LONDON A-Z For my second alphabetical visit to unsung suburbs we're off to Bexley, appropriately enough, where three Bs are strung out along two miles of road beyond Eltham. Blackfen, Blendon and Bridgen were still hamlets 100 years ago, then the building of Rochester Way and railway electrification triggered substantial residential growth. The A2 now hugs all three close, hence a local reliance on car culture, but I buzzed from one B to the next on foot instead.
B is for Blackfen
Blackfen is the largest of the three, inasmuch as its possible to divide up the amorphous suburban sprawl hereabouts. The name means ‘dark-coloured marshy district’, which is hardly a ringing endorsement but originally all this was woodland and farmland rather than real estate to flog. A few cottages existed near what's now the main crossroads and also a pub, The Woodman, which opened to serve rural drinkers in 1845. It'd be plausible to believe the current building was the original were it not for the date on the front, 1931 being the year development ignited locally. So keen were the owners to maintain trade that they built the new pub behind the old one before demolishing it, which has proved fortuitous because there's now room for an enormous beer terrace out front plus a row of timber sheds sponsored by Beavertown. The pub's owners have renamed it George Staples Sidcup, this because George Staples was the original publican in 1845 and because nobody's heard of Blackfen.
Blackfen has a lengthy run of shops, one end a proper redbrick parade circa 1938 and the other a more motley assortment of independent businesses. The motor trade features heavily should you need a used white van or alloy wheels, also haircare and schoolwear should your littl'un need togging out. The busiest cafe appears to be inside the Community Library, which is as it should be. Shops which provide an insight into the local population include a pie and mash shop, two funeral directors and Tonics!, a self-professed retro menswear shop for former mods, scooterists, skins, casuals or rudeboys. My favourite throwback is 1950s bakery J Ayre, not just because they display an 01 telephone number on the exterior but because they still bake gypsy tarts, and if BestMate ever needs a lift I drop in and buy him some from his childhood local. He also remembers when the Co-op was a Safeway, indeed Bexley's first large superstore, but not when it was the Odeon cinema before that. So quickly was Wellington Parade erected that they didn't wait to demolish all of Mr Gwillim's cottage, which is why you can still see its roof perched atop Bulldog Windows and Oscar's chippy.
If it still feels relatively quiet round here that's because urban planners chose not to add a junction to the A2 when the dual carriageway was upgraded in 1969. This calms the local streets somewhat, of which Days Lane is a repurposed country lane and Wellington Avenue one of the first new roads. It's a very Bexley thing that most houses have a garage round the back accessed via a lowly communal drive, the lack of garages up front allowing the developers to fit more houses in. At the heart of all this is The Oval, an eye-shaped green faced on one side by a lengthy Mock Tudor shopping parade. It's one of my favourite outer suburban foci, a genuinely attractive retail curve providing a desirable focus for the surrounding neighbourhood. It's also great for local branding, hence includes the Oval Cafe, Oval Brasserie, Oval Fish Bar, Oval Pet Centre and Oval Village convenience store. A road behind The Oval is called The Triangle, should I ever be looking for a series of geometric streets to review.
Blackfen's such a 1930s construct that it contains only four locally-listed buildings, and just one of these is over 100 years old. My favourite is the small concrete block behind the bus stop at the foot of Wellington Avenue which has a periscope-like metal vent protruding from its roof. It's actually an air raid shelter, and I'd hope there's a much larger space beneath the verge because you'd barely get two bunkbeds inside what's visible. Note the brief brick wall erected just in front of the entrance, a simple insurance policy that would have helped shield those inside from direct blast damage. Also locally-listed is the rare Edward VIII pillar box at the eastern end of Tyrell Avenue, accessed via a thin concrete footbridge across the tarmac chasm of East Rochester Way. The folk whose semis face the A2 direct have deliberately chosen Blackfen's shortest straw. If you're local (or just interested), Blackfen Past and Present is an excellent online resource that puts most London suburbs to shame.
B is for Blendon
Heading east Blackfen blends invisibly into Blendon, Bexley not being a borough that erects neighbourhood signs. The name originally means “the farm of the people who live by the dark water”, again suggesting there's something a bit gloomy about the groundwater round here. Blendon does have a junction onto the A2 so is inherently more car-focused, including two roundabouts, a Shell garage and a large Audi showroom. Most conspicuous is what looks like an abandoned chapel but is actually a small cottage with a spire on top, a folly first plonked here in the 1760s on the edge of Danson Park. It was designed by Capability Brown to cap the view across the lake from the big house, but that line of sight's now blocked off by three rows of houses and a dual carriageway leaving Chapel House looking somewhat forlorn. The dry cleaner at number 266 retired last year and her son is reopening the premises as a micropub called The Dog House in the spring.
The other out-of-place building by the roundabout is a turrety cottage, recently sold. This used to be the West Lodge for a large crenelated villa, Blendon Hall, built in 1763 as a country retreat set in extensive landscaped grounds. In 1929 the estate was inevitably sold off for housing, and because nobody wanted to buy the mansion in the middle it was demolished four years later. Walking the 88 acres today you'd never guess these upmarket avenues were once a rich man's parkland, although the twin lines of linden trees at the foot of The Avenue are actually a leftover from a path linking the Boat House to the Bath House. As for the lakes, formed by damming a local stream, they've since been filled in and replaced by two dippy cul-de-sacs called Beechway and The Sanctuary. Whilst virtually all of the houses here are big semis the estate also includes a few art moderne anomalies, one pair curved and the other not, and why on earth did they not build more than four of these architectural beauties? In 2007 a small hole opened up in a garden on Beechway, and when an archaeological team went down they found a narrow waterproof chamber that once ran the full length of the Hall.
B is for Bridgen
The last of the trio, and least well-known, is Bridgen. Like Blackfen and Blendon it was originally a smallhamlet, and it must still exist because TfL once produced a bus spider map for it. In its day it would have been a brief run of cottages where the road climbs a sudden rise, and still forms a noticeable break in the continuum of 1930s semis. One building looks like it was formerly a shop, one cottage displays a plaque dated 1827 and the flinty hall at the top of the hill is Bridgen's old infant school. Again there used to be a Georgian mansion here (a "handsome and spacious" pile called Bridgen Place) and again no trace remains because the estate's been turned over to housing. As for the pub on the corner, this started out in the 17th century as the Anchor and Cable, became the Blue Anchor in the 18th and is now just The Anchor. Alas in 1928 it was completely rebuilt because the Dartford Brewery realised a yokel-hole was totally inappropriate for hundreds of suburban incomers, so these days they serve smothered steak and spirits rather than a slice of Stuart history. One particular inn sign once led locals to nickname the pub The Snake and Pickaxe.
