The Number 346 Route

Upminster Park Estate to Upminster Station

Thursday November 3^rd 2011

In contrast to our previous route, which felt interminable, this one seemed at the time we rode it, and still seems at the time we post it, to be a strong contender for the project’s shortest route...

We had disembarked from our key route – the very frequent and jolly double-decker 248 – on the Upminster Park Estate (Cranham) and just about managed to eat our sandwiches before the 346 sidled round the corner.  This was definitely the start of the route, although there already was a passenger aboard – we surmised it takes a slightly different route coming and going and she had stayed on in order to get closer to home.  We guessed this estate had been built as a large area of social housing but probably now heavily owner occupied: it seemed mainly to comprise clusters of houses built round greens.  You might have expected the bus to be ‘hail and ride’ but it had its defined stops on a thorough tour to take in the key streets before it headed down to St Mary’s Lane and the main road into Upminster itself.  The estate had areas of semis and then a more extensive outcrop of bungalows so we were not surprised when some more elderly and disabled passengers boarded, the driver allowing them enough time to settle before moving off.

The only site we have located for this route is the Upminster Depot. It is site much beloved of train spotters and rail buffs (as opposed to buffers) and was a popular venue when opened to the public on its 50^th anniversary in 2009.    

From there the bus starts along Upminster High Street, still largely intact and used, then encourages its passengers to descend opposite the station while it goes down the side of the station to ‘lurk’. The railway line C2C logo is more prominent than the District Line insignia but sure enough there was a green coded tube waiting to take us home after a day spent in Essex.

The trip is time-tabled as taking 9 minutes – we timed it at 10 but we were a bit slow getting off.  Does our future hold anything shorter?

The Number 345 Route

South Kensington to Peckham
Tuesday May 11^h  2010

Our key route for the day the 70 had left us just round the corner, and the fact we found our driver seemingly dozing slumped over the wheel of his double decker should I suppose have been a warning for us. He did switch the engine on, which was kind as it gave us some heat before we set off. The fact that we needed heating in mid May was another issue.

It’s a long while since we have passed so close to the great London museums and Natural History was looking busy as ever plus two elephants from the art project running at the time we boarded this route, on our way back from two much earlier routes. Our first impression was that South Kensington and Kensington generally were stiff with Blue Plaques – we passed in quick succession:

Bela Bartok
Sir Alfred Munnings and
Sir John Millais at 2 Palace Gate

The shops also reflect the affluence of the area with Butler & Wilson’s shop showing quality vintage frocks and The Wedding Shop just oozing silver and crystal, if that’s what people really want as wedding gifts?

We also passed the College of Psychic Studies, which in a way seems a contradiction in terms but I suppose even good psychics can learn how to do better.  The housing down to Battersea Bridge is of course delightful and at this time of year covered in blooming wisteria. Some of the lesser blocks  are well crafted also. 

Once over the bridge (another bridge that is shut over the weekend) we noted some of the new building that is going up along here, doubtless trying to claim a ‘river view,’ and there remain some interesting pubs and local restaurants partly to cater for the overspill of Royal College of Art students.  Not sure if this is the new building promised following planning permission in 2008?  Battersea Park Road has its share of ancient and modern and we really hoped that someone would come forward and preserve the rather lovely semi-detached villas (Shakespere & Byron they are called) that were half-boarded up along here.

It was about this point that we started getting irritated with this route as it was so clearly NOT going the most direct way: all in all we spent much time willing it to go straight ahead and instead it would hang another left, or more usually right, just to annoy us, and all at a very slow speed.  Up we went, past Clapham Junction and part way along Lavender Hill, noting that the library, previously encased in scaffolding for cleaning, had emerged rejuvenated though we were not sure for how long it would remain pristine, given the volume of traffic and number of buses.

After Lavender Hill we left the Shaftesbury Estate, built as railway workers’ cottages and now much sought after, on the left we headed up the fine wide Cedars Avenue to Clapham Common. Lambeth Council has housing both sides of the road but we noted at the beginning and end much older mews passages where the ‘ghost’ writing indicated first horses were stabled and shod here and later motor cars, and in fact they still seem to do some servicing work.

