It being a year divisible by 4, curators at the Victoria and Albert Museum have been busy assembling an appropriately Olympic exhibition. They've gathered together a comprehensive collection of Olympicposters, from Paris 1900 right up to London 2012, and all are now on show at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green. Not a very thrilling concept you might think - there's only so much you can do with five rings and a few sportsmen - but it's actually a fascinating way to view the evolution of global 20th century design. See how the artists of the day tackled the Olympic brand brief, from proud torchbearing patriotism to abstract symbolic ingenuity. And yes, all leading up to that design at the end.
This is a rather larger exhibition than I was expecting, filling at least half of an upper gallery. I'm not quite sure why it's being hosted at the Museum of Childhood - the theme certainly falls well outside their usual pre-adolescent focus. But very young children seemed to be enjoying the exhibition all the same, providing them with a fantastic space in which to run around and chase one another. Most of the genuine visitors appeared to be twenty- or thirty-something male meeja types, here to update their creative portfolio, and absolutely none of them with children.
The first Olympics are represented here by their programmecovers, as it wasn't until Stockholm 1912 that an official poster was published. Early Olympic posters often had a very strong nationalistic theme, with artists depicting proud rippling athletes in front of recognisable landmarks. Berlin 1936 for example, with laurel-crowned victor towering above the Brandenburg Gate, or London 1948 (Big Ben plus discus-hurler plus rings - sorted). In the 1960s, however, things started to change. Tokyo 1964 ditched sport in favour of a big bold rising sun, and Mexico 1968 went all op-art with eye-popping concentric black lines. It's this dazzling Mexican design that still stands out as the most modern anywhere in the collection, and the one that'll probably sell the most postcards in the shop downstairs afterwards.
Munich 1972 was the first Olympics to take poster design seriously, approaching the pick of contemporary artists to create an extensive colourful collection that wouldn't have looked out of place in an Athena shop. This photograph shows a selection, plus in the foreground a genuine London 1948 torch (as used on the run across Belgium, apparently). From the 70s onwards I was impressed by how many of the Olympic logos I remembered. These variations on the simple five-ring design may have had an official lifespan of only a fortnight, but their iconic audacity has nevertheless imprinted upon the global consciousness. (Sorry if that last sentence reads like critical artistic tosh, but most of the labels in the exhibition were like that and I fear I've been infected by pretentious verbosity)
On into the modern day. Soft abstract designs dominate, with cunning logos (like Barcelona 1992 or Sydney 2000) where a handful of brushstrokes represent leaping athletes. Photography has been used only infrequently - Nagano 1998, with a thrush sitting on two ski poles, is a rare exception. And then, yes, all the way up to date with London 2012. The Back The Bid posters, with athletes vaulting over major landmarks, still retain a forceful impact. And then there's Lisa Simpson. We haven't had an official London 2012 poster yet, so the organisers have merely spraypainted a large angular blue logo straight onto the wall. According to the art critique label alongside "The London 2012 brand was launched on 4 Jun 2007, when the emblem was first revealed, exciting an extraordinary public reaction". I'll say. Seen here in context it's very much the odd one out, but it certainly upholds the Olympic tradition of cutting-edge design. What's needed in this space is an electronic poster, not yet published, representing the irreversible shift to dynamic multimedia. But that's for the next exhibition - Two Centuries of Olympic Posters. The children running around the gallery today may well enjoy that.
I don't know about you, but I'm too frightened to travel by bus in London these days. It didn't seem too bad a month ago, but now I sense a climate of fear every time I even think of going for a ride. Every big red bus has become a four-wheeled chamber of terror, inside which any number of terrible misdemeanours might occur. The familiar London bus stop has become a beacon of impropriety, enticing the wicked and malevolent to gather beneath its blood-red roundel. Bus shelters have become hotbeds of vice and felony, and our bus stations have descended into sinister anarchic no-go zones. How can I have been so blind not to see it before?
But, with characteristic speed and vigour, our new Mayor has acted. His latest policy announcement will increase the number of law enforcement officers targeting bus-related disorder. Trained police officers will be on patrol across the capital to stamp out misbehaviour on our public transport network. Teams of bus hub crime fighters will work together to confront wrongdoing and put an end to petty law-breaking. Low-level anti-social behaviour will be eradicated, and Londoners will be able to flash their Oysters in safety once more. How terribly reassuring.
Boris's new initiative kicks off by targeting as many as three of London's bus stations. It's good news for inhabitants of Canning Town, Wood Green and West Croydon, who will now see nine police officers wandering around their local transport interchange. Admittedly only two of these will be real police officers, but Community Support Officers and Special Constables can be pretty forceful too. They'll be making a visible difference as they wander around checking for knives, looking hard and glaring at teenagers. Other areas of London can look forward to similar levels of invincible crime protection, but not until next year.
I went to Canning Town bus station the other day. There was no actual crime going on, but the fear of crime permeated the building with a foul stench of terror. Large groups of East End youth hung around the automatic doors, no doubt preparing to board the bus to Romford and terrorise the passengers with their ringtones. A pair of foreign-sounding gentlemen crept up behind me, clearly intent on riding ticketless with their feet up on the seats. Every posse of adolescent girls appeared poised to sit on the back seats and launch into a tirade of boisterous swearwords. Which loutish lad would be the one to press the emergency alarm to exit the bus between stops? I even thought I saw a blade-wielding assassin stepping up onto the number 323, but thankfully it was just an old lady flashing a razor-sharp Freedom Pass. As I stood there, quivering, I thought "you know, what this place really needs is a visible police presence so that no marauder dare venture forth onto the bus network and exhibit anti-social behaviour". Boris has answered my prayers.
The Mayor's new policing policy goes straight to the heart of the problem. Stick a handful of uniformed officers at a few key transport interchanges and people will start to feel a bit safer, even if they were actually pretty safe already. Because what's crippling London's bus network isn't crime, but the fear of crime. Passengers don't care that serious bus-related offences are actually on the decrease, they just want reassurance that their next journey won't be their last. The Mayor has correctly recognised that Londoners are a bunch of screaming wusses with no accurate perception of reality, especially those who never travel by bus because they think it's too damned scary. Be afraid, be very afraid.
Exactly 40 years ago, eighteen floors above the streets of Canning Town, Mrs Ivy Hodge decided to make herself a cup of tea. This turned out to be a ghastly error. The match Ivy struck beneath her kettle ignited a gas leak, hurling her headlong across the kitchen. The force of the blast blew out the concrete walls of her brand new council flat, setting off a terrible chain reaction. Catastrophic structural failure caused the entire southeast corner of her tower block to collapse - wall by wall, flat by flat - sending 22 sitting rooms plummeting to the ground. With just one match Ivy had unwittingly killed four of her fellow Ronan Point residents, altered government housing policy and brought about the premature demise of the Modernist architecture movement. It's dangerous stuff, tea.
Ivy survived, but her early morning brew exposed a fatal flaw in Newham's building plans. Mid-60s architects believed that stacked-up living was the future, and newly created Newham council had taken this philosophy very much to heart. They'd been busily building up into the sky, replacing acres of pre-war slums with stark concrete tower blocks. But construction workers here on the Freemasons Estate had cut corners, failing to bolt together the prefabricated concrete sections with due care, and relying rather too heavily on gravity. One blown-out wall was enough to destabilise this unfortunate house of cards, and Ronan Point's downfallwas inevitable.
