Over The Border

DAY FIFTEEN:

I was so taken by the beauty of Shrewsbury last night that I was roaming the streets till late, and when I did make my way back to the guest house it was via a rather lovely old pub called The Three Fish and a rather fetching little restaurant just under the castle walls (as was the guest house, incidentally) called the Castle Thai.

Yes, I know, it was curry again... I'm a man, I'm weak. What else did you expect?

I was out before breakfast taking more photographs, then left for the Arriva service 70 to Oswestry. This bus had no less than 6 CCTV cameras inside, though interestingly no escape hatch in the roof. Anyone care to explain the logic?

Out of Shrewsbury and onto the A5 (I'm beginning to think its following me). This is lush, fertile agricultural land with fields of nodding cereals disappearing off into the distance in every direction. Large bulbous hills start to appear on the horizon - could this be Wales?

As we get closer to Oswestry (the local's I heard on the bus pronounced it 'Oztry'), the hills become a lot clearer and they seem to be standing right across our path. Except for the huge hill we passed under at Nesscliffe, which I didn't even notice until we were below it. How could I almost miss something that big? I think perhaps they're creeping up on us...

The landscape is definitely getting lumpier as we roll into Oswestry. The town is steeped in history but somehow doesn't show it, apart from the huge hill fort clearly visible on the road into town. I even missed the Transport Museum (blast!) though I suspect this had more to do with the Cambrian Railway than anything else (I'll have to check).

The whole town seems... well, a little bit run-down, somehow. It's lively enough, and the pedestrian streets in the town centre are sheltered and tending to quaintness (which is good), but the market somehow seemed a little half-hearted, and it's all just a bit knocked about. Pity. I was expecting more of a feel of a frontier town, but it was just another High Street.

Onwards via the pithily-entitled 2a to Crick, and this time we really were going over the border (the 'Welcome to Wales' signs in two languages on the outskirts were a bit of a giveaway). Crick is a fairly ordinary little village with a cobbled (though cobbled in the European flat brick sense) High Street and a pleasant park. But its real glory lies just behind the village.

Thomas Telford, builder of bridges and canals and improver of what is now the A5, was given the difficult task of constructing a canal across some of the deepest valleys in the Welsh borders, a job which, at Chirk, saw him create a massive 10 span aqueduct across the 700 foot-wide valley of the River Ceriog. It's a stunning piece of construction, but no less stunning is the 420m tunnel which immediately follows it (and which I walked through along its tiny towpath, in near total darkness – quite an experience!).

Of course, when the railway arrived in Chirk it made the canal look pretty slow and unfashionable and so last-century, fact the railway's engineers maliciously rubbed in by making their railway viaduct, which runs alongside the aqueduct, deliberately and unnecessarily higher. Showing off, in other words.

After lolling around under an oak tree in the park for a little while, I took the 64a Bryn Melyn minibus to Llangollen. This led us ever deeper into the hills and back along the A5, which seems at this point to be carved out of the hillside, with tier and tier of trees above us and the deep valley floor below. Thomas Telford, who built this road to ease the journey from London to Holyhead, certainly knew what he was doing, though I doubt he had tourists like me in mind when he built it. Nonetheless, the views across the valley are breathtaking.

This is big, muscular countryside. It has the ruggedness and roughness you'd expect of wild, mountainous places, yet it's leavened by the soft, sloping meadows and the flower-strewn hedgerows. The green counterpoises the purple of the heather above and it's a strange and beguiling mix, both tough and attractive, a bit like a rugby player in a Laura Ashley frock... but a little easier on the eye.

Llangollen caters very well to the millions of visitors it receives every year. There are shops dispensing all manner of tourist tat – postcards, toys, cheap ornaments, more postcards – and there are whole rows of cafes serving tea and scones and 'something with chips' for the kids. It's a profoundly attractive little town, lodged as it is in a deep tree-backed cleft in the River Dee so it's easy to see why people come here. Good heavens, it even has its own splashing falls under its bridge, and there's even a steam railway, whilst a little up the hill there's the canal again with the chance of a horse-drawn canal boat trip.

This is, I suppose, the Llangollen that most visitors will see. But look beyond the obvious, ignore the shop fronts and the ice cream sellers, and you will see a perfect little Welsh town with churches and chapels and steep, blue slate roofs. With the steep valley sides offering a lush and verdant backdrop, this really is a very pretty place and well worth a look. It's just a pity that millions of other people feel the same...

