As Sunday 30th March 2008 dawned in London it brought mild, warm winds and beautiful sunshine.- as if to make up for the fact that this particular day was only 23 hours long as the clocks have just moved forward! Jumping on the bike I pedalled into the centre of London and crossed over to the South Bank using Jubilee Bridge, which is where this episode starts. The South Bank is a term used to describe 'Queens Walk' which starts at the GLC building and the London Eye (millennium wheel) and heads East along the Thames. At every step are street entertainers, restaurants, theatres and more. As you'll see, the sunshine brought out many Londoners to enjoy this first sense of Spring. (I use the title 'South Bank Show' as it was a popular arts programme on British TV in the 80s and 90s).

If there is a slightly 'hurried' feel to this week's episode, it's because I endured the falling sleet and snow of a Bank Holiday Monday (24 March 2008) to bring you these pictures, fearing all the time for the health of the video camera seeing as how electronics and water rarely mix! So, you may not find this episode relaxing but you should find my visit to Fleet Street full of the most interesting buildings - of churches nestled in amongst the public houses, of offices ancient and modern, and of ex-printing works of well known British newspapers such as The Times and the Express. The film starts at the Temple end of Fleet Street (close to where last summer's episode 'Temple: It's The Law!' also starts which heads south through Temple Bar). We then walk towards the east end where St. Paul's Cathedral stands.

(This episode has been updated because the original video file was somehow corrupted whilst being uploaded to my podcast service provider. Please accept my apologies if you downloaded this episode twice - this 'updated' version is the one to watch). In this special edition episode I wanted to capture London from the point of view of millions of Londoners as they live and work all around London every day. The best place to to this? From an upstairs seat at the front of a typical red London bus. You’ll be taking a 23 minute near-realtime journey on London bus no. 328. The entire route of the 328 is from Golders Green to Chelsea but this episode picks up the journey from West Hampstead and ends as it arrives in Notting Hill. If you would like to follow the journey you can download appropriate maps from the www.londonlandscape.tv web site. The reason for ‘near’ realtime is that the journey I filmed involved a lot of stopping, so I have edited out unnecessary stop time which has removed 7 minutes from the usual 30-minute journey and makes the episode flow better. What will you see? You will see no world-famous landmarks, no well-known buildings, just London suburbs wealthy and not so wealthy as the bus travels through them. Observe the people, the vehicles, the buildings, the shops. This episode is an exercise in ambiance taking in the ‘ordinariness’ of one day in March 2008. The ambiance is not just visual - for the soundtrack to this episode I have recorded that day’s (14 March 2008) tune across the most popular radio stations in London. They feature, in soundtrack order: BBC London (news / talk / music) Capital Radio (chart music) Heart (middle-of-the-road + chart music) LBC (news / talk / phone-ins) Virgin Radio (rock / classic hits) Choice FM (hip-hop / r&b) Kiss 100 (dance music / youth) Magic (classic hits) Classic FM (classical music) Gaydar Radio (dance / clubbing music) Smooth FM (middle-of-the-road music) XFM (rock / indie music) BBC Radio 4 (news & entertainment). On the LLTV website, each of the above radio stations has a link to its own website where you can find out more. All the above stations give you the ability to listen online but some may be restricted to listeners in the UK only for licensing reasons. These radio stations are amongst the most popular in London by audience size but there are plenty of other stations (around 15 on FM and more than 50 on DAB digital radio) including specialist cultural community stations in various spoken languages from Greek and Polish to Punjabi and Arabic, just about any sort of music genre from pop to jazz, classical to hip-hop, as well as religious stations for christian, jewish, islamic, hindu and sikh faiths. There are radio stations just for kids, for the armed forces, and for the elderly. There’s even a station run by the UK Department for Transport called ‘Traffic Radio’ that just transmits non-stop traffic bulletins. Enjoy the trip! Technical info: In order to get the best picture quality for the smallest download size for such a long episode, the picture size in this episode is 960x540 and the bitrate averages 1485kbps.