This research blog is now officially finished (i’m back in London but I’ve turned into too much of a cyclist these days to even randomly post here). I will continue to maintain the blog/s and the website as a record of the project.
Please feel free to contact me if you have anything to add, questions or comments about it.
Add comment April 12th, 2008
Next Tuesday (7th February) the Ritzy Cinema will host the screening of “Farewell Routemaster” – the Film Challenge – which saw 25 filmmakers document the Routemaster over a seven day period.
Here’s the blurb:
In the final week of the Routemaster’s London passenger service in Dec 2005, London filmmakers were challenged to go out onto the streets of London and make a film about the iconic British bus that was about to vanish from commuter service for ever.
25 filmmakers responded to the challenge to record the last days of this cultural icon in its original form. And with just 7 days to complete them, 13 short films were made.
The Farewell Routemaster Film Challenge Finalist films are to be screened by The Ritzy Picturehouse on 7th Feb, the eve of the 50th Anniversary of the first ever Routemaster commuter service – Route 2 from Golders Green to Crystal Palace, through Brixton (No. 2 first entered passenger service in deep snow on the 8th February 1956 and would have celebrated 50 years of Routemaster passenger service in 2006).
The finalist films, from some of London’s most talented independent filmmakers, cover several genres of film including animation, drama, documentary and comedy. The best film, chosen by an industry panel, will be presented with a prize of ï¿¡500 at the end of the screening.
Also part of the evening, is a screening of ARENA: Little Platform, Big Stage, a film commissioned by the BBC to celebrate the now extinct character at the heart of this much loved machine – the Bus Conductor. The film tells the extraordinary stories of five conductors from five decades of London’s history and first went out in December on BBC4 as part of a ‘Bus Night’ to celebrate the Routemaster.
The Farewell Routemaster Film Challenge celebrates London’s cultural heritage through the spirit of independent filmmaking and captures many special moments from the last week of the Routemaster service. It is designed for anyone who has a soft spot for the bus and who misses its presence on London’s streets. All the filmmakers will be at the event and a number of Routemaster drivers and conductors will also be invited as special guests.
LOCATION: The Ritzy Cinema, Brixton
DATE: February 7th 2006.
TIME: 7pm – 9pm
TICKETS: 5 pounds
To book, visit www.ritzycinema.co.uk or www.picturehouses.co.uk, email ritzy@picturehouses.co.uk, or call Box Office on 08707 550 062
Add comment February 2nd, 2006
Today is the last day of the Routemaster in London. The 159RM will finish tonight at 13.15.
Some nerdy details for planning your evening on the last few RM’s [provided by Routemaster Association]:
Friday 9th December: Routemasters will be in operation
as normal but will gradually be replaced by VLAs from late morning onwards,
with the last RM service leaving Marble Arch at around 12.10, bus stop L.
The changeover is being carried out in daylight in order to give the best
photographic opportunities and to make the event safer for all concerned.
The majority of seats on the last bus are being
kept for the general public but it will be on a first come, first served
basis. The final parade back to Brixton Garage will consist of
RMs 5, 6 and, last of all, RM2217 – the last standard RM built. Passengers will
be off-loaded at Brixton Garage before the buses enter and nobody will be
allowed in to the depot. It is scheduled to arrive at BN at 13.15, but will
almost inevitably be late.
There is also a great list of suggestions for RM owners who intend on taking their own bus into the city today to commemorate the last official RM route such as not stopping at bus stops, not carrying official livery and not picking up passengers. Considering the open backed nature of the bus and potential enthusiasm of punters to have a last ride – this should be interesting.
Being the last bus there is of course much mourning in the media today.
The BBC are hosting Bus Night – with listings of the documentaries, sitcomes and movies to be shown on tv tonight. The BBC Four doco Little platform, Big stage looks particularly interesting It tells the stories of five conductors over five decades.
Doubledecker video clips – a compilation of film snippets from Blue Peter to The Good Life where the bus has appeared.
I Love Routemasters - various London figures reminisce about the bus.
The Bus We Loved – one of many reviews of that book by Travis Elborough published this month.
New routes for defunct red buses? All the different uses that new owners are putting their Routemasters to – from bars to accommodation for the homeless.
Requiem for the Routemaster - an orchestral piece composed to
coincide with the decommissioning of the last remaining Routemaster by Tom Smail, a musician and
composer.
I’m at school today so I may not get there for a last ride. But I hope to hear from some of you who do get the chance.
1 comment December 9th, 2005
The No.38 bus finishes tonight. As of tomorrow, all routemaster buses will be replaced with new bendy ones. After the No.38, there is only one other routemaster route in operation – the No.159. However it ends in a few weeks too – on 9th December.