Clapham Common was reassuringly green, but not surprisingly – given the temperatures – the children’s paddling pool had not been filled. Once past Clapham Old Town and the Northern Line tube station we were astonished when the bus turned north again and headed for Stockwell.  It has to be said that for most of our journey this far we had been ambling at a very leisurely pace, and by the time we got to Stockwell we stopped altogether and waited, presumably to regulate the service but no reason given.

We have no objection to Stockwell, but to take this route seems an absurd dog-leg for a part of London pretty well served by transport already, so maybe our friends or followers in Stockwell might enlighten us as to whether they need this route too? Since we last came this way about five months ago the temporary shrine to Jean Charles de Menezes has become a permanent tile memorial by the station. Round the roundabout, with its signpost to the (Type Museum  no I didn’t know there was one either) we went direction Brixton, crossing the High Road which at least spared us the nose to tail that is the Brixton Road. We then headed off up to Camberwell. At this point the 345 closely follows, as it has done for much of the route thus far, the 35 and 45 but now also pretends it’s a P4.

Outside Loughborough Junction we loitered some more (not the best of places to stop) and then again in Coldharbour Lane we stopped and the driver warned us he would take three minutes or so – most passengers heading for Camberwell Green just got off and walked. We meanwhile had all the time in the world to admire the eating joints of the Green, including the quaintly named (Rock Steady Eddies though those who have taken breakfast there seem to agree the name is best thing about the café: a true ‘greasy spoon’

Sugar Momma, however, proves to be a dress shop. We had passed a nice range of hairdressers today, which I have ‘collaged’ to compress them.

As routes go the 345 has a comparatively short history (1995) and really duplicates a whole lot of other routes but I suppose its unique selling point is that it joins up the bits…rather like beads on a necklace…

Once through Camberwell, where the 345 has its own lane to turn right, we were heading straight for Peckham, passing Cambwerwell Arts College (a 2 Art College bus!) and the Harris Academy, and so right into Peckham Bus Garage.

Mary was anxious to pick up a grandchild after school and she had been somewhat spooked en route to find some of her former haunts for meetings demolished and already reduced to that fine rubble that demolition firms can now so easily do.

Thoroughly irritated (and hungry) we descended to make our various ways home glad we had ticked this route off our list – not one, we decided, to revisit on a voluntary basis. 

The Number 344 Route

Liverpool Street Station to Clapham Junction
Monday November 9th 2009

Our key route for the day, the 42, had left us at Liverpool Street so we waited for this double decker outside the Royal Bank of Scotland watching our employees stand there smoking, and even watched three of them leaping into a taxi at our, the tax payers’, expense along a stretch of road served by no fewer than 12 bus routes. By the time you read this the banking crisis/recession may well be over (hollow laugh – June 2012) but even when well into it, it seems outrageous that people should do this.

Our ‘taxi’, that is the estimable 344, took us back into the City past  Heron Tower and St. Ethelburga's

with its centre for peace and reconciliation – the poor City churches that survived the Blitz or, in this case, IRA bombing are very dwarfed by business. The upper stories of some of the not so new buildings have some interesting friezes both on this building and later as we passed the Vintners’ Place. Near Fish Street there was a 1709 clock, so still working after 300 years.

We did an exciting wriggle actually round the base of the Monument and back across the approach to London Bridge so that we could cross  Southwark Bridge 

the ONLY BUS to do so! Tide was very low and still going out and there we were across back in South London.  These bits close to the River are a strange mixture of the new and spruce such as the Novotel and others strangely Dickensian like Marshalsea and Quilp Street. – Dickens seems to be claimed by most London boroughs as having lived there and Southwark is no exception. The bus was not busy – few passengers so far even though it’s the only bus traversing this bit of Southwark. We liked the look of the Island Café at 1 Flat Iron Square SE1 being more in the line of a traditional caff but it too was not busy today.