There is a bridge in Bridgen where the road to Bexley Village crosses the River Shuttle, a brief span originally called Gad Bridge. You can still slip off the road here and follow the river into what's left of Bexley Park Woods, passing what I consider to be southeast London's finest earthy meanders. Amid the trees on the north bank, best approached in sensible footwear, is a slab-topped concrete culvert out of which flows the half-mile Bridgen Stream. That's the buried river which once fed the lakes back at Blendon Hall, and here's where it joins the Shuttle which earlier drained the lower slopes of Blackfen. These three Bs really are connected and not just by road, by water too. The 132 bus also passes through Blackfen, Blendon and Bridgen, should you want to experience all of this in seven minutes flat.
Pub quizzes in Rutland Sunday: The Royal Duke, Oakham (1st Sunday of the month); The Old Pheasant, Glaston (last) Monday: The Catmose Club, Oakham; The Fox, North Luffenham Tuesday: The George & Dragon, Seaton (1st); The White Lion, Whissendine (1st); The Crown, Uppingham (alternate) Wednesday: The Grainstore, Oakham (1st); The Hornblower, Oakham (1st); The Wheatsheaf, Oakham (3rd); Royal Oak, Duddington (last), The Sun Inn, Cottesmore (last) Thursday: The Plough, Greetham; The Black Bull, Market Overton (last); The Vaults, Uppingham (last); The Horse & Jockey, Manton (occasional)
Times when 'London will be hit by five days of snow' according to Time Out 27th January: starting at 6am on Tuesday until 9am 27th/28th January: from 10pm and go on until 9am on Wednesday 29th January: from 12am until 10am 29th/30th January: watch out for the white stuff from 11pm on Thurs night until 10am 31st January/1st February: one final flurry from 11pm on Saturday lasting until 9am on Sunday
The largest settlements in Greenland by population 20,000: Nuuk 4000-6000: Sisimiut, Ilulissat 2000-4000: Qaqortoq, Aasiaat, Maniitsoq 1000-2000: Tasiilaq, Uummannaq, Narsaq, Paamiut, Nanortalik, Upernavik
Aircraft that entered passenger service 50 years ago today: Concorde (LHR → BAH, CDG → GIG)
Number 1 albums whose titles were 5 letters or less 1960s: Help 1970s: Ram, Hello, Tusk 1980s: Duke, Sky 2, Dare, Shaky, Fame, War, True, Touch, Alf, So, Bad, Faith, Blast, Wild 1990s: Doubt, Seal, Stars, Diva, Up, Jam, Suede, Janet, Very, Come, Songs, Pulse, Life, Older, Load, K, Spice, Glow, Blur, Pop, Ultra, Blue, Five 2000s: Rise, Play, Crush, Music, Kid A, Iowa, The ID, Fever, Let Go, G4, X&Y, Ta-Dah, Magic, Konk, Forth, JLS, Echo 2010s: Lungs, Loud, MDNA, Sing, Ora, Babel, Red, Home, AM, Prism, Girl, Stars, III, Title, Views, Blond, Walls, Human, Now, Si, Love, Amo, Lover, Kind 2020s: Calm, Edna, Disco, Weird, WL, Sour, Donda, FTHC, Crash, We, XXV, N K-Pop, Guts, I/O, Tangk, Yummy, Gary, Brat, GNX, Music, Koko, More, Idols, Play
21st century years with 53 Mondays: 2001, 2007, 2012, 2018, 2024, 2029, 2035, 2040, 2046, 2052, 2057, 2063, 2068, 2074, 2080, 2085, 2091, 2096
Presenters of over 200 episodes of Play School Still with us: Carol Chell, Johnny Ball, Chloe Ashcroft, Miranda Connell, Fred Harris, Don Spencer, Lionel Morton, Carol Ward, Carol Leader, Floella Benjamin, Stuart McGugan, Derek Griffiths, Ben Thomas No longer with us: Rick Jones, Brian Cant, Julie Stevens, Sarah Long
Atolls of the Chagos Islands: Blenheim Reef, Diego Garcia, Egmont Islands, Great Chagos Bank, Peros Banhos, Salomon Islands, Speakers Bank
Radio 1 weekday daytime DJ lineups 1967: Tony Blackburn, Pete Murray, Jimmy Young, Simon Dee, Dave Cash, Pete Brady, Don Moss, David Symonds 1976: Noel Edmonds, Tony Blackburn, Paul Burnett, David Hamilton 1986: Mike Read, Simon Bates, Gary Davies, Steve Wright, Bruno Brookes 1996: Chris Evans, Simon Mayo, Lisa I'Anson, Nicky Campbell, Mark Goodier 2006: Chris Moyles, Jo Whiley, Colin & Edith, Scott Mills 2016: Nick Grimshaw, Clara Amfo, Scott Mills, Greg James 2026: Greg James, Rickie & Melvin and Charlie, Matt & Mollie, Katie & Jamie
Countries whose flags are formed of equal stripes 2 horizontal: Indonesia, Monaco, Poland, Ukraine 3 horizontal: Armenia, Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Gabon, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Russia, Sierra Leone, Yemen 3 vertical: Andorra, Belgium, Chad, Côte d'Ivoire, France, Guinea, Ireland, Italy, Mali, New Caledonia, Nigeria, Peru, Romania, Saint Barthelmy, Saint Martin 4 horizontal: Mauritius
Most popular names for pets Cats: Luna, Bella, Milo, Simba, Nala, Oreo, Willow, Tigger, Daisy, Loki Dogs: Poppy, Luna, Bella, Daisy, Teddy, Milo, Ruby, Rosie, Alfie, Buddy
Zone 2 stations without TfL services: Brixton, Deptford, Drayton Park, East Dulwich, Essex Road, Herne Hill, Loughborough Junction, North Dulwich, Nunhead, Putney, Queenstown Road (Battersea), South Bermondsey, St Johns, Wandsworth Town
Most profitable UK companies 1990: BT, BP, Shell, British Gas, Hanson, BAT, Grand Metropolitan, ICI, Glaxo, BTR 2025: Shell, BP, HSBC, Tesco, Lloyds, Unilever, AstraZeneca, Rio Tinto, Vodafone, J Sainsbury
Months by length 28 or 29 days: February 30 days: April, June, September, November 30 days 23 hours: March 31 days: January, May, July, August, December 31 days 1 hour: October
Scottish monarchs (1057-1603): 6 Jameses, 3 Alexanders and Roberts, 2 Malcolms and Davids, and 1 Donald, Duncan, Edgar, John, Margaret, Mary and William
First trains on weekdays
Circle: 0439 Hammersmith - Aldgate
Piccadilly: 0449 Osterley - Heathrow T4
District: 0442 Ealing Common - Ealing Broadway
Central: 0456 Loughton - Epping
Metropolitan: 0500 Wembley Park - Baker Street
Hammersmith & City: 0502 Barking - Hammersmith
Jubilee: 0505 Wembley Park - Stratford
Northern: 0512 East Finchley - Mill Hill East
Bakerloo: 0515 Stonebridge Park - Harrow & Wealdstone
Victoria: 0521 Seven Sisters - Brixton
Waterloo & City: 0600 Waterloo - Bank
26 MPs elected in the 1826 General Election: Clinton James Fynes Clinton, William Tyrwhitt-Drake, Thomas Tyrwhitt-Drake, Thomas Assheton Smith II, Wilson Aylesbury Roberts, Horace Beauchamp Seymour, Charles Kemeys Kemeys Tynte, Fulk Greville Howard, Peregrine Cust, Edmund Pollexfen Bastard, Sir Denham Jephson-Norreys, Samuel Trehawke Kekewich, Major-General Frederick Ponsonby, Charles Delaet Waldo Sibthorp, William Huskisson, Frank Frank, Gibbs Crawfurd Antrobus, Lancelot Shadwell, Abel Rous Dottin, Wadham Wyndham, Bingham Baring, Dugdale Stratford Dugdale, Masterton Ure, Pownoll Bastard Pellew, Sir John Poo Beresford, Horace Twiss
This is Andrew's constituency HQ in Romford.
