Hi there, I'm Jo and for reasons passing all
possible understanding, its just coming up to 03:00 in the morning and I
am standing on the corner of Trafalgar Square on the site
of the original Charing Cross. And the reason I am here is we're about to try and answer one of humanity's great
unanswered questions, which is just how far can you get by bus from central
London in 24 hours? When I say furthest I don't necessarily mean the longest mileage. That would probably be
achieved just by shuttling to and fro between here and The Strand
for the next 24 hours. What I mean is the furthest bus stop as the crow flies from central London that I
can reach in the next 24 hours. I've chosen this spot to start as Charing Cross is the point from which all distances
to London are measured and there is a plaque on the ground here
that in non-Covid times thousands of tourists walk over every
day to mark that fact. There was a cross on this site since
the 13th century, pulled down in 1647 on the orders
of Oliver Cromwell. Following the restoration of the monarchy, in an act of
supreme trolling, eight of those who had signed
King Charles the First's death warrant were executed here on this spot,
and a large equestrian statue of Charles the First was erected. I think that's what passes for dark humour if you're a Stuart king. But enough
of these historical diversions for now: the stop for our first bus
is just up the road here. Now, I think I've worked out on paper what the furthest is I can get in 24 hours. And we're going to try
that out in practice today. But it's entirely possible I am wrong. As soon as you get off a bus, there is normally a multitude
of options to go forward. I've come up with various alternatives which are literally a few hundred metres
shorter than the one we're going to try out today. Now if anyone wants to prove me wrong - on paper because no one needs to do this madness
of being here in the small hours, please do so in the comments. One thing that is certain: the answer lies to the north or west of London, as
the English Channel presents a somewhat formidable barrier to bus travel towards
the south or east. And the groundrules: well, when we say bus, we mean *bus* not an
express coach. As a rule of thumb if you can use an older person's
free bus pass on something it's a bus. Choose your starting point, or time, or date and I'll talk a bit about why I'm here
at 3am, but I might have made the wrong choice. It's just as well, really, that I love a good bus journey because my enthusiasm for the things
might be waning by this evening. Morning! So here we are on our first bus of this
mammoth journey, London night bus N9 headed westwardards through the dentre
of London, past Picadilly Circus, Kensington, the Royal Albert Hall, and out along the empty early morning roads through Hammersmith, Chiswick and Hounslow towards
a still Covid-quietened Heathrow Airport. Now the reason I'm starting this early
in the morning is about efficient use of time: to maximise the useful hours of bus travel
and the distance we can therefore get. In a 24-hour period there's a great chunk
of time from about 10:00pm to 06:00am when in most of England
buses don't really exist. The exception is London. So we're here at 03:00 a.m. on one of the vast network of services that radiate out in the small hours from Trafalgar
Square, to use some of those hours wisely. And the great thing is the night buses take you far further,
far quicker than Transport for London's daytime buses. In the hours when anyone
much is awake, there's no direct bus from central London to Heathrow.
You're supposed to take the Tube. But in the quiet early hours of the morning we can sweep along the darkened roads
the full 25 kilometres to Terminal 5. The N9 is the fourth longest bus route in London and nearly everything
alongside it in the top ten table is a night bus too. Coming into Heathrow now, the bus is very full and we're a bit late. At every
single stop in Hounslow we've stopped to pick up airport
workers heading for the early shift. Quite a contrast
with the image when many have of night buses simply as way to get pub-goers home
from the fleshpots of the West End. We've got to go through the tunnel under the runway to head to Heathrow Central,
turn round and go back out through the tunnel and round the perimiter of the
airport to reach Terminal 5. At the moment we're
about 15 minutes late. Fingers crossed for my first connection. We don't want it all to go
wrong this early on. So after a bit of a scare as to whether we'd actually make the first connection due to the night bus somehow getting very late, we did in fact make the connection into the number 7 towards Slough. I have the bus entirely to myself.