We did the inevitable but today pretty swift circuit at Elephant & Castle and swept along St George’s Road and not only past the side of the Imperial War Museum but rather grandly along the front so we could fully appreciate the guns and the dome. bathed in autumn leaves amidst the Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park. William Bligh of the Bounty infamy once lived (and therefore has a Blue Plaque) along here – ‘such a loser’ as Jo says. At this point we headed back to the river, passing the Marine Society from 1756 and arriving alongside the Lambeth Garden History Museum which is one of the more attractive sites of the Albert Embankment that tends to the featureless, be it residential or business. The River is magnificent though and worth the ride. Next bridge along ('Twenty bridges from Tower to Kew, twenty bridges or Twenty Two’) is Vauxhall topped with Mr.Tradescant’s pineapples. Then comes the really scary 6 lane one way system which even the buses would have to brave – only a suicidal cyclist would attempt this I fear: they need their own underpass or bridge?? Dominating Vauxhall also is the MI6 building.

 

Talking of features, still the most ‘stand-out’ one along Nine Elms is Battersea Power Station which from this proximity was looking fragile and decaying – it is a lovely outline on the horizon – perhaps we just need a cut-out and not the real thing?

As already noted it was quiet today but we still did not expect a full size lorry to behave like a white van and do a U-turn in front of us on Battersea Park Road. Strangely an old ILEA school has now bee n taken over by the private sector and is a preparatory and pre-prep school, which tells you something about the gentrification of this area over the last 20-30 years.

Turning away before we reached Battersea Bridge (otherwise this would have been a 5 bridge bus) instead we headed uphill towards Latchmere – the bus was getting pretty busy by now with more passengers – with a range of shops and services going from the beautifully restored George Blunden Almshouses to Barking Betty (hair care for dogs) and the Islamic Cultural Centre which has both a shop front and house converted to Mosque.

A last push uphill and under the railway bridges and there we were at our destination of Clapham Junction, having taken just about the prescribed time – never wildly exciting but plenty to keep one interested in this fairly extensive east to west trip. Always looking polished, The Falcon (pub) keeps the flame of the lost river Falcon flying and reminds us many road routes follow the valleys of even older now lost rivers.

The Number 343 Route

New Cross Gate to City Hall
Monday October 19^th 2009

 Author Note: It being 2 years nine months since we rode this route we have lost the photos. I have plugged some gaps by borrowing photos off other routes which cross this one but gaps remain. If we find them we will add them later.

  Our previous journey (the Number 36) had left us just opposite New Cross Bus garage, and we used the facilities at the New Cross Sainsbury’s - a site very much designed for the motorist with the need to cross a vast car park before you can enter the store and use its facilities – there are plans afoot to re-design this area and bring it down to street level, incorporating more Housing.

Refreshed,  we crossed the road and boarded a double decker 343, which surprisingly for the first third of its journey goes through some comparative back streets. It starts by climbing up Pepys Road (which locals used to be in the habit of calling ‘Pepp-is’). The bus is the only permitted vehicle to do this, as there is some ferocious one wayery round here. Then up and over (Telegraph Hill ),   passing both the Haberdasher Aske’s schools once we were past the park This is a substantial conservation area built in a planned way to include fine villas, schools and churches on a patch that was once a market garden until the railways came.

From there the route passes through the very large Honor Oak Estate, still in the process of being upgraded, and past Avignon Road where Mary had once lived with a deranged landlady who read all her mail and reported back to her parents so she eventually fled to another flat in North London.  We hope the landlady stopped taking tenants.  By the time it leaves Lewisham borough behind the 343 turns through the older bits of Nunhead and close to Stuart Road.  Mary pointed out her allotment on a good south facing slope in Elland Road. From there the 343 skirts the edge of Rye Hill Park and Peckham Common, arriving at the crossroads junction formerly known as King’s on the Rye, and then up and into Rye Lane – this was a Monday afternoon and actually very quiet as some days there is no room left to walk so busy are the pavements.

