David Bowie was one of those singers who made it through to the mainstream and when he died of cancer at the age of sixty-nine, having just failed to reach his biblical allotment of three score years and ten, politicians of all different stripes were lining up to praise him even if they had little time for his music when he was alive. People spontaneously wanted to express their grief at his passing and many of them went to a Brixton mural to do so.

For many visitors to London, one of the iconic sights of a trip to the capital is a traditional London red double-decker bus. Known as a Routemaster, these buses was designed in the late 1940s and manufactured until 1968 when production stopped, mainly because their open back doors – which were one of the attractions for many Londoners – made them unusable by those in a wheelchair. They were still used on many routes until the early twenty-first century and some can be seen occasionally on routes such as the Routemaster Heritage Route 15 which runs from Blackwell to Trafalgar Square.