In this special edition episode I wanted to capture London from the point of view of millions of Londoners as they live and work all around London every day. The best place to to this? From an upstairs seat at the front of a typical red London bus.

You’ll be taking a 23 minute near-realtime journey on London bus no. 328. The entire route of the 328 is from Golders Green to Chelsea but this episode picks up the journey from West Hampstead and ends as it approaches Notting Hill Gate.

If you would like to follow the journey you can download appropriate maps from the Transport For London website for bus 328 by clicking here.

The reason for ‘near’ realtime is that the journey I filmed involved a lot of stopping, so I have edited out unnecessary stop time which has removed 7 minutes from the usual 30-minute journey and makes the episode flow better.

What will you see? You will see no world-famous landmarks, no well-known buildings, just London suburbs wealthy and not so wealthy as the bus travels through them. Observe the people, the vehicles, the buildings, the shops. This episode is an exercise in ambience taking in the ‘ordinariness’ of one day in March 2008.

The ambience is not just visual - for the soundtrack to this episode I have recorded that day’s (14 March 2008) tune across the most popular radio stations in London. They feature, in soundtrack order:

1. BBC London (news / talk / music)
   

2. Capital Radio (chart music)
   

3. Heart (middle-of-the-road + chart music)
   

4. LBC (news / talk / phone-ins)
   

5. Virgin Radio (rock / classic hits)
   

6. Choice FM (hip-hop / r&b)
   

7. Kiss 100 (dance music / youth)
   

8. Magic (classic hits)
   

9. Classic FM (classical music)
   

10. Gaydar Radio (dance / clubbing music)
    

11. Smooth FM (middle-of-the-road music)
    

12. XFM (rock / indie music)
    

13. BBC Radio 4 (news & entertainment).
    

Each radio station has a link to its own website where you can find out more. All the above stations give you the ability to listen online but some may be restricted to listeners in the UK only for licensing reasons.

These radio stations are amongst the most popular in London by audience size but there are plenty of other stations in London (around 15 on FM and more than 50 on DAB digital radio) including specialist cultural community stations in various spoken languages from Greek and Polish to Punjabi and Arabic, just about any sort of music genre from pop to jazz, classical to hip-hop, as well as religious stations for christian, jewish, islamic, hindu and sikh faiths. There are radio stations just for kids, for the armed forces, and for the elderly. There’s even a station run by the UK Department for Transport called ‘Traffic Radio’ that just transmits non-stop traffic bulletins.

Enjoy the trip!