The ‘Co-Op’ apartments are about the only new building round here and they are in a thirties tribute style and the rest of Rye Lane dates from just about every decade. The bus then turns left into Peckham Road, dominated now by the new Harris Academy, and a newly demolished pub. The bus does not stick to this main road, however, but works its way through the Aylsham Estate and to Burgess Park, once an oasis for Peckham but now in need of something of a face-lift.  The former Camberwell Public Baths adjacent to Wells Way library are of course famed for the huge tile mural of the Camberwell Beauty butterfly which came from the demolished gummed paper works of Samuel Jones. This site offers a closer look at what else is worth stopping for round here. Special mention for the Chumleigh Gardens Almshouses a hidden gem with café!

This bus alone services the huge Aylesbury Estate but today there were not many takers. The Charlie Chaplin centre looked deserted and the Heygate estate now emptied – so we eventually arrived at Elephant & Castle (we need a tick-off list to count down the 26 routes passing through).  Unusually the driver was hooting round the roundabout (perhaps he recognised some-one) before we drove up to the Borough complete with mis-spelt signs telling us of roadworks in Marshalsea,  which made us think of ' Little Dorrit'. 

The courts are close by in Newington causeway and we pushed on stopping only in the street for London Bridge station, and not up and down where most buses go. By now it was clearly lunch-time with all the office workers out and about to mingle with additional tourists heading for all the delights along here – Hays Galleria,   HMS Belfast, the tacky London Dungeons beloved of school groups and the curious ‘Britain at War’ – I always wonder why pay when you get the same or better for free at the Imperial war Museum.

Anyway the bus stops behind City Hall – a name we struggle with as it’s NOT the town hall for the city of London but merely the administrative headquarters for the Mayor, who is Mayor for greater London? Anyway this part of London and the river offer unequalled photo opportunities to the bus passenger and pedestrian alike and this 343 only took 50 minutes. 

PS Apparently said Mayor and others at City Hall receive more complaints about this service than many others, and I have to confess I have in my time stood alone and friendless in Frendsbury  Road waiting over ½ hour for this particular number – when I don’t want it of course it runs in positive convoys…

PPS Quite a bit has changed in the nearly 3 years since we rode this route:
Boris has been re-elected as mayor, but you knew that.

The roadworks and traffic re-alignment at Elephant & Castle have finished and make negotiating the double roundabouts easier.

The Heygate Estate is very empty, and the Aylesbury partially and both beloved of filmmakers who wish for a gritty location, to which the remaining tenants object, not wishing to be portrayed as crime hotspots.  Some of the promised rebuilding is finished – ‘Strata’, notably – but other sites continue to languish

The Belfast has been closed and re-opened (following unplanned collapse of gangplank) The Imperial War Museum has been open but is about to close (planned rebuilding works for the first half of 2013) 

Peckham has fairly continuous roadworks,  the results of which are never very clear!

Burgess Park has been getting a make-over which is nearly complete.

John Lanchester has written a novel called ‘Capital’ whose characters live round New Cross…in Pepys Road .

We celebrated the  200^th anniversary of Dickens’ birth this year.

The Number 342 Route (not)

We are reaching a stage in our list where the number of missing buses increases, so I thought I would take the opportunity to give readers a light entertainment break.

The Number 63 regular made a compilation of 'bus' songs for us to mark the new year:  but this one is the mother and father of them all, even if it used as an anthem by route-master fanatics.

Enjoy it!

The Number 341 Route

Thursday 31 May 2012


Linda has been blogging stored routes, and inventing interesting things for non-routes for so long, it was almost a shock to be back on a bus.  And the day did not start particularly well.  Linda, Mary and I were going to meet at the head stop and, naively trusting the online map and the listed route, we thought that meant County Hall, or at least York Road.  I suppose we have had too many easy starts to our journeys.  After a lot of wandering around (and I hope South Londoners will not object to me saying that walking down Lower Marsh is always a pleasure, doing it more than once and still not finding a bus is not) we consulted the paper map.  Ahah.  The asterisk that marks the start or stop was clearly in Baylis Road, right by Lambeth North tube.  So we were well exercised when we boarded our double decker at 10.00.


