Its 10.10 on Saturday morning and as usual the wait at the bus stop for a 73 is very short. I am on Euston Road, outside the British Library and the traffic is thick and heavy, a mix of semi-trailers, urban family cars and more convertible sports cars than an average weekday. It is a very warm day today, blue skies and sunglasses are out and people are on the move. The rumbling of the 73 Route Master engine is distinctive and familiar before I catch sight of it. I jump onto the platform of the bus behind three others and as the lower level looks half full - all the seats have at least one person on them - I climb past the conductor who stands in his ‘cubbyhole’ up the stairs to the upper deck.

The bus passes through the city and
the city passes through the bus.

There are only eight people upstairs and all are at the front end of the bus. All the top winding windows are open and it is bright and sunny. It is hot but breezy upstairs, which I am relieved for as I half expected it to be really stuffy. I sit in the middle of the bus on the right hand side against the window. A small boy aged about six or seven attracts my attention first. He is playing with the winding window and calling to his mother to watch him do it. As no one is paying attention to him, I cannot work out who his mother is. There is a young girl in front of me staring out the window, two young male men in front of her, a woman about 40ish sits alone one seats back from the front seat and a female couple are in front of her. At first glance they all appeared to be strangers. No one is speaking, no one is paying attention to the boy, everyone is staring out the window, either to their right or straight ahead.

The boy keeps yelling out to his mother, trying to get some attention. He climbs all over the seat standing and sitting, wriggling. Then he runs to the front seat couple and they tell him to sit down. He plays again with the window and the 40ish woman talks with him. I cannot hear the exchange. The young girl glimpses at him but turns back to the window.

A burst of conversation is audible from the two front seats. The conversation is angry, the words staccato and punchy. The woman at the front seat window is saying, ‘you got to understand who I am’ and the older woman in the seta behind responds, ‘well you got to understand who I am too’. Neither women speak face to face, all heads are faced forward or towards the window. The conversation rises and drops away.

The window is their interface to each other. They visually engage with the cityscape rather than face to face. The tone of their voices is very personal and confrontational yet directed out of the bus.

We are stuck in traffic along Euston Road and the bus is barely crawling along. The engine rolls and growls as the driver prevents it from stalling. The rhythmic rumbles vibrate the whole bus, through the floor and seats. The sounds of loud r&b music from a car near us is floating into the bus. The boy bounces up and down on the chair in time to the music and pretends to sing along to it.

The exchange between all three antagonists barely lasts five minutes yet its remnants hover in the air and mingles with the noise from outside the bus. I wondered as to the catalyst of the argument. Could have been the static bus stuck in traffic, the heat, effects of the pollution in the air, the music from the nearby cars, little boys incessant whinging, or simply a combination of all of these?

The Routemaster is transparent to the changing moods of the city. In comparison to the tube, the bus is an integral part of the sensory city. The bus passes through the city and the city passes through the bus. It is transparent to noise, pollution, weather and people as they hop off and on at bus stops, between and even before it has stopped moving. All of these sensory elements compose the experience on a bus in the city. John Urry in Sociology Beyond Societies; Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century suggests;

 

URRY, John. 2000. Sociology Beyond Societies; Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century, Routledge, UK.