It's called Margaret Thatcher House and it's in Western Road, just behind the Mercury Mall.
Outside are four big posters of Andrew, two plaques and five flags. Andrew is a self-confessed flag fanatic and Chair of the Flags and Heraldry All-Party Parliamentary Group, so it's no surprise to see a proliferation of poles outside the building. Two Union Flags hang from the building itself while the central red, white and blue is flanked by a St George's cross and the flag of Essex. Andrew is 100% convinced that Romford should be in Essex, even though it hasn't been since before he was born, and last year spoke lengthily in Parliament proposing that "Havering Belongs in Essex – Not Greater London". Andrew also loves to use the coat of arms of the long-defunct Municipal Borough of Romford so it appears on his poster amid the flags... and also in pride of place above the front door.
Margaret Thatcher came to open the building on 17th March 2005 after the previous Tory HQ burnt down. She was described on the day as "a bit frail", but still got stuck in with a shovel to plant a tree in Coronation Gardens. The blue plaque by the door isn't official, it says Romford Conservative Association around the edge, but it does describe our former PM as The Rt. Hon. The Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven L.G. O.M. F.R.S. because it's a very Andrew thing to be properly correct about official titles. Also the opening day just happened to be Andrew's birthday, which I doubt was a coincidence, and last March his constituency colleagues threw him a special St Patrick's Day party at which he danced to Steps in front of several portraits of the Iron Lady. They won't be hosting one again.
As yet the posters of Andrew haven't been removed because it takes time to react to a sudden defection. Andrew's done a much swifter job on his own website, however, which he took down yesterday and it now redirects to his page at parliament.uk. Here's some of what you're missing.
• Andrew’s interest in politics started from a young age, joining the Conservative Party at the age of fourteen. He was elected Chairman of the Romford Young Conservatives at sixteen and went on to become a Councillor for the Chase Cross Ward in 1990.
• Andrew belonged to a small group of Conservative 'Spartans', who voted against the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement each time it was put before the House.
• "I recently conducted an MP's Opinion Poll, receiving responses from over 400 residents in the Romford constituency. An impressive 94% of participants voted in favour of granting Havering independence from City Hall. This is a clear mandate from our community, signaling the desire for change and self-determination."
• Known as one of Westminster’s most patriotic M.P.s, Andrew has always believed the Union Flag should be proudly flown from all public buildings across the U.K.
• "The 'woke' agenda has made its way into so many of our national institutions, businesses, the Church, our media and universities. I believe it is time to address this, which is why I am launching the Romford 'Woke Watch' initiative - a platform designed for local people to voice their concerns and combat this growing self-loathing by an elite minority."
• In 2022, he launched a campaign to play the National Anthem on BBC every evening, unfortunately they have not done so yet but GB News now play it at 6am each morning before live programming commences.
Even in 2002 Andrew was being described "a right-wing populist", so it's not hard to see why he might have switched to Reform. It is a tad self-serving though, having been elected as Romford's Conservative MP at every election since 2001 and now suddenly jumping ship to the right-wing party furthest ahead in local polls. Seemingly the straw that broke the camel's back is the ongoing controversy over handing back the Chagos Islands, but not the fact the government are doing it, just that the Conservatives aren't doing enough to stop them.
However, the time has come to put country before party. The failure of the Conservative Party both when in government and more recently in opposition to actively hold the government to account on the issue of Chagossian self-determination and the defence of British sovereignty, represents a clear red line for me.
Also I note that even at the 2024 election, Andrew was promoting himself with a leaflet that made no mention of the Conservative party.
It's very Rosindell to write M.P. as a proper abbreviation.
It's very Rosindell to include two Union Flags and a St George's Cross.
It's very Rosindell to include the coats of arms of the Municipal Borough of Romford, Hornchurch Urban District and Essex.
And it's exceptionally Rosindell to include the names of 14 places within the constituency drilling down to increasingly archaic settlements.
These are the geographical extremes of Andrew's constituency, namely Havering-atte-Bower, Ardleigh Green, Crowlands and an unnamed neighbourhood near St Leonard's Hamlet.
The photos show... N) a proud village sign draped with a backward England flag E) a throwback bakery with a window full of warm sausage rolls W) a glum pebbledash terrace with a flat on the market for £235,000 S) a house on Acacia Avenue with a recently-erected double-flagged flagpole
This is potential Reform territory on all fronts.
The big question is how many other London constituencies might switch to Reform too. The latest poll suggests seven more are currently on track to flip to Farage, all of them in outer east or southeast London.
No General Election is due for three years and an awful lot could happen before then, plus don't underestimate the impact of tactical voting. More likely perhaps is that another Conservative MP will defect, what with the political momentum currently running that way, rather than risk being voted out further down the line. Andrew Rosindell may not be the last London MP to shake Nigel Farage's hand outside Westminster, but he always looked the most likely to defect and oh look, he now has.