We were headed for the huge Ikea in Edmonton, and we assumed it was going to take quite a long time, which it did. 

First we went round the Imax and past the Hayward Gallery, which had a wonderful baobab tree made out of rolls of fabric outside it.  But the website is full of Tracey Emin and David Shrigley, so I don't know what the tree is about. Over the river, we went round Aldwych to head along past the Royal Courts of Justice.  There were press vans all over, because of the Leveson Inquiry. Today was the day that Mr Hunt the Culture Secretary was 'on'.  You can watch and listen to him on the website.  In passing I should like to remark how odd it is that people who are incandescent with fury about cyclists on pavements don't seem to mind motor vehicles on pavements, like the press vans outside St Clement Danes.

But anyway, we pressed on to turn left up Fetter Lane (the only bus to do so!) and passed the statue of John Wilkes. Left along Holborn, and up the Grays Inn Road, our bus reached the Clerkenwell Road at the Yorkshire Grey,  a pub with its own website which explains the name, so three cheers for that.  We turned right and then left up Rosebery Avenue, and then went straight up past Sadlers Wells to reach Angel.

We noted the Old Red Lion Theatre Pub and then headed along Upper Street to fork right into Essex Road at the statue of Sir Hugh Myddleton, developer of the New River. Among the other monuments we admired was a newish war memorial, apparently known as 'the doughnut', and then a possible Banksy dog on one of Islington's little green spots.


Heading on northwards, we crossed the Balls Pond Road and saw signs for new build on the site of the Mildmay Hospital.  Strangely, this clip of the demolition does not seem to have any date on it, but the work that the Mildmay did with Aids patients is still going on.  Through Newington Green we came to the Monarch pub with a picture of Charles I and an inn sign depicting his beheading. A good, macabre joke, we thought.


 We realised we were in Green Lanes as the shops were mainly Turkish, and the traffic quite slow.  The advertisement for the Fitness First Centre seemed rather appropriate, but mostly we were ogling the amazing cake and fruit shops of the area. 

We had come past the Robinson Crusoe Pub and Clissold Park, before reaching Finsbury Park and crossing the New River.  Now we noticed a slight tendency for pubs to have the names of politicians:  first the Beaconsfield, with a gloomy Disraeli on its sign, and later Salisbury and Palmerston.  It was at the Salisbury Hotel that we finally turned off Green Lanes to head along Harringay Road, passing George's Fish Bar with its handsome mosaic.

The Tottenham Ambulance Service HQ is along here, which reminds me that during our morning's travels we saw three different ambulances attending road traffic accidents.  I don't know if this is a normal number or whether the sudden cooling of the weather had caused inattention on the part of road users. Up St Ann's Road, and left along Black Boy Road, we came to West Green and turned into Philip Lane.  We passed the Marcus Garvey Library as well as the Bernie Grant Arts Centre, and looped round to get back to the main road and reach Bruce Grove Station.  There is a mixture of housing types around here, including these embellished terraces.

We reached Northumberland Park Bus Station, and headed straight on, once again becoming the only bus. Turning right into Leeside Avenue, we came to a wasteland of large gas holders, and crossed the railway to arrive at the enormous Ikea at 11.20.


It had been a remarkable route, not least for the number of times it avoided the straight direction in order to serve different corners, from Fetter Lane in the city to Lansdowne Road in Tottenham.

The Number 340 Route

Edgware Station to Harrow Bus Station
Wednesday March 7^th2012

This was a wet day but we were not going to complain as months have elapsed since it  has rained on our parade, and the South East is in drought. Also we had only just caught our previous, fairly infrequent bus as it was drawing away and were in a mind to check again its frequency and count our luck, when the 340 appeared. (So no time to verify the frequency of the 305.)