And in a few moments time we will be leaving Greater London, free of the stifling air of the metropolis, and out into the leafy dells and bowers of Slough. We did of course get to Slough in the end. Dawn is breaking over the Holiday
Inn Express and perhaps more interestingly, over the fine Great Western Railway station. Now those of you who have seen Slough's most
famous export, the UK version of The Office, will have caught a glimpse of the old Slough bus station for a second
in the opening credits. A concrete monstrosity
with a roundabout underneath. So it may come as something of a surprise
to see what the current Slough bus station looks like. It's a sort of large
metallic worm. Behind me you can see why it was
actually not worth leaving London any earlier than 3 o'clock. While there were plenty
of night buses and there was another bus number 7 from Heathrow
that I could have caught, I'm here at Slough and I still have to wait
for the first bus out of here. So our next bus is the X74 at 05:31 heading
into the Chilterns and to High Wycombe. And yes, those of you who were following
along on the map: we're suddenly veering north. Anyone who got the idea we were heading west was perhaps slightly misled. So we're now passing what will truly
be one of the highlights of this journey: Slough Trading Estate, allegedly
the largest trading estate in Europe. So slightly excitingly we're now on the M40 bypassing
the town of Beaconsfield. I remember being told as a child that buses couldn't use motorways,
which is obviously a complete lie. But there's still a slight feeling of
naughtiness and transgression as we trundle along the slow lane. We've reached High Wycombe bus station in the
heart of the Chilterns. One of the many attractions of this
location is what claims to be the UK's first fashionable face
mask vending machine. If only I knew that was
a thing, I'd have stocked up. Not very fashionable. Heading out of High Wycombe into the hills, The lodge we are about to pass is for Hughenden
Manor, once the home of Benjamin Disraeli twice 19th century Prime Minister,
novelist and developer of the concept of one-nation conservatism. In order to be an acceptable
person to lead the Tory party of the day, it was vital to represent a county seat, and not one of these new-fangled urban constituencies. To do so,
you had to be a landowner. So Disraeli, being of middle class Jewish
stock, had to take out a huge loan to buy Hughenden and achieve
the suitable social standing. We're on to our first proper climb of the journey and our little bus is
struggling up the hundred metre climb out of the Hughenden Valley
and up to Nap Hill. We're passing the entrance to RAF High Wycombe,
built in 1930s as the headquarters of Bomber Command, disguised as
a manor house and a small village. And just to fit with the Prime Ministerial theme of this trip on the 300, just below
that northern Chiltern ridgeline over there is Chequers, the PM's grace
and favour country residence. From the early autumnal Chilterns, it's quite a comedown to Aylesbury bus station, a diesel-fume filled bunker
under a multi-story car park. Now I'm not saying this is going to be the worst bus station on the journey,
but it is setting the bar pretty high. We're now on the 100 bus passing through the Buckinghamshire village of Wing.
In 1971, Wing nearly fell foul of severe nominative determinism when a Commission
recommended it as the site of a four runway third airport for London. Outcry saved Wing
and focus shifted to an airport in the Thames estuary. That didn't happen either,
which sounds a bit familiar. The 100 is a bit of an express bus to take commuters into Milton Keynes and we're now
batting along the Leighton Buzzard bypass. The Milton Keynes connurbation,
famous for not being named after John Milton or after John Maynard Keynes,
though the government minister in charge of naming this new town in 1960
hoped you would think it was. It's also famous having
roundabouts. Lots of them. We've arrived in the surprisingly sleepy heart of Milton Keynes,
which in lieu of a bus station, has this rather pleasant tree-lined
boulevard lined with bus stops. Next door is The Point, once Britain's
first multiplex cinema now apparently. threatened with demolition. While it most closely
resembles an Enver Hoxha-era pyramid I once saw in Tirana in Albania,
that does seem rather a shame to me. The X6 is our first double decker since
leaving London and we've got the best seat in the house and the top deck entirely to
ourselves for the journey to Northampton. The little secret to making good progress on this sort of journey is to find
a hopscotch of good-sized towns about an hour apart. Invariably you'll find is a good, fast bus between each of them. Here on the borders of the South East
and the East Midlands, we've got exactly that sort of sequence
and we can spin northwards at good speed. Once we're extracted from Milton Keynes' gridiron of boulevards we've got 16
minutes spin all the way to the little hamlet of Grafton Regis with no
scheduled stops at all. And after that we can plough on along the fast trunk road,
through the large village of Roade, into Northamptonshire. The bad thing about Northampton's
apparently controversial new bus station is it is too small. The good thing about
that is the lack of space means that instead you get off
the X6 next to the town's stunning All Saints Church. The church was rebuilt
after the Great Fire of Northampton, which happened 14 years
after the Great Fire of London and feels somewhat unjustly overshadowed
in the conflagration stakes. The other good thing about the new bus
station is that the bus station it replaced was described in the local press
as 'a portal to hell'. So there's that. Well, the bus may say Coventry on the outside, but in reality
it's going nowhere near there. The X7 is a long haul route heading due north out of Northampton.
Maybe I am too conditioned to think that Northampton is a medium sized town, but it sure seems
to go on for a very long way. The town does end eventually and is replaced with lovely north Northamptonshire countryside. It's an astonishingly empty land
of scattered villages, spineys and deep rolling hills,
speckled with ancient mansions. If you think of your geography in railway
terms, as I too often do, this is the green desert between
the main lines out of Euston and St Pancras, its rail links long since
given way to this bus. This is deep England, infused with deep English history.
On those fields below us in 1645 at the Battle of Naseby, Cromwell's New Model Army effectively destroyed the Royalist
force, at a cost of 1400 lives. Defeat here meant that the King's forces ceded
control of much of southern England, effectively ending the Civil War
in any meaningful military sense. About halfway along the X7 journey, this is Market Haborough.
