Death Wish on Denmark Hill

• Routes 185, 380, 53 (3 hours 9 minutes)

Today I have a companion – Uncle Treaders. As explained previously, he’s not my uncle and I don’t think he’s anyone’s uncle. But Uncle Treaders he remains and having threatened to join me for several weeks, we are finally united.

Our day begins at the swarming mass of humanity that is Victoria. If it isn’t the busiest station in London, it always feels the busiest, but the 185 – which is to take us over Vauxhall Bridge and south-east to Lewisham – is simple enough to find and soon Treaders is preening himself for his first photo. He looks like a preener, don’t you think? Vain sod.

As ever, there is a shiver of excitement for the adventure ahead as we take our seats upstairs. Our good driver pulls away. Treaders seems impressed with my organisation and what has now become my routine and he gamely feeds my ego with lots of questions, making me feel incredibly important. I answer with verve, although I should like to note that we are no more than 500 yards from Victoria when he first mentions beer. I’m not saying he’s got a problem, but I can’t help feeling he’s got his priorities terribly wrong.

Still, the 185 swoops south over Vauxhall Bridge and we make pleasing progress past The Oval, through Kennington and into Camberwell. However, by the time Denmark Hill arrives, things have taken a sinister turn with regards to our driver. Having met the best driver last week on the 481, today is a different story. As we lurch through the streets of south London, it is clear he has personal space issues – honking aggressively at any other driver who comes within a couple of feet of his bus lane – and is almost reluctant to let passengers on.

On Denmark Hill, obviously unaware of his erratic ways, three pedestrians step out in front of him in the space of 20 yards. One has a buggy with a toddler, but he shows little sign of slowing down. He merely honks his horn and swerves. It’s Death Wish on Denmark Hill. Don’t these people know the William Booth Memorial Training College is around the corner? It’s where they train Salvation Army officers. The future lies not under a bus my friends.

Through Dulwich and Forest Hill he continues his moody progress and in Catford, another bus forces him to stop 20 feet short of the stop. Two elderly ladies wait in the correct place, expecting him to nudge forward to let them on, but to their disgust he roars off, one of them shaking her walking stick as he carries on regardless. I smell a strongly worded letter to the Catford Chronicle. We pass the Catford Mews for the first time since I came to Catford on the very first day of this quest, but I am so shocked by our driver’s behaviour, I again forget to take a photo of the huge fibreglass cat perched over the entrance. That’s 0-2 now and I’m running out of opportunities. It will have to be the 188. I always was a dog man.

Lewisham Station, the end of the route, arrives soon after and our driver is spared a the usual ‘thank you’. We are simply grateful to be off, albeit in good time. A pitstop is required so we make our way into the town, where we find the Lewisham Racial Equality Council boarded up and looking very bedraggled. No one has been here for a while. We then stumble upon the most depressing entrance to a shopping centre – but it is good for some food. Treaders, a man who lives life at his own unique pace, insists we sit down to eat and I obey. England’s miraculous escape in the first Test is discussed before we trundle off in search of a loo and the 380.

The loo brings unexpected reward – opposite the entrance is a mural detailing the history of the borough of Lewisham. While it avoids looking like a school project, it does smack of ‘trying too hard’ to impress. Part of the mural is a painting of Captain Cook and while I’m sure he was from Yorkshire, I’m equally certain he did not sail from Lewisham. It’s not as if WG Grace and Spike Milligan are anything to be ashamed of.

However, Lewisham confounds my expectations to a large degree and is far less bleak than I was anticipating, with the market in the centre of a town a lively hub. It is from the market that we are to catch the 380, a single-decker that is to take us to the gates of Belmarsh Prison, near Plumstead.

Once out of the market square, it wheezes its way up the hill to Blackheath and so proud is it of its exertions that it performs a victory lap around the heath before descending into Charlton Village – which obviously used to be a village before the railways but has decided to keep the name in a bid to sound quaint and keep house prices up.

It’s a tricky route for our driver as he wriggles through hilly residential backstreets until finally we emerge onto the wide open space of Plumstead Road. We are surely nearly at the prison. I look out for women with their hair scraped back sitting in Ford Escorts, waiting to take their men back home, but there is no sign. Instead, we enter a massive housing estate called Gallions Reach Urban Village, which is as sinsiter as it sounds. Endless identikit housing, eerily quiet streets, it’s Stepford Wives without the satire and it adds 15 intolerable minutes to the journey. Treaders seems quite taken with the place, but I put that down to his sickeningly positive attitude. Not that Treaders doesn’t have a dark side. In many ways he’s like Butters in South Park and I can say that because I know he has no idea who Butters is.

Then, without us even realising, we are at the end of the route. The prison is behind a line of trees, but for some reason I thought it was a grand old Victorian institution with a dark and inhumane past. It turns out it was built in 1991 and has a dark and inhumane past. Known as Britain’s highest security prison, Jeffrey Archer was inexplicably held there for a while, but it was the detaining, without charge, of nine foreign nationals for over three years after September 11 that prompted Amnesty to brand it ‘a Guantanamo in our own back yard.’ The Law Lords subsequently branded their incarceration illegal and they were released on conditional bail.

The building, from what I can see through the trees, is disappointingly bland though. It could be a huge leisure centre (the Daily Mail would have you believe that’s what it is) or hospital. Wormword Scrubs will have to satisfy my thirst for ominous-looking buildings. Such is its blandness that I fail to muster the enthusiasm to take a photo.

Poor show indeed, but that maybe because I can tell spirits are wavering with poor old Treaders and I am aware that we should press on. He has an evening of intellectual stimulation at the Royal Festival Hall ahead of him so I must not take up his entire day. We have a 15-minute walk into Plumstead to catch the 53 to Whitehall. There are apparently two sides to Plumstead. One, away from the river, has maintained its ‘rural character’ and features two commons up on Shooters Hill. The other, down by the river is an uninspiring area dominated by industrial and commercial development – a reaction to the expanding Thamesmead. We see the latter, but fortunately the 53 is not far behind us.

Unfortunately, the early part of its route is a retracing of the route we took to get here and there is nothing quite so depressing as stopping at Woolwich Arsenal Station when you were there just over an hour before, going the other way. That’s when those awkward questions start to rear up again.

The 53 marches at a funereal pace back across Blackheath, through Charlton, before finally opening up through New Cross. Treaders starts talking about bin men and wondering why they don’t work on bank holiday if, well, I have no idea what comes next. I zone out. New Cross becomes the Old Kent Road becomes the New Kent Road becomes Elephant and Castle. Westminster Bridge offers the first close-up of Parliament on this quest. Dark, portentious clouds gather above, a sign of the malaise currently engulfing those twittering on inside.

For us, it’s simply been a long day and this journey, at 77 minutes is the longest so far. We are tired, and the throng of tourists surrounding anything of interest on Whitehall precludes too much more investigation.

He was right about that beer.