What I learnt on a bus tour in my own city

It’s a grey, midwinter weekday morning and I’ve bought a £40 ticket to sit in a slow-moving traffic jam and inspect London from the top of a double decker tour bus.

“Do you speak English?” the guide enquiries of me as I find a seat in between a German couple and a gaggle of Americans. I tell him that I do, that I’m a Londoner in fact, and he gives me a slightly bemused nod before returning to his post at the front to commence our 23-stop loop around the capital.

It only recently dawned on me that despite having lived here on-and-off since birth, I hardly know this city at all. It’s all the more ludicrous given that I’m a travel writer, with itchy feet and an insatiable thirst for exploration, who knows more about the places I’ve been once or twice than the one I’ve grown up in. I’ve been to Antarctica but I’ve never been to St Paul’s Cathedral.

I haven’t been to Big Ben either, not since childhood, and even then it was for a school trip. I still don’t know who Ben was, and why he had a clock named after him. Then again, how many Londoners have visited the Houses of Parliament for fun of late?

This all came into sharp focus not long ago when a friend from New York was planning a visit here and asked me for recommendations. “Is the London Eye any good? Is the view from the Shard worth the entrance fee? I’ve only got one day, should I go to Buckingham Palace or the Tower of London?” I was woefully short on answers.

So here I am, on a crash course tour of my homeland, where centuries of monarchs have lived and died, where subterranean Roman temples hide beneath office blocks, and where drunk elephants once loitered the grounds of a world-famous execution site. It’s a place I’ve taken for granted for more than 30 years.

We start at Green Park, close to Buckingham Palace - which was stripped of all its flowers in the 17th century after the wife of King Charles II caught him picking blooms for a mistress: fact number one. Across the road is the world’s first branch of the Hard Rock Cafe, opened in 1971 by a pair of American businessmen who didn’t trust the British to serve a decent burger: fact number two, of many to come.

Passing Wellington Arch, it’s on to Apsley House, an address once known as ‘Number 1 London’, the first residence of the Duke of Wellington, so called because it was the first house you’d see in the capital as you rode in from what was, in Georgian times, open countryside. Hyde Park, our tour guide Chris tells us, hosted Justin Bieber in a concert a few years ago (prompting a small squeal from the Americans) but 500 years ago served as hunting ground for Henry VIII.

I recognise the Animals in War Memorial, having driven past it many times without knowing what it stood for: all the creatures who served in the military over the 20th century, a touching tribute that I’m glad to have learned of. Marble Arch, a copy of the Arch of Constantine in Rome, I knew about.

Close to it, a pavement plaque marks the former spot of Tyburn Tree which was a public hanging site particularly popular in the 16th century that gave rise to two well known English phrases - something I didn’t know. “One for the road” refers to the last pint of ale a prisoner was permitted en-route to the gallows (one London pub we later see is rather morbidly named ‘The Hung, Drawn & Quartered’), while the term to stay “on the wagon” borrows from the driver of the cart, who wasn’t allowed to drink for obvious reasons.

Britons have always taken their drinking holes suitably seriously, and we pass by several of London’s most famed pubs over the course of the morning (none of which I’d been to). When the Great Fire of 1666 ravaged the medieval City of London and destroyed most of its infrastructure, Sir Christopher Wren was tasked with rebuilding 51 churches, among them St Paul’s Cathedral. It is a lesser-known fact that the first thing he had built before all that was two pubs to serve the construction workers, the still-standing Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese and The Old Bell Tavern, which we pass later on. “Wren had a good understanding of the English psyche”, Chris remarks.

From there we weave into Mayfair, about a third of which is owned by the Grosvenor family, who in the 1720s transformed large swathes of swampland into what is now one of London’s most expensive neighbourhoods. Grosvenor Square, or “little America”, is home to a 9/11 memorial for the British victims and the building that was, until relatively recently, the American embassy.

Trump was not at all impressed when it was sold off six years ago under the Obama administration - “for peanuts”, he said, and part of a “bad deal” - so much so that he refused to cut the ribbon at the opening of the new embassy, located south of the river in Nine Elms near Battersea.

We pass Bond Street, which hosts some of the best preserved terracotta facades in the country, and Sotheby’s, where Banksy’s self-shredding artwork was recently sold. “Says a lot about the state of the art world,” Chris states, somewhat disgruntled.