The short ride into Wrexham gave me the chance to try the other side of the valley, which seemed less hilly somehow, so either Telford really didn't know what he was doing or we have become a lot better at building roads since his day. Out of the Dee valley the road becomes more level and the landscape broadens out and we roll into Wrexham with the Welsh hills seemingly far behind.

Llangollen was certainly busy, but Wrexham seems infinitely noisier. Is it all a lot brasher and aggressive, or is it just that I've lost the knack of large towns and cities? Whatever it is, I'd better get used to it because tomorrow I'm going on a ferry across the Mersey to one my favourite cities, Liverpool. And that won't be quiet!

Of Trams and Prams

DAY FOURTEEN:

It's great to be on the move again after a day spent trundling around Birmingham on old buses. The fact that it's raining heavily for the first time in months puts a bit of a crimp in my enthusiasm, but I'm damp rather than downhearted.

First stop of the day was Snow Hill Station in Birmingham's city centre to catch a tram to Wolverhampton. Last time I visited Birmingham the tram hadn't even been thought of, so I was keen to take a closer look. It's everything you'd expect from a modern tram – smooth, comfortable and very, very quick. Much of the line appears to be along the track bed of disused railway lines, so with no traffic or pedestrians to get in the way, the drivers can really put their foot down.

Quite a lot of the line has a smooth, tarmac-ed cycle way running right alongside it, which I must say seems like a very good idea. Extra sustainability Brownie points for someone, clearly.

Having looked around Snow Hill for a ticket machine a la Tyne and Wear Metro, a fellow passenger helpfully informed me that you actually buy your ticket on the tram. Like, from a conductor. Remember them? No, me neither...

Only when our tram reached Wolverhampton city centre did we leave the sheltered confines of the disused railway lines and took to the road, but there didn't seem to be any slackening in our pace until we drew up at the terminus in the city centre.

I rather like Wolverhampton, though I confess that I only had 10 minutes or so to look around. Its busy centre is graced by a range of architectural styles (apart from 1960's Brutalist, I'm relieved to say), it feels comfortable and there is little that is overbearing to jars the eye. I'd liked to have explored it further but had to be content to looking at its art gallery and other fine civic buildings from the window of the 890 to Bridgnorth.

The bus quickly filled with elderly, white-haired ladies all chatting amicably – little did they realise the apparent mortal danger we were all facing. I mean, why else would you fit a glass escape hatch (with a hammer in a glass case to smash it with) into the roof of the bus (yes, the roof) if you didn't expect it to topple over and crash at splinteringly high speed onto its side. I mean, exactly what kind of ride was this to be, for heaven's sake?

I also noticed that there were no less than 4 separate CCTV cameras fitted to the inside of what was a fairly modest single decker bus, which seemed a little excessive, if not downright paranoid. Still, it meant that if one of the old ladies was to launch a brutal and unprovoked attack on me, we'd have the whole incident covered on video from every angle.

Within minutes we were out on the Bridgnorth Road gobbling up the miles at a rate which began to explain the presence of the emergency exit in the roof. The countryside was veiled in mist which was coloured golden by the fields of flowering rape across the landscape.

I got off just as the bus was about the cross the River Severn and begin its long pull up the hill into Bridgnorth. I had decided to take a more direct route straight up the near-vertical cliffs of the Severn Gorge by means of the Bridgnorth Cliff Railway. Two ancient-looking carriages – resembling a cross between a vintage bus and an old Silver Cross pram from the 1950's - pendulum-ed up and down the 45 degree slope connecting the main town centre with its riverside.

Technically, it's a funicular railway and one of about 14 currently operating in the UK. However, this is the only one as far as I can discover which is not there purely for tourists or holiday-makers – it's a proper piece e of public transport and therefore worth including in my journey.

Bridgnorth probably doesn't look its best in the rain... but it still looks pretty damned gorgeous. Elizabethan, Georgian, Victorian, it's all here but it's become blended in a way that is impressively easy on the eye.

I left Bridgnorth at speed on the 99 to Telford. This is big countryside, with great expanses of steep pasture dotted with giant oaks, rolling tree-topped hills and winding roads. We were soon dropping back down into the Severn Valley to Coalbrookdale and Ironbridge, the very crucible of the industrial revolution and an area with a fascinating history. I'd liked to have stopped to visit its many museums but I had to get to Telford for my bus to tonight's overnight stop-over, Shrewsbury.

