There’s no better seat in London than the front row, top deck, of a red double-decker. From here, the city unfolds like a film reel: unspooling its characters, its textures, its contradictions. Vivid. Immersive. Chaotic.
It is early morning on a hot London Monday. I clamber up the stairs and settle into my perch. The vinyl seat is still cool from the early hour. Through the vast windscreen, the city glimmers under a wash of summer blue, streaked with contrails and crowned with the leafy hush of early traffic.
We’re moving through Marylebone, dipping past coffee shops, estate agents, scaffolding. Everything is in motion: the pedestrians, the pigeons, the endless tide of people spilling out of bakeries and boutiques. London, always mid-stride.
We glide past BoConcept and Lokanta, their shopfronts crisp in the angled light. Below, a man leans on a railing with the slack posture of the truly unhurried. The street is waking: baristas pulling shots, fruit stands stirring to life, a red post box yawning open for the day’s dispatch.
Moments later, a clock face — ornate, anachronistic — floats past my window like an actor on cue. A red bus turns lazily ahead of us, all gloss and swagger, a mobile metaphor for this endlessly performing city.
Further on, the streets soften. Trees lean in with old green grace, and the road quiets. We roll past whitewashed terraces and lampposts strung with hanging baskets. London’s two faces, the steel and the stone, the roar and the rustle, briefly meet here.
And then we hit Oxford Street.
Union Jacks strung overhead flicker in the breeze: neat rows of red, white and blue fluttering against the sky’s hard blue dome. Beneath them, the shops of the empire of Neon Brittania: Primark, Zara, Foot Locker, JD Sports, glowing like secular cathedrals. Through the windscreen, the curve of the street stretches out like a canyon carved by commerce. Black cabs cruise past like urban gondolas. Somewhere behind me, a child squeals with delight at the sight of a red bus passing us in the opposite direction: the quintessential London encounter, mirroring itself.
Oxford Street is madness, but from up here it’s curated chaos. I don’t have to dodge the shoppers or hear the tinny throb of buskers. I just watch it all, a silent witness drifting through the eye of the shopping tempest.
We roll on. The city changes with every corner. One moment I’m in glass-and-steel modernity, the next I’m gliding beneath a canopy of trees somewhere near Hyde Park, where the traffic thins and the air feels older, gentler.
I don’t always know where the bus is going. And that’s half the joy. To climb aboard, snag the front seat, and surrender to the rhythm of the ride. To let London carry you forward: not quite a destination, more a moving meditation. A pilgrimage on wheels.
I could stay up here all day, riding the city like a gentle wave, letting the Number 12 or the 88 or whatever one this is now carry me past the city’s infinite vignettes. Because up here, on the top deck, London is both theatre and sanctuary. A front-row seat to memory and motion.
TravelWriterLife 