The red bus dominates the London street scene. It is one of the great icons of London City, so much so, that it was used in London's contribution to the handing-over ceremony at the end of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Whilst the bus in the ceremony was spruced up and spotless, in reality London buses are covered in dirt and surrounded by pollution. Dirty and smelly it maybe, but the London bus is like an ox, it's a reliable beast. In fact the London bus might be compared to an Arctic icebreaker, shoving its way through a turgid sea of cars, motorbikes and cyclists, slowly, but with unchallenged momentum, from one stop to the next. Faithful servant with a smoker's cough, it is a welcome friend to many, never sycophantic or ostentatious but hospitable and warm. Many are those that welcome the touch of a bus' threaded cushion: travellers and tourists, the homeless and jaded, night revellers and early starters. Together London's buses spin a web, which encompasses and squeezes the city, shrinking time and space, opening up possibilities for living, experiencing and knowing London. And for the imaginative minds of London, buses are so much more than transport: for some they are a retreat, others a way to see the city, for some a bed for the night, others a mobile youth club. There is so much life in and on the London bus.

Find practical information on bus time tables, routes, prices and tickets here.

In other cities around the UK you wait hours for a bus, but in London, perhaps due to the population density, perhaps due to the conscious decision of the Mayor to get things moving, the buses come frequently. They spin a web which encompasses and squeezes Greater London, shrinking time and space, bringing people together and increasing possibilities for living, work and leisure. In this way London buses underpin the social fabric of London, how we live, experience and know the city.

The bus network is an aid to the working classes, middle as much as lower. It is a lifeline for those whose job is miles away; and who can't afford to take the tube. London buses make life viable, saving people from further depravation and isolation. The routes of London buses are the tenuous diaphanous threads by which life is held together for many. Mind you for the poorest among us a single bus fare can be prohibitively expensive.

There's nothing I like more than knowing I've got plenty of time on my hands and so going up to the top deck of the bus, where I plonk my arse down on the front seat, and look forward to seeing the sights of London for the next forty minutes, as the bus winds its way into central London. You get to see everything that's happening on the streets, and as the bus takes in and drops off people, the bus draws from London's mix, and you get to see and hear so many people from all around the world dropping in for ten to twenty minutes. Being on a London bus can be as good as most TV.

Faithful servant, never grumbling, the bus is a welcome friend to many, hospitable and warm. It was a London bus, the 394, which caught youngOlatidebe Agboola when he flew out of his mother's womb in 2009. Olatidebe's mother, Emiloju, was heading towards Homerton Hospital, with her waters broken, when she started to go into the final stages of labour. She stopped the bus, asked for help, but before an ambulance came, young Olatidebe was born. Olatidebe was given the middle name Dennis, the name of the bus company. A kind of godfather, Dennis handed a present and card to Olatidebe on his first birthday.

Since Ken Livingstone allowed under 18s to travel on London buses for free it has been argued thatgroups of young people, having nowhere to go, but wanting somewhere warm and safe to hang out, have annexed the top deck of some buses, turning them into what some have termed 'mobile youth clubs'.

Buses are a place to escape and reflect. I, myself, have taken a bus, when I have had an hour or two to kill, and haven't fancied sitting in a cafe or wandering the cold streets. For the schizoid, the mentally ill, the shy, those who need some respite, buses offer the perfect combination of being with people without having to face up to people. Buses might also be used as a place of ecstasy, a passport into another world. One winter's evening in early 2009 the CCTV cameras on an N36 night bus running through Queens Park, were picking up images of Pawel Modzelewski, a Polishman of no fixed address. Pawel got on the bus, went upstairs and found himself a seat. Pawel, who had consumed alcohol that night, got out a syringe and injected himself with heroin, laid back, and eased into what he most likely thought was going to be an ecstatic top deck experience. However within ten minutes he was reaching for the seat in front, most likely gripped by a severe agony caused by an overdose of drink and drugs. Throughout these torturous minutes and long after, the N36 trundled onwards, to the end of its route, and then slowly into the bus garage. The engines stopped and Pawel, who lent motionless against the seat, was either stone dead, or as the bus driver who was inspecting the top deck had thought, sleeping. The bus driver, with only the still of the night, the empty bus and what must have been a thousand and one things on his mind, went home 'forgetting' about the motionless Pawel. The next morning, the bus coughed up its guts in preparation for another day's work, rolled out of the bus station and made its way back on to the roads. Pawel still seated was heading in the direction he had spent his final moments traveling from.

