London by Matthew Green

Author:Matthew Green [Green, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781405919135
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

The horse-bus to Whitechapel

It will be green, bedecked in advertisements and say ‘Bayswater to Whitechapel’ on the side, and you shouldn’t have to wait long – it runs every eight minutes, just as in the twenty-first century, from 8 a.m. to midnight. Don’t worry about finding a bus stop since they don’t exist, just hail one – they always keep to the left and the driver will be very keen for your custom, veering in front of other traffic to pick you up. The cad, or conductor, will stand on a little foothold by the back of the bus, blowing a whistle to indicate to the driver to stop. Don’t worry about buying a ticket either – you pay on your way off: 3d in this case (though cads are known to arbitrarily double it – ‘how strange it is’, comments Punch, ‘that conductors never know how to conduct themselves’).

At least 200,000 people ride buses every day, mainly the middle classes. It takes around 50,000 horses to keep London’s public transport system circulating, caking the city in 1,000 tonnes of dung a day. Which is one of the reasons it smells so bad, despite huge advances in hygiene and health.

Around fourteen people can squeeze into the bus’s inside compartment, which has straw on the floor, small windows, and plenty of advertisements (though sadly the days when bus companies provided reading material for their customers are gone). Don’t expect any riveting conversation, rather insouciant disdain – as Charles Dickens points out in his Sketches by Boz in the 1830s, ‘it is rather remarkable, that the people already in an omnibus, always look at newcomers, as if they entertained some undefined idea that they have no business to come in at all’. Watch out for fleas and pickpockets. Men will be expected to surrender their seats to oblige female passengers, and sit on the roof if necessary.

Even if you’re not a man, it will do to head upstairs, onto the top deck, for the view. You find seating for as many as ten people either on two benches facing one another or in a ‘knifeboard’ layout whereby the passengers sit back-to-back down the middle of the roof. Since you are new to town, this is the perfect place for you as we rattle past Bank, down Leadenhall Street, through Aldgate and into Whitechapel. The buses are not speedy – they won’t go much faster than three to four and a half miles per hour and they get clogged up in almighty scrummages of traffic at bottlenecks like the Strand and Bank. So you’ll have plenty of time to sit back, relax and take in the sights on our journey to Whitechapel.

You rattle down what’s left of the Strand, entering Fleet Street, where a dragon monument on a tall plinth marks the threshold of the city. One of the busiest streets in London, Fleet Street is of course a turbine of news, both enlightening the world and receiving its news via telegraph connections.

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