I was alerted to this news via an email from Jonathan Wolfe;
I thought you might be interested in a song mourning the demise the number 38 bus (it’s the last weekend of this routemaster!). I wrote it a while back and after getting the news of the demise from Transport for London a couple of days ago thought I had to post it up on my website at www.jonathanwolfe.co.uk
The song is wonderful. Have a listen.
I also found this bus happening at The Old Red Lion on Sunday night. They are commemorating the No.38 with poetry and music.
Come along on Sunday 30th of October to celebrate the last day of the No. 38 Routemaster Bus, which has trundles pass this pub since anyone can remember!! Free Admission – Starts in the bar @ 8.30
I’m off now. I have to catch a bus, or two.
Add comment October 28th, 2005
An article in today’s Guardian – On the Buses by Laura Barton, celebrates the spirit of London in the bus. Barton suggests that whilst the bombing of the tube was devastating to Londonders it was the sight of the wrecked No.30 bus that ‘truly represented the capital’s wounded spirit’.
Why? Because they are big, red, noisy, dirty, mundane, ordinary and everyday and filled with a compendium of the world.
She writes:
For the bus offers a very visible London, a city constantly in the process of change. And to travel east to west, south to north on its networks is to witness a living, breathing, bustling city, and to experience its multicultural, architectural and seasonal changes.
“To me, buses are London,” said one passenger at a bus stop outside the British Library this week. “When I first moved here, years ago, I would sit on the number 12 and watch London go by: the Thames, Westminster Bridge, the Houses of Parliament, Downing Street, Trafalgar Square …”
We’re protective of the routes – some, such as the 11, are institutions. They’re brands – ask a marketing person and that’s what they’d say, each route is a brand: 9, 12, 73 … The 73, which is probably the most busy route in the city – generations know it goes to Stoke Newington. And I’m proud of that, I’m proud of the fact that I’m responsible for a lot of glorious history” Peter Hendy – TFL.
Add comment July 15th, 2005
On first glance it appears a normal busy day at Kings Cross – a melee of commuters at a bus, tube and rail interchange. Except it’s not. Apart from a few people waiting at the bus stop, the crowd consists largely of journalists, camera operators and crew. They cluster, weighed down with heavy equipment, around a small fenced area of floral tributes, of notes and thoughts. They await news of the rescue and salvage operation going on below their feet. Amongst them are people paying their respects and taking a moment to reflect. There is, however, little space for quiet contemplation away from the camera lens.
3 comments July 9th, 2005
Living in Kings Cross you’d think I might have been alerted to news quicker on thursday but I, like many (without the radio or tv on), initially found out through fragmented emails, texts and calls from people wondering if I was ok. “Hi. Yes, I’m ok. Why…? Oh… what!” Questions from family, close friends and distant acquaintances from all over the world streamed through my (slowing) internet connection and mobile phone. (A few calls could get through but texts arrived in intense bursts).
Meanwhile, I frantically googled for any information and found little available on news sites at that time. Flickr members, however, were responding quickly. I joined in, adding some shots of my street – so eerily quiet, despite becoming increasingly packed with people having been evacuated from offices but unable to go anywhere in the blocked off area. Very quickly I was invited to join a Flickr group pool – 7/7 Community/London Bomb Blast and from there information unfolded at a rapid pace.
It soon became obvious how desperate everyone else was for information and also the amazing collage of news flickr members were collectively able to assemble. Within minutes the group pool membership grew from the 10′s to the hundreds and I was astounded to find that within a very short time some of my pictures had close to 10,000 views. (I compare this to my average image views which can be roughly counted on two hands).
Hundreds of photos, like mine, began to document the mundane, the ordinary, the unsensational yet unsettled city in the hours that followed Thursday morning. We couldn’t see anything – it was all below ground or restricted from public view. Yet these images tell stories of a different type of chaos, of anxiety, of tension. Images of course don’t have to capture action to talk of these things. A quiet sense of unease, of sadness and desperation pervades many of them. We see a pedestrianised city, clusters of people waiting, walking, talking, asking. We see worried faces, tense bodies. We see streets devoid of cars, absent of buses. We see the blurs of speeding emergency vehicles and tangles of police tape. We see signs on closed shops, closed streets, closed tubes. We see our familiar city somehow shifted, disrupted, changed.
The flickr group used (and are still using) the photo pool to try to make sense of Thursday – and not just with individual personal photos but with snippets of information in many forms. Throughout the day, the temporal trajectory of news and information from a variety of ‘official’ news and other sources can be mapped according to the uploaded files. Members took screen grabs and images from an electic range of local and global blogs, online news sites, tv reports and newspapers – creating a media collage that blurs the personal and professional, the private and public, the individual and community. By interrupting, picking and filtering ‘established’ or ‘official’ media channels it mediates a collective representation of news that attempted to present the stories, the personal experiences and the multiple realities of many of us.
2 comments July 8th, 2005
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