The disaster could have been far worse. It being before 6am, very few of the kitchens and sitting rooms beneath Flat 90 were occupied. One woman who'd been sleeping on the couch overnight managed to scramble to a narrow ledge along the inner wall, and was rescued from the rubble by her husband. The four flats above Ivy were more seriously damaged, but fortunately these were still unoccupied because Ronan Point had only opened back in March. And even the offending gas stove survived. When the residents moved out so that the block could be rebuilt (yes, rebuilt, not demolished), Ivy took it with her.
The Canning Town collapse had several ramifications. A ban was placed on the supply of gas to high rise blocks. Legislation was passed requiring any new towers to be able to withstand much stronger explosions. And the tide of public opinion started to swing away from head-in-the-clouds elevated boxes back to communal lowrise living. You didn't see Mary, Mungo andMidge much on TV after the early 70s, did you? Newham council took a little longer to come back down to earth. Ronan Point was finally demolished in 1986, along with its eightsister blocks on the Freemasons Estate. Not a trace remains.
Today a carpet of two- and three-storey dwellings covers this part of Canning Town. Families live in council houses with their own garden and a car parking space out front, next to scrappy patches of grass where wandering dogs relieve themselves. There are bland brick tenements and pebbledash terraces, plus shuttered shops in a peeling parade offering everything from bread rolls to betting slips. Take a walk up Freemasons Road from the ExCel Exhibition Centre and you'll probably be passed by several kids on bikes and the occasional tartan shopping trolley. Look out for the clenched fist sculpture outside the credit union, and smile at the portraits of "Leslie" and "Ethel" carved into the pavement between Leslie Road and Ethel Road. It may not be nirvana, but it's a lot more desirable than Ivy's 60s skyline. And, if you fancy a cuppa, a lot less dangerous.
Finally, after two months of dietary restraint and a week of waiting, my blood test results are back. I returned to see my doctor yesterday to find out if a diet of chicken, porridge and no-chocolate-whatsoever has had any positive effects on my arteries. And hurrah, it has. Back in March my cholesterol level was 5.5 (which is both "average" and "too high") and now it's dropped to a much more respectable 3.7. My tubes are one-third less congested than they used to be. Hurrah! In addition, individual counts for various subcategories of fatty deposit are also now within tolerable limits, whereas none of them were before. See, this is what happens when you shun the delights of (sob) pies and (sniff) cake for eight weeks.
My doctor is very impressed. So am I, to be honest. But I'm not very impressed by the way our five minute chat panned out. The conversation seemed personable and informative at the time, but it was only after I walked out of the surgery that I realised there were several key areas we hadn't discussed. We talked about the fact I'd been eating very sensibly, but I forgot to give details. I didn't mention my biscuit deprivation, my total crisp avoidance or my general cheeselessness. Unbelievably I didn't bring up, and he didn't ask about, the stone in weight that I've lost as a side-effect of a low-cholesterol diet. And although I now know that I don't need to be prescribed wonder-statins (which I'm very pleased about), neither of us discussed precisely what steps I ought to be taking next. It's odd, I knew exactly what I was going to say when I walked in, but somehow I managed to say none of it.
Maybe the doctor assumed from my silence that I intend to keep up this puritanical food intake into the forseeable future. No way. Man cannot live by oily fish alone, and I need some variety in my diet over the next 40 years or else I'm going to go mad. I think I can allow the odd Creme Egg, croissant and roast dinner to slip back in, just so long as I don't revert to my previous over-lipidy ways. At least my latest blood test has provided some proper data on which to base future food consumption. If my previous diet led to 5.5, and angelic eating has made me 3.7, then I reckon I now know how to aim for 4.3. Hell, I might even allow myself to go out for a meal again, rather than just sitting there like a lemon while other people tuck into pizza and ice cream. It may not be NHS-sanctioned, but it sounds like a plan to me. I wonder if I can still remember what a good cheddar tastes like.
Three nice things what I have bought recently 1) Album: In Ghost Colours(Cut Copy): I can't quite remember how I stumbled across this band, given that they're only big in Australia, but I'm glad I did. Cut Copy's music is sort-of electroindiepop, but with guitars. It's sort of New Order, but maybe even more 80s than that. Great stuff. Cut Copy's rather lovely debut album Bright Like Neon Love came out four years ago, so I've been counting the days to mid-May to get my hands on the follow-up. The first 20 seconds could easily be NewMusik, which is reason enough to cheer, and latest single Lights & Music is three minutes of chirpy upbeat delight. There's always an emphasis on slickly poptastic melody, and the complete 16-track package is (I think) worthy of repeatedadoration. In Ghost Colours is now available for just £8 at whatever ghastly name Virgin Megastores are calling themselves these days, or for even less at River Warrior Stores. 2) Book: Derelict London(Paul Talling): I first directed your attention to the Derelict London website four years ago. Paul's a photographer with an eye for the decaying, the demolishable and the doomed. If it's faded, forgotten or falling down, he's probably been out to snap an image for posterity. And now Paul's compiled images of more than 100 of his favourite overlooked locations, complete with passionate commentary, into a compact manbag-sized book. I think it's fair to say that no previous volume has brought together the Gypsy Hill public toilets, Palmers Pet Shop (Camden), The Intrepid Fox and Feltham Arena. As some indication of howenticing the book is, I forked out good money to buy Derelict London a full fortnight before the publisher emailed me to offer a free copy. Hurry now, most of the buildings depicted here probably won't be standing in five years time. 3) Chocolate bar: Dairy Milk(Cadbury): Mmmm, it's been a long time...
But one aspect of the project made me sigh, deeply. A dozen or so wooden posts have been bashed into the banks, in pairs, at regular intervals along the new stream. These fulfil no decorative function, nor are they linked together by chains or rails to form a protective barrier. They don't support noticeboards with maps or background information, neither are they present to delineate a waterside path. No, these posts exist solely to display three yellow warning symbols. They're risk management beacons, liberally scattered by the authorities to warn approaching visitors of perceived potential dangers. And they state the utterly bleeding obvious, and the blatantly untrue. Repeatedly. Here are those three pointless warning triangles in a bit more detail.
Caution - Area liable to flooding Well, yes, obviously. It's a river, isn't it, and that's what rivers do. Every now and then, after particularly heavy rain, they fill up and overspill into the surrounding flood plain. Do visitors to a river really need to be reminded of this? I mean, you don't see this notice plastered every 20 metres down the Thames, or attached to every lamppost in downtown Tewkesbury. This warning message might just possibly be useful during an especially violent storm should a tidal wave be about to sweep across lower Lewisham. Or it might just possibly prevent the occasional lost drunkard from stumbling into deep floodwaters after dark. But quite frankly I doubt it. Why is this warning here?