Telford probably doesn't look its best in the rain. Unfortunately, it wasn't raining and it looked, if anything, worse. Telford is a new town, with all that implies. Its town centre is a shopping mall. I looked. I then took the first bus out of there.

The bus to Shrewsbury gave me another look at Ironbridge before clambering out of the valley further up stream hard by the distressing ugly Ironbridge Power Station. Why, oh why do they do these things?

Because, power stations apart, the views just keeps getting better. Our road takes us past flat meadows strewn with buttercups, with green hills rising all around us, their tops crusted with trees. One minute we are diving through deep woodland, the next we are breaking out into high upland fields, with tremendous views and bright sudden glimpses of hills in the distance – is it the Welsh Border?

We arrive in Shrewsbury over the English Bridge, and everything looks perfectly English – Elizabethan timber-framed buildings, cobbled winding streets, elegant Georgian terraces, the romantically-ruined castle above the river, Greggs the Bakers – but I have a feeling it's going to be a lot less English tomorrow.

For tomorrow I venture over the brooder into Wales to try out what appear to be agonisingly infrequent rural buses. Wish me luck...

Er... Actually, I’m More Of A Leg Man Myself...

DAY THIRTEEN:

Today – which is Bank Holiday Monday – offered the chance to visit Birmingham's two transport museums and to travel between the two of them on buses you would normally expect to see in a bus museum. This one event was the sole reason for my being here today. Let me explain.

Now, I'm a real sucker for museums and transport museums are a particular favourite, so the opportunity to visit two of them in one day was probably a good enough reason to be here. And the possibility of a curry, of course – this is, after all, the home of the balti (I may have mentioned this already).

But the opportunity to travel on real museum pieces was a huge bonus and an experience that doesn't come along every day. Plus I was keen to see and meet bus enthusiasts up close and chat to them about transport and stuff.

Oh. Big mistake.

I arrived at Aston Manor nice and early (in fact, it was before they'd even opened, but they still let me in... easy-going bunch, these bus enthusiasts). I soon got chatting to one of the museum helpers, but as soon as he realised that I hail from the North East of England, he immediately launched into an extremely technical and detailed conversation about Bristol REMH's, after first admitting to me that "...he'd always been a Bristol man" and had even lived there once.

This was all slightly disconcerting. I hadn't a clue what he was talking about, yet he clearly thought that I was just as knowlegeable as him. However, before I had a chance to commit a major faux pas by telling him that Bristol's are all well and good but I was personally more a leg man, it slowly began to dawn on me that we were actually talking about buses. So I quickly slipped into MRM (Male Recovery Mode) by starting to nod, smile and generally "ah, yes... ah-ha, well now..." in a non-committal sort of way in a bid to keep him going whilst I figured out what the hell we were talking about.

Incidently, and I probably shouldn't be giving this away, but this is a technique practised by most men, usually on their womanfolk. Blokes can find the "ah, yes... ah-ha, well now..." technique very useful for covering up the fact that whilst their wife was explaining something terribly important about, say, next door's washing machine, they were in fact thinking about what that weathergirl off the telly would look like in just her underwear and a pink duffle coat. So when said wife then proceeds to seek the husband's perspective on, say, next door's washing machine, he can use this technique to flannel about convincingly for a bit whilst he picks up enough clues from his wife to make a reasonable stab at an answer.

Anyway, I finally figured out that this gentleman was referring to the long-distance coaches that I used to travel on to London as a child, so after exchanging a few personal anecdotes we eventually parted on good terms. But it was a close-run thing.

And it illustrates an important lesson on the dangers of speaking to any kind of enthusiast – unless you really, really know your stuff, I mean right down to chassis numbers and engine specifications and moquette variations, you can quickly get out of your depth.

In fact, the same thing happened to me again later in the day when I shared a picnic table with a father and his teenage son. It was a simple enough conversation, but I was totally floundering within seconds. Thank God they didn't ask me any questions...

Whilst Aston Manor Transport Museum was fairly big – it has previously been a corporation tram depot - the museum at Wythall was a lot bigger and rather well laid out. The main exhibition hall was carefully arranged by period – the 30's, the 40's, that sort of thing – with loads of well-written and helpful information panels for idiots like me. Outside, there were two other hangars full of buses, some preserved, some less so. And some a lot less so!

