Why the 24 is the best bus route in London

George is my 87-year-old next-door neighbour in north London. Retired from the property business, a widower since losing his wife, Rose, in 2021, he has lived in the area his entire life. I’ve only been here five years. 

We occupy different worlds, but there’s at least one thing that unites us – and the rest of our neighbours – in addition to the quiet residential street we all call home. We live only a few moments’ walk from one of the stops on the best bus route in London – the 24, which transports passengers from Hampstead Heath to Pimlico and vice versa.

The best bus route in London? The 24? Who says? Well, George, for one. He knows his London, and he’s been a 24 bus user ever since he was getting up to mischief as a teenager in the early 1950s. 

“Oh yes,” he told me. “That was always how me and my pals would head into Soho and back. We’d go to the 100 Club. There was one club where we’d heard all about the girls, but when we got there, all these posh cars were parked outside! We were out of our depth!”

Car ownership of any kind was beyond young George, and the 24 was his lifeline, his escape route, his transport of delight – a club on wheels where he, and so many others, young or old, could feel they belonged. They did so before, and they have done since.

Of course, many people would make the same claim of their own beloved bus route. I’ve a Battersea-based friend who waxes lyrical about the 19 (Battersea Bridge to Finsbury Park), likewise one who lives in Kilburn, for whom the 36 (New Cross to Queen’s Park) prompts similar feelings.

Like the 24, those are both cross-town routes incorporating some of the best of central London with the charms of areas that bit further out. But the 24 has claims to greatness that other routes simply can’t match. 

They start with its setting-off point and its final destination. Are there two more evocative locations anywhere on the 620-route London bus network? 

Hampstead: home to the literati and to one of London’s great wild spaces. Tell someone you live in Hampstead and all sorts of assumptions will be made. And what about Pimlico? It feels like Victoria’s quaint, country cousin, with a name that’s like a little ray of Latin sunshine, and, what’s more, thanks to Passport to Pimlico, is enshrined in movie history.

Then there are all the great London landmarks the 24 passes: the Royal Free hospital, Camden Market, Euston Tower, Centre Point, the old Talk of the Town, theatreland, St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery, Admiralty Arch, Whitehall, Horse Guards Parade, Downing Street, the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Victoria Station. The 24 is a tourist bus route minus the commentary and, mercifully, the open top.

One writer for whom the 24 bus has provided some lovely colour in her work is the novelist Amanda Craig. The 24 has a cameo role in Craig’s novel The Lie of the Land, a reflection of how much the bus routes mean that are local to her in Camden. 

“The 24 has such a nice ‘old London’ feel to it,” Craig says. “I always sit on the top deck and from there you notice so many things that you wouldn’t at ground level. You get conversation on a bus that you never would on the Tube, and for a novelist that’s wonderful.”

The bus route serves a further purpose. “You’re always trying to create verisimilitude. You’re trying to concoct a plot out of real life. Details like what kind of food people eat or what clothes they wear or the buses they catch – they provide all that. You’re evoking how ordinary people get around and live their lives. The bus is a very novelistic kind of place, and the 24 was perfect for me.”

Craig is the proud possessor of a London bus tin – the kind of thing you’d keep biscuits in – and delights in the number 24 it bears on the front. She is insistent that only tins with that number were manufactured. “The 24 is that iconic!” A glance at Google images suggests that other number tin buses are available – I find the 9, the 15, and the 137 – but nonetheless, for the 24 to be immortalised in biscuit tin form is quite special.

The choice of 24 to adorn such a tin may have something to do with perhaps the bus’s greatest distinction: it’s the oldest route in London. Asking people which year the 24 started operating is a good quiz question, I find, and congratulations to Amanda Craig for coming pretty close with her guess of 1920. In fact the route began in 1910. 

In those days the bus ran from Hampstead Heath only as far as Victoria station, but by 1912 it had been extended to Pimlico. It carried on through two world wars before, in 1949, it found fame on the big screen.

Passport to Pimlico is one of the most celebrated creations of the Ealing comedies era, its tale of an attempt by residents of Pimlico to declare independence from the rest of the UK finding a new resonance in recent years as a metaphor for Brexit. Starring Stanley Holloway and Margaret Rutherford, it teems with post-war city life – all braces, bowler hats and bomb sites – and you do not need to be that observant to spot the prow of the 24 bobbing and weaving its way through the streets.

More than any other bus route, the 24 comes closest to the open-top bus on which the winning Cup Final team inch their way through tens of thousands of fans on the day after the match. The 24 equivalent is when the service navigates Camden High Street with Camden Market in full cry.

A visit to the market is a rite of passage for all London youth, and if you’re aboard a 24 heading north on a Saturday afternoon, it’s like the bus is this great whale surrounded by shoals of humanity, many pedestrians seemingly oblivious to its presence as it looms over them. 