Warning - Strong currents Er, I don't think so. Look at that little river, it's not exactly torrential is it? There's barely a current, let alone a strong one. I know it's not rained much recently, but this shallow channel is almost never going to fill up with gallons of gushing water. It's just a wiggly sideshoot of a major river, not a streamlined sluice susceptible to raging riptides. Nobody's going swimming here - it's going to be a nice paddle across the pebbles or nothing. Hell, even the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain is more dangerous than this, and there are no ubiquitous yellow triangles encircling that. Why is this warning here?
Caution - Soft mud Hmmm, where? There's not a square inch of soft mud anywhere to be seen along this river at the moment. Obviously the weather has a part to play here, but soft mud is by no means a permanent feature of this corner of LadywellFields. And what's so wrong with soft mud anyway? It might discolour your favourite trainers, but it's not exactly killer quicksand. If the authorities are really concerned about soft mud, why don't they slap thousands of warning notices all over the UK's forests and woodland, just in case? Honestly, this is little more than disproportionate anxiety about the almost insignificant. Why is this warning here?
Perhaps I shouldn't have been overly surprised by these excessive levels of risk management pedantry. There's a clue in the name of the body responsible for the improvement works in Ladywell Fields, which has the cumbersome acronym QUERCUS. You won't be surprised to hear that the Q stands for Quality, and the S stands for Stakeholders. This isn't Lewisham, it's an Urban Environment. And anyone who travels along the Ravensbourne valley, obviously, they'd be a River Corridor User. An organisation called QUERCUS could only be a European-funded partnership, couldn't it, intent on developing symbiotic communities and realising key objectives. All the right ideas, but delivered with a repressive bureaucratic flourish. I'm surprised they didn't go the whole hog and install lifebelts, tannoy announcements and emergency 999 hotlines. Be grateful that our nation's streams and rivers weren't installed by committee.
You've just missed National Mills Weekend - two days when more than 300 UK wind and watermills opened their doors to the public. Yes, who knew? It's an annual event, apparently, but not the sort of thing that gathers a huge amount of pre-publicity. I mean, where should one go to see advance notice of this kind of thing? Time Out missed it completely. Enjoy England, the official national tourist website, is always unhelpfully location-specific rather than time-specific. Visit London continues to emphasise the mainstream, and hides the occasional quirky gem deep within its unmanageable database. It was only by chance (and at the last minute) that I discovered this weekend's windmill festival on the ever-comprehensive 24 Hour Museum website, which is currently celebrating Museums & Galleries Month. You didn't know that either, did you?
Anyway, despite the limited promotion, I thought that a visit to one of London's few remaining windmills was required. I've not been to the millat Upminster before (nor, indeed, to Upminster full stop), so that's the windmill I chose. It's only open on a handful of weekends each year, so probably won't be accessible when I finally pull Havering from my special jamjar. And the mill is free to enter and staffed entirely by volunteers, which I always think are two damned good reasons for visiting anywhere. So off to the eastern extremity of the District Line I went.
Upminster Windmill is very much in the middle of suburbia. There are semi-detached houses on three sides of Windmill Field, and the mill would have followed suit had Essex County Council had their evil way in the 1950s. But local people successfully fought off the developers, and when the area was transferred to London in 1965 the new council was rather more sympathetic. What's special about this windmill is not its history or its design, but just that it's managed to survive.
Recently the mill has fallen victim to the wind it was meant to tame. A particularly violent storm on 18th January 2007 snapped off one of the sails, and the opposite sail then had to be removed to allow the structure to balance. Since then the windmill has looked slightly lopsided, with only two sails, while a pair of traditional replacements is built. These should be up and operational next month, paid for by the council's building insurance, and Upminster's iconic four-ness will be restored once again.
Sails aside, this is a traditional five storey smock mill. The tower is octagonal, with sloping wooden sides, topped off by a cap and fantail that allow the sails to rotate into the wind. It stands 17 metres tall and, yesterday at least, formed a perfect backdrop for the taking of artyblue-skiedphotographs. The mill dates back just over 200 years, built on the highest point in Upminster, and continued to grind wheat until the 1930s.
My guided tour began with a ladder-climb to the very top, beneath the cap, where the power of the sails is transferred to the central vertical shaft. Here we came face to beak with some pigeons who've recently broken in through a gaping hole in the woodwork, and are now making a mess with their roosting, nesting and guanoing. As we slowly descended, our guide explained the mechanics of flour production one floor at a time. Hoist up each sack using this, drop the grain through that hatch there, crush the kernels with these stones here, and filter out the surplus bran through this. It was an appropriately interesting 45 minute tour, illustrated with various tools and machinery, and kept children involved and entertained throughout. Admittedly Upminster's innards aren't yet restored to full working order - a Lottery grant will be required for that - but hopefully proper functionality will come soon.
I was especially impressed by the (mostly retired) volunteers who keep the windmill open, tirelessly battling against petty vandalism, irregular opening hours and mechanical failure. Only through their dedication has Upminster Windmill survived through the years to inspire and to educate. It's important to remind each new generation that we didn't always have the convenience of ciabattas, ovenbake baguettes and sliced bread. They were bloody clever, our forefathers, and Britain's remaining windmills stand as a monument to their ingenuity.
Silver discs(May 1983) An occasional look back at the top singles of 25 years ago
Three obscure-ish but memorable records from May 1983 Jane - It's A Fine Day: This unique acappella ditty is perfectly evocative of a warm pre-summer's day, just like today. Throw open the French windows, sit back in your deckchair and perspire a little. " It's a fine day, people open windows, they leave their houses, just for a short while." Ah yes, a fine day indeed. This is the original version, a sparse vocal performance by Jane Lancaster, not so much sung as breathed. "They walk by the grass and they look at the grass, they look at the sky." The lyrics were from a poem written by Jane's boyfriend Edward Barton, and originally doomed to indie obscurity until John Peel (and then Cherry Red) picked up on their timeless charm. "It's going to be a fine night tonight, it's going to be a fine day tomorrow." Never a hit, alas, until Opus III slammed the vocals over a dance beat and reached number 5 in the charts nine years later. "Sitting in this field, I remember how we were going to sit in this field but never quite did, rain or appointments or something." Mixes perfectly does our Jane, just like a good Pimms. [YouTube] "We will have salad." Kissing The Pink - Last Film: Ahh, I loved this one. From the opening whistling drumbeats to the disciplined harmonies of the chorus, there always was a hint of military madness about it. The band looked like a bunch of earnest geeks, probably because they were a bunch of classically trained musicians (from Willesden) masquerading as popstars. The name Kissing The Pink was a reference to snooker, obviously, although sexual connotations required abbreviation to KTP in America. The band had tons of othergreatsongs, many on the LP/cassette "Naked" which I bought and played over and over, and you almost certainly didn't. Three consecutive weeks at number 19 on the singles chart was as good as they ever achieved over here, but One Step was the best selling song in Italy in 1985 (yes really), and the club-friendly Certain Things Are Likely reached number one on the US Dance Chart. Sadly underrated, but oh so quintessentially English. [ToTP] "In the last film I ever saw, they wore suits and they wore ties. In the last film I ever saw, they kept the change and they told lies." Seona Dancing (pronounced "Show-na") - More To Lose: I used to record lots of songs off the radio in the 1980s, including this keyboard curio from some obscure new wave band I'd never once seen on the telly. I must have missed Razzmatazz that week. Just as well perhaps, because the duo's floppy fringes, dangly earrings and eyeshadow might have put me off. So imagine my surprise, several years later, to discover that the band's pretty boy singer was none other than Ricky Gervais, before he was famous, back when he was only proto-desperate. New Romantics in the Philippines adored him, but the UK was not taken. Maybe it's just as well, because if Ricky from Reading had become a big star a quarter of a century ago, pinned up on teenagers' walls and promoting hairgel, we might never have seen The Office. [audio][Razz][fansite][myspace] "A thousand tortured lives have fallen, wounded dying cut down by the questions that we've sharpened, just to save our losing days"
In the suburbs to the west of Lewisham, sort of Brockley/Ladywell-ish, there's a big convex park called Hilly Fields. It's an extensive green space with proper steep slopes, boasting fine views over Docklands and the uplands of Dulwich. Victorian developers devoured most of the surrounding area in the late 19th century, but this verdant hillock was saved from residential destruction by Octavia Hill, one of the founders of the National Trust. At the summit are tennis courts and half a secondary school, as well as (at this time of year) a very popular ice cream van. In the heat of a pre-summer's day it's a perfect spot for a minor kickaround, or for watching your dog let off steam, or for sitting on a folding chair in the shade of a blossoming horse chestnut whilst reading Daily Mail supplements with the wife. East London has nothing similarly contoured which could possibly compete.
