How the 192 became Manchester’s muse

The only light at Hazel Grove Park & Ride is yellow light oozing out the windows of a big blue bus. It’s half four in the morning, and the 192 is collecting commuters from the rain and shifting them silently down Stockport Road to Manchester: a train driver studying route maps for the day ahead; a girl applying makeup on the jolting road.

Stephen is the day’s first passenger, so he gets to sit top deck and front. He’s on his way to Piccadilly, then on foot to Spinningfields, where he’ll spend the early morning cleaning beer lines at the bar in which he works. He knows the 192 – the bus he takes to work and back daily – is famous across the North West, but he isn’t sure why.

But passengers on the same bus, at around the same time, heading in the opposite direction, could likely clear that up for him. The last ride home from town to Ardwick, Longsight, Levenshulme, and Stockport has been described to me variously as “fucking chaos”, “an absolute zoo” and “character-building”. Ask any passenger, past or present, for stories from the late-night journey, and they come easily. “A guy once asked if he could call his girlfriend off my phone, then tried to run off with it,” one woman tells me, while a man recalls being threatened by a large Eastern European man for “looking at his girls”.

The 192 runs from Hazel Grove or Stepping Hill to Manchester and back again at least every ten minutes during daylight hours. It starts at 4:24am each day, continuing well into the early hours on weekends, moving in a straight line down the A6: London Road, Buxton Road, Wellington Road and Stockport Road. Once cited by Stagecoach as “Britain’s busiest bus route” with over 9 million passengers a year, its journey can be traced back to 1889 when horse-drawn trams would pick up passengers half a mile down from the Rising Sun. By 1905, the council had electrified the line. By 1949 it changed from tram to bus, and by 1969 it officially gained the title of the 192.

In the last decade, the writer David Scott wrote a poem about the bus. Singer Dave Hulston wrote a whole album about it. Mill readers have told me that Comedian Chris Addison has a stand up routine where he cracks jokes about the journey, and American choreographer Merce Cunningham has a dance inspired by it. Last year, one woman got the entire bus tattooed across her bicep. How is it that one bus route has somehow took over a city’s consciousness?

On Halloween night in 2006, Kat hopped on the 192 with a friend and headed into town. A teenager at the time and living in Stockport, she was wearing a Little Red Riding Hood costume, and her friend was dressed as a maid. The pair sat on the top deck, at the back with the smokers — “smoking on the top was a known thing, it was almost respectful to the people at the bottom,” she says. After a few minutes, a cigarette butt fell on her friend's costume, and her dress went up in flames. Nobody was particularly alarmed. “It was just like, normal rules didn’t apply,” Kat laughs.

Kat and the other born and bred Stopfordians I speak to go far to explain the 192’s allure. Many tell me that riding the night bus to go underage drinking, or even just to buy chicken caesar wraps from the all-night Spar in town, was a local right of passage. Leanne, a close friend of mine from Offerton who first introduced me to the infamous bus, describes the journey as one where “it always felt like anything could happen… encouraging a level of alertness that most bus journeys don’t require”. This is something that she tells me proved helpful once she’d had a few in town, and had to stay semi-awake until her stop in Hazel Grove.

But it wasn’t just the night bus that attracted chaos. In her teenage years, Kat had a Saturday job at ILVA furniture shop, and rode the 192 to get there. One morning, a man dressed in Nike TNs, with tracksuit bottoms tucked in his socks, got on the bus and started swinging a mop around his head while Gregorian chanting. “Thankfully it was a clean mop,” she tells me. “Honestly, some of the things you’d see.”

But these are memories from the early 2000s — how does the bus’s reputation hold up in the modern day? Lawrence moved to Manchester ten years ago, and has spent the whole decade living along the 192 route, first in Levenshulme, then in Stockport. He tells me that since the move, he’s dropped his old hobby of going to the theatre. “I think it’s cause I get the 192 alot,” he says.

Lawrence describes the riders of the 192 as “a bunch of people needing to get places, who are encountering people living with greater intensity than they are." Last time he boarded the bus, a man in his 60s in crutches boarded a few stops after him, and started one by one going up to every passenger and asking them if they were alright. “And you had to make eye contact with him,” Lawrence explains, “and say ‘yeah, yeah, I’m alright’.” These sorts of people don’t always rub up well against the other passengers. At the stop outside the Apollo, he tells me that you’ll often get a crowd of “40 to 50 somethings in neatly pressed jeans, people who’ve been to see Van Morrison, who’ve never been on a bus before in their lives,” and who don’t necessarily gel well with the 192’s regular clientele.

And perhaps no one can speak better to that particular group of people than Angela — a hero in our story. A driver of the 192 for the last six years, she’s one of those rare people who speaks with absolute delight about her job. “It’s one of the best routes, really!” she tells me. Why? “I don’t really know!” she laughs. She tells me about the 192 regulars, in particular a woman named Clare, who recently passed away. Everybody knew her, Angela says, and she was always chatting to people, or trying to get all the passengers to join in singing on the bus. “Sweet Caroline was her favourite.”

Angela has “many, many, many,” fond memories up and down the route, but her favourite was the time she “basically T-boned a car” with a “fully loaded bus.” (Though she clarifies that nobody was hurt.) “That’s probably one of the best ones I can think of,” she says. She also tells me that her bus has been attacked on numerous occasions with eggs and fireworks, and that she’s been personally attacked while getting her cash tray — though she remains unwaveringly joyful while recounting these stories.

I ask Angela if the 192 has changed in the six years that she’s been driving it, and she answers, firmly, “no”. The new Bee Network buses have smoke detectors now, and the card machines work better, but that’s about it. This is the resounding view of the bus. Lawrence tells me that even the steady gentrification of Levenshulme and Stockport hasn’t affected the route at all — the newcomers all have cars anyway.

And it seems that people like it that way. “I think it’s loved,” Kat says of the 192. “I think it’s scary, but that’s what makes Manchester Manchester. I don’t know if it’s still the same. Part of me hopes it is.” And Leanne, my Stopfordian friend, without whom I might not have heard of the 192, has perhaps the nicest review of all, though obviously I’m biased. “The thing that — for me, at least — always did happen, was it delivered me home safely,” she says. “So based on that, and the life lessons, it gets five stars.”

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