The long way round
A misspent day on London’s “superloop” bus network.
This week’s “one I made earlier” went to paying subscribers back in May, on the day Rishi Sunak called the election. As ever, if you want to read this stuff as it comes out, rather than late, or possibly never, you know what to do. There’s a special offer on and everything:
“If you want to board this bus,” the driver growled, “you’re gonna have to switch off that bloody noise.”
“Your bus makes noise,” replied the guy with the boombox. “This is music.” He did not switch off that bloody noise. There then followed a brief standoff in which the driver refused to drive, the guy with the boombox – who even has a boombox these days? – refused to switch it off, and the rest of us did our best not to make eye contact. With an estimated eight hours of bus travel ahead of me on seven different buses, it did not feel like an auspicious start.
It was the last day of April, the first properly sunny day of the year, and I was in Thamesmead: a train-free housing estate on some former marshland in the wilds of south east London, and probably the biggest chunk of the city unserved by its rail network. The Superloop, a network of express bus routes intended to improve orbital links in outer London, had been launched nine months earlier at a cost of £6 million. I’d read the claims that it was meant to compensate for policies, like the expansion of the Ultra-Low Emissions Charge, intended to encourage suburbanites out of their cars. I’d noticed the panels announcing the network on lucky bus stops, including the light up signs on the roof which suggested we were meant to think this something special.
Despite my long-standing interest in urban transport, though, I had not so much as set foot on it. I was also, if I’m honest, cynical. Express orbital Green Line Coach services had linked the suburbs for much of the mid-20th century, but passenger numbers had declined and few had survived into the modern era. Several mayoral candidates – including Boris Johnson, who’d actually managed to get elected – had proposed bringing them back.1 But they’d never actually happened. It felt like there was probably a good reason for that.
The Superloop though, had apparently gone well enough that, a fortnight before May’s mayoral election, serving mayor Sadiq Khan had made expanding it a major campaign pledge. And so, I decided it was time I gave it a go. According to my trusty journey planner, travelling on all seven buses which made up the orbital section of the network should take roughly 405 minutes: throw in six changes of buses, and that was probably about eight hours. I’d almost certainly be sat at a laptop for eight hours anyway – why not just treat London’s newest transport mode as my office for the day? What could possibly go wrong?
I’d decided to start at Thamesmead and go clockwise, even though doing so meant copying YouTube’s own Geoff Marshall, largely so that I didn’t find myself miles from bloody anywhere at the wrong end of the day. But that meant a slightly annoying journey just to get started; I’d also set off later than I’d intended because the dog had had some extremely important sniffing to do in the local park.
And so it was 11am by the time I was boarding my first bus, the SL3 from Thamesmead to Bromley. After some grumbling about the lack of respect the driver had decided, begrudgingly to drive; and honour apparently satisfied, the man with the boombox had got off the bus after only two stops. I was on my way.
At first, it was rather lovely. The bus had a tube-line style route map, which made it feel proper. Outside, the sun shone on a variety of suburbs – the abbey and woods of Abbey Woods; the picturesque Bexley Village which, bafflingly, the superloop chooses not to stop at – which looked surprisingly nice. But by the time I reached Bromley North, where I changed to the SL5 – a single decker, which would take me past Beckhenam’s mildly problematic Chinese Garage, the amusingly named suburb of Shirley, and the Bethlem Royal Hospital, which you may know by a different name – it was already clear I had made a terrible, terrible mistake.
For one thing, with phone, laptop, and a USB cable (the buses are equipped for such things), I had assumed I could work. This was, it turned out, not true: the constant bouncing made it impossible to look at a screen and stay focused. Over nearly nine hours, I would do a single piece of work that would normally take me perhaps 90 minutes.
Secondly, that first bus had taken me 55 minutes, not the 45 promised by the timetable. By the time I hit Croydon and went looking for lunch, half the day was gone. I had done precisely a quarter of the loop.
This feels as good a time as any to talk about how annoying the branding of this thing is. The name “Superloop” makes me want to hit things, but that’s a relatively minor issue. More baffling is the numbering of the routes, which appears, at first glance, random. It isn’t. The numbering starts in the north, like a clock, rather than the east, where there’s a break in the network thanks to the Thames; but then the three radial routes use the same scheme, even though that means the numbers aren’t consecutive.
All of which meant that my journey was to go SL3, SL5, SL7, SL9, SL10, SL1, SL2. Sure.
The next bus on my journey was by far the longest route on the network: I’d be on the SL7, a long-standing route linking south London to Heathrow, which comes with room for suitcases and was previously branded as the X26, for long enough to watch the whole of Back to the Future Part II. Somewhere around Cheam, for the second time on this trip, I rejected an entreaty from a rarely visited friend that I jump off and have coffee, for fear that if I did I wouldn’t finish. Beyond that came plush riverside suburbs like Kingston and Teddington, then the glorious open space of Bushy Park.
Soon enough, though, all that gave way to a more industrial landscape as we approached Heathrow; and the weather, which had felt so delightful when I’d started, began to feel uncomfortable and oppressive. As I overpaid for coffee in a sweltering airport bus station, and it hit me that I was probably the only person there not getting a plane – that I was literally the only person there for fun – I began to seriously question my life choices.
