would happen next. As George was excitedly developing plans for his new omnibus service in London, Baudry was already discovering that his omnibus service was being copied by rivals, and the streets of Paris were quickly becoming flooded with omnibuses. Bankrupted by the competition, Baudry elected to end his life by flinging himself into the Seine.
Whilst this dramatic little scene was being played out in Paris, Shillibeer’s was enjoying early success with his own fledgling service and blithely putting on more and more vehicles. However, it was soon apparent that, like Baudry before him, George's Omnibus idea was also receiving unwanted attention from rivals.
Within a few short years, dozens of copycat omnibuses had appeared and poor old George, the progenitor of the whole public omnibus idea in England, found that he just couldn't compete against such overwhelming competition. One of his main problems was the size of his vehicles. Shillibeer’s large 20-passenger omnibuses were pulled by three horses while his competitors mostly ran smaller omnibuses pulled by only two. His costs were higher and in the end he just couldn’t make it pay. Resisting the urge to fling himself into the Thames, he instead sold up and moved on.
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| George Shillibeer's grave, Chigwell |
Shillibeer eventually made a new life for himself in Chigwell to the east of London, where it is believed he adapted his former omnibuses to his new trade as an undertaker. In fact, its believed he might even have converted one into a kind of hearse-omnibus hybrid which would allow both the living and the recently-departed to share the same vehicle for their last cosy journey to the graveyard. They were not, however, a success. George himself made that final journey in 1865 and now lies, largely uncelebrated, in a modest plot in the graveyard of St Mary's Church in Chigwell.
I soon locate his headstone and pay my respects before returning to my hotel and an early bed. It has been a long day, the most tiring - and tiresome - of the trip so far, though at least I've established that George's invention, which first turned a wheel some 185 years ago, appears to have stood the test of time.
NEXT: Central London – Watford - where I turn my back on the bus for a day to travel through a former wartime underground factory, go up and down on Europe's longest escalator and discover exactly what lives inside your typical Undergound train seat.
Map courtesy of those awfully nice people at Google
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