There was also a collection of electric milk floats and other vehicles to look at, plus there was an exhibition of model buses from a local modelling group. There was even a little steam railway in the grounds.

What was common to both museums, however, were the trade stands selling all manner of model buses and other vehicles, books and videos about buses, photographs of buses and bus jumble – cap badges, mechanical items, bus tickets, that sort of thing. These all seemed very popular.

Eventually, I caught an elderly Daimler double decker back into Birmingham and even though the bus was more than 50 years old it was a pretty smooth ride – at least as smooth as some of the more modern buses I have used on this trip – though a little slow on the hills.

So, it was an enjoyable day even if I was afraid to speak to anyone. It's been a pleasant enough day off, but the journey to John O'Groats starts again tomorrow and, if I'm honest, I'm itching to get going again.

And tomorrow starts with a tram ride...

Excuse Me, Haven’t you Got Any Change...?

Day 12, and it's probably been the shortest day to date.

All I had to do today was to travel from Coventry, where I stayed last night, to Birmingham which was little more than an hour away. So, with a whole day ahead of me and only an hour of travelling to fill it with, I decided to take another look at Coventry's cathedral.

It being a Sunday, it seemed like a good idea to attend a service so that I could really see this amazing building in use. But in the event, it was even better than I could have hoped. I'd arrived in Coventry in the middle of their International Church Music Festival, so Sunday's Eucharist Service was to be against the background of Schubert's Mass in G delivered with the help of a 100-strong professional choir, a couple of fine soloists and the full might of the BBC Chamber Orchestra.

It was an amazing, spine-tingling experience and one I'll not easily forget.

I made my way to Coventry's Meadow Pool Bus Station, which probably the most palatial bus station I have yet encountered – shops, information screens, seating, even picnic tables, and it was wholly lit my natural daylight. Why can't they all be this way?

Unfortunately, things went disastrously wrong when the Stagecoach 900 service pulled up. I asked the driver for a ticket to Birmingham and handed him a £10, but he turned me away saying that he could only accept the right change. I rummaged through my pockets for loose change to drop into the slot device on the driver's door and managed to scrape together exactly £1.69p. The ticket to Birmingham cost £1.70p

So off I got to find a shop so that I could buy a packet of Polo mints with my £10 note. Barmy! It seems the drivers are not given the chance to handle any money at all as all the change falls into a sealed cash box via a sort of trapdoor with window so the driver can check you've put the right amount in. If any I'd known beforehand – but there were no signs, no warnings, no nothing.

The actual journey to Birmingham was quick and uneventful. The scenery was pretty uneventful, too, though we did pass through Meriden which used to be the home of the British motorbike industry (for a little while) and which also holds claim to the title of the absolute centre of England. Apparently nowhere else in England is as far from the sea as Meriden. Not the centre of Britain, however – I'll be passing through there much later in my trip.

Anyone getting off an airplane at Birmingham International Airport is able to catch a bus into town very easily – the bus stops are right outside the terminal. There is also, somewhat bizarrely, a fully-functioning Job Centre Plus in a set of Portacabins right next to the terminal. Crikey, things in the airline business must be bad!

I have not visited Birmingham in 25 years and the city as changed markedly in that time. It looks a lot more busy and prosperous. Shiny new office blocks, pedestrianised streets where once there were streets of dense traffic, it was all rather disorientating.

Birmingham being the home of the balti, you can probably guess what I had for tea tonight. Well, I had to, didn't I?

Tomorrow is Bank Holiday Monday and, more importantly, it's the day when the two local bus museums - at Aston Manor and at Wythall - get their exhibits out onto the road and use them to run visitors from one museum to the other. That's the whole reason for being here tomorrow – and I have to say I'm rather looking forward to it.

Sending Myself to Coventry

DAY TWELVE:

I have done Northampton bus station a slight injustice.

I admit that I was highly critical of it when I arrived last night, but I have subsequently discovered as I waited this morning for my bus to Rugby that it is, in fact, remarkably well equipped. There are abundant wooden benches to sit on, there is travel information in abundance, it is logically laid out, and is generally clean and litter free. Underneath, there are toilets and a cafe with escalators linking them to the platform waiting areas. I mean, it even has a bus wash.