Employees at Hamley’s - now the world’s largest toy shop since Toys R Us went bust - wave energetically as we drive past, dressed as dancing bears. During the Second World War, this store was a symbol of the British ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ mantra, I learn. It never closed, not even during the Blitz of 1940, when German bombs rendered it too dangerous for shoppers to enter. Instead, clerks in tin hats stood at the entrance and took orders, scurrying inside and searching the rubble for toys to be sold.

The gargantuan screens that light up Piccadilly Circus have changed since I last bothered to look at them. Its electronic adverts date all the way back to 1908, and over time, bulbs gave way to neon lights, then digital projectors followed by LED displays. Today the main spectacle is a single HD screen - the largest of its kind in Europe at 8,400 sq ft in size - which responds to the weather, triggering ads for winter clothes when the temperature falls below a certain level.

On we trundle, through the theatre district of Haymarket, so-called because of the vast quantities of hay that was sold there to feed London’s 50,000 horses at the turn of the 20th century. As we pass Her Majesty’s Theatre, Chris tells the story of the comedian Tommy Cooper who died there live on stage in 1984 from a heart attack. Everyone thought it was part of the act and laughed for quite some time before the grim reality sunk in.

We turn onto Trafalgar Square and admire Nelson’s Column, a tribute to Britain’s greatest naval commander and an ode to his death in 1805 at the Battle of Trafalgar. I feel I should have known this next fact, that his body was transported from Gibraltar to London in what was essentially a barrel of brandy for the purposes of preservation - a barrel from which sailors drank during the journey home to toast their fallen leader, and the origin of the phrase “tapping the admiral”.

Chris can’t help but make a quip as we drive through Whitehall and past Downing Street, the home of Prime Minister Theresa May, “for this week at least”. My fellow tourists are in for a bit of disappointment as we pull up briefly alongside the Houses of Parliament to the base of Big Ben, which is currently shrouded (all but one clock face) in scaffolding and will be until its major restoration is complete in 2021. They take photos anyway.

It is believed that this clock tower, built in 1859 and known formally as Elizabeth Tower, was named either after Sir Benjamin Hall, First Commissioner for Works, whose name is inscribed on the bell - or, according to Chris, Ben Caunt, a champion heavyweight boxer. You can find a further 39 facts on this London landmark here, but for the tour bus, it was onto the next: Waterloo Bridge.

From here, a decent view in both directions and a tale of two cities: the City of London to the east, the original heart of the capital from the time the Romans settled here some 2,000 years ago, with a black dragon for an emblem; and the city of Westminster to the west, established around 1,000 years later.

It’s certainly going fast, this tour, so there’s little time to delve into the history of every port of call given that we’re gliding past them only fleetingly, but I make a note of nuggets that sound most interesting to read up on later.

History aside, the route is peppered with pop culture anecdotes, too - Mick Jagger spent a year at the London School of Economics, for example, before throwing in the towel to join The Rolling Stones; and Australia House, opened in 1918 and the longest continuously occupied diplomatic mission in the UK, was used in the Harry Potter films to represent Gringotts Bank.

As we halt outside St Paul’s Cathedral - topped with a gold-gilded pineapple (once a symbol of great wealth), Chris suggests some of us get off and climb the 259 steps up to the dome where lies the Whispering Gallery. Thanks to its design, its makes a whisper uttered against one wall audible on the opposite side. I’m in it for the long-haul, so stay on board and vow to drop in another day.

The charming public drinking fountains we drive past next were constructed in Victorian times in the hope that they would encourage the working classes to choose fresh water over ale, and limit the number of drunks crawling the streets. Needless to say, it didn’t work, but did leave something elegant behind.

I’m intrigued to learn of what lies 20 feet beneath the Bloomberg offices by Bank station, the Roman ruins of the Temple of Mithras, now a free museum. Though the site has stood for nearly two millennia, it was only uncovered by archaeologists in 1954, buried under the detritus of post-war London.

Next on the itinerary is Number 1 Poultry, the country’s newest listed building at 20 years old, modelled on the design of a ship in the region of London where chickens and ducks were sold at market during the 16th century. The same goes for the nearby ‘Milk Street’ and ‘Bread Street’. From here, it’s on to the Royal Exchange, technically the geographical centre of London, and the Bank of England, where billions of pounds in gold bars are stored and where protection measures include no windows on the ground floor.