Three blokes sat opposite me on the train yesterday, 40-ish, off to the other side of London. And just after they sat down they each opened a bottle of water. One had a bottle of San Pellegrino and the other two each had a bottle of Smart Water whose caps they released with their teeth. I wouldn't normally mention this except that every few minutes throughout the journey they drank a small sip, then another, then another, and I wondered "why are some people so fixated on regular hydration?"
At a later station I looked around the platform and at least half the waiting passengers were carrying a bottle of water. Several were carrying nothing apart from a bottle of water, as if it's the sole essential when they travel. Some had their bottle tucked into the pocket of a bag or rucksack so it was always available. The well-planned ones had refillable bottles, often fairly expensive-looking, but the majority were carrying a plastic bottle they'd either brought with them or bought along the way. I checked the vending machine on the platform and it contained far more bottles of water than any other drink, so plainly this stuff sells.
And as yet another teenager lifted yet another container of clear liquid to their lips I thought "can these people really not go very long without a sip of water?"
You don't need to drink water frequently, I checked. What you do need to do is drink enough.
But although I can find plenty of advice that carrying water with you is a good idea, I can't find anything that suggests you need to sip from it frequently. Where did this idea come from that taking little swigs every few minutes is the healthy thing to do?
It might be from companies that make bottled water in an attempt to sell you more of it. It might be that some people are overly keen to keep thirst at bay. It might be a commonplace misreading of "regularly" for "frequently". It might come from marketing campaigns with a full-on 'hydration' focus in an attempt to make their product feel more essential. It might be that people find comfort in swigging water in much the same way that a cigarette or vaping settles them. It might just be because everyone else is doing it.
Obviously you can not drink for several hours and suffer no ill effects. An hour's abstinence is perfectly fine, even four or five hours without a drop touching your lips because you're getting on with your life. Overnight we drink nothing for ages while we're asleep and nobody recommends setting the alarm for 4am for a quick glug.
» When I was at school all we had to drink each day was a small beaker of water with our lunch, and we all turned out fine.
» I went out for seven hours yesterday and drank nothing, and sure the first thing I did when I got home was get a drink but where's the harm?
» People who keep popping into shops for water are no healthier than those who don't, just poorer.
» The human race didn't die out before the concept of hydration was invented, do get a grip.
Were it summer the risk of dehydration might be tangible but it's mid-January for heaven's sake, suggesting bottle-carrying is a reflex action rather than a necessity. It ought to be possible to go without for a few hours, say while travelling from one building with a tap to another building with a tap, rather than effectively being addicted to swallowing on the way.
And yet sippy people are everywhere, clutching their bottles and entirely beholden to the contents. But why?
London's next dead bus 472: North Greenwich to Abbey Wood Location: southeast London, outer Length of journey: 9 miles, 40 minutes
The 472 is one of London's 100 busiest bus routes and carries 6 million passengers a year. It dies this weekend. It's run from North Greenwich to Thamesmead since the Jubilee line extension opened in 1999, and was extended to serve Crossrail at Abbey Wood in 2022. It has five days left.
It's being replaced in its entirety by a new Superloop route, the SL11. Previous Superloop launches have included renumberings of existing routes and reductions in frequency for parallel routes, but this is the first time an entire route's been killed off. It is true that the SL11 will follow the same route as the 472, one twiddle round Woolwich town centre excepted. But because it's an express service it won't be stopping everywhere, skipping 25 of the 472's existing stops, and if one of those is your local you're about to see a worse bus service than before.
I listed 20 downsides to the new arrangements last March when the SL11/472 consultation first launched so won't plough through them again. But I have been out for a last ride with a list of the about-to-be-extinguished stops, so can bring you a list of the places that are due to suffer most when the 472 is deleted.
(between North Greenwich and Charlton station it's all good, the SL11 never skips more than one stop)
Charlton to Woolwich: Inexplicably the SL11 will skip eleven stops between Charlton station and Woolwich station, a distance of two miles. It's great if you want an express journey but less good inbetween where the number of buses per hour drops from 21 to 15. It's much worse if you're travelling to/from North Greenwich because only the 180 does that, hence a cut from 11 buses an hour to just 5. Also there are cycleway-related roadworks along this entire stretch until spring 2027 so good luck trying to run an express service through that.
(between Plumstead and West Thamesmead it's all good, the stops are already a long way apart and the SL11 stops everywhere)
Thamesmead Town Centre: Impractically the SL11 will skip the stop closest to where all the shops are. It'll still stop before and after, but from next week the stop closest to Aldi and Iceland won't be served by any buses heading round the outer Thamesmead loop.
East Thamesmead: The 472 currently stops five times around the loop in the eastern half of Thamesmead. But the SL11 will only stop once, at the very far end, which is great if you live there and a right pain if you don't. Those not fortunate enough to live near Eastgate are about to lose their sole quick connection to Woolwich and North Greenwich, and will also see a 40% cut in direct buses to Abbey Wood station (from 17 buses an hour to 10).
The SL11 will be a strange limited stop bus, sometimes stopping almost everywhere and sometimes stopping barely at all. For many it should mean faster journeys but my commiserations if you live along one of the skipped bits because you won't be cheering next weekend. Expect some very pissed off Charltonites and Thamesmeaders next week, and excited smiles from everyone else whizzing straight past.
Also hello to the muppets who put up route change posters at affected bus stops. They've put up two, one with details of new route SL11 and the other warning "Route 472 will not run". But nowhere on either of the posters have they mentioned the key fact that the SL11 is essentially identical to the 472, just with several stops missed out.
The 472 poster includes the advice "During the daytimes please use alternative bus routes including routes 177, 180, 229, 244 and 401." Alternative routes might also include the SL11 but they haven't mentioned that, nor shown it on the map, just a lot of tangled coloured lines for the aforementioned five routes. There is some smallprint on the map which says "New Superloop express route SL11 serves some stops previously served by route 472" but that's not as explicitly helpful as it could be.
Ideally they could have made different posters for different stops en route with targeted advice rather than broad waffle. At the very least they should have made two different posters - one to display at stops the SL11 will still call at and another for everywhere it won't. But TfL's Map Generation Department only bothers to make one variant these days and slaps it up everywhere, either because they're cash-strapped or because they can't be bothered to inform the public properly.
An occasional series in which I miss a bus, decide to walk to the next stop but then spot something interesting in a place I've not been to before.
