The Number 485 Route

Friday 26 August 2011

We travelled four buses on this Friday (an unusual day of the week for us, but I was only just back from an excellent holiday in Orkney). The weather was, as we have come to expect for August, cloudy, grey and wet. An earlier bus had conveyed us from Willesden Junction to Wandsworth.  Now the single decker 485 was to take us to the splendid, two storey bus station at Hammersmith.

We picked up our bus close to the former Ram Brewery in Wandsworth, without too much of a wait considering that it is an ‘every thirty minutes’ bus.  

As so often, we were sharing our road with one of the laughably named cycling superhighways.  Why anyone, especially an elected and well paid Mayor, should imagine that painting  but of road blue will make them safer or more attractive in the battle to reduce pollution, is beyond meThe route turns right off Wandsworth High Street to head along Putney Bridge Road, but spurns the bridge to head on towards Barnes.  We did have time to notice the protests about the planned sewer (an issue which does not seem to have been settled almost 18 months later).

Barnes Common was looking pleasantly flowery, as far as we could see through the rain, and we liked the kind of planting that the borough had done as we made our way along Church  Road and along Castelnau.  

As so often before, we enjoyed the good looking houses. Being on a single decker, even Linda was unable to get a picture that will do them justice, so this one is from Wikipedia. We have been here so often that we barely needed to check the name which, of course, means New Castle in Occitan, and was settled by Huguenot refugees from the south of France in the 17th century.  of course, in the days before Bonaparte started to unify France in every way, Occitan was a separate language, soo the name sounds nothing like chateauneuf.

We were passing the London Wetlands Centre, remarkable for many reasons:  avocets breed there in fresh water, though they usually prefer East Anglian salt;  bitterns, so nearly extinct a few years ago, can now be seen there in winter.

 But we did not stop as we had to head on towards Hammersmith Bridge, with its  elegant lampstands, not to mention views of the grey river and the aptly named pub guarding its southern approach.

Once over the bridge there is little more than unpleasant traffic to look at before we reached the end of our journey and the bus station.

This was not a very exciting ride, but it took only a little more than the advertised 45 minutes, so we did not mind. And it left us conveniently placed for our next two South West buses.