And this is the local park which Nick Nicely sang about in his seminal psychedelic 1981 masterpiece - Hilly Fields (1892). Described by some as "the Strawberry Fields of the Eighties", it's a mysterious combination of synthesiser, cello and reefer madness. Hilly Fields was even sufficiently cutting-edge to include a bit of scratching, well before Malcolm McLaren kickstarted that particular bandwagon. What do you mean you've never heard the song before? Head on over to Nick's myspace and familiarise yourself immediately. Admittedly you might hate it - it's a Marmite kind of a song - but I've adored it for a quarter of a century. Nick spent six months perfecting the track, which nearly made it onto the seminal Some Bizarre sampler but didn't quite, and which EMI ought to have promoted more as a single, but didn't. Shame, but maybe New Romantic Britain wasn't quite ready for a late 60s acid revival. Lack of commercial success halted Nick'smusicalcareer, although he still lives nearby and no doubt revisits Hilly Fields regularly. Sitting up there in the sunshine earlier today, humming along, I can see why. "18th of July, marked in with a circle of red. He left them all behind, filed under missing or dead, it said... 1892, lines are still on you, Hilly Fields."
So, erm, the plan today was to tell you all about my boat trip yesterday. That would have been really interesting, and there should have been some great photographs. Except that I never got to go on the boat trip yesterday, because they cancelled it without warning me in advance (something to do with dredging, the excuse was), and I only found out when I arrived at the quayside. Ah well, I'm sure I'll get my deposit back eventually. I had a lovely sunny day at the seaside instead, gobbling fish and chips and downing pints. I even managed to go sort-of-brown, rather than sort-of-red. But there are no great photographs, and there was nothing much really worth writing about. So, bad luck. In the meantime, does anybody know of a decent optician in the E3/East End area? I need to get my eyes tested before I run out of contact lenses, and there's no way I'm going back to the bunch of incompetent disorganised jobsworth chancers at Canary Wharf who mucked me around last year. Any recommendations?
Final diet update: after 2 months Chocolate: nil, nada, nichts Chips: two small servings of low fat oven chips Crisps: not a single packet Cheese: only 300g (of low fat tasteless cheddar) Red meat: one serving of low-fat mince Chicken: absolutely loads Salmon: over and over and over again Porridge: 42 bowls Weight lost:one stone (6kg) (woo!!!)
Round about now, if everything's gone to plan, I should be heading back onto dry land after a marvellous afternoon of messing about in boats. I hope I got some decent photographs. Hurrah for scheduled post publishing. And now for something I haven't done for the last two months - a proper fish supper! Fish may not have been banned as part of my low-fat cholesterol diet, but battered cod straight out of a spitting fryer was most definitely off limits. Especially with a side order of thick greasy vinegar-splattered chips piled up on the side of the plate, mmmm. Tonight's fatty feast is because I went back to the doctor's yesterday for a second blood test, signalling the end of my two months of extremely strict eating. Hopefully my cholesterol levels have dropped significantly, but I won't actually find out my results until next week. So I've decided to have a celebratory unhealthy blowout anyway, which yesterday included steak and kidney pie, pancakes and my first Creme Egg in eight weeks. It can't affect my test results, so why not? And tonight, I don't know about you, but fish and chips and a mug of steaming tea in a seaside restaurant sounds absolutely perfect.
Of course, scheduled post publishing has its risks. Post too far into the future and events may overtake planned reality. I must never assume that it's possible to predict precisely what's going to happen next, because what happens next may turn out to be completely different. Right now, for example, I was planning to be on board a boat in the middle of the Thames, investigating a few more of London's wartime estuary defences. But things may not have worked out in quite the way I planned. I might have missed the train out of town, reached the harbourside too late and had to watch the boat sail off into mid-river without me. I might have discovered that my online booking hasn't been accepted, that the boat is full and that I've wasted my time travelling all the way down here. I might have misjudged the weather forecast and accidentally picked the only afternoon this week that isn't sunny, and stormed back home in disgust. Or I might even have fallen victim to the Great Thames Tidal Surge Disaster of May 2008, and be posting posthumously. Well, you never know. But hopefully I'm out on the river, in the sunshine, having a whale of a time. Ooh, blimey, look at that! Fantastic! Fingers crossed. [n.b. Twitter may have a more timely update]
And here's another post I wrote earlier. I'm almost never at home to blog at 10am on a weekday... but now, with Scheduled post publishing, I can pretend to be. I actually published this particular post 12 hours ago, but Blogger has held it back until precisely now. And this is great. I can now stick up pre-prepared posts while I'm at work, or while I'm out and about, or even while I'm on holiday, and you'll think I'm blogging in real time. It means the end to week-long hiatuses, like when I was incommunicado in the Outer Hebrides, because I can write you a week's worth of thrilling stuff in advance. Trust nothing from now on, it's all an illusion. For example, it's now 10am and I'm not actually blogging. I've taken today off work and I'm sitting on a train at a central London terminus about to travel out of the capital. The weather forecast looked really good earlier in the week, and a day trip to the seaside sounded like an utterly splendid no-brainer of an idea. Looking at the cloud, I'm not so sure now. Whenever 'now' is. Blimey, this time-travelling is really complicated.
This is the first post I've ever published while I was asleep. Look down there at the timestamp. It's 4am, and I'm unconscious to the world under the duvet in the bedroom nextdoor. And yet this blogpost has appeared, all by itself, with no human interaction whatsoever. At 03:59 it wasn't here, and now 60 seconds later it is. Hello to any of you who happen to be awake (or, more likely, abroad) at this unearthly hour. All this synchronised excitement is thanks to a new Blogger feature called Scheduled post publishing. Regular commenter siddiq has the heads-up. It's very simple. If I write a new post and change its timestamp to some moment in the future, and then press publish, Blogger will wait until the appropriate time before publishing. Yes, I know that other blogging platforms have had this particular future-feature for absolutely ages, but it's long-awaited for us freebie-kids on bog standard Blogger. Hurrah! Can you hear me snoring?
