The man who toured Britain on the 94 bus routes

When David McKie was a little boy, his mother would test him on the bus routes. She’d ask him, ‘Where does No 5 go?’ and he would reel off the route. The former Guardian journalist has kept up his interest in buses ever since. Now 82, he has published Riding Route 94, “an accidental journey through the story of Britain”.

The premise is simple: McKie rode 25 bus routes containing the number 94 as a method of surveying the country, covering lands as varied as the Isle of Mull and Huddersfield. But which bus route to choose?

“If you choose a low number like three, they’re everywhere,” he explains. “If you choose a number like 367 then you’ll find there are only about four, so you’ve got to get a medium between those two. I wanted a good spread geographically, so the shortlist was 93 and 94.”

The latter appealed to McKie partly because there’s a running joke in Private Eye which always says, ‘turn to page 94’.

The book begins with a comparison of the 94 route from Blewbury in Oxfordshire to Didcot and Middlesbrough’s 794. He describes the former as having “plenty to make [it] feel like a nice place to live... there are favourite walks on the Downs... there is easy access to Thamesside villages”.

For comparison: “A government assessment in 2015 put Middlesbrough among the authorities with the highest proportion of deprived neighbourhoods in England.”

But there is a lot to be said for Middlesbrough, McKie believes. “It struggles, partly because of what people write about it.” He quotes J B Priestley, who, in 1933, described it as “more like a vast, dingy conjuring trick, than a reasonable town”. There are other much-sneered at places in the UK, McKie says that Wigan is another.

“It’s always sneered at in the South of England as a place where no one knows anything about, but I like Wigan.” Slough and Swindon, too. “It’s sneersville. They all have something that sneerers can fasten on to.”

Other corners of England surprised him. The 394 in West Yorkshire runs from Huddersfield to Slaithwaite via Milnsbridge and it was at the final stop of that route that he found a town quietly reinventing itself.

“The canal, which contribute so much to the scene, was only rescued from disuse in 2001. Locks were resurrected, new ones added and all this and more add up to a sense that Slaithwaite, having largely lost its industry of yesteryear, has found a new relevance.

“Unlike neighbouring Milnsbridge where on one side of the river there is a promenade of industrial buildings that could raise the spirits only of someone enraptured by the sight of corrugated iron, it is once again pretty sure what it’s there for.

McKie says his goal was to learn something. In the introduction he writes that Riding Route 94 is not a book about buses. “It’s a book about where they take you... George Orwell went to Wigan, Sheffield and Barnsley in search of what he expected to find... I tried to find some device that would produce a random, unpremeditated sequence of journeys.”

He believes choosing 94 did just that. But any other number would have produced the same result. “Any route which was feasible would have combined places I knew a bit, and places I’d never even heard of. It would have been a different book, but there would have been common themes, doing the 75, or even the 93.”

He chuckles, taking a sip of his coffee. “I once proposed a book called ‘Second left after the Rose and Crown’, on the basis that wherever you go, there’s always something there.”

Riding Route 94 by David McKie is publised by Pimpernel Press, priced £9.99.