The Oyster Periphery Zone (OPZ)

My Oyster Zip card will expire come the end of September, and with it, I'll no longer get free travel on buses. As someone who loves travelling around London, this will be very inconvenient, and, along with getting my National Insurance number and completing my A Levels, the expiration will be another indication that I'm growing up faster than I would want to.

There are, however, several places that I wouldn't ever dream of going to that suddenly look appealing - these are the locations outside of London which can be accessed by bus. Sure, most of these locations can be accessed by train, but there's nothing better than a random bus trip to a place you've never heard of, to take in the various local sites. 

As a South London-focused blogger, I'll go through the destinations south of the river that will soon cost money to visit - however, that doesn't mean I'll go to all of them. I'll blog about those I will visit in a new series, the Oyster Periphery Zone (OPZ).

As regular readers will know, me launching a new series doesn't guarantee it will ever come to completion - but there's reason to be optimistic: I have visited two locations, albeit one of them was during my exams, so I'm unsure if I'll finish writing up that post or if I should revisit the area. The second place, however, I've just recently visited, and will try to sort out as soon as possible.

Here is a list of possible locations you may read about in this series:

• Dorking
• Caterham(-on-the-Hill)
• Warlingham
• Redhill
• Tatsfield
• Westerham
• Esher
• Dartford

But again, that list isn't a list of places I'm going to visit necessarily. Some of them I will, for sure, others I may not. And there are various other locations on the table, too - that list is merely meant to be a taster of the kinds of places I will encounter. Mainly, sleepy commuter towns in Surrey and Kent, and only Surrey and Kent, because I want to focus on South London's border areas.

If you know any areas I could visit, or if there are any particular locations you recommend, please tell me and I will consider them. The scope truly is limitless: even HM Highdown and Downview could theoretically be included in this series. And yes, that is also the only place I am ruling out of blogging contention, because if I wrote a blogpost about a prison complex, what would that do? I'm not exactly encouraging people to visit.

Another worthy point that could be added is that whilst my Oyster Zip expiring means no more free bus travel, I also lose out on visiting the truly far-flung parts of the rail network for relatively cheap costs. When I went to Watford Junction for a Millwall game, I paid merely £2.10 for my rail fare, despite Watford Junction being outside of the fare zone. 

So theoretically, I could also include locations outside of the regular zones, like any stations south of Redhill and Epsom, as part of this series. Admittedly, Epsom is already part of the regular list, and south of Redhill there are only four applicable stations, one of them being Gatwick, and again how am I meant to write about Gatwick, there's only the airport there and that wouldn't make for a fun blogpost.

Admittedly, I have no clue how I'll go about visiting and writing about these places, so the only thing I can really do at this point is...visit them. Surrey and Kent have a lot of history and interesting quirks to them, and I'm starting university in late September, so I have more than enough time. How exciting.