The number 11 is Europe’s longest urban bus route and first came into existence in 1923.
It now follows the city’s outer ring road, the A4040 with some small deviations.
A full circuit takes 3hrs to complete, and the service carries 50,000 passengers each day. There are 272 bus stops.
40 buses are used each day – 20 for the ‘A’ and 20 for the ‘C”
On the eleventh of November our good friends at “Birmingham it’s not shit” and a few others who can’t be named here….are inviting anyone with an interest to spend eleven hours on the eleven bus starting at eleven am in “Birmingham: It’s Not Shit’s 11 11 11” (yes I know there’s four elevens there really, but even the alliteration starts to drag after a bit).
The rules are
* Get on the 11C at 11am (or as near as dammit) on 11/11.
* Get off the 11C at 10pm — 11 hours later — (or as near as dammit) on 11/11.
* You can get on and off the bus as many times as you like (don’t spend more than 23 minutes off the bus).
* Document your journey; photos, film, writing, cross-stitch, knitting, amigurumi, poetry, blog, twitter, however you like.
* Meet up with others as mad as you, if you want.
* Record everything — or on your own space and link us up.
The idea is that a snapshot of the real Birmingham from a number of different people will emerge, one that’s unedited, unspun, and unwashed. Circling the city will force the gaze inward, focussing our attention exclusively on our municipality. It’ll also freak out the drivers, the man on the clapham omnibus and others who normally expect passengers to have a destination in mind.
If it’s better to travel hopefully than arrive, Birmingham is the ideal place.
some context: “The man on the Clapham omnibus ” is a descriptive formulation of a reasonably educated and intelligent but non-specialist person — a reasonable man, a hypothetical person against whom a defendant’s conduct might be judged in an English law civil action for negligence. This standard of care comparable to that which might be exercised by “the man on the Clapham omnibus” was first mentioned by Greer LJ in Hall v. Brooklands Auto-Racing Club (1933) 1 KB 205.
The first reported legal quotation of the phrase is in the case of McQuire v. Western Morning News[1] a libel case, in which Sir Richard Henn Collins MR attributes it to Lord Bowen, who had died nine years earlier.
It is derived from the phrase the bald-headed man at the back of the Clapham omnibus , coined by the 19th century journalist Walter Bagehot to describe the normal man of London , so used because Clapham in south London at the time was a non-descript commuter suburb and was seen to represent “ordinary” London. Omnibus is a now archaic expression for a public bus , but would have been common usage amongst the judiciary at the beginning of the 20th century.
It is time to separate from the Normal Man, It’s time to separate from the Man on the Clapham Omnibus.
All Agents: This is Birmingham http://elevenbus.co.uk
…..and if you enjoy this sort of thing, you may want to also try this:
please pass this on…..