Sometimes it's not so much your own curiosity and nosiness that leads you into other lives. Instead it's the sheer volume that people emit. In the past, when I travelled on buses a bit more than I do now I found young people tended to head to the back seats of the top deck, from where one would phone a friend, put them on loudspeaker and talk to them with a volume that turned their conversation into a kind of theatre. Because it tends to be the young who are given to inviting people into their world in this way, such moments are golden opportunities to brush up on the latest street slang. In 2008 I was introduced to the expression 'chat shit' by this small black guy, about 15, who shouted the phrase into his mobile phone thirty times in three minutes, to a girl whose number he seemed to have attained only recently. Afterwards I heard the phrase 'chat shit' on every top deck I got on to, for the next three months. Ian Marchant talked of the occasion he was on the top deck of a Greenford bus, making a radio programme about young people on buses. He invited a boy he had struck up a conversation with to sit next to him. Ian patted the empty seat next to him to which the boy replied 'Man an' man don't combine, see what I'm saying, blood?'

November 2009, a young African girl with chubby cheeks, four or five years old, walks up the isle of the single deck 78. The bus is in Shoreditch and is travelling to Nunhead. She looks like a mini-space man, dressed in a big coat with a satchel on her back, which unbalances her, as she walks to the empty seat her mother is ushering her towards. Destination reached the girl bundles herself on to the window seat. Her mother sits next to her, first checking a map to the health clinic and then reading the London Metro. Her daughter, mirroring her mother, is also in a world of her own. Or so it seems. Actually, her nonchalance masks the fact that she is quietly monitoring everything and everyone, catching peoples' eyes when theirs don't catch hers. Like only a child does, she leans back on her satchel, and arches her body so that her head is facing the ceiling of the bus, 'In, out, in, out, in, out, in, out' she says, lazily, as if she's reciting some school song she recently learned. She sings without melody and with the lethargy of someone who is not awake enough to be in full possession of her senses. Still looking at the ceiling she goes silent, arches her body further backwards and her eyes momentarily catch mine. This very young girl, travelling through the City of London so early in the morning looks so warm and comfy, mother on one side, the embrace of a London bus on the other. Her mind roams free.

I'm in deepest Lewisham, somewhere, a little lost in the suburbs, waiting for a bus to take me to Lewisham station. After a while my bus arrives, a single deck bus, packed. I get on. The bus driver is a Jamaican, late twenties, elegantly muscular in body and face, debonair, with braided hair stuck tight to his head, sporting a sleeveless blue jumper overlying a long sleeved shirt. As we wind through the streets of Lewisham, it's as if he's winding through the hills and country roads of Kingston Town. 'Whaddya tink dis is? A smart car' he says at every meeting with a car where there seems to be an intractable battle for space. 'Get out ma way, am king a de road' he says, and then aggressively battles his bus through the smallest of gaps left by the reluctantly retreating motorist. Two young black girls, around fourteen years of age, are walking across the street. The bus judders to a halt. The driver opens the window of the driver cabinet, and speaks to them, neither with great smiles or aggressively, but with confidence and nonchalance. Both girls smile sweetly back at the driver, one of them raises her hand to say hello; almost to gesture see you later. The bus moves on. Later, a BT repair van faces up to the bus. Both drivers wind down their windows. The driver shouts, 'Whadya tink am driving? A bloody smart car. Na, get out a ma way, am king a de road'. Comes the exceedingly agitated reply, 'Fack orf you facking cant'. The BT van driver starts to reverse.

The behaviour on night buses, like that of a nursery, involves laughter and tears; although maybe tears is a misnomer for shouting and punching, for violence.

As well as being a place where people can sing their way home, it can also be 'last chance saloon' for anyone willing to make a last ditch attempt for a mate.

The N29 is nothing if it is not entertaining. One summer's night, in 2006, a French guy, drunken and amazed by the antics and theatre of the N29, which he had had the pleasure of watching all the way from Trafalgar Square to Turnpike Lane, being left on the bus with just a couple of strangers, started to talk about his euphoria at having made the decision to move to London. The N29 was proving to him just what a city this was!

