London Orbital
Our student halls at Brunel University were in a village called Cowley, just about a mile or so from Uxbridge itself. Cowley is as far west in Greater London as you can go without falling in the Grand Union Canal. Even though it meant nothing to any of us at the time, it's a stone's throw from a place called Little Britain. (Please feel free to read the rest of this in Tom Baker's voice if you like.) It placed us very firmly in the Outer Zone of the London Transport network. As you can imagine, it didn't take long before I started exploring the place. We were about a minute's walk from one main road, the A408 between Uxbridge and Heathrow Airport. By cutting across the campus for a few minutes you could get to the A4020, the road into Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush. In those days, bus travel was cheap – a 'short hop' of up to a mile cost the huge sum of 20p, and a longer journey in the Outer Zone was capped at 30p. At the time (1984-5), Ken Livingston