LONDON—One end of the 3 London bus route starts in Crystal Palace, a South London hilltop locale, that is, in many ways, a shell of what it once was—except of course it is a shell without its shell, for its legendary glass panes are now gone and thus there is no palace, or shell, left. Indeed, Crystal Palace Park is now an empty field with sign posts marking its former footprint and the local high street storefronts are populated with flimsy blue cardboard signs that are stuffed in between Poundland coupons and plastic contraptions, which note the traditional traders and purveyors used to operated the same premises. Some of Crystal Palace Park is now is a cheaply assembled (on account of its mobile impermanence) amusement park that rests in reticence upon the laurels of its name and former greatness. The route’s destination — Whitehall — can be said to share many of the same qualities.
So, the 3 bus follows a formerly palatial route that is now without any palace. From Crystal Palace to Whitehall, it is a ghost bus of palaces; places whose names derive from something—palaces—that no longer exist. Whitehall takes its name from the Palace of Whitehall, the main residence of English monarchs from 1530 to 1698, which burned down in 1698. The Crystal Palace, too, met its final fate in succumbing to fire in 1936. Reportedly, 100,000 came to watch it burn from the nearby Sydenham Hill. Among the spectators was Winston Churchill who declared, “This is the end of an age.” And the route is a parade too; officially starting on Crystal Palace Parade and ending on Horse Guards Parade. Though while it travels upwards through south London, the route can perhaps be said to follow a very much downhill course.
Upon the relocation of The Crystal Palace from Hyde Park in 1854, the name of the area in surround was changed to Crystal Palace and the title has remained long after its fiery demise. Perhaps by account of this sudden relabelling, and the losing of that which the label was based on soon after, the area has no official boundaries (though a felled oak tree is apparently one marker), so I am unsure when or even if we have officially left it. The road we initially follow winds its way to more level ground and could have once been very beautiful—a path darting through meadows and marshlands to the crest of a hill where a palace sat on top of. Now the road is an industrial alleyway of cheap council housing in following to the familiar pattern of post-war city planners finding opportunity to build the most grotesque in the most previously peaceful settings. I sometimes wonder if these urban planners felt that these green open spaces that had stood tranquil and untouched for thousands of years were just waiting for the honour of being on a blueprint, and begging for efficient improvements. I sometimes wonder if these urban destroyers thought they could finally give this land meaning and purpose that it had never asked for.
After Gypsy Hill, we turn along a curved row of Victorian houses that have surely been begrudgingly left alone by the council. I suppose what I’m trying to say is, if you mean to imagine where the ugliest place will be in the future, quite probably it is at the moment nothing but a peaceful field. It is a modern tragedy that emptiness of that sort carries the greatest potential for ugliness. I should wish very dearly that our beauty is not complete, that is, that the potential for ugliness means, and results, in potential for beauty too.
An Eastern European father and son, who look like they have come from a great feast and not the barbershop, are sitting beside me. After the brief respite of a fashionable stretch of route, we enter into the clearly relatively recent fields, now, yes, modern housing complex. There is a book flayed open, resting on the top of the shelter at Lings Coppice bus station. Its pages, ruffled by water damage, swing from a spine that seems half-melted into plastic below it. It has been some time since there as been any sort of commercial establishments.
The road now curves sharply to the left. A series of ugly prints are left outside a house by the side of the road and whether for sale or for trash collection I do not know. More signs: these ones are pleas made by signs outside homes to ‘Stop the Road Closures’, and now they are displayed at every third house. I suppose these are not members of the 3 bus fan-club. We pass under a bridge in need of paint, though that is still attractive in its fading red and white iron floral patterns. We approach Brockwell Park, which seems from the road an inclined expanse of green that gives preview to how its surroundings might have looked before they were baptized by city planners. We pass Herne Hill Station and the attractive shops, pubs, and brick buildings that encompass it.
