It has been an extremely long, long-haul flight to London, and I am feeling gritty and grey as we drag our bags off the bus at Paddington. But the sun is shining between showers and sparkling in the puddles, and I can’t stop grinning. We play dodgems with our wheelie-bins as we try to navigate the crowds on the forecourt, to reach the Underground. Its taken a day and a half and almost every form of transport to get here: car, taxi, plane, feet, bus, feet, Underground, feet… but we are here at last, and I am still grinning.
Offloading our bags, we shower and head out to explore our old stomping ground. Nothing much has changed, and although it feels like the population has grown exponentially, we are, after all, more used to our small, beachside town far from the crazy crowds of an international city.
The next morning, we continue the theme and set out to visit the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden. There is a small person at home who is mad about London’s red, double-decker buses. So, as we sit atop the number nine bus from Kensington High Street to Aldwych, we made a video call to Australia to share the moment.
The truth is, I’m just mad about London buses too. As we sail along the edge of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, past Park Lane and along Picadilly towards Leicester Square, through Trafalgar Square and down the Strand, I feel as if we are driving around a giant Monopoly Board. Of course, it is summer in the northern hemisphere, and all the green spaces are dazzling at this time of year. The parks are thrumming with life – flowers, birds, squirrels, dogs – and the sky is mostly blue. I cry out at familiar sites, as excited as a kid hunting for Easter eggs. We remember previous moments strolling through Green Park, visiting the Royal Academy or popping in for afternoon tea at the Ritz. I nod to Prince Albert opposite the Albert Hall, to Anteros in the centre of Picadilly Circus, to Charing Cross Station and Australia House. I bemoan the old buses with the spiral staircase at the rear and the bus conductors no longer in evidence, only to discover that the new buses have two sets of stairs, back and front!
At Covent Garden, I find myself looking for Emilia Clarke in her Christmas elf outfit and searching for Santa in her shop filled with Christmas decorations. Pointlessly, it turns out. Maybe they will both turn up closer to the Festive Season. Never mind. We are on a mission.
The London Transport Museum, on the south-eastern corner of Covent Garden, is about to open, and I am keen to find a London bus (in miniature, of course!) for a small, eager little girl in Australia. The One & Only is also keen to see the museum’s collection of London transport posters.
Despite a minor dose of jetlag, we skip merrily through the museum, pausing to examine the reproductions of a sedan chair, a horse drawn omnibus, an elderly underground carriage, and read voraciously about the history of London transport – a history that affected the world.
In the early days, London was dependent on the River Thames, London’s ‘ancient highway’. Can’t you just imagine it crowded with vessels of all shapes and sizes, from small, sturdy rafts to sleek and speedy tea clippers, to large galleons like the Golden Hinde, and naval warships? Bridges were few and far between until the nineteenth century, so wherries (light rowing boats or barges) ferried customers and their goods back and forth across the river.
Now compressed between manmade embankments, this broad river has been the starting point of many a perilous journey: men heading to war for King and country; traders off to explore and exploit distant countries and continents; convicts and migrants bound for Australia, dreaming of a better world, or merely dreaming of survival. In 1815, steam ships were introduced and passenger traffic on the river increased enormously. Although accidents on this now overcrowded highway were all too frequent, thousands of commuters sailed up and down the river daily.
Back in the days when the river was king, London was so small that it took only half an hour to walk out to the fields of Essex, Kent or Hertfordshire. Today, London’s suburbs stretch to the horizon – or to the false horizon of the M25 anyway, that circular motorway built to contain the ever- expanding capital. And this viral spread largely came about because of the development of transport systems – from Cobb & Co. coaches to horse-drawn tram cars, from overground steam trains to underground electric trains and, of course, to the big red double decker buses. All these methods of transport allowed workers from farther afield to travel daily to the City, until today commuters arrive from Brighton, Bath, and Birmingham. Distances and costs may have soared, but still London has a magnetic pull that ensures more than a million commuters dash in and out of the capital every day.
In those long-forgotten days of the 16th century, few could afford any kind of transport beyond their own feet. Wealthy, well-dressed gentlemen might hire a sedan chair, carried on poles by two chairmen, to prevent their own dainty feet getting muddy. And while that might sound luxurious, I am reminded of a letter my great aunt Edith wrote of riding in such chairs in Peking in the late 19th century, who wrote “I am going to buy Mrs. Cummins chair – but it is the bearers who are so expensive.” It seems this was a more comfortable option than a cart, however, as “It’s hard work in a cart with children you have to try and “protect from bumps as well as oneself.”
Before the red double-decker bus, there was the omnibus, which arrived in London in the 1800s. This was an enclosed carriage drawn by one, two or three horses. Twelve passengers could sit inside on long benches for sixpence, but there was additional seating on the roof, on back-to-back benches. The driver sat on the front to drive the horses. An unknown traveller in 1833 writes of finding himself ‘jammed, crammed and squeezed’ into a bus with ‘six and twenty sweating citizens… like so many peas in a pod.’ Some would say little has changed!
In the 1830s, the first railway in London was built between London Bridge and Greenwich on a brick viaduct. The steam train knocked the stagecoach into a cocked hat, able to carry multitudes of passengers at a far greater speed than the poor old coach horses could manage. hundreds of horses pulled horse-drawn trams across the city, which had first begun operating in 1861. But horses needed food and stables and someone to clear up the vast amounts of manure they left on the roads. By 1910 they had been replaced by electric trams, the poor old horses put out to pasture.
In the eighteenth century, there was only London Bridge, wich crossed the river from Southwark to the City. Covered in shop-houses, the gatehouse often decked out with the severed heads of criminals beheaded at Tyburn – supposedly a deterrent to would-be thieves and murderers. These days, some thirty-five road, rail and footbridges cross the Thames from Hampton Court to the Tower of London.
Back at the Transport Museum, I discover that this beautiful old building with its Victorian iron and glass structure – like a miniature Musee D’Orsay – was originally designed to hold a flower market in 1871, the same one in which Eliza Dolittle collects her violets to sell on the steps of the Covent Garden theatre next door. For a century, the flower market held about 500 flower stalls and employed over 2,000 men. The flower market moved out in 1974, and the building was reopened as the London Transport Museum a few years later.
It is the end of the summer holidays, and the museum is full of kids eager to explore the old train carriages and clamber up into the omnibus, high above the ground. Eventually jet lag kicks in, and we eschew the crowds and find a quiet pub around the corner to sit quietly for a bit and summon up the energy to wander home. Big red bus? Underground? Shanks’ pony…?