By now it was 3pm, and the after school rush was beginning. I’d never been entirely convinced that “stopping comparatively rarely” was quite the same as “express”. But as we slowed to a crawl on a series of identical 1930s shopping boulevards lining the route of the SL9 to Harrow, I began to wonder if the Superloop really differed that much from regular buses at all.2
There were other aspects of the network’s design I’m not entirely convinced by, either. The decision to make the loop discrete sections means there are journeys (Sutton to Bromley, say) which inevitably require a change of bus, even though they’re relatively short. The decision to end the SL2 at North Woolwich, even though you can’t cross the Thames on it, also means the network goes a lot further into west London than it does to the north east. This has led to residents of Havering, the only outer London borough entirely ignored by the network, to complain of their exclusion from the network – even though it’s not very good.
It all feels to me like the planners got a bit too into the loop bit of the Superloop. Since only mad transport bloggers are ever going to attempt the full circle, a version with routes covering overlapping sections of it, then diverting to serve more destinations, feels like it might be more useful, even if it results in a less aesthetically pleasing map. This is, to be fair, not a million miles away from what’s planned for phase two.
On the buses, it was getting worse. On the SL10 around Hendon, my attempts to take photographs of the interesting sights we were passing accidentally convinced another passenger I was a creep. Around North Finchley, my repeated decision to buy coffee rather than water meant a descent into actual madness. I spent 20 minutes walking round and round failing to find the next bus. I began tweeting the names of businesses with stupid taglines in all caps, or rewriting the lyrics of ‘Baby Shark’ to be about buses. The small army of people who’d been following my journey, liking every post since the morning, mysteriously but noticeably thinned out. I began tweeting photographs which were, quite literally, upside down. “If you can’t handle me at my ‘half mad from dehydration, screaming ‘I. AM. A. BUS’ at strangers on the internet’,” I would tweet later, “you don’t deserve me at my ‘aww look at this cute house’.” I stand by that.
After Arnos Grove, we joined the North Circular (A406), a grim orbital trunk road lined by industrial sites, and passed through the less fashionable of north London’s two districts named Angel (this one’s in Edmonton). When we turned off the road towards Walthamstow, I realised the route meant doubling back on myself: this was annoying, because by now it was early evening, and all I wanted was to get home. The constant micro adjustments required, the way that you can never fully relax, mean that travel is tiring, even if you’re ostensibly sitting still, so despite having barely moved all day I was shattered. At Walthamstow I stopped to get some water and something with sugar in it, and was rewarded by the sight of the final bus on my journey pulling away, leaving me hanging around yet another suburban bus station for an unspecified length of time. The driver of the SL2 very kindly opened the door for me at some traffic lights, thus sparing the people of Waltham Forest the sight of a large adult man publicly weeping about missing a bus.
But it was fine: this was the last leg. After the long drag of Forest Road, past one of London’s most ludicrously grand town halls, we returned to the A406. At South Woodford, the bus stopped at the bottom of a canyon beside an urban motorway, a good three storeys worth of steps below civilisation. We passed Gants Hill and Ilford and trundled on towards Barking.
Perhaps it was dehydration and incipient madness speaking, but I was no more convinced of the benefits of the Superloop than I’d been at the start of the day, because it was clear that London’s express bus network wasn’t really either. It may be faster than regular buses, traffic willing – but traffic very often isn’t, and without protected space the Superloop will always be far, far closer to regular buses than to trains.
It’s also not a network in any serious sense. Imagine trying to get from, say, Hendon to South Woodford. Picture London as a clock, and that’s roughly 11 to roughly 1 – exactly the sort of journey for which express orbital buses should be perfect. Taking the Superloop, though, would involve three different buses, and take the better part of two hours. You’re better off taking the train into central London and out again. That’s probably not the only reason why, with the exception of the Heathrow to Harrow route in school rush hour, none of the buses I took were particularly busy. But it clearly hasn’t helped.
The main thing my day on the buses convinced me of was not really about buses at all. A recurring argument I’ve seen from economists is that trams aren’t worth building: buses are both cheaper and more flexible. But with their own space, trams don’t get stuck in traffic. They’re also, I can say from experience, smooth enough to work from. The Superloop is fine, as an addition to London’s world-leading bus network, but it’s nothing more. Spending eight hours on board mainly made me jealous of the proposed Grand Paris Express and that city’s growing network of trams.
North Woolwich, a patch of lingering industrial wasteland at the far end of the Royal Docks, has rarely looked like the promised land. But when I reached it at 8pm that evening, nine hours after I’d set out, with the sun going down over the city to the west and the sky darkening over Thamesmead to the east, I could have kissed the ground. Two things would later cheer me. One was the discovery that, because superloop is covered by the bus fare cap, this eight hours of travel of perhaps 75 miles had cost me precisely £5.25. The other was the realisation that I would never, ever have to do this again.
All that, though, was in the future. In that moment I was too tired to feel anything. I trudged back to King George V DLR station, and, feeling grateful once more for the existence of trains, began my journey home.
A reminder, if you’ve read this far, that my latest book, A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines On Our Maps, is available now. In fact, you can read an extract from it in this week’s New European.
Also, if you want more of this stuff, then why not:
Also non-mayoral candidates, like my teenage self, who spent ages poring over maps and planning an entire network and then posting it to a thankfully long dead usenet group. I did not, it’s worth noting here, have a girlfriend.
It was at this point that, reminded of the name of a long forgotten Big Brother contestant from two decades earlier by the name of a West London estate agents’, I googled her only to discover she was married to someone I worked with. I was starting to go peculiar.