Category: Luton

After a little sojourn in Luton Wetherspoons, which is obviously where all the best trips start from, I had a walk to the airport hotel. Some travellers prefer private transfers, but they risk missing several miles of dual carriageway and an abandoned vehicle factory.

This is what was the Arndale Shopping Centre, then renamed the Mall Luton, then Luton Point and since earlier this year, it’s now Frasers Plus which is effectively Sports Direct. This is perhaps one of the nicer areas in Luton, but the shopping centre’s construction in the 1970s destroyed a lot of heritage and has messed up the town’s street lines.

I made a quick stop at Lidl in the Frasers Plus shopping centre because I urgently needed fruit suspended in sugar. I’m not sure I have ever craved fruit so intensely that I felt compelled to rush into Lidl for it, but there we are, life is an exploration.

This is the entrance to Kimpton Road, formerly known as Gallows Road, and I’ve never thought enough about that former bridge crossing there. The mainline railway (formerly known as the Midland Railway) is just behind it, but this separate line was once the Luton & Dunstable branch of the Great Northern Railway. This line ran to Dunstable and beyond, but it was closed down in 1965 which as usual was a sub-optimal decision as Dunstable really could have done with a railway line. That bus in the photo is relevant to this story.

I was standing where the ‘smithy’ is on the map.

That’s where the bus was heading, the former line is now the Luton to Dunstable Busway which opened in 2013 and is apparently the second longest in the world. It’s 13.4 kilometres (8.3 miles) and the guided track is 7.7 kilometres (4.8 miles) of that. I like railways, but there was a good reason not to rebuild this one as the expense was high and it would be difficult to connect it into the main rail network, which is always an optimal aim. It means Dunstable doesn’t have a railway station, but at least they have a guided busway station and that will have to suffice.

The war memorial outside the former Vauxhall Motors works. The factory was bombed in 1940, killing 39 workers and injuring over 40 others, and this memorial was redesigned here when the former buildings were demolished and converted to housing in 2022. Vauxhall car production came to an end in 2002 and those buildings were the ones taken down, with only commercial vehicles made here after that. Although more of that in a moment.

Some of the names from the Great War and I might well come back to this at some point….

For anyone who would like to see the memorial, it’s located opposite Luton Airport Parkway railway station. This is the station I complain about quite regularly, so my loyal readers may already feel they know it personally.

I mentioned that cars were made in Luton until 2002, but commercial vehicle production also came to an end in 2025. The final vehicle made here was a Vauxhall Vivaro completed on 28 March 2025, marking the end of 120 years of production on the site. There is now extensive security to stop the site from being taken over, this was one of the main entrances.

And this was another entrance and I remember the workers piling into these buildings when I was off walking to the airport, it all feels a little sad now.

There is at least still a Vauxhall dealership here.

And this little plaque was put up recently to mark just how many people used to work at the site.

After a little more walking and crossing busy roads I was nearly at the Ibis hotel and this is the Ibis Budget that has been closed for years.

And safely at the Ibis hotel ready for my early morning flight.

I accept that a trip supposedly involving the Balkans has so far featured Luton Wetherspoons, Lidl, a guided busway, an abandoned Vauxhall factory and two Luton hotels. It is perhaps not the most conventional introduction to the delights of the wider Balkans region, but international travel involves a certain amount of administrative build-up.

I am now writing this from Belgrade, though, so we are very nearly at the point where the Balkans finally enter this Balkans trip. The anticipation is almost unbearable. Although, after Luton’s second-longest-in-the-world guided busway, Belgrade has a great deal to live up to.

I decided this morning to walk the three miles or so from Luton Travelodge into the beating heart of Bedfordshire, namely Luton town centre. The Balkans would have to wait a little longer while I completed some important preliminary research into roundabouts, pavement parking and budget fruit salad.

As an aside, I hate this road crossing which is where Dunstable Road meets Chaul End Lane. A driver kindly waved me across, but it’s a roundabout with an unmarked pedestrian crossing just off it. A quick Google search shows that there have been accidents here before, including when a car ploughed into a mother with her pushchair. Is it really too much to ask that pedestrians should be able to cross safely?