Hanger Hill is an actual hill in north Ealing with a crest 70m above sea level. Ealing Broadway's more like 35m, for comparison. The name comes from the Old English word hangra meaning a wooded slope. There used to be a big mansion at the summit called Hanger Hill House, built in 1790 and home to local landowners the Wood family. When they moved away a gelatine entrepreneur's son moved in - Sir Edward Montague Nelson - who in 1901 became Ealing's first Mayor. The house then became the clubhouse for the local golf course but was demolished in the 1930s as part of a swish estate repurposing the fairways for housing. Nothing to see here.
The country lane crossing Hanger Hill was called Hanger Lane, indeed still is, although it's no longer a sylvan rural backwater but a seething stretch of the North Circular. Such are the differences a century makes. At the foot of the northern slope is the concrete maelstrom of the Hanger Lane roundabout, also the subway-infested Hanger Lane station, but today's post is more interested in what's up top. I understand the view's quite good but to see over the trees and rooftops it helps to be on the top deck of a bus and as I said I missed mine, so saw nothing.
What first drew my attention was Hanger Hill Park, mainly because it had a lot of contours and some impressively varied old trees. Normally when you find diverse conifers in a scenic setting it means this was once a rich man's garden, but in this case it's just because Ealing Borough Council took their landscaping duties seriously when they opened the park in 1905. The hilltop ridge has acidic sandy soil so was deemed ideal for leylandii and giant redwoods, whereas oaks were better suited to the clay at the foot of the slope. The newest addition to the park is Hanger Hill Tiny Forest, a brief arc of assorted saplings now just over one year old. There are about 40 such mini-woods across London designed to encourage wildlife, community engagement and children's curiosity, hence the benches here can double up as an outdoor classroom.
A substantial portion of the park is occupied by the Hanger Hill outpost of the London Footgolf Centre. This used to be a pitch and putt course but the 18 undulating holes are now used for sequentially kicking a football around (1755 yards, par 65) because that's a sport these days. They say it's ideal for birthday parties, stag dos, corporate team building and school trips, but by the looks of it the target audience is sporty 20-somethings who'd otherwise be playing football and/or golf. The 'clubhouse' is an ugly retro hut with no indication whatsoever of opening times, just a lot of boards advertising the ice creams they'd sell should the building ever be unlocked. Checking the website you can't book online you can only ring up, and it seems if you simply turn up with your own football for a guerilla round in midwinter nobody will notice and you can save £12.
Hillcrest Road is well named and dominated by what looks like a lofty watchtower. It's not, although there was once a lookout here called Mount Castle Tower (supposedly Elizabethan) which in the 1780s was used by the Anglo-French Survey as the northernmost vertex of a trigonometric chain linking London to Paris. It survived as a tearoom until 1881 when it was demolished to make way for Fox's Reservoir, a storage facility named after the Chairman of the Grand Junction Waterworks Company (Edwin G Fox) who officiated at the opening ceremony. A considerably larger reservoir was built across the road in 1889, boosting the burgeoning suburbs of Ealing by delivering a clean water supply, hence the water tower that dominates the skyline. Still there, still doing its job.
Fox's Reservoir was drained in 1943 to prevent German bombers using it as a highly reflective nocturnal navigation aid. The council duly bought the space (and the surrounding ancient woodland) and it's been a nature reserve since 1991, providing a contrasting adjunct to Hanger Hill Park. Being flat it's ideal for sports pitches so if you turn up on a Saturday morning it'll be swarming with footballers from Acton Ealing Whistlers, the local youth football club. An ancient track called Fox Lane runs alongside, while a former field-edge footpath called West Walk runs quarter of a mile downhill towards the throbbing metropolis around Ealing Broadway station. Look, the first crocuses are already emerging, winter must have turned a corner.
I thought I'd seen it all at this point so planned to escape on a 226 bus. It's Hail and Ride around here, but when I stuck my arm out the driver totally ignored me leaving me adrift at the top of Mount Avenue. And that's when I stumbled upon this extraordinary house name. Wow, I thought, here are two neighbours who really don't get on.
Let's call the disputing parties X and Y. Mr X moved into Mount Avenue in 2014, buying up a plot behind the main row of houses to build a modern home. In 2016 he wanted to add a new garage so Mr and Mrs Y let him knock down part of their back fence on the understanding he'd put it back later. He didn't, so 10 months later they went ahead and rebuilt the fence themselves. Mr X was livid, convinced the new fence was six inches closer than it should have been. He accused the Ys of erecting the fence on top of his drainage pipe, they accused him of laying his pipe on their land in the first place, and both sides embarked on a legal slanging match accusing each other of trespass.
By the time the case reached court in February 2020 Mr and Mrs Y had spent £10,000 in related costs and Mr X had spent £60,000 on legal fees. If you find your neighbour aggravating it clearly helps to be a millionaire property developer with bottomless pockets. I haven't been able to determine the outcome of the case because it seems themedia only reported on the trial, not the verdict, but I can tell you that the sign saying 'Boundary Dispute House' appears in the front garden of Mr and Mrs Y. The neighbours on the right of the photo weren't part of the dispute, although one of their upper windows is emblazoned with weird distrustful signs so goodness knows what's going on there. Also if you try to check on Google Street View it turns out this entire section of Mount Avenue is missing, so perhaps give thanks that you don't live anywhere as furiously litigious as this.
You really never know what you'll stumble upon if you miss your bus.
You'll have lots of interesting things to do because it's Saturday, so I don't need to be interesting here.
The barber shop at the Bow Roundabout has moved.
Billy's Barbers used to be underneath Sky View Tower facing away from the road.
It's now underneath City West Tower facing the roundabout.
The new shop is significantly more visible.
I expect business will be brisker.
Background
» The Capital Towers development opened in 2017. The apartments in its 34- and 14-storey towers were sold mainly to foreign investors. At the time I wrote "At ground level are half a dozen commercial spaces which could be used as offices or presumably as shops. Given that the only retail successes within five minutes walk are a McDonalds drive-thru and a tiny corner shop, I don't rate their chances of being rented out.... but we'll see."
» In 2023 the first unit to be occupied by a shop was Sky Local, a convenience store under the tallest tower. Then came Current Wigs, an artificial hair emporium occupying unit 3 underneath the smaller tower. Then came Billy's Barbers.
» Billy's Barbers leased a unit that can't be seen from the road and which hardly anyone walked past. You'd only spot it if you lived here or were trying to take a minimal shortcut to Cooks Road. The shop was often empty, but Omar and Ali did sometimes seem to have a clientele.
