Some travel stories involve ancient temples or once-in-a-lifetime safaris. Others involve a bus shelter in South East London that woke up wearing a hat. This one is firmly in the second camp.
The scene: Brockley, a leafy, well-liked pocket of the capital between Lewisham and New Cross. A commuter walking to work one early September morning spotted something odd — four orange traffic cones, perched neatly on the roof of a bus stop. Not dumped, not tossed, but arranged. Straight lines, rectangular formation, almost geometric. Somebody, it seems, cared.
The obvious explanation is that a group of local teenagers, probably the worse for wear on something or other, decided the shelter needed decorating. But here's what makes it fun to think about: the odds of throwing four cones up there and having all of them land upright and neatly spaced are slim. The likelier scenario is a small crew operation — one person climbing on the roof, cones passed up from below, then a careful bit of arranging. That's teamwork, planning and follow-through. Jokingly, the walker who found them wondered whether whoever did it had channelled those skills into their GCSEs too.
There's also a running joke baked into the piece: the "Cone Catchers of Catford" — a nod to nearby Catford's reputation for cone-related mischief — supposedly closing in on Brockley, so the cones hid in plain sight, on a roof, in a group. Safety in numbers.
Then comes the best part, and the reason the whole thing feels very London: the writer predicted the installation would survive about 30 days. It didn't make it through the night. By the next morning the cones were gone. The whole thing lasted less than 24 hours — a pop-up exhibition, as it was dubbed, open for one evening only.
Why bother writing about four cones on a bus shelter? Because this is exactly the kind of small, unexplained, faintly absurd thing that makes walking through London's neighbourhoods rewarding. Brockley is a good place for it, too — an area known for its independent cafés, the weekend Brockley Market, street art around Lewisham Way and one of the city's nicer common spaces in Hilly Fields, with views back toward the City. You don't plan a trip around a piece of incidental street silliness, but you do remember it. And it captures something honest about the place: a sense of humour, a bit of mischief, and a community that notices what's on its streets and talks about it.
If you find yourself in South East London, take the slow route rather than the bus. The cones may be gone, but the walk — through Brockley's terraces, past the market stalls, up to Hilly Fields — is the kind of thing that reliably produces its own small surprises. Keep an eye on the rooftops.
Reporting via Kuriositas.