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 seven 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.
>
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.
Hour 1 0:00 Just by standing outside Romford station I can tick off HAVERING (1). 0:06Chadwell Heath is an excellent station for borough-visiting. The ticket hall is in REDBRIDGE (2) and the pavement outside is in BARKING & DAGENHAM (3) 0:28 I continue west via Crossrail to Forest Gate which is in NEWHAM (4). The smell of baked goods from the Hovis factory is very pleasant. It's only a short walk up the road to Wanstead Park to join the Suffragette line. 0:48 A simple switch at Blackhorse Road, stepping out into WALTHAM FOREST (5) to admire the black horse mosaic. Then disaster strikes - the Victoria line is part suspended and the next train is 30 minutes away! The platform is full of confused passengers wishing a member of station staff would make a useful announcement. The next train is now 39 minutes away! An automated message urges everyone to take care because surfaces may be wet. The next train is now 32 minutes away! (thankfully the display was lying and the next train was only 3 minutes away, but phew that could have wrecked everything) 0:56 Everyone changing between tube and rail at Tottenham Hale has to step out through a gateline into HARINGEY (6). It's been a profitable first hour.
Hour 2 1:14ENFIELD (7) is the first annoying borough requiring an 'out and back' train journey. But I've got very lucky with timings because a half-hourly train to Meridian Water is due. The new station is still surrounded by empty space containing hardly any flats. 1:32 The Victoria line remains buggered but I can still get a train to Finsbury Park. This is in ISLINGTON (8), and simply by crossing two roads I can spend a few seconds in HACKNEY (9). 1:42 All change at Highbury & Islington for the Mildmay line. Grrr, it's a maximum 9 minute wait.
Hour 3 2:12 Alight at Brondesbury because that's in BRENT (10). 2:13 Cross the road because that's in CAMDEN (11). Then cross back and catch a 189 bus to Cricklewood. 2:20 Great, that's done BARNET (12). Now all I need is a quick bus to Willesden Town, five minutes max. 2:21 Aaaagh the 460 bus is on diversion. The announcement doesn't say where to and dinging the bell to alight has no effect. Oh god we're going back towards where I just came from. I check an app and it turns out the diversion is an extra two miles because of a burst water main. The bus would eventually have reached Willesden Town but thankfully I manage to persuade the driver to drop me at Kilburn instead. Bullet dodged. 2:54 Finally up the Metropolitan line to Harrow-on-the-Hill in HARROW (13).
Hour 4 3:05 Switch from a Watford train to an Uxbridge train. I have to go as far as Eastcote to enter HILLINGDON (14), one of today's tougher boroughs. 3:15 I just missed a Piccadilly line train at Eastcote so I have to wait for the next one at Rayners Lane. 3:39Acton Town is another useful borough-ticking station because immediately outside is EALING (15) and just round the corner is HOUNSLOW (16). 3:55Hammersmith, obviously, is in HAMMERSMITH & FULHAM (17). Hurrah, I'm finally halfway and it's only taken four hours.
Hour 5 4:06RICHMOND (18) is a bit of a pain, so I've chosen to visit it by walking across Hammersmith Bridge and then straight back again, all on foot. 4:24 District line to Earl's Court, walk out onto the street to get KENSINGTON & CHELSEA (19). Then re-enter station and walk straight onto a Wimbledon train, perfect. 4:43 Nip out at Southfields to get WANDSWORTH (20). I could have nipped out at East Putney but I was at the front of the train. 4:53 A productive run ends at Wimbledon for MERTON (21). Now for the last annoying 'out and back'.
Hour 6 5:05KINGSTON (22) can't be done on a TfL train so I've boarded a Hampton Court train to New Malden. The high street still has poppies on some lampposts. 5:37 And back to Wimbledon to catch the tram, which is by far the easiest way to visit SUTTON (23). I pick Beddington Lane but could have picked Therapia Lane instead. 5:53 The tram is obviously ideal for CROYDON (24), in this case West Croydon. I've got lucky because a Southern train to Victoria is in the platform.
Hour 7 6:15 Up the very long staircase at Crystal Palace for BROMLEY (25), then back down the very long staircase for an Overground train. 6:30 I've got lucky again because another Southern train is right behind us, so nip out at Forest Hill for LEWISHAM (26), then nip back in. 6:54 I've reached London Bridge just as the rush hour begins, but thankfully everyone's going the other way. That's SOUTHWARK (27) done and only six more boroughs to go.
Hour 8 7:05 An easy one-stop ride to Waterloo East, then a bit of a hike to neighbouring Waterloo to get LAMBETH (28). I'd prefer to catch the Waterloo & City line but unfortunately I still have to go to Westminster first. 7:15 One stop on the Sponsored Lager line takes me to Embankment (where yes they've fixed the incorrect map). Poke my head briefly above ground for WESTMINSTER (29). 7:32 Change from the Northern line to Crossrail at Tottenham Court Road and hop along to Farringdon. The quickest way up to the CITY OF LONDON (30) is at the Barbican end. 7:42 What I should have done at Canary Wharf is stop and come up for air. But I've already been to TOWER HAMLETS (31) because I live there, so I awarded myself a free pass for that one. 7:58 The Elizabeth line terminates at Abbey Wood which is convenient because the station straddles my last two boroughs. The street outside is in BEXLEY (32), and if you walk just round the corner before the Post Office you enter GREENWICH (33). And that's a two minute walk so my All Boroughs Odyssey has taken eight hours precisely.