» This was Billy's Barbers' third shop (other branches are in Stratford and on the Isle of Dogs).
» The prime unit facing the roundabout was first occupied in May 2024 by a dry cleaners. At the time I wrote "The new shop is called Gold Dry Cleaner, a name announced in red letters stuck somewhat wonkily above the door, and appears to consist of a bloke and a few machines in a mostly empty room." I didn't rate their chances of success, not least because their windows were emblazoned with spelling errors.
» A few months ago Gold Dry Cleaner moved out.
» This week Billy's Barbers moved in.
Observations
» The shop's much more visible, especially to anyone walking round the roundabout or heading down to the Lea towpath.
» The doorway is seriously unwelcoming but it's early days yet.
» They've moved the original signage from round the corner which means the street number in the corner is now wrong (it says 8, it should be 6).
» They haven't yet moved the table football table out of the old unit, nor the microwave oven.
» If anyone's thinking of taking out a lease on the old rear-facing unit I'd strongly advise against.
This is a 467 bus at Meadowview Road in Ewell.
The bus runs hourly and no other routes stop here.
So I wondered how many London bus stops only get an hourly service.
Obviously Ewell isn't in London so this doesn't count.
Indeed only 30% of the route is in London.
Indeed the 467 is proportionately TfL's least Londony bus (as previously blogged).
There is a very short stretch of the 467 in Chessington where the 467 is the sole bus route, but the only bus stops are in Surrey.
So we can discount the 467.
The TfL bus routes with an hourly frequency (or worse) are: 146, 375, 385, 389, 399, 467, H3, R5, R8, R10, U10, W14.
If we check all the sections where these are the only bus routes, we can make a definitive list. (I've ignored school buses and mobility buses)
London bus stops with an hourly service (or less) 146: Keston Church, Holwood Farm, New Road Hill, Farthing Street, North End Lane 375: Chase Cross, Bower Park School, Kilnwood Lane, Bower House, Havering Green, Samantha Mews, Dame Tipping School, Liberty Cottages 385: (Hail & Ride only) 389: Underhill 399: St Albans Road, Hadley Green, Dury Road, Hadley Wood Station 467: (all outside London) H3: (Hail & Ride only) R5/R10: Pratts Bottom R8: (Hail & Ride only) U10: Ickenham Station, Neats Acre, Field Way, Woodville Gardens W14: The Forest, Eagle Pond, Elmcroft Avenue, Woodford Station, Spencer Close, Hillside Close, Heronway, Bush Road
London has many dull plaques, but I think this might be the most inconsequential.
It appears on platform 1 at Surbiton station.
And it "remembers" the news kiosk.
It was clearly a nice news kiosk but there's nothing about what it looked like, nor why it was important, nor who ran it, nor why it might have been special. We do discover it dated from 1940, closed in 2016 and ended up in Wareham on the Swanage Railway. But the plaque entirely underplays anything that may or may not have been remarkable, it just doesn't say.
The news kiosk used to be here in front of the refreshment room (now a Nero Express cafe). The wall has photos of swirly milky coffees and this plaque, and I do wonder how many people ever look at it. Maybe they do and think "ah yes, the Surbiton News Kiosk" with a nostalgic sigh, but I've never seen anyone do it.
• I've found a photo of the kiosk here.
• I've also found a photo of the kiosk when it was open.
• The newsagent from 2010 to 2016 was John Greig, who'd previously worked at Taylor News outside the station.
• John waved goodbye to kiosk life so he could take up a new job as a platform supervisor at Effingham Junction.
• John blamed several factors for damaging his business: i) the rent on his kiosk being raised, ii) a Sainsbury's opening on the station forecourt, iii) free Metro newspapers.
• In its heyday the kiosk sold 300 Daily Mails every morning, but by 2016 that was down to 25.
• In 2016 the top selling newspapers were 1) The Sun, 2) The Times, 3) Daily Mail, 4) Daily Telegraph, 5) The Guardian
• In 2007 the kiosk was rebranded 'R. Glass' when it appeared briefly in the film Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.
• SW Trains wanted to demolish the kiosk to make more room for passengers at the foot of the stairs.
• I haven't found a photo of the kiosk at Wareham station.
In the 1860s Joseph Bazalgette built a huge tunnel within the Victoria Embankment to help solve London's sewage crisis. 150 years later engineers decided it needed urgent backup and set about building the Tideway Tunnel. One of the key sites was at Blackfriars Bridge where the Fleet sewer overspilled into the Thames at times of heavy flow, repeatedly damaging London's eco-credentials. A huge worksite thus had to be built in the heart of the City, the proposed solution an offshore wedge which could later be transformed into a new public space. When I wrote about the plans in 2016 the intention was for the extra three acres to open in 2022 with the 14 mile tunnel fully flushed by 2023. In fact the Tideway Tunnel first flowed last February and the additional public realm at Blackfriars only opened earlier this week. It's called the Bazalgette Embankment, and I have taken far too many photos of it. [25 photos]
It's enormous, indeed the largest single structure built into the River Thames since Bazalgette's initial work, and if you stand on Waterloo Bridge you can easily see how much it sticks out. Better to approach from Blackfriars Bridge however, partly because you get a much closer top-down view but also because a new staircase finally reconnects the pavement to the embankment below. They really want you to come down here and enjoy the new public realm, which makes a nice change after almost a decade of not being able to walk along this side of the riverbank at all. On the descent you can get up close to the floral ironwork beneath the main span and then, before you enter the Embankment proper, go peek at the massive bobbly intervention underneath the bridge. The Fleet used to emerge here from a piddly sluice but the entire riverbed's now been capped to ensure no brown sludge ever escapes again.
This is the thin end of the wedge so also the least decorous, but there are still several odd-shaped benches where you can rest and take in the riverside ambience. Part of the space is being taken up by a long pedestrian ramp descending from above and this has created an extensive undercroft sealed off by unpolished metal panels. A set of public toilets has been tucked away in the centre - yet to open - but the remainder is a mysterious secret lair from which workmen pushing barrows occasionally emerge. The ramp up top is a more tempting entrance for most visitors, passing a totem with all the project's background info before stepping down directly onto a long plantedterrace. This maze of beds includes 71 young trees and its design is supposed to 'reference the path of the lost River Fleet' from woodland to meadow to marsh, although I confess I couldn't see it myself.