It also meant there was no time to savour our last visit to Edgware Bus Station, the 340 being the highest route number to pass through, or as today start or finish here. Edgware Bus Station is one of the best for which our criteria are

• easy  for changing routes
• clean
• well signposted and set out
• close to a station (Northern Line in this case)
• adjacent to a modest shopping centre with lunch-buying and toilet facilities.  
• frequently playing classical/soothing music

There is a road to cross to access either trains or shops but the buses are patient and well trained and the crossings are clearly marked.

I loved this piece when Tanya Gold wrote it two years ago, maybe I’ve linked to it before but it’s worth it  The bus station also seems to have its own Facebook page – who ‘befriends’ a bus station? – other bus stations?  Bus routes? Drivers?

To get back to business: the route started with a left turn out of the station and went straight ahead at the crossroads, passing the very familiar Church of St Margaret of Antioch – busy bee that she was (see the link on the 303) – and the stately solid red-brick Edgware Police Station. Not a state of the art police station but one that houses the Child Protection Teams for Harrow and Brent (yes I know it’s confusing, most of Edgware is in Barnet borough but the border runs along nearby Stonegrove). The building dates from 1892.

As the 340 heads towards Canons Park the semis that line the route get more substantial and are set further back from the road. 

‘Cannons’ [occasionally sic] Park was originally the ducal estate for Lord Chandos who seems to have been both an embezzler, abusing the trust of his public position, and then an  ‘insider trader’ and poor speculator to boot, so not surprisingly his estate fell into decline.  So the name has nothing to do with either big guns or small priests.

St Lawrence’s Church is also historic and Handel is said to have played there with Lord Brydges/Chandos as his patron.  

At the next crossroads the 340 turns up Marsh Lane, where it is the only route on offer – on a day like to day it was easy to imagine this as marshland but essentially it’s a small strip of Common land before the well spaced housing continues; much of it set back behind green verges.

Like most of the sights on our trip today the Ernest Bernays Institute, recently restored but looking small adjacent to Stanmore’s Sainsbury’s, was not seen at its best through the rain and gloom   but does serve to remind us that Stanmore was a village long before its current status as yet another mixed High Street, though admittedly in better shape than many.

We thought the bus might be heading to Pinner as we glimpsed the rather charming white sign posts but in fact it goes through Great Stanmore (is there a little Stanmore?) and more direction Harrow Weald. Here the grander semis are interspersed with newer, retirement type blocks. We saw Heywood, not one of the major firms, was building even now. From their website I gather they may be a descendant of the once radical Notting Hill Housing Trust founded to combat the inequalities in housing apparent in the Sixties, though never really eradicated.

Here the bus is alone as a numbered route but with company from some of the Hs (mainly H12) and they pass close to Harrow Weald cemetery and the rather attractive and substantial churchyard of St John the Evangelist. We also spotted ‘The Miller & Carter’ trading as a steakhouse but research indicates this is a ‘false traditional’ name and they are actually a chain of Steak Houses so doubtless dreamt up by a focus group or advertising agency…

The rain was pretty constant by now, so much so that the wind screen wipers were squeaking relentlessly, therefore no surprise when lots of people boarded indicating that a double decker was a fully justified choice for this route.

The stretch of route between the roundabout and Harrow Bus Station was all too familiar (see routes 140, 182 and 258) but like leaving Edgware we think this is the last time we shall pass this way, meaning through Harrow Weald and then Harrow. itself.  We could doubtless retrieve photos from these earlier trips but in the spirit of truthful reporting we shall give you Harrow in the rain. The lamppost banners were advertising the Harrow Dance  & Food festival. While I can see that these two activities celebrate the diversity of this North London borough dancing after eating never seems that advisable, speaking digestively.

After this comes the usual sequence of Bus depot, Salvatorian College and Harrow & Wealdstone Station, less monumental inside than out, the Civic Centre, monument to bureaucracy  like all local authority centres, and finally the somewhat depressed High Street that runs to the bus station . Jo had already announced she was not going to photograph the ‘Golden Lady’ just short of the bus station but snapped our final destination instead. A rainy jaunt of 35 minutes through NW London. 

And Harrow Bus Station  - murky but musical...