Riding Route 94 Quotes

“There’s a reassuring sense of continuity in these 11s and 44s and 170s and 211s. Where outside the capital the service buses are clad in company colours, proclaiming that they belong to Stagecoach, Arriva, GoAhead and the rest, in London they’re still, whichever outfit provides them, uniformly red. They announce an allegiance not to some big commercial company but to the great world city they serve, much as they did when George Orwell, returning from the war against Franco in Spain, numbered them among the sights which brought him some kind of peace: ‘the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen”
― David McKie, Riding Route 94: An Accidental Journey through the Story of Britain

“the relationship between London and the rest of the country was described by Tony Travers of the London School of Economics, perhaps the supreme authority on the workings of modern-day London, as ‘a bit like a relationship between a grumpy couple. They know they’ve got to be together, but they always sort of see each other’s weaknesses more clearly than anybody else would’.”
― David McKie, Riding Route 94: An Accidental Journey through the Story of Britain

“I join a small crowd assembled around the imposing Gothic memorial erected a decade after his death to the talismanic Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott. The great man is holding a book and looking preoccupied. The tilt of his head suggests that he’s keeping an eye on Jenners department store, established in 1838, six years after he died, and today festooned with advertisements for their 50 per cent Big Brand sale. Fortunately for Scott, he is sheltered under a canopy, unlike his immediate neighbour David Livingstone. A gull is perched on the head of the celebrated explorer and the legacies of previous visits by gulls and pigeons are streaked down his rugged Scots face.”
― David McKie, Riding Route 94: An Accidental Journey through the Story of Britain

“A Warwickshire priest, John Rous, writing a history of England at the end of the fifteenth century, chronicled the ruthless large-scale destruction inflicted on the North by William the Conqueror (see chapter 14), and asked what now should be said of the ‘modern’ destruction of villages. ‘The root of this evil’, he said, ‘is greed. The plague of avarice infects these times and it blinds men. They are not the sons of God, but of Mammon’.”
― David McKie, Riding Route 94: An Accidental Journey through the Story of Britain

“They used to build locomotives in Gateshead, very fine complicated powerful locomotives, but they never seem to have had time to build a town’.”
― David McKie, Riding Route 94: An Accidental Journey through the Story of Britain

“What was it that the eighteenth-century traveller said about Mull? ‘Italy itself, with all the assistance of art, can hardly afford anything more beautiful and diverting’. On this blessed September evening that verdict needs no amendment.”
― David McKie, Riding Route 94: An Accidental Journey through the Story of Britain

“(The shirts of the referee and his touch judges, as if to confirm everything that crowds have ever suspected about match officials, carry the legend Specsavers.)”
― David McKie, Riding Route 94: An Accidental Journey through the Story of Britain

“Some have speculated that had he succeeded, the road, not the railway, might have remained the conventional way to travel, that the runaway expansion of the railway might never have taken place. In a book called The Suppression of the Automobile: Skulduggery at the Crossroads, David Beasley argues that road transport was more potentially profitable, and failed only because powerful political interests were determined to stop it. ‘If the steam carriage proponents in Parliament had forged a lasting alliance between the radical Whigs and Conservatives,’ he says, ‘the railways would have been stopped in their tracks.”
― David McKie, Riding Route 94: An Accidental Journey through the Story of Britain

“The law locks up the man or woman/ Who steals the goose from off the common/ But leaves the greater villain loose/ who steals the common from the goose’.”
― David McKie, Riding Route 94: An Accidental Journey through the Story of Britain

“It has come to pass’, she wrote, in lines that reverberate still, ‘that the working class is used, so to speak, as the unit of the moral investigation, until we well nigh believe that this class is the chief repository of the vices and virtues of the nation’.”
― David McKie, Riding Route 94: An Accidental Journey through the Story of Britain