It's just a pity it looks like the kind of alien abattoir that would be summoned from the imagination of Ridley Scott in one of his darker moods, and is accessed via an underground sewer.

Sorry, Northampton, that's as close to an apology you are going to get. Now, on with the journey!

This morning's driver on the 9.45 Stagecoach service to Rugby helpfully pointed me in the direction of a mega gold saver day thingy which saved me a couple pounds (i.e., at least a pint!), so clutching my ticket and having embraced my new found friend, we set off together into the rain.

Once through the sprawling suburbs of Northampton we were quickly into pleasant, open countryside. This appears to be landed gentry country, too, as the huge sandstone walls and the achingly attractive estate cottages which we kept passing seemed to testify. I thought this bit of the journey might be flat and boring, but it's proving to be anything but.

Picking up where we left off yesterday, we were once more crossing and re-crossing the M1 motorway and the West Coast mainline and the Grand Union and even, at one point, the A5. The whole purpose of the road we now call the A5 when it was built was to link parliament and the Crown with its troublesome colony over there in Ireland. That heroic road builder Thomas Telford did much to improve it and I hope to be catching up with some more of his works a little later in my journey.

Most of the older buildings around here seem to be made from a very bright and friable yellow sandstone which looks scarcely strong enough to bear its own weight. There's quite a bit of thatch, too, and lovely aged Victorian brick and tile, and the lanes joining these hugely attractive hamlets gently roll through the countryside along strips of smooth road fringed with cow parsley and flowering hawthorn. Smashing, despite the rain!

Daventry International Rail Port is passed on the road into Rugby. It's giant white sheds – and I mean absolutely flipping enormous airship-sized sheds – provide a distribution base for dozens of high street stores and supermarkets and I suspect that almost everything you buy in a chain store these days has probably passed through this place at one time or another.

As for Rugby, at which we arrive a few minutes later, well... I don't think it looks its best in the rain. I think we'll leave it there.

The run into Coventry aboard the 86 was every bit as pleasant as the trip up from Northampton, through astonishingly pretty villages of mixed and varied architectural styles. Most of these, I suspect, provide homes not for farm workers and village postmasters but for well-heeled commuters from Coventry, but frankly who could blame them.

Into Coventry, out into the rain and straight into the Coventry Motor Museum, which to my amazement is right in the heart of the city and is absolutely free.

And it's brilliant. I was in there for three hours all told (and, yes, they did have a display of locally-made buses – mainly Maudsleys and Daimlers, as you're asking) and the only reason I wasn't in there longer was because my wife wasn't there to keep holding me back saying "Hey, have you seen this". She'll do this, oh... 80 or 90 times in any one visit, and to be quite honest I've absolutely come to rely on it. So instead, I just went round twice. Well, it's free, isn't it...?

The rain had stopped by the time I visited the stunning Coventry Cathedral which was built almost amidst the ruins of the former cathedral which was destroyed in the appalling blitz of 14 November, 1940. It's a highly atmospheric and moving place which I intend visiting again before I leave.

As for the rest of Coventry city centre... well, it probably doesn't look its best in the rain.

Tomorrow I pass through the centre of England en route to Britain's second city, Birmingham. And I may possibly take a ride on the longest bus route in Britain. Or not!

The Well-Trodden Path to the North

DAY ELEVEN:

Day 11 was always going to be something of a break-out, a determined effort to get away from London's cloying crowds and get myself up-country towards the next bit of the journey which begins in the West Midlands.

However, it was all so much more than I was expecting.

Watford had seemed pretty dismal when I arrived last night – poor-looking terraces, pizza take-away's and massage parlours – but the town centre I discovered this morning had a much more optimistic and brighter air and I rather liked it.

Onto the bus to Aylesbury then, and we were soon heading towards London's outer boundary, the M25, then under it and out the other side. As if to confirm that we had indeed left London behind, the first thing I spotted was a herd of Jersey cows resting in a roadside meadow. Red-tiled villages soon followed and it was clear that we were definitely out the other side.

We arrived in Hemel Hempstead via one of the most unnecessarily complicated roundabouts I had ever seen, which was negotiated in both directions of travel with the help of additional mini-roundabouts at each of the five junctions. Absolutely mad!