I'm sure eight hours is beatable although I wasn't aiming for a record, just hoping to get to the finish. It was a 'slippery surface' day across the London transport network anyway. I nearly had very bad luck with line closures and bus diversions but on the whole my planned route worked out pretty well, with only a few changes of plan when an unexpected train offered a fresh alternative. Also I walked seven miles, climbed the equivalent of 70 flights of stairs and read two-thirds of a novel so I wasn't completely wasting my time.
I don't recommend trying to visit every London borough in one day because it's a bit knackering and ultimately pointless. But I have now completed an extraordinary achievement, and best of all I have no need to ever do it again.
Last year, you may remember, I went to every London borough at least 40 times.
Here's how I'm doing so far in 2026.
Enf
2
Harr
2
Barn
2
Hari
2
WFor
2
Hill
2
Eal
2
Bren
2
Cam
2
Isl
2
Hack
2
Redb
2
Hav
2
Hou
2
H&F
2
K&C
2
West
2
City
2
Tow
12
New
8
B&D
2
Rich
2
Wan
2
Lam
2
Sou
2
Lew
2
Grn
2
Bex
2
King
2
Mer
2
Cro
2
Bro
2
Sut
2
It's only 12th January and I've been to every borough at least twice.
That is very good going.
What's more I've been to every borough exactly twice. (other than Tower Hamlets where I live and Newham which I live five minutes from)
This is arguably the greater achievement.
It took some doing.
For example I'd been to Southwark, Lewisham and Bromley twice by 3rd January, then wasn't allowed to go back again.
For example this weekend I still had nine outer London boroughs to visit but had to get there without setting foot in an inner London borough.
n.b. my rules for visiting a borough are that I have to set foot in it - standing on a station platform or riding through on transport don't count.
My 2026 visits include a tour of SE26, both ends of the 222 bus route, the London New Year Parade, exploring Aldborough Hatch, a yomp across Richmond Park, riding the Waterloo & City line and visits to Arnos Grove, Barking, Belvedere, Colindale, Haggerston, Morden, New Malden, North Greenwich, Northwick Park and Upminster. I like to travel.
And at the other end of the scale there are Londoners who haven't been to all the London boroughs, not even once.
I wonder if that's you.
special comments box
I AM A LONDONER AND THERE ARE BOROUGHS I'VE NEVER BEEN TO
Your most unvisited: Barking & Dagenham, then Havering, then Bexley, then Sutton
It'd be hard never to have visited Westminster, Camden or the City of London. If you've walked along the South Bank you've done Lambeth and Southwark, if you've crossed Tower Bridge you've done Tower Hamlets, if you've done the museums you've done Kensington & Chelsea, if you've been to Battersea Power Station you've done Wandsworth and if you've shopped at Westfield you've done Newham and/or Hammersmith & Fulham. Further out if you've been to Wembley you've done Brent, if you've flown from Heathrow you've done Hillingdon, if you've visited Richmond Park or Hampton Court you've done Richmond, if you've been to Wimbledon you've done Merton and if you've been to Greenwich you've obviously done Greenwich.
But some boroughs are much easier to miss. Havering's so far east most Londoners have no need to visit. Harrow and Enfield are easily skippable if you live south of the river, similarly Kingston and Bexley if you live north. Barking & Dagenham seemingly has nothing to entice visitors from further afield. A lot of Londoners couldn't tell you where Redbridge or Sutton are, let alone think of a reason to go. There are all sorts of reasons why peripheral boroughs might go unvisited, even after several decades of living in the same city.
My hunch is that Bexley, Harrow, Havering and Sutton are the boroughs least visited by other Londoners, but we'll see if your comments back that up.
I wasn't always the roaming globetrotter I am now, indeed when I introduced my random jamjar feature in 2004 I was in some cases breaking new ground. Even so I'd been to most of the boroughs before I moved to London, aided by growing up at the end of the Metropolitan line and having family in Croydon, Waltham Forest and Enfield. A concert at Crystal Palace took care of Bromley, a wedding in Fulham ticked off Hammersmith & Fulham and a rail replacement bus must have delivered Havering. I couldn't tell you which was the last of the 33 boroughs I eventually visited but it wouldn't surprise me if it was Sutton, dullest of the suburbs.
Obviously most Londoners go about their days without giving a damn where the borough boundaries are. You have to be a bit of an administrative nerd to know that crossing the Old Street roundabout takes you from Islington into Hackney or that one side of Kilburn High Road is Camden and the other in Brent.
But some people do deliberately go out to visit the lot. In 2018 Ollie O'Brien did all 33 boroughs by bike and train in 9 hours 25 minutes and wrote up his exploits here. David Natzler went one better and placed artwork at all the triple points, the places where three boroughs touch, and Richard Gower has a fabulous photographic summary of the results. Maybe you went out and did something alternatively specific, or at least kept track of your travels over a longer period of time.
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I KNOW I HAVE DEFINITELY BEEN TO ALL 33 LONDON BOROUGHS
For all other comments, including "I'm not sure which boroughs I've never been to", please use the ordinary comments box at the end of the post.
It's obviously entirely unnecessary to have visited all the London boroughs but, as I hope I've made clear over many years, the suburbs contain much that's fascinating so if you've never been you're missing out. Maybe this should be the year that you fill in your gaps - even Barking & Dagenham and Sutton have their moments! It shouldn't take long unless you've been extraordinarily parochial, indeed some of us have been to all 33 twice in twelve days flat.
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