The pavements through the Bury Park area presented a different challenge. Cars and vans obstructed numerous sections of the route, making progress difficult for anyone using a wheelchair, mobility scooter or pushchair. I have blurred the number plate of this particular car, although its parking position was making no comparable effort to preserve anyone else’s privacy, dignity or indeed access to the pavement. Anyone without restricted mobility could squeeze past most of the obstructions by stepping into the road or turning sideways. This is apparently considered an adequate local accessibility strategy and it’s perhaps all a bit sub-optimal.

Anyway, today is not a day for complaining, despite what appearances might suggest and I think that’s the limit of today’s drama.

And there’s the White House, which is Luton’s JD Wetherspoon outlet that I don’t need to write about again, it’s been recorded on numerous locations on this blog including at https://www.julianwhite.uk/luton-the-white-house/. There are limits to how many times one building can be presented to readers as a fresh discovery, even on this blog.

I think it’s fair to say that ordering fruit salad for breakfast isn’t usual for me, but sometimes the body craves this sort of cuisine. I mean, mine never has before, but variety is the spice of life and all that. After a brief stay of five hours drinking the unlimited coffee costing just £1.49, I felt sufficiently rested.

Properly nourished, extensively caffeinated and still some distance from the Balkans, I was finally ready to walk towards the airport hotel. I accept that this series is approaching its stated geographical subject with no great sense of urgency, but travel is all about the journey and all that. Unfortunately, quite a lot of this particular journey still involved Luton, but there we go.

I’ve had a slightly less productive weekend than I would have liked, which has meant I didn’t complete some blog posts that I had intended so they’ll have to wait for a few weeks as I’m now off on my next little research trip. Good intentions and all that. It’s the trip I mentioned some weeks ago to explore some of the Balkans, mainly by train, with my friend Jonathan which will let me visit a couple of European countries that I haven’t visited before. Much as I like exciting content, I’m hoping for not too much railway or border related drama.

My ever helpful friend Liam drove me to Luton Travelodge and we stopped off at the nearby McDonald’s. For reasons unknown I decided that I needed melon balls, which Liam seemed to be quite confused by, alongside a hamburger. I never knew that McDonald’s did melon balls, but they were rather delicious.

There was exciting drama, and I say drama as I haven’t been out much for the last few weeks, when the McDonald’s crew member told Liam that he had driven to the wrong window. It was the window he was told to drive to, so there’s nothing like a little internal confusion to pass the time with. Poor Liam had to deal with both that, as well as why I had ordered melon balls….. Incidentally, I’m impressed at how busy McDonald’s was at just before midnight on a Bank Holiday Monday and there seemed to be little prospect of peace for the crew members, particularly while customers were being circulated between windows under conflicting instructions.

But with that, I was safely in Luton. I would add that I accept this isn’t a riveting blog post, but it’s part of the story of the trip and so it’s going in. If every travel account began beside the Adriatic in glorious sunshine (in the shade obviously), nobody would fully appreciate the considerable administrative effort required to reach it.

Lovely as Luton is, I try not to spend too much time there, but as my flight was arriving relatively late I wouldn’t have time to get back to Norwich. So, as the Thistle seems to have gone up in price, I went for this poorly reviewed little arrangement located near to the railway station. One of the reasons that I ignored the reviews is that booking.com noted that there was a high number of guests who rebooked there, which is usually a positive sign.

I had a ten minute wait at reception but this didn’t concern me as there was air conditioning in this area and I was too hot. After several days in France, I was prepared to tolerate quite significant administrative failure provided something kept blowing cold air at me. There was a phone number to ring in the event of an emergency, so I eventually rang that and a team member came out to complete the check-in process.

A quick look at the fire plan shows the general lack of decadence about the room size, but I like hotels such as this as they’re cheap, affordable and don’t include luxuries that I don’t need. Like windows. There are people who want boutique furnishings, mood lighting and an inspirational selection of cushions from their hotel room. I mostly want somewhere clean to sleep with a plug socket and a temperature that doesn’t make me irritable.

The basic room which was clean, at a temperature that was acceptable to me although not overly cold, and which I thought was entirely satisfactory.

I’d stay here again, I didn’t have any noise issues either internally or externally, although it would have been surprising to have any of the latter given that there was no window. The prices were low (the room was around £35 for the night), the staff member was polite and I was near to JD Wetherspoon and the railway station. For anyone that likes comfort, space and a window, then this is perhaps a little sub-optimal and that would explain the rather poor reviews.