As you'd guess, it's a market town and a nice one too,
but choked with too much traffic. To game the driving hours
regulations, as a polite fiction we technically becoma another bus here. Except of course we don't. We're running late and we plough onwards towards Leicester. This is our first meeting with the A6, a trunk road between Luton and Carlisle,
which will be our on and off companion for the rest of the journey, if you wanted a hint as to where we might end up. We are running about 20 minutes late due to endless temporary traffic lights,
dealing with attempted fare dodgers and a remarkable episode where the driver
assisted, in very good Italian, two very grateful people
struggling to buy tickets to Leicester. However, with a 20 minutes connection in Leicester, between two
different bus stations, things are starting to look a bit tight. This is Haymarket bus station in Leicester. It's 1218 and our next bus is due to leave St Margaret's bus station
a few blocks away at 1220. No chance of that. Luckily this is a connection
into a frequent service - we just need the 12:40
to be nice and punctual. As it turns out, they've knocked down St Margaret's bus station
in order to replace it. Not to worry though, as there are some luxurious
temporary waiting facilities provided. The next, rather excellent bus makes up for its
starting point. It's the SkyBus, too grand to have a number, operated
by local stalwart Kinchbus. As the name suggests,
it serves the local airport, but in reality it's a route linking small towns
and villages between Leicester and Derby. We start off with a fast run on the A6 dual carriageway to Loughborough, before veering off on country lanes towards the airport. We're wandering around the hinterland
of East Midlands Airport. It may not impinge much on the national
consciousness as a passenger destination, but this is the UK's second busiest freight airport,
second only to the one we visited at 4am. There's a decent chance that your Amazon or Royal Mail package passed through here and these huge warehouses late last night. As we needed, the Skylink was punctual and we're back
on track here at Derby, The lovely Riverside Gardens beside
the Derwent must surely be the nicest thing out the back of any
English bus station. Just up the river is a statue of Bonnie Prince Charlie, marking as far
south as his Jacobite forces got. He occupied Derby for two days. Despite
a remarkably easy time getting here he then retreated to Scotland
on the advice of his generals. The Transpeak service from Derby to Buxton is a classic British bus journey. Up
the sylvan Derwent Valley through Matlock Bath, Matlock and across the heart of the
White Peak through Bakewell and Ashford-in-the-Water. It's supremely scenic but also a vital
bus link across the Peak, far faster than the train. It once ran right
through to Manchester, but we'll have to change in Buxton now. As we arrive in Belper, it is exactly 12 hours since we left Charing Cross.
This feels appropriate because as someone suggested on Twitter, Belper is the first
place that feels 'northern', rather than 'midlands'. The houses, the colour of the stone, the first mills.
To cap it all, it has a classic bus station
where the bus drives in to a shed. Half bus station, half depot,
once common in small towns but mostly long since swept away in favour
a few bus shelters. As we pass through the honeypot village of Matlock Bath,
squeezed into a gorge with the River Derwent and the A6 road, we can see a bit
of the visitor numbers that this area attracts. The Peak District National Park is the second most visited national park in the world after Mount Fuji,
not just because it's beautiful but also because it's within an hour's drive of half of Britain's population. The A6 can be a bit of a bottle neck as a result, with knock
on effects on this bus. But today, luckily, we're largely
sailing straight through. We're now passing through
the Peak District town of Bakewell. I've quickly discovered that if you
a tweet a joke about Bakewell tarts, it's not the mildly risque humour
that your timeline will object to, it's a hundred people insisting they're actually
called Bakewell Puddings. We're racing westwards now, besides, the River Wye, through the heart
of the White Peak. It's so-called to distinguish it from the dark peak to the north.
The White Peak is limestone; the Dark Peak is gritstone.