Scatteredaround the Embankment are five large black sculpted forms called The Stages, created by Nathan Coley. They're varied, dark and slabby, in some cases sheer surfaces and elsewhere something you can actually walk on. They also have names, so the thin pillar near the bridge is Kicker, the pair beside the river wall are Twins and the longest wiggle is Zigzag. The tallest sits in a stepped pool and is called Waterwall, so I assume it's meant to double up as a dribbly cascade for children's summer frolics. Best not imagine the actual liquid barrelling underneath on its way to Beckton Sewage Works. I liked the basalt quintet more before I read the associated artbolx (including claims that the 'playful and interactive assembly' creates a 'lyrical happenstance'), but they integrate well and I concur that the larger platforms could indeed double-up as a venue for cultural programming.
Along the former Embankment wall are several bronze lions with large mooring rings in their teeth. They're 1868 originals by Timothy Butler and line a mile of river, encouraging the urban legend that if the water level ever reaches the lions' mouths then London will flood. It won't happen here because they've been relocated from Bazalgette's original walls, but this has provided a rare opportunity to get up close to a leonine London icon rather than simply staring down from above. The uppermost lion has been nicknamed 'Roary' whereas the others await comical christening. Check the side of the westernmost lion for the plaque unveiled by King Charles when he visited in May to mark the tunnel's completion. The row of electronic bollards alongside has not yet had to be raised because the pavement connection remains a fenced-off worksite while final snagging works continue.
At the broadswooshy end of the Embankment the scale of the engineering becomes clearer. There's easily enough space here for an audience to watch a small performance or for stalls to be set-up for some organised event, even to play five-a-side kickabout. Look down and the reason for the lack of intermediate infrastructure should become clearer, it's because the paving is liberally scattered with rectangular access covers. They're needed because this public realm is really just useful camouflage for an awful lot of critical pipework above the main shaft, hence the phenomenal number of recessed slabs - I lost count around 70. The ribbed rotunda on the nearside has too small a diameter to cover the invisible drop shaft and according to original plans was intended to house a control cabin, but will perhaps end up as the inevitable cafe.
The western tip is where you'll find three twisty columns, more grey than black, a signature artwork also found at other Tideway sites along the Thames. They're actually ventilation shafts - best not think for exactly what - and their edges are inscribed with hard-to-read lines from commissioned verse by Dorothea Smartt. Ridiculously the poems are only available as graphics on the Tideway's website 'due to artistic restriction and copyright', whereas anyone can stand beside the sculpt-trumpets and read "The Furious Fleet flows red with Roman blood, Boudica battles bravely." Meanwhile alongside this poetic trio is a small raised terrace, large enough only for a few tables, and also a dead end so its purpose appears to be as a viewing platform. Maybe it'll be cappuccinos only later.
The Bazalgette Embankment is a welcome addition to the City of London's longstanding lack of public open space and a cunning solution to the problem of how to hide a former construction site in plain sight. It's also a veritable trip hazard throughout with so many steps, seated areas and changes of level around the central flat piazza that I anticipate a regular slew of accidents. I suspect the Embankment will look at its finest on a sunny day but I loved the glistening sheen created during yesterday's horrendous rain, weather which fortuitously discouraged other visitors and permitted me to create an album of essentially vacant photographs. Also I understand there's only one more of these riverside protrusions yet to open to the public, so when King Edward Memorial Park in Stepney joins the throng I should probably go out and catalogue all seven.
I was in Brentwood yesterday and walked past a Wenzel's bakery in the main street. Oh they're in Essex now, I thought. When Wenzel's started up they were very much a northwest London thing, but I've seen a lot more of their bakeries elsewhere recently. How have they spread this far?
So I drew some maps.
I've been meaning to do this for a long time.
The first Wenzel's bakery was opened by Peter Wenzel in Sudbury Hill in 1975. This became the epicentre of the expanding Wenzelverse. But at the time it was just a single shop with no aspiration towards dough domination.
It's hard to determine how and when the chain first expanded, but there are ways to dig back. It seems Wenzel's first launched a website in 2008 - all very minimal - and by searching back within the Wayback Machine I can see what the store list was.
Our stores are in Pinner, Northwood, Joel Street, Harrow, Rayners Lane, Sudbury, North Harrow, Wealdstone, South Harrow, Ruislip and Watford.
Joel Street is in Northwood Hills, if you were wondering.
So just the 11 stores in 2008.
Here they are on a map.
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Wenzel's is very much a northwest London bakery at this point, with the majority of stores in or around Harrow along the arms of the Metropolitan line. The original Sudbury Hill store is the black star at the bottom of the map. The only real outlier is on Watford High Street in Hertfordshire. It's taken the brand over 30 years to get to this point, and if you'd never been to the northwestern suburbs you'd never have noticed them.
There are now 34 Wenzel's bakeries, still with a Metropolitan line focus but now with a greater spread beyond. The business has crept closer to central London with stores in Wembley, plus a bold move into a unit inside Baker Street station. To the south the three lone wolves are Greenford, West Ealing and Yiewsley. To the northeast there's a new cluster around Edgware and a distant store in Radlett. And to the northwest there's Rickmansworth and also Little Chalfont, the first Wenzel's beyond the M25. It's a statement of intent...
That's quite an expansion! There are now 72 Wenzel's bakeries, essentially a doubling, as the chain exerts its dominance over northwest London. There's been a spread into north London, also a nudge closer to the centre. Proper Home Counties outposts now exist in High Wycombe, Aylesbury, Luton and Stevenage. However nothing's opened south of the M4, also Wenzel's is still avoiding east London where rival chain Percy Ingle has just gone bust.
The Essex star isn't in Chigwell or Loughton but in Debden, which is much more target audience. There are also two further eastern stores I've had to chop off my map, one in Romford and the other in Brentwood. It turns out the Wenzel's I saw yesterday has been there for a while, indeed it opened exactly five years ago in January 2021.
There are now 111 branches, very much no longer confined to the old Middlesex stomping ground. The bakery has now reached commuter towns like Basingstoke, Billericay and Basildon, even Guildford and Woking, in its search for fresh markets to tap.
But what I've not shown you are the additional dozen openings that lie off the edge of even this expanded map, for example the northernmost Wenzel's is now in Northampton. More extraordinarily they've opened bakeries along the south coast in Portsmouth and Southampton, even Bournemouth and Poole, almost 100 miles from the original store in Sudbury Hill. Many of these farflung extras are actually in out of town retail parks rather than on high streets, thus catering for a somewhat different clientele. You can check the spread on my summary Google map, it's got all these branches on.
