This is a guest post by Jonn Elledge, from his blog The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything from the June 11, 2025 edition.
Newlywed friend of the newsletter Ed Jefferson is making the most of married life: he’s made a website on which you can explore London’s busiest bus stops, because of course he has.
In fact you can do it in several different ways. First off, here’s a map of the top 100:
Two related things leapt out to me about this. The more obvious of them is that Brixton station is London’s busiest interchange from tube to bus (“bus-head”?) by a distance: the two stops outside the tube station, from whence buses will carry you south, take both first and third place, over 6.7m passengers a year between them. That to me suggests a huge swathe of south London is dependent on being able to jump on the end of the fast and frequent Victoria line to get to work every day.
The other took longer to see. I might have imagined, sight unseen, that the busiest bus stops would be in areas of London poorly served by the tube: that’s where buses would be all the more important, right? Actually, though, the opposite seems to be true. All the busiest stops are where you can interchange to tube, DLR or Elizabeth line services. To find one where that doesn’t apply, you have to get down to 15th place (Eden Street, in Kingston town centre, and even that’s not far from the rail station). Most of the top 100 are in areas where there are decent rail services to change onto.
The other thing you can do with this tool, if you feel the need, is to look at your favourite bus route and find out which of its stops are busiest. Here’s the 38.
I don’t particularly know why you’d want to do this, but if you do knock yourself out. It’s quite fun, if you’re a London bus passenger.
Jonn Elledge is a writer, journalist, Sunday Times bestselling author, and editor of the late and lamented City Metric website.