London

When Billy Bragg did his Londoncentric version of ‘Route 66’, he paid homage to the A13, recreating that rock ’n’ roll spirit on the trunk road that runs from Wapping to Southend. Oddly, if Bragg had travelled a few miles anticlockwise around the A406 to the neighbouring A12 – that giant dual carriageway that takes you from Wanstead to Suffolk – he’ll have found that east London already had its own route 66 in the shape of a long-established bus route.

Running along an eight-mile stretch of the appropriately named Eastern Avenue, route 66 is a 45-minute tour through intra-London migration, gentrification and ‘white flight’, one that’s far from the vibrant clatter of E1 and closer to what George Orwell described as ‘the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London… sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England’. Feature continues

The route starts in the shabby gentility of Leytonstone, where the large Victorian terraced houses once provided a semi-rural refuge for those fleeing the East End in the late nineteenth century. From here it’s straight past the Green Man Roundabout and on to the A12, an arterial road started in 1925 which has since been one of the key paths taken out of the city by generations of East Enders, each wave leaving vestiges of migration behind them.

Wanstead, surrounded by forest, retains a distinctly villagey feel, but you’re soon under the North Circular Road and into more hard-bitten suburbia. The classic art deco underground station at Redbridge welcomes you to the cabbie capital of London; less than a mile later you reach Gants Hill tube station – the grand, uplit interior of which is apparently modelled on Moscow’s Metro – and you see the Chabad Lubavitch Centre, a community centre that announces you’re in one of the capital’s largest Jewish settlements, mainly Ashkenazim who left the East End in the 1950s.