For just over three years, Birmingham’s number 11 bus lost its coveted title as Europe’s longest urban bus route – and, what’s worse, to an obvious copy-cat.

In June 2013, Transport for the West Midlands (TfWM) introduced the 360 City Circle, a 31.5 mile loop around Coventry. The idea was obviously inspired by the long-standing success of the Birmingham Outer Circle, a 27-mile loop that has been circling Coventry’s larger neighbour since 1926.

It didn’t take, though: in July 2016, TfWM announced that too few passengers were using the 360 to justify the necessary subsidy. And so, that route was broken up, and the number 11 regained its crown.

Indeed, it’s gone from strength to strength. While the 360 was getting fewer than 14,000 passengers a month, the 11 is reported to have more than 50,000 a day. Every 10 minutes or so, if you’re so minded, you can get on a bus somewhere in suburban Birmingham, and spend three hours traveling past 266 stops, 233 educational establishments, 69 leisure and community facilities, 40 pubs, 19 retail centres, six hospitals and a prison.

The route. Image: Centro, via Birmingham Museum & Gallery/Flickr.

I was so minded. So one recent Sunday, I boarded a bus somewhere in North Edgbaston, for no other reason than to get back to where I started. Here’s what I learned.

The Outer Circle is a road as well as a bus

The route follows the A4040, the Birmingham outer ring road. But that isn’t a specially built orbital route: it’s just a bunch of disconnected roads given the same number, so that you can, if you fancy, circumnavigate the city.

As a result, in a few places, the bus route suddenly doubles back on itself:

The route around Cotteridge. Image: National Express West Midlands.

The Outer Circle pretends to be two routes, but isn’t

Technically, there are two number 11s. The 11A circumnavigates the city, running from Harborne to Kings Heath to Acocks Green to Stechford to Erdington to Handsworth to Harborne again.

My bus, though, was an 11C, which does the same route, but the other way around. If you’re wondering why there’s no 11B, it’s because the letters stand for anti-clockwise and clockwise. You could have an 11B, meaning “backwards”, but that might get confusing.

Anyway: this is really just a single route with two slightly different labels, to get around the fact that destinations aren’t much use on a circular route. It reminds me of Glasgow’s insistence that its subway has an inner circle and an outer circle, rather than a single circle with two directions.

In western Birmingham there’s a station named after a bus route

Winson Green Outer Circle is a stop on the Midlands Metro tram route. Winson Green is the name of the area; Outer Circle is the name of the bus you can change for there.

I’m not certain this is unique, but it must at least be unusual. London stations don’t name themselves after their interchanges with road services, otherwise you’d end up with nightmarish formulations like ‘Plaistow 69 241 262 325 473’. I mean, imagine the roundels.

The lampposts are colour-coded, sort of

“You get to see all the lampposts colour-coded by area,” occasional CityMetric contributor David Barker told me.

This, it turns out, is a real thing. According to the Birmingham Mail in 2010:

THE humble grey lamppost is set to get a dazzling new lease of life in Birmingham, with communities being invited to pick their own colours.

The dull grey poles can now be replaced with red, greens, blues and blacks or even, at extra cost, a different colour.

The Irish Quarter in Digbeth could go for green, while Caribbean communities in Handsworth might favour a green, yellow and red motif.

Sadly all I spotted on my journey was that the ones in Handsworth are orange. Still, though, it’s a nice thought. If anyone out there has done a map, let me know.

Birmingham’s islands are very disappointing

Birmingham, its fans like to tell the world, has more canals than Venice. This is true (35 miles to 26 miles), though it rather ignores the fact that Birmingham is physically quite a lot bigger than Venice.

Despite this profusion of waterways, the various “islands” the number 11 passes are not nearly as nice as they sound. In the Brummie vocabulary, “island” means “traffic island” – or, to you and me, “roundabout”. Perry Barr Island is not nearly as scenic as its name suggests.

Bromford is a real place

This is quite a personal one, but I’ve never quite been able to believe in the existence of Bromford. It sounds like the sort of place a guy from Romford might make up as his hometown in an attempt to impress a woman posher than he is.

Bromford. Image: Google Maps.

But no, there it is. Huh.

This used to be a nice name, once

Look what I found in Stechford:

No comment.

Brummie roads have a lot of wasted space

Look at that central reservation:

There are loads of roads like that in Birmingham, with big, grassy gaps between the two carriageways. Some of them have trees on them. Some of them just have a big metal barrier.

Things like this seem like they should make the world more scenic. But often, so it feels to me, they just make everything feel a bit windswept.

The spaces were once, someone told me, used for trams. Couldn’t they do that again? Or at least, cycle paths? The current set up just feels like a bit of a waste of space. It’s not like you’re ever going to have a picnic in the middle of the Bristol Road is it?

The route 11 makes southern Birmingham feel like the posh bit

Many of the suburbs on the north side of the city appear, from the bus, to be fairly run down, ex-industrial districts. Those on the south – like Kings Heath, or chocolate-box-y Bourneville – are relatively plush residential areas.

Is this really how the economic geography of the city breaks down, I wondered? Or is it just a function of which route the bus happens to take?

The BBC’s Joey D’Urso suggested it’s a bit of both. On the one hand:

But on the other:

Worthy topic of further bus-based Birmingham research, perhaps.

Traffic is genuinely lower on a Sunday

All the stuff I’d read about the route suggested that it would take as much as three hours to do the whole circle. At the stop I’d got on at (City Road/Fountain Road, if you’re interested), the signs showed journey times up to the eastern suburbs – the furthest point of the route, presumably on the grounds that to go any further you’d be better off taking the bus from the stop across the road. This, they said, was 90 minutes away.

My bus though took just 2hrs21 to do the entire route. Huh. Turns, out roads really are quieter on a Sunday.

Bit disappointing, though. I was hoping for the full three hours.

Ah well, maybe next time. 11A, baby!

Jonn Elledge is the editor of CityMetric. He is on Twitter as @jonnelledge and on Facebook as JonnElledgeWrites. 

Want more of this stuff? Follow CityMetric on Twitter or Facebook.