The NUMBER 39 Route

Clapham Junction to Putney Bridge  

Thursday May 16 2019

This was our third bus of the day, which had started in Vauxhall.  The end points of the 39 make it sound like a gritty urban route but on the contrary it feels a bit like a country bumpkin poddling round the varied and hilly estates of SW19.

This single decker route we picked up just near the wide bridge that carries Clapham Junction’s many rail lines into London and where the pollution verges on the unbearable, so a relief to board this bus which, by its second stop opposite the occluded entrance to the station, was pretty popular.

While the shopping trolleys, their owners with sticks and the several buggies settled themselves the bus itself was repositioning itself as three police vans sped up St John’s Hill with their blue lights flashing; the bus had just speeded up when a 4^th van overtook us. Jo reckoned they were heading for lunch – I wondered about a riot in Wandsworth Jail which might require some input but a news item at the end of the day solved the mystery :an unexploded bomb discovered during a building operation near Kingston University Campus requiring the police to evacuate over a thousand local residents and students.  For the third time today we climbed St John’s Hill, where several passengers boarded who looked as though they might have been using the health centre’s therapeutic services, and took the one way system to pass the Huguenot Burial ground on the way.

Our two previous routes today had covered this particular bit of the South Circular Road and each one had been delayed somewhat by the development overspilling into the road (not the same as road repair works) but speeding up towards Wandsworth Town Hall. The latter is very often glimpsed in TV dramas where both the interiors and exteriors are favoured for locations implying ministerial buildings on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The late 1930s building more than earns its keep and of course is still a working town hall. 

The RamQuarter had been ‘under discussion ‘ on our last trip so it was good to see it nearly completed to include the listed buildings from the now defunct brewery. The somewhat dated Southside shopping centre opposite will doubtless benefit from the newer residents and we admired their planters and the foliage camouflaging the tin huts which serve as ‘street food ‘ booths.

Leaving Wandsworth town centre behind our route started by paralleling the Wandle River – so a somewhat meandering road bordered by smaller cottage-type housing and on the left (river) side a range of industrial units, interspersed with the odd pub.

The passengers were mainly the elderly with their shopping trolleys and parents with sleepy children on the way home from morning playgroup or nursery sessions but from Southfields we took on some random tourists heading for the Lawn Tennis Museum – not Jo’s favourite but actually worth the trip and easier to access from this station rather than Wimbledon itself. Also a station favoured by cyclists. 

The bus however abandons the straighter roads and the swankier homes to climb the hill (which will eventually prove to be Putney Hill – bear with me) and takes a series of twists and turns through the various estates of SW19.  On the whole these are 50 year old social housing, but a few private blocks (behind modest gates) have been squeezed into some gaps – there are some clinics and schools but little else in the way of facilities so this bus route remains a lifeline for all those buggy and shopping trolley users. Wandsworth seems to have planted up the verges with some alliums and other flowers to enhance the 'village' feel? 

Jo and I had been wondering why a rather smart single buggy had an Air France label/logo on its hood and the mother was keen to ex toll the virtues of her choice of buggy – she thought it might signify that the airlines would be prepared to have them in the cabin rather than the hold – it was that rather smart French Navy colour as opposed to the more sedate Navy Blue favoured by the UK.  

Photography was a bit tricky through this part of the route until we emerged , very suddenly, onto a dual carriageway with road signs pointing us to Portsmouth, and all points south on the A3.  But of course the bus, or rather its careful driver, knows it needs to circumnavigate Tibbetts Corner, sweep past the Green Man (been there said Jo) roundabout and start heading for Putney Hill and bridge.

The announcements both visual and oral were not very clear about where the bus journey finished and Jo and I began debating whether it might be an easier and quicker journey to walk back from the end of the bridge to Putney Station and hence into Waterloo.  We were slowed at the traffic lights that cross with the South Circular and admired a cyclist pushing her way uphill, and just failed to capture the first of two sundials in Putney, on the corner office block.  

Past the station and the modest shopping centre and lo: it is a route that actually crosses the bridge and stops as close to the station as it can, which made any decision making very easy – the District Line it would be and somehow the latter’s amiable slow speed made the parochial-feeling Number 39 quite appropriate. 

Apart from some overdue works now completed round Wandsworth unusually so far this trip felt very little different from that of ten years ago, which is what a good local service should be.

As we stepped off an elderly white couple complained the bus was a few inches short of the pavement which they followed up with a nasty chauvinistic remark which marred an otherwise happy trip,