Two Forts Way: According to Thurrock Council there's a three mile pedestrian andcycle route along the banks of the Thames to the east of Tilbury, called the Two Forts Way. It looks almost convincing on an Ordnance Survey map, hugging the edge of the estuary and wiggling round the edge of a giant power station. So I thought I'd give it a try, on my way from Tilbury Fort to another defensive position further downriver. I'm glad I knew this thoroughfare existed before I got there because the signage was almost non-existent, and I'm particularly glad I didn't bring a bike.
Setting out from Tilbury Fort, all well and good. And then a small crossed-out sticker on a metal staircase hinted that this was where National Cycle Route 13 faded away. Erm, OK, up and over, to the high tide side of the river wall, and along the rather chancy path hugging the concrete edge. To my left towered the twin belching chimneys of Tilbury 'B', and to my right loomed a Mauritanean tanker. At one point, below the power station pier, the Thames was lapping over the footpath and I had to detour inland through a forgotten wildlife garden and over an enclosed rusty footbridge. Great stuff, if a little unexpected. Eventually these industrial ramparts dissolved away, and I found myself walking across deserted marshes covered by golden rape. Just me and the river and the occasional silent angler. Tiny newts scuttled across the path and I was repeatedly dive-bombed by butterflies. Even greater stuff. It was a real shame when, after a mile of 'proper' irregular footpath, the bland tarmac cycle route suddenly returned. Giggling kids and families with pushchairs signalled car park ahead, and the magic of the secret trail ebbed away. I hope they never link the two ends together with anything too accessible.
Coalhouse Fort: When warships grew stronger and Tilbury Fort grew obsolete, the Victorians installed three replacements on the penultimate bend of the River Thames. The best preserved of these is Coalhouse Fort, an armoured casemate battery with curved granite walls set behind protective earthworks. Bloody enormous guns were lined up around the perimeter to take aim at any French (and later German) battleships that dared to approach. None ever did. The fort is now in the care of a devoted band of volunteers who are slowly restoring its crumbling fabric, and who open up the gates to visitors on the last Sunday of the month and on bank holidays. So I popped in here too. The £3 for admission was a bargain, and they chucked in a free hour-plus guided tour as a bonus. I was impressed by our guide who managed to keep talking throughout, in spite of the echoing moans of a couple of uninterested toddlers being dragged round by their smiling parents. From the dark (now damp) tunnels where the gunpowder was stored up to the gun emplacements on the roof, she battled to tell us every last elaborate detail of the fort's operation. Most informative, perhaps overly so, but a fascinating behind the scenes glimpse of 19th century ingenuity all the same.
Once dismissed from the tour I went to looked round a couple of pleasingly amateur museums, each crammed with a hotchpotch of military exhibits and ephemera. There's a particular emphasis on aviation, including several 'bits' that the curators hire out to film crews who need authentic plane crash debris. Out in the courtyard I found a selection of old army vehicles, and the remains of a V2 bomb which landed on Wickford (ha!), and a handful of stalls peddling crystals and tarot readings. I'd turned up on the day of the fort's annual Psychic Fair, although very few stallholders had made the effort. Judging by the lack of consumer interest, it was the psychics who'd stayed at home who had the true predictive ability. I was too late to pay a pound for a visit to "The Haunted Tunnel", and I also missed Yvette Fielding who was here with her over-hyped film crew a couple of months ago. If you dare follow in her (and my) footsteps, your next opportunity is in three weeks time.
Bataville: And finally, on the long walk back to East Tilbury station, what looks like a peculiar Eastern European outpost. To the west of the road are a series of blocky whitefactories, now mostly empty, and to the east a compact square estate of semi-continental-style houses. All date back to the 1930s when Tomas Bata came from Czechoslovakia to build a shoe factory in these estuarine meadows. He was a man with a passion, not just for footwear but for the welfare of his workers and their families. He planned a utopian 'garden village' settlement, promoting modernist design, with all of its services managed by the Bata Shoe Company. There was a Bata cinema and a Bata butchers and a Bata supermarket and even a Bata war memorial (plus, of course, a Bata shoe shop).
Shoe production has long since moved overseas, leaving the estate as a peaceful commuter village with half a row of shops and a central library. Walking round the tightly-packed grid of leafy residential avenues it's clear that this is still a desirable place to live, even without the community infrastructure so carefully cultivated by its original benefactor. But Tomas's legacy lives on at the Bata Reminiscence and Resource Centre, whose website will tell you all you need to know about the history of this unique location. If expansion plans for the Thames Gateway go ahead, there may yet be thousands more homes on their way. Let's hope they don't smother the site's quintessential Bata-ness.
Tilbury Riverside: On the grey northern banks of the Thames, just before the estuary opens up to the sea, lies the historic town of Tilbury. It's home to one of the three largest container ports in Britain, and the only commercial survivor of the outward expansion of London's docklands in the 19th century. Huge ocean-going ships sail in daily to unload their cargoes, and vast acreages of unsold shiny cars cover the quayside. It's all screened-off and rather ugly, at least until you make your way a mile out of town to the one remaining accessible stretch of river frontage. There used to be a major train terminus down here until the 1960s, back when this was London's main passenger liner terminal. Thousands emigrated to Australia through its portals, and 60 years ago the Empire Windrush docked here heralding the beginnings of Commonwealth immigration. It's rather quieter these days. The terminal now hosts only the occasional deep water cruise and the notoriously unreliable GravesendFerry, while the railway line is used only by freight. There was no ferry service on Bank Holiday Monday, just a deserted locked-off jetty (so no chance of escaping to Kent). Business was unexpectedly buzzing at the World's End pub, appropriately located at the end of a bleak mudflanked cul-de-sac. A few yards further along the river wall, however, was my intended destination.
Tilbury Fort: How best could the Kings and Queens of England prevent enemy boats from sweeping up the Thames to capture London by force? A large militaryfort at Tilbury, that's how, guns poised ready to sink any advancing maritime threat. Henry VIII built the first defensive structure here but it was Charles II who instigated the impressive star-shaped structure still to be seen today. It's essentially pentagonal, with diamond-shaped bastions poking out into a series of concentric moats. Alas you don't get any sense of the geometric splendour of the site by visiting, that's only evident from the air. But the front entrance - a decorative Water Gate - is mighty impressive, and there's plenty more to see inside.
Entrance costs only £3.70 (very Thurrock prices, I thought), and with your ticket you get a push-button audio tour and free rein to explore the site. Out across the parade ground for starters, or up onto the bastion wall to look out over the concentric moats and wooden drawbridges protecting the fort from land-based attack. Younger visitors will enjoy scrambling over the earth banks and grassy peaks labelled "do not climb", even though English Heritage might wish they didn't. One especially well-preserved building is the East Magazine, used for storing thousand stacked-up barrels of gunpowder. It's surrounded by an additional curtain wall to limit the possibility of serious blast damage - risk management is certainly no 21st century invention. Elsewhere you can go down into the dark storage tunnels of the north-east bastion, these a later addition to the fort, or climb up onto the gun positions overlooking the Thames. Blam! Pow! Gotcha!
