The Number 11 Bus Route

Further to my post below about Jon Bounds' excellent 11-11-11 project which created a participatory heritage and arts project around an 11 hour journey on Birmingham's famous number 11 outer circle bus route, I thought I would share an article I put together a while ago about the history of the number 11 bus route (in the words of my very first icon and mentor Valerie Singleton "...here's one I made earlier"). I was saving this for the Alphaspagettical Guide to the West Midlands, but seeing as it's taken me 12 months to get to the end of the letter C in the alphabet, by the time it comes round to using it under the letter N, I would guess that either my readership will have forgotten all about it or the internet will have gone into administration.

The photography below is all my own, though I should acknowledge the fact that a couple of bus pictures were taken at the Transport Museum in Aston. Great place to have a little mooch amongst old buses and that sort of thing. Don't forget your flask.

Number Eleven Bus Route

In a city the size of Birmingham there are very few constants apart from change itself. Things are constantly changing: as old buildings are demolished, new ones spring up in their place; street names disappear, only to be rejuvenated eighty years later; local characters come and go; much loved landmarks fade into distant memory with brand new ones eager to grip the public imagination. Change is literally all around us; go away from the city for a month and you’ll miss the next new city centre development, go away for six months and when you come back you won’t even recognise the place!

Bus routes and bus timetables are the worst culprits of all. It seems like you only have to go on a visit to the Bullring and three hours later you’ll go to catch your bus home from Corporation Street and three men in WMPTE flat caps have not only moved the bus stop but moved Corporation Street into the bargain. But in all of this there is one bus route that all Brummies can rely upon for consistency, one route which all Brummies know no matter where they live in the city – the number eleven.

The number eleven bus route is twenty-six miles long (the same distance as the Marathon), the route is eighty years old and each year number 11 buses carry 20 million passengers round and round in circles. It is the ultimate experiment in perpetual motion, a huge centrifugal machine turning like a Ferris wheel around and around on the outer edges of the city.

The number 11, or outer circle bus route, came in to operation on Wednesday 7th April 1926 when two existing routes, the number 10 from Kings Heath to Bearwood and the number 11 from Erdington to Acocks Green were brought together with bits added to fill in the gaps. The route has changed very little since 1926, even if the scenery has changed quite significantly in certain places.

Public houses still constitute many of the best known landmarks and destination points (there are an estimated 42 pubs on the route) and number eleven buses will take you as near as close to many of the city’s best known venues, roughly in this order: HM Prison Winson Green; City Hospital; the old Kings Head pub at Bearwood; Harborne swimming baths; Queen Elizabeth Medical Centre; Bristol Road for Birmingham University; Selly Oak Hospital; Cadbury World; Cotteridge and Kings Heath shopping areas; Sarehole Mill; Acocks Green; the Swan island at Yardley; Blakesley Hall; Cascades Leisure Centre at Stechford; through the industrial area of Bromford; under the M6 motorway to Erdington; past Witton cemetery, IMI and Villa park; One Stop Shopping Centre and the UCE at Perry Barr; through Handsworth Wood crossing Soho Road to send you straight back to Prison without collecting £200 as you pass “Go”!

In the 1930s the number 11 bus route was so popular with the public that half-day holiday trips were even advertised as competition to the infamous number 70 trams to the Lickies. Outer circle tourists became known as ‘all-rounders’ and conductors would recall how whole families of ‘all-rounders’ would fill the top decks of buses throughout the holiday periods, taking in the sights of Brummagem as they picnicked their way past Witton cemetery and round to the IMI factory at Perry Barr.

In spite of it’s reputation for being exceptionally good at making passengers wait for forty five minutes outside Selly Oak Hospital and then having half a dozen buses turn up in convoy, the number 11 bus route remains one of the longest and most dearly loved routes in Europe. So if you ever want to see the suburbs of Brum in approximately 2 hours and 10 minutes, just jump on a number 11!

Other interesting facts about the buses of Brum:

First covered double-decker

The first covered-top double decker bus ran on the streets of Birmingham in 1924.

Celebs who travelled the 11

Simon Le Bon from Duran Duran wrote the hit single ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’ on the number 11 bus between Perry Barr and Kings Heath and Martin Barre of Jethro Tull composed an instrumental called ‘The Outer Circle’ which was inspired by his journeys on the fabled number 11. Another Brummie rocker who wrote a song about bus travel in Birmingham was Steve Gibbons who entitled a track “No spitting on the bus”.

Hitler has missed the bus

Was Brummie born pre-WW2 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain subconsciously thinking of the number 11 when he famously said “Hitler has missed the bus”? The number eleven was, after all, one of the closest bus routes to Chamberlain’s Highbury Hall home near Kings Heath. Other famous number 11 route residents included J.R.R.Tolkien in Moseley, W.H.Auden in Harborne and Ozzie Osbourne in Aston. It is also possible that Steel Pulse were regular number 11 travellers, whereas UB40 were more likely to have used the number 8, inner circle route.

And your specialist subject – bus journeys on the number eleven

There are estimated to be 266 bus stops and 39 fare stages on the number 11 route, giving just under 2000 possible combinations of passenger journeys for drivers to have to randomly calculate fares for. With around 50,000 passengers jumping on and off the number 11 every day, drivers need to be as proficient at maths as they are at remembering the route.

Crossroads

The number 11 bus crosses every main arterial road radiating from Birmingham city centre, which includes: Hagley Road, Bristol Road, Pershore Road, Alcester Road, Stratford Road, Warwick Road, Coventry Road, Washwood Heath Road, Tyburn Road, Sutton New Road, Birchfield Road, Soho Road and Dudley Road.

Reference material used to research this page:

Chamberlain quote from Collins Gem Dictionary of Quotations

Birmingham Handbook 1950

Outer Circle – Birmingham’s No.11 Bus Route by David Harvey, Margaret Hanson and Peter Drake (Tempus Publishing Limited 2003)