The N43 in contrast to the N29, heading towards the wealthier Highgate, Muswell Hill and Friern Barnet, is full of comedian wanabee white guys, who buoyed by alcoholic excess feel the need to bathe everyone in their soon to be televised wit. Some of it is funny, but some of it is scornful and this gets on my wick. One night two white guys were dishing out the scorn and sarcasm to everyone. They brutally insulted a girl with a big nose who was sat to their right talking to a friend. These psychopathic boys felt safe in their little bubble of mutual masturbatory ridicule. Sat in front of me and next to the girl with a big nose was a slightly overweight, ordinary looking girl. Once her friend had gotten up and left, she turned to her side to talk to the guys. I took a deep breath in, as I expected her to scald them. Instead she struck up a conversation. These guys, whose volume had ruled the bus up until that point, on being entreated to conversation by the girl, looked at each other with sadistic glee. She didn't know them from Adam. However, to my surprise she was sharp and her alacrity, intelligence and wit ensnared them immediately; she was always one step ahead of them; each time she spoke she'd leave them thinking, and before they'd gathered their thoughts she'd taken the conversation somewhere else. Within seconds, the boys were being taken on a rollercoaster ride, the direction of which they had no possibility of controlling. I felt privileged to watch it, she annihilated them. The knockout blow came when she invited the two back to her house for a blowjob. Choking with shock, they asked her if she was serious. She sighed and said it had been a long night. The two guys were stunned. The girl rang the bell, almost to signify a knockout. She got off at the next stop, the boys shouting at her as she walked down the stairs.

Buses tend to attract adolescents, who lack the money to take the tube or a taxi. There is a high level of rabble-raising amongst adolescents, owing to the fact that they are curious to see what their emerging powers can attain them, what the boundaries and limits are, added to the fact that they are at an age where they have nowhere to go, nothing to do and no money to spend. Adolescents' use of London buses increased when Ken Livingstone, in 2006, made a decision to make travel free to all children. Groups of young people started to annexe the top decks, using them as 'mobile youth clubs'. In 2008, London bus drivers were arguing that the Mayor's policy of giving children free bus travel on buses was causing children to run riot on the bus network.

From a situational point of view, buses create space, which humans then contest. It is noticeably the case that spaces on buses compared to spaces on the underground, is far less regulated and rule-governed. It is no surprise then that so many more altercations take place on buses.

On another occasion on the same bus, as the bus worked its way through Stroud Green towards Crouch End, I heard a guy on the back seat of the top deck, with a loud powerful voice, shout, Heh you, come over here and suck my dick.' If the remaining passengers on the bus were like me, a little bit paranoid, then with their back to this guy they couldn't be completely sure that the guy wasn't referring to them. Subsequently, everyone on the bus froze, the sickening sycophantic laughter of the guy's contemporaries choking us in an otherwise cavernous silence. The guy then repeated his call. Again, there was a frosty silence. So, imagine the sense of relief, surprise and hidden joy, when another very guy, bravely or stupidly depending on your perspective, also sat behind most of the people on the bus, responded in surly tones, 'Suck your own dick'. I thought it was really going to kick off but on this occasion there was no violence. Though I wanted I never once looked round; affected nonchalance is the best strategy in such situations.

