Great Bus Journeys of the World

These journeys have all been extracted as pdfs from the editions of Battersea Matters, the magazine of the Battersea Society in which they were published. You can find all editions in full on the society’s website.

I travelled on buses much as Mr Gladstone (above) did wearing a top hat, and brandishing a quill pen while recording what I saw from the windows. Be that as it may, these pieces are meant as a light-hearted guide to some of the interesting, unusual and sometimes quite boring sights you can see while travelling on a London bus. The idea was that some part of the journey was inside Battersea, though I don’t always stick to that.

During the time I wrote many of these pieces, much of central London was affected by the Crossrail development, and on occasion the routes were subject to complicated diversions. And of course there have been changes – some better than others, with some parts of the city looking like a perpetual building site.

And a few of the journeys are a bit different, in that buses play a very minor part in them, and in one case aren’t mentioned at all. I never claimed that I was going to be consistent.

Number 19 from Battersea Bridge (south side) to FInsbury Park. (Written by jenny Sheridan)

Number 49 from Clapham Junction to White City

Number 170 from Victorian to Roehampton Danebury Avenue

Number 35 from Clapham Junction to Shoreditch

Number 295 from Clapham Junction to Ladbroke Grove

Number 87 from Clapham Junction to Aldwych

Number 345 from South Kensington to Peckham

Number 344 from Clapham Junction to Liverpool Street

Number 319 from Sloane Square to Streatham

Number G1 from Battersea to Streatham

Number C3 from Clapham Junction to Earls Court

Number 337 from Clapham Junction to RIchmond