The best way to observe London, with all its charm and beauty, oddity and idiosyncrasy, is from the top of a bus, and mine was the 31—the only one that went to the World’s End and passed through some of the most varied and vibrant parts of the city. Starting in Camden High Street outside the World’s End pub, it headed up past Camden Lock to the old railway marshaling yards and the Roundhouse that had just become a cool music venue and then on round the strangely kitsch Swiss Cottage. It swung south down the hill past Abbey Road to cross the Kilburn High Road and on through Notting Hill Gate.
Pausing for the lights at the bottom of Kensington Church Street, you could peer out at the lovely reliefs of 1930s airplanes and steam engines carved on to the facade of Barkers in High Street Kensington before you turned west past the neo-gothic charm of St Mary Abbots and south again through avenues of peeling bedsits in Earls Court towards the wrong end of the King’s Road in Chelsea. There the conductor would shout, “All change,” because it had not just reached the end of the line but also another World’s End pub in the King’s Road. A quick stop for a cuppa in the transport café and then back north again, day after day, from World’s End to World’s End.
The approved method for catching the bus was to jump on when it was still moving by grabbing the white pole and swinging in, earning both the respect of your school friends and a furious tirade from the conductor. I would run upstairs into the smoky gloom of the top deck and try to get the front seats, where, if you opened the top windows with the little steel handle, most of the cigarette smoke would get blown to the back and you could sit with fresh London air streaming in. Eventually the conductor would work his way through the passengers, glaring at me accusingly as I ordered a half fare to Westbourne Grove with wide-eyed innocence.
He would vigorously turn the knobs and handles on the intriguing steel ticket machine and out would come a faint strip of paper ticket, with its numbers and symbols printed in purple ink. Clutching this in my grubby hand, I would lean forward and enjoy one of the best views in London. I was starting to join the ancient community of people who have cut beauty and order from rock, and I knew that I was in the right place.
It was the late 1960s, and London was still pretty patchy. It was more than 20 years since the end of the war, but there were plenty of areas that had not recovered from the Blitz. John’s Wood and Belsize Park were clean and prosperous, but then a few hundred yards down the road there was Kilburn.
Damp houses with moldy plaster and broken windows lined streets between terrifying schools with grimy kids gazing forlornly through lethal wire fencing around the playgrounds. At the time, it was a downtrodden area favored by Irish immigrants, and it was little more than a slum. I used to look fearfully through the first-floor windows of the houses from my vantage point on the top deck into bare rooms with peeling wallpaper, cold and unfurnished, sad and empty.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