The most insane behaviour I ever witnessed occurred in 2007, one summer's evening, as I took a bus from Turnpike Lane to Kingsland Road. I went to the top deck and was followed by several small black boys, ranging from eight to ten years of age, who had been waiting at the same bus stop. Up on the top deck there were a few tough looking Turkish guys, an outrageous looking punk, and one of those guys who looks foreign, looks like he knows London and he's scraping a life together but you've got no idea where he's from. The boys who accompanied me on the bus were hyperactive. One in particular, the smallest, couldn't keep still, jumping from seat to seat, poking his head out of the window, running here and there, his friends following him wherever he went. The atmosphere on the top deck was tense, everyone was quietly anxious about what this young boy was going to do, and well aware that however angry he might be making people, with his vocal behaviour, he was only eight years old. This was a very tense situation for everyone on the bus. Pretty soon the boy had eyed the punk, and sensing vulnerability, started to victimise him, putting on a Jamaican twang and calling him 'punky'. The punk, two and a half times the size ignored the boy. Then as the bus pulled past a barber's on the corner of West Green Road and Black Boy Lane, the boy, seeing several Black guys sat outside the barbers, assuming they were African, poked his head out the window, and started shouting 'A whimba whey, a whimba wey' and hurling racist abuse. His friend tried to restrain him telling him the guys weren't African but Caribbean, but the child would have none of it. He was like a verbal machine gun, so quick and witty, but also insulting and nasty. The boy then clocked some girls he seemed to know, in their early teens, walking down the street. He rushed over to the seat behind the foreign looking guy, to shout at the girls, but in so doing disturbed the guy, who in a flash stood up and swore at the boy. Mayhem looked like it was about to break out but then a Black man, who had been sitting at the front on the top deck, hobbled his way to the middle of the bus and started remonstrating with the kid. He took him to one side and said 'Look I know we're both black and we've got to take care of each other but have some respect, you're going to get yourself hurt behaving like that.' The eight year old, on another planet, looked through his Black brother – he wasn't answerable to anyone. Even his friends were just flotsam caught in the whirlwind of his energy. The older guy limped back to his seat. By this time the girls, who the boy had been shouting at, had joined him on the top deck. They talked a short while, and the boy tried to pinch a few behinds, after which the girls made their way off the bus, to insults. Then finally much to the relief of everyone, the young boy and his colleagues rang the bell to get off. We all thought we'd seen the last of the young boy as he went down the steps, but suddenly, no sooner had he disappeared, than his head popped back up, and in the flash of a second a raw egg was whizzing its way across the bus, in the direction of the punk.

Drivers can only take so much of this behaviour. One commented, 'A few years back I was driving a London bus and often would be spat at by passengers - one day a young passenger got on my bus and tried to get on without showing a pass, when I asked to see his pass he started kicking my driver door and punching my screen and then started spitting at me. That was it, I snapped and chased the guy up the street but he was too fast, I finished my journey and took the bus back to the garage and resigned on the spot.' In 2010 a pedestrian who spat at a bus driver through the driver's cabinet window near Monument Tube station did not escape so lightly. The driver, incensed, took the law into his own hands, and delivered some personalised justice. He got out of his cabinet, beat the pedestrian to the ground and kicked him in the groin.

One bitterly cold evening at Finsbury Park in 2007, I saw a coolly handled example of driver protection. Let me set the scene. There was a small crowd, shivering in the night air, wondering when the driver of the W9 was going to start the bus up and let them on. The driver sat motionless in the darkness of his cabinet, staring ahead. There was a Black woman in her late thirties and a couple of white teenagers. Another guy, looking like someone from a 1980s mining town walked to the end of the bus shelter and leant against it. He was wearing one of those old black dust jackets, a black woolly hat and ill-fitting jeans. His hands and fingers were huge and covered in leathery skin, encrusted with the ugliest thickest fingernails. London takes all sorts, but he wasn't the kind I'd expect to be taking a bus to Crouch End on a Sunday evening. Now, as the would-be passengers were persevering, their attention turned to a minor kafuffle coming from the other side of the station. A solitary young boy, Black, sixteen or seventeen years of age, thin, dressed in cap and big baggy coat, arms swinging across his body, walked jauntily towards us, shouting to himself, as if his own thoughts weren't loud enough to register in his own brain. As he approached our shivering congregation, on seeing the bus, driver, but no invitation to get on the bus, he banged on the doors, and threatened violence on the driver if he didn't open the doors. Those waiting for the bus, already frozen stiff, stiffened up some more. We all stole a glimpse at the driver, who we thought was in mortal danger. Obscured in the darkness of his cabin, the driver looked ahead, motionless, like a mouse in shock. The boy walked up and down the platform, shouting about how he had just gotten out of prison and how he needed to get somewhere. He returned to the bus doors and was about to bang on them a second time when his actions were checked, 'Leave the driver alone' were the words that rang out crystal clear in the night air. Everyone's heart stopped. The boy, momentarily stunned, looked towards the man in the black hat and black coat, with a smile of disbelief. He then made to launch into a tirade of abuse when he was pre-empted a second time, 'Sit down, leave the driver alone, and wait until he's ready'. I had this sense that this man, who judging from his accent, was from Newcastle, had come down to London and was witnessing a kind of behaviour that just wasn't accepted in the North East. I was wondering if he realised what life was like in London, how this kind of behaviour is a daily occurrence, and how you take your life in your hands by challenging it. I wondered who would win a fight between the two. The boy might reveal a blade. But then the man might know a thing or two about fighting, if he had grown up a working class lad in the northeast. But it never came to this. The boy was flummoxed, fascinated and slightly amused by the man, and never at any point looked like mounting a physical attack. Nevertheless for the next five minutes there was a verbal interchange between the two, with the man, who continued to lean against the side of the bus shelter, repeating his orders to the boy, whilst the boy walked up and down the length of the bus stop, like an angry peacock, shouting to himself and questioning if this man 'worked for the feds'. The man was remarkable for the fact that there wasn't a hint of aggression or fear in his voice, only unwavering authority. Eventually the bus lights flickered on and the doors opened. Getting on the bus, the boy made to verbally abuse the driver, but once again the man ordered him to be quiet, leave the bus driver alone and sit down. Interestingly the boy, who could have gone on to the top deck, decided to sit on the lower deck, it seemed he appreciated the fathering. He was joined by everyone who had been waiting for the bus, all fascinated by how this tete-a-tete was going to work out. The boy continued to pipe up and kept mentioning the 'feds' but whenever he did the man met him with an order to be quiet. The boy turned to the black woman, who was sitting across from him. She told him he was going to get himself into trouble behaving like he did. He told her she should be supporting him because he was black. She smiled and shook her head. Somewhere in Stroud Green the boy got off and disappeared into the night. Several stops later, in Crouch End, one of the two white kids, who had been waiting at the bus stop, getting off the bus said something like 'thanks, that was a good show' to the man in passing. The man, unimpressed by this comment, replied 'was it?' For the man, it seemed this was nothing more than an assertion of his values. At Hornsey, he got off the bus, and disappeared into the night, as dark and black as his hat and coat.

