Archive/The Collection/Marcus Bello
Record PS–132 · Night bus driver · North London
Marcus Bello
Nine years on the night network, and the four o'clock hour when the road belongs to him.
- Subject
- Marcus Bello
- Occupation
- Night bus driver
- Route or region
- North London
- Recorded
- 19 November 2024
- Duration
- 1 h 51 min
- Reference
- PS–132
Introduction
Marcus Bello has driven for the same London operator for nine years, the last six of them entirely at night. He requested that we record in the canteen at the end of a shift rather than at home, because at home, he said, he would be a different person and we would get a worse interview.
He is an unusually generous talker, and the recording is full of digressions he apologises for and then continues anyway. He is also precise: about times, about stop names, about who is on the bus at which hour. Several of the passenger accounts here were corroborated, at his suggestion, by a colleague who declined to be recorded.
The night network is the part of a city's transport system that most people never see and many assume barely exists. Marcus is clear that it does not carry a fringe. It carries a workforce.
Four excerpts are published here from a recording of one hour and fifty-one minutes.
Recording location
Recorded at a bus garage canteen, Tottenham
Excerpts published
4 of the master recording. Timecodes refer to the unedited master file.
Access
Full audio and transcript are available to researchers on written request to the archive.
Transcript excerpts
Master duration 1 h 51 minWho is on the bus
Interviewer
Who's actually on the bus at two in the morning?
MB
Everybody. That's the thing people don't get. They think it's drunks. Yeah, you've got drunks. You've got plenty of drunks, I'm not going to sit here and tell you different. But you've also got the lady who cleans offices in the City, gets on at half four, flask in her bag, upstairs front, same seat, every single night for I want to say four years now.
MB
Nurses. Kitchen porters. Chefs — chefs are the tired ones. A chef gets on and he's asleep before we've pulled off the stop. Gone. Every time.
Through the screen
MB
At night people talk to you. In the daytime nobody talks to the driver, you're furniture. At night they'll stand there — I've got a screen, right, and they'll stand at the screen and tell you things they've not told anyone.
MB
I had a fella tell me his wife had left him that afternoon. Standing there with his card still in his hand. And what do you say to that? You say, I'm sorry to hear that, mate. And then you've got to pull off, because you've got a timetable and you're already two minutes down. And that's — yeah. That's the job.
Interviewer
Do you think about them afterwards?
MB
Some of them. Not all. You'd not manage, if it was all.
Four o'clock
MB
Four's the strange hour. Between about half three and half four the road's yours. You can see all the way down Seven Sisters and there is nothing on it. Nothing. And you're driving this enormous empty thing with all the lights on inside, like a — I don't know how to say it. It's like being a shop that nobody's come into.
MB
[laughs] I've said that before and people look at me like I've lost it.
The last one off
MB
Last stop, and there'll be one asleep on the top deck. Near enough every night. And you go up, and you can't touch them, you're not permitted to touch them, so you sort of — cough. Loudly. [laughs] All right mate, end of the line.
MB
Nine times out of ten they're mortified, off they go, fine. And then sometimes they're not fine and you're stood on the top deck at half five in the morning phoning somebody, and that's a different night.
Timecodes refer to the unedited master file. Hesitations, repetitions and dialect are retained as spoken.
Closing note
Marcus has since moved to a route on the western side of the night network and describes the change as “like moving house”. He asked that the cleaner mentioned in the second excerpt not be identified or approached. We have not attempted to.
Elsewhere in the collection
Full index
PS–147 · 2025-03-12 · Immingham – Dover
Ray Attwood
Twenty-two years on the same overnight run, and the bridge he still looks for.
PS–141 · 2025-01-28 · Merseyside
Dee Kavanagh
Twelve years of working in a moving room, and a map of the city she can no longer drive through normally.
PS–152 · 2025-06-04 · Caithness
Sheila Kerr
Ninety miles, forty-odd houses, and the customers she is deliberately late for.
Recordings like this one take about three hours and cost nothing.
If your work happens on the road, or you know somebody whose does, we would like to hear from you.