At moments like this I fear as much for the driver as I do for the people dodging the bus, so what’s it like to be behind the wheel of one of these great beasts? One morning in March I was at the stop close to me, which is where another bus route – the 46 – has a change of driver. I got chatting to a driver called Milos as he waited on the pavement for his 46 to arrive. He’d driven various routes over the years, including the 24. It wasn’t his favourite.

“The worst bit is the West End, coming down Charing Cross Road,” Milos said. “You’ve got people stepping out right in front of you – crowds and crowds of them. They’re off to the theatre or a restaurant, and they don’t look where they are going. It’s very stressful.” 

Milos said he also found it a challenge dealing with the rowdy teenagers who proliferate on the 24 on account of it travelling through youthful Camden. One of the bus’s southbound stops is Hawley Road, close by the Hawley Arms pub made famous by Amy Winehouse, in whose footsteps many of her disciples follow. 

The 46, Milos said, was much nicer – a single-decker bus unlike the double-decker 24, its route taking in Swiss Cottage and St John’s Wood, the home of older, better behaved and indeed better off residents. The 24 route is much more of a mix, with, at one end, the social deprivation of parts of Kentish Town, and, at the other, the discreet affluence of the streets of Pimlico. In between there’s the tourist maelstrom of Cambridge Circus, Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square.

The reality of bus driving was brought home to me by the writer Magnus Mills, who spent 28 years as a London bus driver (retiring in 2021), while also managing to publish a dozen or so novels, the Booker-shortlisted The Restraint of Beasts among them.
The 24, Mills said, was considered a flagship route by Transport for London, partly because it went past the TfL HQ in Victoria, but it had a bad reputation among drivers, and not just because of the crowded streets it had to negotiate. “The problem is all the fare dodgers.” Camden, it seems, is a fare-dodgers’ hot-spot.

“You could tell the fare dodgers from their body language as you approached a stop,” Mills said. “Then as a driver, you had a choice – to confront people or let it go. I always faced people down. But it all got a bit much.”

I’ve used the 24 hundreds of times, but I’d never travelled the entire route. After meeting Milos, I did exactly that in both directions, with its 34 stops, average journey time a little under an hour, chatting to passengers along the way. When I asked about the 24, it was always the same topic that came up first – the bus’s near consignment to history back in 2022. 

That was when nearly a fifth of London’s bus routes faced closure, the 24 – shockingly for such a historic, cherished route – among them. 

“I couldn’t believe it,” an elderly lady called Barbara told me. “The 24!” She’d been riding it for 60 years, and she’d signed a petition to save it. Altogether there were more than 20,000 replies to Transport for London’s consultation paper on its proposed cuts.

Other passengers echoed Barbara’s mixture of dismay and relief at the episode, the happy conclusion to which caused an instant outpouring of virtual cheering on my street’s WhatsApp group. “Yay!” was the general consensus. Somehow Sadiq Khan – London mayor and son of a London bus driver – had found the necessary £25 million to keep nearly all the routes open.

Barbara alights at the Camden Sainsbury’s and the 24 continues its stately progress south. Soon we are sailing down Tottenham Court Road – for so long a one-way street, but now two-way – and on to the “pageantry” London of Westminster. Arriving in Pimlico is like a smooth digestif after a series of gastronomic delights. 

One of my favourite stretches of the 24 route is where it bisects the vast building site just north of Euston station, which is where the HS2 line is under construction. On a single-decker, you wouldn’t be able to see above the hoardings surrounding the site. From the top deck of the 24, the epic scale of the work is revealed – all cranes and craters and cabling and machinery spread out over 60 acres, such a far cry from the modest environment that is my NW3 backwater.

My nearest stop is called Mansfield Road, though the stop itself is closer to my own road, Lisburne Road. I’ve always thought how nice it would be to live in a street whose name you get to hear called out by the automated voice on the bus, but that’s probably the only reason I would have to envy my neighbours in Cressy Road, the stop before mine.

One 24 regular I may have shared a journey with without knowing so is the thirtysomething writer and voice-of-a-generation Dolly Alderton. I doubt the 24 has a bigger fan. Alderton was the first person I came across who declared the 24 to be the best bus route in London. At the time I was sceptical. Now I agree. 

Alderton has written lovingly about the 24. “You’ve made me believe this city is kinder and quainter than I could ever have predicted,” she wrote in the local online magazine Kentishtowner in 2015. “You guide me home, lovely thing (the BT Tower as my compass and you as my wagon). You’re my second star on the right, you’re my yellow brick road. You’ve bewitched me body and soul and I love, love, love you.”

My neighbour George couldn’t have put it better.

Simon O’Hagan is the chief sub-editor and commissioning editor at Radio Times.

This piece originally appeared in Echos, the 12th edition of Tortoise Quarterly. Echos, and all past editions, are available to buy on the Tortoise Website at a special members’ price.

Photographs Alamy Images, Luke MacGregor/Bloomberg/Getty Images, Hope/Daily Mirror/Getty Images