How bus travel lost its magic 

At the former Chiswick Works in west London, I recently celebrated the Routemaster’s 70th birthday. I owe my existence to this majestic mode of transport. My mum was a conductress on a Routemaster – the No. 16 – which cut a merry swathe from Cricklewood to Victoria, right through the centre of London. My dad, like a lot of young Irishmen, had arrived in London in the 1950s to help rebuild a city still recovering from the second world war. Every morning, he’d catch the first bus from his digs off the Edgware Road to various building sites. One morning he got chatting to the young clippie, and married her a few months later. ‘Open the front door,’ he’d say to me years later, ‘and the whole world’s outside.’

For families like ours, who didn’t own a car, the ‘whole world’ began at the bus stop. Routemasters arrived at the end of our street to take us where we wanted to go.