And yet, for all its impressive fortifications, Tilbury Fort never really earnt its keep. No enemy gunboats ever made it this far up the Thames, and the only wartime action was the shooting down of a single WW1 Zeppelin. And so the fort survives, battling on against a regular invasion of Essex dads, spray-tanned mums and their bloated runaround offspring. The Spanish Armada was surely nothing in comparison.
As the weather finally improves, I'm getting increasingly worried. As I look around at others in the sunshine, I fear that I may not be normal. As Britain starts to strip off for spring, I have a terrible confession to make. Yes, unbelievable as it may sound, it's absolutely true. I don't have a tattoo. How did that happen?
There is no blotchy blue design sprawled across my upper arm. No dragon's claw or dolphin's tail pokes out from beneath the hem of my t-shirt sleeve. I haven't got a row of Chinese characters running down my forearm, nor the name of my firstborn emblazoned across my shoulderblade. There's no intricate Celtic knotwork encircling either of my biceps, nor the emblem of my favourite football team etched permanently into my calf. No constellation of stars adorns the nape of my neck, and no mythical beast-filled tableau plays out across my chest. My skin, alas, is totally wholly 100% tattoo-free.
It's bewildering, to be honest. Surely by this point in my life I should have subjected myself to the needle at least once? Surely my mates really ought to have cajoled me into the artist's chair for a shared Maori symbol or an impulsive Union Jack. There must, surely, have been one drunken evening when I felt the need to stumble into a tattoo parlour and demand that a comedy bulldog be injected beneath my skin? I must, surely, have woken one morning with a thumping hangover and wondered why my skin was suddenly peeling in technicolour. How can I have held out for so long?
And yet no. My unblemished skin remains a virgin embarrassment. Other men can whip off their t-shirts in public to reveal inclusive tribal markings, but I need to wear long sleeves to hide my un-inked shame. Other people wear their personality with pictorial pride, like a hieroglyphic hallmark (football team, sign of zodiac, MUM, firstborn), whereas I have no distinguishing features whatsoever. Everybody else's epidermis appears to have succumbed to indelible scarring, but not mine. As the sun starts beating down for summer, I can no longer pretend to be a functioning part of modern society. I am so very very sorry.
I guess a tattoo's just something I've been putting off, like a trip to the dentist. Maybe one day I'll identify a particular design I want plastered all over me in perpetuity. Maybe one day I'll choose to adorn my bodily canvas with something spontaneous and witty. Maybe one day I'll step up and join the ranks of the permanently marked. Maybe one day I too will be innately fashionable, even with nothing on. In the meantime, I'm resigned to being alienated by my lack of artistic taste.
Please, I beg of you, don't laugh at me. And I promise not to laugh at you when your dragon fades, and your angel blurs, and your phoenix sags, and your inkblot wrinkles, and your beloved divorces, and your football team rebrands, and those Chinese characters turn out to spell a particularly crude swear word. In 20 years time, I may still relish being the odd one out.
I don't know about you, but most of the art I did at school wasn't very good. A few charcoal sketchings, a couple of badly misfired clay objects and several posterpaint daubings. It came as some surprise, therefore, when my secondary school art teacher saw fit to place one of my not terribly good paintings on the art room wall. And even more of a surprise when that same painting (of a plate of food) was still there on the same wall four years later. School art doesn't usually have longevity, and isn't usually great. But one of my contemporaries from school moved on from art lesson brushwork to exhibit in galleries worldwide. Simon was a couple of years below me, but I was at least in the same class as his brother. And yesterday I went to Greenwich to see a proper exhibition of his work. This time with no double-mounted sugar paper anywhere in sight.
You probably know some of Simon Patterson's work. He was the mastermind behind the first tube map mashup - The Great Bear - in which the names of all the stations were replaced by famous people. Engineers on the Bakerloo line, philosophers on the Circle and Footballers on the Jubilee, etc etc. It doesn't sound terribly original now but the trick, as with all wonderfully simple ideas, was to come up with it before anyone else. The Great Bear is the first thing you'll see as you enter this exhibition. It's based on the 1992 tube map so it still looks like a proper work of art - no accessibility blobs or excess information overload here. And no obtrusive IKEA advert either (but there is a station rather prophetically called Boris). Stand and admire - you'll not see the tube map this clean and clever again.
And there's more (though, to be honest, not a huge amount more) as the exhibition continues. A quartet of giant abaci, each inscribed with the name of a famous ship. A liner's cross section marked out with geological timelines. A pair of slide rules depicting biblical, scientific and psychological evolution. Three fully rigged racing sails, each labelled with the biographical details of a famous writer. All perfectly in tune with the National Maritime Museum's historical obsession with time and the sea. But someone really ought to have gagged the art critic whose gushing prose appears in the show's catalogue. I mean, really, who writes this sortof stuff...
"Patterson's artistic practice uses wry humour to question the ways language is used and misused in a flawed network of knowledge, power, doubt and affirmation. Language is built on consensus, yet in Patterson's hands the register shifts to one of dissensus as he negotiates between universal solutions and failures that are, paradoxically, essential for language to do its work."
Ah, I've not heard him called "Patterson" since the early 80s. Further inside there are two exhibits on a rather grander scale. Cosmic Wallpaper is a giant starchartmural with stellar names replaced by a Deep Purple discography. Strange, I didn't have the Patterson family down as a prog rock stronghold. And there's the NMM's new commission, Cousteau in the Underworld. At first sight it looks like a room hung with vintage Mediterranean sea charts, but look closer and you'll see that not everything in sepia text is a genuine place name. Some are more definitely linked to Greek mythology, while whole sentences appear to have been lifted from a Wikipedia biography of France's finest undersea explorer. Yeah, very clever. Sometimes I feel Simon's a one trick pony, but it's a mighty fine trick.
Outside, above the museum's Neptune Court, there's one further physical installation. A giant white kite, emblazoned with the name "Yuri Gagarin", has been lodged against the glass ceiling. This is an "itinerant sculpture" and has been travelling the world since 1999 (up an E3 tree, between Australian town hall pillars, in a Japanese tea garden, etc) before it eventually reaches its final destination at the Moscow airfield where Gagarin lost his life. Very deep, very symbolic. And finally, if you can find your way to the rear parlour of the Queen's House nextdoor, a rare venture into video. Simon's filmed two 18th century pocket watches and added a one minute soundtrack of a man and woman exercising. It sounded like shagging to me, but the guidebook assured me they were instead "pushing their bodies to physical limits, intertwining mechanical and experiential time".
The exhibition won't detain you for long, but it's well worth a look at some point over the next six months. Especially the legendary tube map. And once the doors have shut and Simon's work has been cleared away, I wonder if they'd be interested in a commission from one of his artistic contemporaries. I must have that painting of a dinnerplate somewhere...