Despite its tall modern buildings close to the infamous roundabout – located there, one assumes, to give office staff a good view of the carnage and mayhem below – the centre of Hemel Hempstead has a late 50's feel about it with some rather fine post-war public buildings. Its architecture tells Hemel Hempstead's story, in that the town was developed almost from scratch just after the Second World War to provide new homes for London's bombed-out masses.

The road out of Hemel Hempstead takes us across water meadows and over a canal which I assume is the Grand Union Canal connecting the Thames with the industrial Midlands. We then dip under the West Coast mainline and the impression that this is a countryside often travelled through grows yet stronger. It's all very different to the counties bordering London's southern border. It's just as green and tree-lined and just as busily farmed, but its more spacious somehow, the sky seems bigger and the roads wider. It's almost like this is a countryside designed to be travelled through, which I suppose it probably is.

We visit a number of pleasing Chiltern towns and villages – Berkhamsted, Tring – before arriving at Aylesbury's subterranean bus station, an underground horror roofed with sewerage pipes and air conditioning ducts, dimly lit and hidden from sight beneath a sprawling and unnecessary shopping mall. It's truly horrible.

Venture outside and you'll immediately find a beautiful market place with a clock tower and a busy market, bustling and attractive streets and you wonder why on earth such a foul, windowless shopping mall could have been dropped into such a place.

I couldn't get out of Aylesbury – or, at least, its underground fume-filled bus station - quick enough and luckily I didn't have long to wait. My bus to Milton Keynes had leather seats, which was a luxurious touch in what was in all honesty a fairly ordinary and elderly single decker.

Through field after field of rape, bean and wheat we head towards Milton Keynes through gently rolling countryside with the tree-top Chilterns never far away. We cross and re-cross the West Coast mainline and the canal before arriving at Bletchley, which is busy and bustling and has the simplest and least stimulating bus station I have ever seen. It's a car park around the back of some tall building and nothing more. No attempt at design has been made, no imagination or creativity deployed. Well, it's only a bus station...

Let me tell you what it is like to find yourself in the middle of Milton Keynes.

Being in Minton Keynes is like being trapped on a vast business park, with islands of tall anonymous buildings set in a sea of tarmac and shrubbery. It's like a set for an episode of Doctor Who, but scarier. Despite the trees which optimistically line the broad boulevards, trying for all their might to lend a European and cosmopolitan air to the place, the effect is to distance people still further from the world around them – or at least one mad vision of the world.

I mean, separating people from traffic is logical enough, but the degree of separation is so extreme that it banishes pedestrians to the edges of the undergrowth which actually feels quite threatening. Reducing people to walking beneath roads in dank, graffiti-scarred underpasses whilst motorists above bask in the full blaze of the sun is difficult enough to justify during the hours of daylight, but at night...

For these reasons, and many more, Milton Keynes feels fragmented, furtive, abandoned. And this is on a bright sunny day in May. What it must feel like on a cold January morning can scarcely be imagined.

Eventually, I am out on Milton Keynes along its many, many shrub-lined dual carriageways, vainly looking for a view that may or may not be there, and on the road to Northampton. More lovely farmland and rough stone cottages, the road tracing ancient field boundaries on its journey from village to village.

Eventually, we arrive in Northampton - to an underground bus station of such a vast scale and of such mind-boggling awfulness that I'm genuinely surprised to see anyone waiting for buses there. It's enormous. You get to it by crawling all what feels like a drain to a flight of sick-spattered concrete stairs. It saps the will, it is a Dementor of a bus station, and I've got to go back there is the morning. Oh, God.

Time for a curry, I think...

On The Town

This was to be the day that I finally, at the second attempt, nailed London. It was also to be a day of history and exploration, and I was really rather looking forward to it.

The day started with a visit to King's Cross railway station so that I could leave my rucksack at the Left Luggage office there – an experience which left me pondering on the way railway left luggage offices have changed over the years.

Once upon a time, which is approximately from around the dawn of time to I'd say roughly 1979, such places were generally tucked somewhere around the back of a station where they were overseen by a kind of superannuated porter in a waistcoat and cap. He (and it must have been a trade union diktat that it had to be a bloke, because it always was) would scribble your name with the stub of a pencil onto a khaki label, sprinkle fag ash on it from the butt that was permanently wedged in the corner of his mouth, and charge you fourpence for privilege. He would then absent-mindedly fling your bag or case into the farthest, unlit and cobweb-ridden corner of the office, ensuring that your return visit to reclaim your luggage would take at least 20 minutes and you'd probably miss your train.