Then, a short salute at The Monument to the Great Fire of London, which raged for five nights but remarkably only resulted in six recorded deaths, and did have its upsides - unwittingly putting a damper on the Black Death that was still killing off Londoners in droves, by causing the rats (and their disease-spreading fleas) to scurry away from the inner city.

We head further east, where all the “smelliest jobs” were traditionally performed and where the city’s paupers were stationed - glue-making, tanneries and butchers abound - and where you’ll still find Billingsgate, the UK’s largest inland fish market and once the biggest in the world.

We wave to the Shard, the tallest building in the European Union, and the Gherkin, or as Chris refers to it, “the towering innuendo”. And to the gleaming 37-storey tower at 20 Fenchurch Street, which came to be nicknamed the “Walkie Scorchie” in 2013 after a design flaw resulted in beams of sunlight reflecting off it before melting cars and cracking pavement slabs. A sunshade system has since been installed to deflect the rays.

As we cross Tower Bridge, we learn of the Royal Menagerie that existed in the grounds of the Tower since King John installed it in the early 1200s. Inmates later included a polar bear (courtesy of Haakon IV of Norway), and an African elephant (thanks due to Louis IX of France). The elephant died, it is thought because of the red wine it was fed on a weekly basis.

Here, too, we glean the origin of another popular saying, to “laugh your head off”. In 1747, Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat, a Jacobite involved in the 1745 Rising, was about to executed on Tower Hill when the viewing scaffold collapsed, killing 20 spectators. The condemned man found this to be hilarious, and was laughing right up until the moment the axe fell. Incidentally, he was the last man to be publicly beheaded in the UK.

As we near the end of our loop, by which point I’m pretty cold to be honest, we learn how the OXO building on the South Bank managed to circumnavigate the ban on Thames-front advertising for its beef stock cubes in 1928 by designing now-iconic windows which just so happened to resemble the characters ‘O’, ‘X’ and ‘O’.

We pass the M16 building, with Chris stating, “I don’t know why our spy headquarters are in such an obvious place”, and finally the Grey Coat Hospital school for girls, a former charity school - just one of a cluster of similarly named educational establishments in the area built in the 16th century, among them Blue Coat and Green Coat.

To distinguish themselves between the schools, students adopted different coloured blazers, heralding the first adoption of school uniforms in the UK. Long yellow socks were dyed with saffron in an attempt to deter rats and stop them nibbling at the pupils legs - before this, students would have to sleep with their dirty socks under their pillow. In a great many ways, London has come a long way.

The route ends, conveniently enough, directly outside The Telegraph’s headquarters on Buckingham Palace Road and I hop off with a surprising conclusion. Personally, I don’t like buses of any sort by their very slow, lumbering nature. I tend to avoid tourists as much as possible, particularly on my own stomping ground. And I should have wrapped up warmer. All that said, I find myself to be an unlikely tour bus convert.

I’ve got my bearings on London’s centre in a way that countless Tube journeys cannot match. I’ve identified a handful of places intriguing enough that I’d brave the crowds to delve into them on my own one day, the Tower of London being one, the Roman Mithraeum another.

I still have no desire to go on the London Eye (it’s closed for maintenance until January 23 anyway, the Germans were dismayed to find) nor scale the Shard, and I know that now. But I’d genuinely recommend a bus tour to anyone visiting London for the first time as a way to scope out the best attractions.

Furthermore, I’ll absolutely get one out of the way the next time I descend upon a new city. “Couldn’t you just have got on a normal London bus and taken a guide book?” my colleague enquired when I got back. It really wouldn’t have been the same. There’s something nice and orchestrated about donning headphones, leaning back and letting an informed voice guide you on a city circuit. And next time an out-of-towner asks me for suggestions, it’s the first thing I’ll recommend.

Big Bus London tours cost from £37pp (adults) for a classic one-day, hop-on hop-off ticket, which includes optional walking tours and a one-way river cruise. Children cost from £19, and a family of four costs from £93. Annabel took the red route consisting of 23 stops, but other offshoots amount to 47 stops in total. Book: bigbustours.com