Fly from Stansted airport...get there from Liverpool...
How awful it is...
I chose the cheapest method to get there, by coach. Now, to be blunt, you get what you pay for, so I am not going to moan about the lack of leg room, the lack of sleep or anything else that was endured on this trip up to Stansted and back again. I have done the worse my travels by coach.
If you are departing from or arriving in London by long distance coach, there is a good chance that you will end up in Victoria Coach Station.
Victoria Coach Station was built in the 1930′s and surprisingly the building is listed. Goodness knows why, the interior has not really changed since the mid 1980′s, the whole place feels awful and unappealing.
As a first welcome into London (my first visit was in 2004), it really does not get much worse than this. Some forgotten spot, seemingly miles away from the nearest tube station, and with separate sites for the departing and arriving coaches, this relatively small coach terminus (and it is small compared to some of the behemoths I have seen worldwide) is utterly bewildering and unhelpful. Trying to find staff is impossible and wanting any information can be tricky. I know the score, but to someone who is new here, Victoria Coach Station is just bad news. Plus it smells. I cannot put my finger on it, but there is a particular musk in the air. And it is an unappealing scent.
Victoria Coach Station is also seemingly expensive, for what is one of the cheaper ways to enter and exit the city. Food and drink is extortionate here, plus you have to pay 30p to use the (disgusting) toilets (disgraceful).
In the end, there is not much that is nice to say about Victoria, so I will keep my mouth shut. It is a safer thing to do. To be blunt, no one chooses the coach for its lifestyle statement, you choose it because you cannot afford to use the train and/or the flight is just too inconvenient/expensive. While my journey to Malmo would have been completed by fly, the cost of the train to London and Stansted airport (plus the relative bargain that coach travel is) meant that I was always going to take the poor man’s option.
Actually fly to the Malmo takes one and half hour, journey by coach to the London Victoria coach station from Liverpool takes overnight (!) – 7(!!!) hours! Journey from Victoria coach station to the Stansted airport takes one and half hour!