Finally here's the map I really wanted to draw - the expansion of Wenzel's 1975 → 2008 → 2016 → 2021 → 2026.
This is a bakery chain on the up, both expanding its coverage and also filling in the gaps. No wonder Peter Wenzel received an official Outstanding Contribution to the Baking Industry accolade at the Baking Industry Awards last year.
There's still a lot further Wenzel's could spread, so if you haven't seen the orange bakery in your town yet it might be on its way. But I note that London south of the Thames appears to be resolutely and deliberately out of bounds (which reminds me, I really should draw some Coughlans maps one day).
The Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum Location: St Mary's Hospital, Praed Street, W2 1NY [map] Open: 10am - 1pm (Mon-Thu only) Admission: free Two word summary: antibiotic genesis Five word summary: where Fleming spotted lifesaving mould Website:imperial.nhs.uk/about-us/what-we-do/fleming-museum Time to set aside: less than an hour
A lot of us wouldn't be here (or have been born at all) without antibiotics. The first of these was penicillin, discovered by Alexander Fleming at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington on 3rd September 1928. That's his laboratory on the second floor, in the protruding bay beside the main entrance just above the brown plaque. This tiny room is part of a museum devoted to telling the story of both discovery and discoverer, a very small museum that's essentially a hospital stairwell and a few rooms off it, which since 2023 has been free to enter. If you can get in.
Alexander Fleming was born in Ayrshire in 1881, not far from Kilmarnock, and moved to London in 1895 to take up a job as a shipping clerk. In a quirk of fate an uncle died and left him a bequest which allowed him to enrol at medical school. In a quirk of fate he joined St Mary's teaching hospital mainly because it had a good water polo team. Fleming did outstandingly well in his studies and was all set to become a surgeon but no vacancy was available, so in a quirk of fate accepted a temporary post in the Inoculation Department. He loved the work so stayed on, and twenty years later a carefully observed quirk of fate would make his name.
The entrance to the museum is a brown door just behind the hospital's ornamental gates. You have to press the button alongside to gain access, chatting via a semi-intelligible intercom to one of the volunteers upstairs. It's a very stiff door so might not open easily even after they've triggered the release (expect similar tugging issues on the way out). Entry is via an evocatively institutional stairwell tiled in green and ivory which curls upwards towards reception, and which is shared with maternity services because this is a working building. A volunteer will then lead you up one further flight to the room where the discovery took place. Be aware there's no lift, it being impractical to adapt an authentic listed building to modern accessibility standards.
During WW1 Fleming spent time at a military hospital in France where he observed how many injured amputees died for want of an effective antiseptic, so focused on this area of research when he returned to Paddington. His first great success came in 1921 when he observed that mucus wiped from his nose dissolved bacteria on a petri dish. It turned out this was because it contained our body's own natural antiseptic, also found in tears and egg white, which Fleming named lysozyme. He was very proud of this discovery, even much later in his career, but lysozyme didn't help cure the fiercest germs and so his search went on.
The second floor room where the discovery took place has been restored as it would have been in 1928 with dishes, brown bottles, stoppered test tubes and a microscope, all arrayed along a wooden bench in front of the window. Looking down Fleming would have been able to watch the traffic passing on Praed Street, and today you can additionally see a pharmacy in the shop opposite which feels particularly appropriate. A separate cabinet in the corner of the room contains medals, awards and other congratulatory ephemera from later in Fleming's life. You can't get right up close to the bench because only the volunteer gets to cross the divide and tell you all about it, then helpfully answer your questions. The room is also subject to the museum's widespread 'No photography' policy which is why I can't show you what it looks like.
On the crucial day in 1928 Fleming had been away for the summer and, fortuitously, some of his earlier dishes hadn't been cleared away. One showed unusual patterns where a mould on one side of the dish had inhibited the spread of staphylococcus on the other. Nobody's quite sure where the spore came from, only that it floated in randomly on the air, quite possibly from the fungi-focused laboratory downstairs. "That's funny," said Fleming to his junior colleague Merlin Price, a Welshman who arguably spotted the peculiarity first. The secretion was initially called 'mould juice' and Fleming tested it on a few of his colleagues to see if it cleared up their infections. It proved encouragingly lethal to certain microbes and not to humans, but also very hard to isolate and stabilise so the groundbreaking work essentially stalled.
After breathing in the atmosphere of the laboratory the volunteer will lead you up to the screening room on the third floor and press play on a ten minute film. This tells the full Fleming story complete with archive footage, including a speech Sir Alex gave in the presence of the Duke of Edinburgh on the 25th anniversary of the discovery. I learned a lot but the flickering presentation had all the nostalgic quality of a film I might have been shown in a science lesson on a wheeled-in telly, so I sat through the black and white credits to see when it was made. It turned out to be a 1993 production, the same year as the stairwell was turned into a museum with the aid of money from the drugs giant SmithKline Beecham, who plainly haven't been back to update it since.
In 1938 researchers from Oxford University were drawn to Fleming's work, initially via his discovery of lysozyme, but soon realised that penicillin could be considerably more useful. Howard Florey and his colleagues were eventually able to test it on a few critically injured patients and reverse their infections, but couldn't generate enough supplies to ultimately prevent their deaths. It being wartime the team needed to turn to America for the means to mass produce penicillin on commercial terms, and by 1944 it was being used on the front line to save countless lives. Fleming, Florey and a biochemist on the team called Ernst Chain were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1945 "for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious diseases".
The final room is 'the exhibition', a circuit of 19 information boards telling the whole story from Fleming's birth to the present day, assuming the present day is 1993. It's highly informative and all the better for lacking the flashy screens and sparse text that would likely be the presentational style were the display ever redone. The central section explains how bacterial resistance has always been an issue and how scientists have attempted to keep pace, initially by attaching cunningly similar but non-identical molecules to the penicillin nucleus. But essentially the exhibition is a celebration of the ground-breaking discovery made downstairs when a sequence of quirks of fate led a former water polo player to spot a mould that helped make medicine hugely safer.
After your visit don't head round the corner for a proud pint in the Sir Alexander Fleming pub because it's closed.
Also I can confirm there's no real need to troop down to the Chelsea Embankment to see the blue plaque on Fleming's home at 20a Danvers Street, although I did anyway and got very wet in the process.
If you really do want to track down Fleming's legacy then a trail leaflet has been produced complete with several maps. But it's probably best to stick to the museum itself where the curator and associated volunteers do a fine job of explaining what they can in an outdated space where history was made... on that bench there, just up the road from Paddington station.
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