It being a year divisible by 4, curators at the Victoria and Albert Museum have been busy assembling an appropriately Olympic exhibition. They've gathered together a comprehensive collection of Olympic posters, from Paris 1900 right up to London 2012, and all are now on show at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green. Not a very thrilling concept you might think - there's only so much you can do with five rings and a few sportsmen - but it's actually a fascinating way to view the evolution of global 20th century design. See how the artists of the day tackled the Olympic brand brief, from proud torchbearing patriotism to abstract symbolic ingenuity. And yes, all leading up to that design at the end.
The first Olympics are represented here by their programme covers, as it wasn't until Stockholm 1912 that an official poster was published. Early Olympic posters often had a very strong nationalistic theme, with artists depicting proud rippling athletes in front of recognisable landmarks. Berlin 1936 for example, with laurel-crowned victor towering above the Brandenburg Gate, or London 1948 (Big Ben plus discus-hurler plus rings - sorted). In the 1960s, however, things started to change. Tokyo 1964 ditched sport in favour of a big bold rising sun, and Mexico 1968 went all op-art with eye-popping concentric black lines. It's this dazzling Mexican design that still stands out as the most modern anywhere in the collection, and the one that'll probably sell the most postcards in the shop downstairs afterwards.
Munich 1972 was the first Olympics to take poster design seriously, approaching the pick of contemporary artists to create an extensive colourful collection that wouldn't have looked out of place in an Athena shop. This photograph shows a selection, plus in the foreground a genuine London 1948 torch (as used on the run across Belgium, apparently). From the 70s onwards I was impressed by how many of the Olympic logos I remembered. These variations on the simple five-ring design may have had an official lifespan of only a fortnight, but their iconic audacity has nevertheless imprinted upon the global consciousness. (Sorry if that last sentence reads like critical artistic tosh, but most of the labels in the exhibition were like that and I fear I've been infected by pretentious verbosity)
But, with characteristic speed and vigour, our new Mayor has acted. His latest policy announcement will increase the number of law enforcement officers targeting bus-related disorder. Trained police officers will be on patrol across the capital to stamp out misbehaviour on our public transport network. Teams of bus hub crime fighters will work together to confront wrongdoing and put an end to petty law-breaking. Low-level anti-social behaviour will be eradicated, and Londoners will be able to flash their Oysters in safety once more. How terribly reassuring.
Exactly 40 years ago, eighteen floors above the streets of Canning Town, Mrs Ivy Hodge decided to make herself a cup of tea. This turned out to be a ghastly error. The match Ivy struck beneath her kettle ignited a gas leak, hurling her headlong across the kitchen. The force of the blast blew out the concrete walls of her brand new council flat, setting off a terrible chain reaction. Catastrophic structural failure caused the entire southeast corner of her tower block to collapse - wall by wall, flat by flat - sending 22 sitting rooms plummeting to the ground. With just one match Ivy had unwittingly killed four of her fellow Ronan Point residents, altered government housing policy and brought about the premature demise of the Modernist architecture movement. It's dangerous stuff, tea.
"The Mayor proposes to work in partnership with charities like Trees for Cities and the London Boroughs to launch a major effort to bring street trees to those areas of London that need them most."
Somewhere else I went at the weekend was Ladywell Fields. Local community groups were holding a Fun Day in the park, to celebrate the completion of a major environmental project. The River Ravensbourne, which runs along the eastern edge, has been allowed to break out into the fields through a man-made meandering channel. Here's what the featureless flat grassland used to look like (2006), here's the new stream under construction (2007) and here's the finished result (2008). Before, after. It's a doubly clever idea, both making the park a more attractive place to visit and also providing extra drainage capacity following heavy rain. On Saturday the new waterway was the centre of attention, with several small children scrambling along the gently sloping banks and paddling in the sparkling water. Really, it's a most attractive piece of landscaping.
Caution - Area liable to flooding
Warning - Strong currents
Caution - Soft mud
Upminster Windmill is very much in the middle of suburbia. There are semi-detached houses on three sides of Windmill Field, and the mill would have followed suit had Essex County Council had their evil way in the 1950s. But local people successfully fought off the developers, and when the area was transferred to London in 1965 the new council was rather more sympathetic. What's special about this windmill is not its history or its design, but just that it's managed to survive.
My guided tour began with a ladder-climb to the very top, beneath the cap, where the power of the sails is transferred to the central vertical shaft. Here we came face to beak with some pigeons who've recently broken in through a gaping hole in the woodwork, and are now making a mess with their roosting, nesting and guanoing. As we slowly descended, our guide explained the mechanics of flour production one floor at a time. Hoist up each sack using this, drop the grain through that hatch there, crush the kernels with these stones here, and filter out the surplus bran through this. It was an appropriately interesting 45 minute tour, illustrated with various tools and machinery, and kept children involved and entertained throughout. Admittedly Upminster's innards aren't yet restored to full working order - a Lottery grant will be required for that - but hopefully proper functionality will come soon.
Silver discs (May 1983)
Jane - It's A Fine Day: This unique acappella ditty is perfectly evocative of a warm pre-summer's day, just like today. Throw open the French windows, sit back in your deckchair and perspire a little. " It's a fine day, people open windows, they leave their houses, just for a short while." Ah yes, a fine day indeed. This is the original version, a sparse vocal performance by Jane Lancaster, not so much sung as breathed. "They walk by the grass and they look at the grass, they look at the sky." The lyrics were from a poem written by Jane's boyfriend Edward Barton, and originally doomed to indie obscurity until John Peel (and then Cherry Red) picked up on their timeless charm. "It's going to be a fine night tonight, it's going to be a fine day tomorrow." Never a hit, alas, until Opus III slammed the vocals over a dance beat and reached number 5 in the charts nine years later. "Sitting in this field, I remember how we were going to sit in this field but never quite did, rain or appointments or something." Mixes perfectly does our Jane, just like a good Pimms. [YouTube]
In the suburbs to the west of Lewisham, sort of Brockley/Ladywell-ish, there's a big convex park called Hilly Fields. It's an extensive green space with proper steep slopes, boasting fine views over Docklands and the uplands of Dulwich. Victorian developers devoured most of the surrounding area in the late 19th century, but this verdant hillock was saved from residential destruction by Octavia Hill, one of the founders of the National Trust. At the summit are tennis courts and half a secondary school, as well as (at this time of year) a very popular ice cream van. In the heat of a pre-summer's day it's a perfect spot for a minor kickaround, or for watching your dog let off steam, or for sitting on a folding chair in the shade of a blossoming horse chestnut whilst reading Daily Mail supplements with the wife. East London has nothing similarly contoured which could possibly compete.
Round about now, if everything's gone to plan, I should be heading back onto dry land after a marvellous afternoon of messing about in boats. I hope I got some decent photographs. Hurrah for scheduled post publishing. And now for something I haven't done for the last two months - a proper fish supper! Fish may not have been banned as part of my low-fat cholesterol diet, but battered cod straight out of a spitting fryer was most definitely off limits. Especially with a side order of thick greasy vinegar-splattered chips piled up on the side of the plate, mmmm. Tonight's fatty feast is because I went back to the doctor's yesterday for a second blood test, signalling the end of my two months of extremely strict eating. Hopefully my cholesterol levels have dropped significantly, but I won't actually find out my results until next week. So I've decided to have a celebratory unhealthy blowout anyway, which yesterday included steak and kidney pie, pancakes and my first Creme Egg in eight weeks. It can't affect my test results, so why not? And tonight, I don't know about you, but fish and chips and a mug of steaming tea in a seaside restaurant sounds absolutely perfect.