Four years after Hasib exploded his bomb, Ms French who was sat on the bus when the roof was blown off, decided to get back on a bus for the first time since the explosion. She was quoted in the Metro as saying, 'I was very tense, I was clinging on for three hours but the longer I was on the bus the more relaxed I was feeling. When my brain sees a packed commuter bus, it senses danger because that's what once happened. I can literally be sick, it turns my stomach.'

Interestingly Johnson puts such incidents down to the fact that London bus companies do not have a revenue structure related to the number of passengers they carry or the fares they receive. 'Instead, they are simply paid to ply the route, and paid according to the miles travelled during the day; and so the bus driver's incentive is to whizz around London and certainly not to linger for a straggler.'

The first buses to tour London's streets were horse drawn. They appeared in the early nineteenth century and were present up until the dawn of the twentieth century, when combustibles appeared.

In February 2008, the top of a double decker bus, which had been redirected from its usual route, after a fire had occurred at Camden market, was ripped off, when the driver tried to take the bus under a bridge. A passenger commented, 'There were road markings on the bridge and on the road telling drivers to keep to the middle, but I saw the bus go into the wall. All the windows popped out and the roof just peeled back about half way. The people at the back had time to duck and were protected by the chairs.'

In 2005 11- to 15-year-olds were able to travel free on buses. In 2006 that privilege was extended to under 18s in full-time education.

The humble elegance of the London double decker has made it an object of affection in the public's mind. Entrepreneurs looking to cash in on this subconscious affection have housed their businesses in old double deckers. In Camden one bus is used as to house an estate agents. In Brick Lane, a bus was used to house an organic restaurant called Root Master.

In 2007 Ken Livingstone signed a deal with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, in which Chavez supplied fuel with a twenty per cent discount for London's buses in return for a team of experts from Greater London Authority being sent to Venezuela to work on recycling, waste management, traffic and reducing carbon emissions. Ken's plan was to use the subsidies to provide half-price bus and tram travel to Londoners on income support. Whether he achieved this aim I am not sure. Interestingly, this forced the Conservatives to become the standard bearer of an unlikely cause. The deal clearly benefited Londoners, but needing to find something to oppose, the Tories argued that the deal deprived Venezuela's poor of revenues gained had the oil been sold at full price. The deal was discontinued by the Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson when he came to power in 2008.

I have from time to time come across a rather distasteful opinion, held by motor vehicle owners in the main, that buses are dirty and full of people who smell. Such opinions seem to be been rife amongst people who are petrified by strangers, those who have lost faith in mankind. It has been said that, “Loelia Ponsonby, the third wife of the Second Duke of Westminster, stigmatised those who used buses by saying that "a man who, beyond the age of 30, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure."”