A middle aged woman — I know she is middle aged because she is old enough to have the conversation she is about to have, but also young enough to have such conversation—a few rows behind me has an appointment with her dog at 2:45 that she has notified whoever the appointment is with that she cannot make it. She offers after 3:30?, sometime tomorrow?, or really ‘whenever you’ve got’ as it isn’t urgent — and here is the box of the Sainsbury’s we saw on the 2 bus whose route we have now merged with for a brief time — and she should be fairly flexible tomorrow, a couple of things ‘in’ only, and by ‘in’ I suppose she means her calendar, and has anyone asked the dog? — and here is a street sign for Brixton indicating it was named after Brixi, a Saxony Lord — she laughs, busy time, what about next Monday morning? Is this a dog groomer, not available for an entire week—an unrecognizable language in spoken in between us now as a man behind me answers his ringing phone— thank you the woman now says, thank you, thank you, thank you, the woman has red framed sunglasses, she is still waiting on an answer. Maybe they are asking the other dogs.
It’s smoggy. The Shard is perceptible but barely visible in the distance as we approach Brixton station. Now I wonder why I haven’t heard an answer, for surely the matter cannot be this complicated. My suspense is stunted and left unresolved when I realize she has left the bus and taken her elongated scheduling appointment somewhere else. We now push forward onto Brixton Road, drifting between old townhomes and new fried chicken shops. Another woman is giving instructions over the phone on how to find somewhere or other on Oxford Street. The man sitting next to her makes a hushed comment, now she says what to the man, the girl on the phone says what, now the woman gives the man the phone, and the man tells the girl to go the other way than the woman had said.
Buildings here need paint, though really paint would only be a blank canvas to graffiti, where they would need paint again, and thus lie frayed and aged, and why are there so many satellite dishes here? To the left are former mansions and to the right are council blocks, and this is what they would call a through-road. As we approach Kennington, shops appear en masse again, though many seem permanently closed. Oval Station is passed on the left, and to the right is the expansive Kennington Park, whose trees bow down into the street over blue painted cycle lanes.
We turn down Kennington Road and more large oaks (I don’t know if they are oaks but they seem like what I take oaks to look like) come into view. An ambulance flashes in the distance, and here are the lettings agencies again. The road is long and straight again and ghastly mid-century tower blocks loom over elegant town homes and less elegant new builds on both sides, forming a frightful symmetry.
A woman clamours to get off—I’m not sure where she expects to—and yells that she is in a hurry, please, but the bus pushes forward. She yells that she pressed the button and is still yelling without realizing the doors are now open from reaching the next stop. The Imperial War Museum passes in and out of view, we make a left at Lambeth Road avoiding the lead to Waterloo Station, and the Lambeth Palace is in view, along with the river and Lambeth Bridge. In the mirror of beautiful and repulsive sits the Parliament View Apartments, that have a view through the gardens and stone and brick of Lambeth Palace, through its dirty glass onto, yes, the expanse of Parliament, and the ugliest buildings ironically have the best views. We rise up and fall down Lambeth Bridge, now turn around a palm tree centred roundabout at Millbank, and proceed across the dignified Millbank towards Parliament Square.
Here, armed policeman, orange adorned construction workers and men on the phone—often in some combination—exist in equal ratio. It’s sunny, and lunch time, and people are sprawled across the grass of Parliament Square, which we encircle on the final turns before Whitehall. The scaffolding on Big Ben is almost gone, and it is glittering, perhaps the missing shining palace on this palatial ghost route. One last sight to the left is Downing Street, and now in the middle halfway up Whitehall our journey comes to an end, though not before a man breaks upon a series of expletives of protest upon hearing the bus terminates exactly where it had meant always meant to (though I looked — the route had gone through to Oxford Circus until 2006). The man looks skyward in frustration, though the sky is of course interrupted by the roof of the bus. Indeed, the route seems incomplete, not unlike the place we have now arrived at. Or, the area is the same, but what is here now is different. It was greater before, perhaps.