Then in the 1980's, after the Thatcher Government had began helping British Railways to become leaner and meaner and had offered all its porters, left luggage attendants and other workers the amazing opportunity to embrace capitalism and seize the chance to become Aston Martin-owning entrepreneurs themselves by sacking them, we had irritating metal boxes to cope with, huge lockers of the kind you normally see in gyms and sports centre changing rooms, and which somehow never seemed quite big enough.

Then we had the London bombings, and that effectively was the end of Left Luggage.

But it's back, and thank goodness, only this time its run by a private company. It's got a shop front right on the concourse at King's Cross and it uses one of those luggage x-ray machines you normally see at airports. Well, you can see their point. And it probably helps to explain the cost - £8 for 24 hours – which is clearly calculated to turn a profit.

Anyway, having dropped off my bag, I headed for the Northern Line and the Angel underground station. For a long while, this station had the longest escalator in the world – now it's just the longest in Europe. And its long, I mean really, really long. In fact, it's so long that one wag decided to put on a pair of skis and do a Franz Klammer down it on the basis that it's probably the only decent ski-able slope in central London (it's certainly the longest, but I think we've established that). This mad fool also thought it would be a good idea to strap a video camcorder to the side of his head (as you do) before making the descent – and indeed it was a good idea, as the resulting video makes the phrase 'white knuckle ride' seem very, very inadequate. It's well worth watching - you'll find it on YouTube somewhere.

From there, I had a spot of lunch in an old Routemaster which has been converted into a vegan restaurant and parked up in the yard of the old Truman's brewery in Spittalfields. It's called the Root-Master (its vegan - get it?) and the food is quite brilliant, as is the whole atmosphere on the top deck, which has been rather stylishly laid out as a dining room. It's a must-do.

I then took a ride on the newly-reopened East London line through the first tunnel ever to be dug under the River Thames, by no less a person than Isambard Kingdom Brunel's son, Marc. This was also the first tunnel to be dug using a shield. Teams of diggers gradually moved this great circular digging platform forward inch by inch and once they had dug out sufficient clay and sand a huge cast iron ring was inserted. This clever system ensured that there was never more than a few feet of unsupported earthworks at any time. Then the shield was moved forward and process begun again and it kept going foot by foot and ring by ring until the whole tunnel had been dug. The same process is still in use today.

I then got lost in Rotherhithe for a bit, but I eventually found my way to Tower Bridge Road and caught a bus over the eponymous Tower Bridge. One of the bridge's many claims to fame is that it was once jumped by a double-decker bus whilst in the process of opening. This bizarre event happened during the 1950's (1951, I think) and was widely reported in the press at the time. The driver was happily driving across Tower Bridge when it inexplicably began to rise, presenting him with something of a dilemma – attempt to brake and risk ending up in the river, or just put your foot down and go for. Well, he went for it, breaking a leaf spring in the process but successfully making it to the other side. In truth, the gap was probably only a couple of inches but I'm quite prepared to believe that it seemed like a great deal more at the time! The driver, needless to say, was feted by the public for his undoubtedly quick thinking - and rightly so!

Then it was off at Tower Hill and onto one of the few Routemaster buses still running. Though withdrawn from service around the turn of the century, a small fleet of these most recognisable and iconic of London buses have been retained for so-called' heritage services' and I was able to catch one which ran past the Tower of London, St Paul's Cathedral, Fleet Street and The Strand. It's a hugely enjoyable experience which I'd recommend to anyone visiting London and to my mind there can be few finer or more atmospheric ways of seeing the sights.

The day ended with a journey by Metropolitan Line – the first underground railway in the world, no less – to Watford. This showed the other side to travelling in London –the sheer frustration of it.

Things began to go wrong when an Underground train broke down at Liverpool Street resulting in huge delays on the Circle, Hammersmith & City and Metropolitan Lines. Minor chaos and long delays ensured. Then there was a train breakdown on the Jubilee Line at Waterloo bringing that to a standstill. And as if that wasn't bad enough, there were no less than two separate signal failures at different stations on the District Line which brought that to a virtual standstill, too. And all this during the rush hour!

Hopefully, I'm now well out of it – though Watford doesn't really feel that far, or that different, from London. Nice Underground station, though, even if it is miles from the town centre.

We'll see what Watford really looks like in the morning...