Setting out from Tilbury Fort, all well and good. And then a small crossed-out sticker on a metal staircase hinted that this was where National Cycle Route 13 faded away. Erm, OK, up and over, to the high tide side of the river wall, and along the rather chancy path hugging the concrete edge. To my left towered the twin belching chimneys of Tilbury 'B', and to my right loomed a Mauritanean tanker. At one point, below the power station pier, the Thames was lapping over the footpath and I had to detour inland through a forgotten wildlife garden and over an enclosed rusty footbridge. Great stuff, if a little unexpected. Eventually these industrial ramparts dissolved away, and I found myself walking across deserted marshes covered by golden rape. Just me and the river and the occasional silent angler. Tiny newts scuttled across the path and I was repeatedly dive-bombed by butterflies. Even greater stuff. It was a real shame when, after a mile of 'proper' irregular footpath, the bland tarmac cycle route suddenly returned. Giggling kids and families with pushchairs signalled car park ahead, and the magic of the secret trail ebbed away. I hope they never link the two ends together with anything too accessible.
Coalhouse Fort: When warships grew stronger and Tilbury Fort grew obsolete, the Victorians installed three replacements on the penultimate bend of the River Thames. The best preserved of these is Coalhouse Fort, an armoured casemate battery with curved granite walls set behind protective earthworks. Bloody enormous guns were lined up around the perimeter to take aim at any French (and later German) battleships that dared to approach. None ever did. The fort is now in the care of a devoted band of volunteers who are slowly restoring its crumbling fabric, and who open up the gates to visitors on the last Sunday of the month and on bank holidays. So I popped in here too. The £3 for admission was a bargain, and they chucked in a free hour-plus guided tour as a bonus. I was impressed by our guide who managed to keep talking throughout, in spite of the echoing moans of a couple of uninterested toddlers being dragged round by their smiling parents. From the dark (now damp) tunnels where the gunpowder was stored up to the gun emplacements on the roof, she battled to tell us every last elaborate detail of the fort's operation. Most informative, perhaps overly so, but a fascinating behind the scenes glimpse of 19th century ingenuity all the same.
Bataville: And finally, on the long walk back to East Tilbury station, what looks like a peculiar Eastern European outpost. To the west of the road are a series of blocky white factories, now mostly empty, and to the east a compact square estate of semi-continental-style houses. All date back to the 1930s when Tomas Bata came from Czechoslovakia to build a shoe factory in these estuarine meadows. He was a man with a passion, not just for footwear but for the welfare of his workers and their families. He planned a utopian 'garden village' settlement, promoting modernist design, with all of its services managed by the Bata Shoe Company. There was a Bata cinema and a Bata butchers and a Bata supermarket and even a Bata war memorial (plus, of course, a Bata shoe shop).
Tilbury Riverside: On the grey northern banks of the Thames, just before the estuary opens up to the sea, lies the historic town of Tilbury. It's home to one of the three largest container ports in Britain, and the only commercial survivor of the outward expansion of London's docklands in the 19th century. Huge ocean-going ships sail in daily to unload their cargoes, and vast acreages of unsold shiny cars cover the quayside. It's all screened-off and rather ugly, at least until you make your way a mile out of town to the one remaining accessible stretch of river frontage. There used to be a major train terminus down here until the 1960s, back when this was London's main passenger liner terminal. Thousands emigrated to Australia through its portals, and 60 years ago the Empire Windrush docked here heralding the beginnings of Commonwealth immigration. It's rather quieter these days. The terminal now hosts only the occasional deep water cruise and the notoriously unreliable Gravesend Ferry, while the railway line is used only by freight. There was no ferry service on Bank Holiday Monday, just a deserted locked-off jetty (so no chance of escaping to Kent). Business was unexpectedly buzzing at the World's End pub, appropriately located at the end of a bleak mudflanked cul-de-sac. A few yards further along the river wall, however, was my intended destination.
Tilbury Fort: How best could the Kings and Queens of England prevent enemy boats from sweeping up the Thames to capture London by force? A large military fort at Tilbury, that's how, guns poised ready to sink any advancing maritime threat. Henry VIII built the first defensive structure here but it was Charles II who instigated the impressive star-shaped structure still to be seen today. It's essentially pentagonal, with diamond-shaped bastions poking out into a series of concentric moats. Alas you don't get any sense of the geometric splendour of the site by visiting, that's only evident from the air. But the front entrance - a decorative Water Gate - is mighty impressive, and there's plenty more to see inside.
"I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm." (Queen Elizabeth I, Tilbury, August 1588)Entrance costs only £3.70 (very Thurrock prices, I thought), and with your ticket you get a push-button audio tour and free rein to explore the site. Out across the parade ground for starters, or up onto the bastion wall to look out over the concentric moats and wooden drawbridges protecting the fort from land-based attack. Younger visitors will enjoy scrambling over the earth banks and grassy peaks labelled "do not climb", even though English Heritage might wish they didn't. One especially well-preserved building is the East Magazine, used for storing thousand stacked-up barrels of gunpowder. It's surrounded by an additional curtain wall to limit the possibility of serious blast damage - risk management is certainly no 21st century invention. Elsewhere you can go down into the dark storage tunnels of the north-east bastion, these a later addition to the fort, or climb up onto the gun positions overlooking the Thames. Blam! Pow! Gotcha!
You probably know some of Simon Patterson's work. He was the mastermind behind the first tube map mashup - The Great Bear - in which the names of all the stations were replaced by famous people. Engineers on the Bakerloo line, philosophers on the Circle and Footballers on the Jubilee, etc etc. It doesn't sound terribly original now but the trick, as with all wonderfully simple ideas, was to come up with it before anyone else. The Great Bear is the first thing you'll see as you enter this exhibition. It's based on the 1992 tube map so it still looks like a proper work of art - no accessibility blobs or excess information overload here. And no obtrusive IKEA advert either (but there is a station rather prophetically called Boris). Stand and admire - you'll not see the tube map this clean and clever again.
Outside, above the museum's Neptune Court, there's one further physical installation. A giant white kite, emblazoned with the name "Yuri Gagarin", has been lodged against the glass ceiling. This is an "itinerant sculpture" and has been travelling the world since 1999 (up an E3 tree, between Australian town hall pillars, in a Japanese tea garden, etc) before it eventually reaches its final destination at the Moscow airfield where Gagarin lost his life. Very deep, very symbolic. And finally, if you can find your way to the rear parlour of the Queen's House nextdoor, a rare venture into video. Simon's filmed two 18th century pocket watches and added a one minute soundtrack of a man and woman exercising. It sounded like shagging to me, but the guidebook assured me they were instead "pushing their bodies to physical limits, intertwining mechanical and experiential time".