From their different geologies arise different topographies and equally
a different atmosphere. In literary terms, the White Peak is Jane Austen and Pemberley, The Dark Peak is Charlotte Brontë
and Thornfield Hall. It might seem a bit odd that after all this time traveling north, that our route has suddenly veered west. When working out the furthest I could get, I quickly became aware of where
the gaps in the bus network are. One of those is in the Vale of York, where buses are infrequent
and stop early in the evening. If we stuck to the eastern side of the country heading into Yorkshire,
we'd come to a dead end quite early. Scarborough would probably be the limit of our journey. But the closer-linked
towns and cities on the other side of the Pennines present
opportunities to go further, later. That's why we're now climbing over the national watershed and heading
towards the industrial northwest. At 300 metres above sea level, Buxton claims to be England's highest
market town, though Alston in Cumbria disputes this. It's still
not entirely unknown for this spa town of 22,000 people
to be cut off entirely by snow. The Spa means it must also be the smallest town in England
to boast an opera house. Not much time to see such delights today,
just to scope out an excellent bookshop, sample the local wares and as the County Council's
cutesy sign says, 'Keep calm and take the bus'. The bright red 199 takes us
past Buxton's Victorian villas, back out into the open country,
descending through the last foothills of the Peak, via an unxepected tour of High Peak's
depot at Dove Holes to change drivers. We press on through the mill towns
of the Goyt Valley to reach the southwestern edge of Greater Manchester, where the Friday evening peak is building up - luckily, in the opposite direction to our bus. We're not going all the way to the airport
but hopping off on the board, bleak A6 road - natually - in the Stockport suburb of Stepping Hill, to switch to a more local service. The 192, it turns out, has something of a cult
status in Grearer Manchester. They even make posters
of it. This evening, to me, though, it's seems a bit disorganised, with bunched buses, services turnng short of their destinations
and grumpy drivers. But it is good to be up on the front of a double decker again, for the first time since Northampton, as we head past biscuit factories, the largest brick viaduct in Britain, and into Manchester, with it's re-opened nightclubs
and bright yellow trams. Manchester on a balmy August Friday has an almost continental feel,
with the passegiata in full flow in Piccadilly Gardens. It's buzzing
and friendly and best of all my schedule gives me 45
minutes for a quick dinner, before I head over to sparkling Shudehill Interchange. I've got a choice
of buses for the next leg, and I'm choosing the fastest: the number 8, straight
up the A666 to Bolton. There's just an awful lot of dual
carriageways and wide roads from Manchester, through Salford, and out
north westwards towards Bolton. As dusk falls and Salford becomes Irlams o' th' Height, becomes
Pendlebury, becomes Wardley, without any obvious break, I can feel a bit of tunnel vision coming
on, as we approach 17 hours on the road and endless suburbs stretch away into the grey, drizzle-sprinkled distance. The choreographed, almost balletic arrival
at Bolton's bright, vast bus station with a few other double deckers feels a bit
like docking at a drizzly space station. On the other hand,
the Friday night pedestrianised town centre has all the atmosphere of an airlock,
brightened only by the spectacular 1870s town hall, just oozing with civic
pride, the epitome of the excellence of Northern municipal
architecture of its day. In the daylight there must be some great views, from the top of the 125 as it climbs the Chorley Old Road. This evening, though, there's just the distant lights
of the Lancashire plain. We start off empty, but slowly fill up as we proceed towards Preston,
becoming a pub crawl bus, the lower deck loud with tall tales of sexual
exploits and youthful batting prowess. We've reached our final interchange
spot, and it's a treat. Preston bus station briefly hit
national headlines at the start of the century when the council threatened
it with demolition. There was an outcry and - seeing it for the first time,
dramatic and floodlit on a wet night - it's not hard to see why. This is a brutalist temple to public
transport, a late 60s masterpiece of design, finally saved, listed and refurbished
in the 2010s. Of course, being a very British temple to public transport,
the top floor is a multi-story carpark and the whole thing is
locked up by 10:00 p.m. So, here we are on the final bus of the day and the answer to the riddle is revealed:
our destination - and I think the furthest you can get from London
by bus in 24 hours - is the Lancashire seaside town of Morecambe. The number 40 normally
runs between Preston and Lancaster. But because the bus garage is at Morecambe, the last few service of the day extend there, give
me a few extra miles from Charing Cross. We're taking one last ride on the old A6, through Garstang and Lancaster, then branching
off on the final run to the coast. We started our journey,
over 21 hours ago, by an equestrian statue in the middle of a roundabout.
We're ending it, 339 kilometres away,
by a statue of some gannets, in the middle of a roundabout. I like the symmetry. Obviously, we've still got more
than two and a half hours of our 24 hour window available. It's only half past midnight. The simple fact is,
there aren't any more buses to catch. I can't find a way to usefully
use the remaining time. If you can, let me know. We've had a great run. With thirteen connections, we easily made twelve of them. And the one we didn't make
didn't turn out to matter. It's been great to see a full day
of Britain's life - from the airport shift workers at Heathrow, to the
party goers of Preston. Most of the buses have been comfortable, the new towns and cities I've seen
have been fascinating and the countryside lovely. At nearly £57, I'm not sure I'd recommend this as
a bargain or speedy route to Morecambe. But it's been a huge amount of fun. But now: bed. It's a pretty grey morning here in Morecambe. There's no sign of the usual
fabulous view to the Cumbrian Fells. But the bleakness and majesty of Morecambe Bay is still hugely in evidence. After a morning spent enjoying this rather
lovely, if struggling resort, I'm looking forward to a straightforward
train journey back to London. With buses, you can probably have too
much of a good thing. Yep, that was inevitable.
It's a rail replacement bus.
