1) Offset your broomstick flights: Leave that birch-broom in the cupboard! It's no longer socially acceptable to fly everywhere, especially for short-distance domestic flights where alternative public transport options are available. Remember that witches over the age of 60 travel free on buses, and that most carriers allow cats, owls and other familiars on board for no additional charge.
2) Use low-energy bulbs instead of candles: You might think that flickering wicks add the perfect eerie ambience to any Samhain seance, but they may instead be harming Mother Gaia's cloud-filled airblanket! Have you stopped to consider the damage that an entire pack of IKEA tealights can do to the atmosphere? Blow out that greedy carbon-guzzling flame and flick the switch on the wall instead.
3) Turn down your cauldron by 1ºC: Ask yourself, does your favourite metal pot need to be hubble-bubbling away at quite so high a temperature? Such tender delicacies as eye of newt and toe of frog taste just as good on a low heat, and you'll save money on burning woodpiles too!
4) Recycle your pumpkin innards: Once you've carved out your gap-toothed pumpkins, it would be ecologically irresponsible to throw away the inner flesh. Thankfully everyone in Britain adores the crisp fresh taste of pumpkin, so they'll thank you for converting your leftovers into a series of tasty orange-pulp dishes. Why stop at pumpkin pie? Party guests will lap up a banquet of pumpkin salsa, pumpkin hummus, pumpkin soda and chocolate-coated pumpkin seeds.
5) Use only locally-sourced apples for bobbing: It'd never do to stick your head face-down into a bucket of water for a French Golden Delicious or a South African Granny Smith. Instead you ought to bite your teeth into a knobbly Egremont Russet or Laxton's Epicure scrumped from the orchard just down the road. It may be theft, but it's better than buying some limp irradiated fruit that's been flown halfway round the world.
6) Send your child out trick-or-treating unaccompanied: Everyone says it's dangerous out there at Hallowe'en. Everyone says watch out for strangers with evil intent. Everyone says beware of murderers dressed up as little old ladies. Everyone says stay clear of back alleys and dimly-lit streets where knife-wielding maniacs might lurk. Everyone says double-check any sweets you're given in case someone's laced them with rat poison. But, quite frankly, the very best outcome for the environment this Hallowe'en is that your child ends up dead. That'd be 80 years of wasteful carbon footprint prevented in one simple stab wound. Go on, send 'em out by themselves, just this once. You know it make eco-sense.
7) Switch off your television, turn off your hi-fi and spend the evening sitting in the dark: Not only is it good for the planet, but it's also the best way not to be spotted by those bloody trick-or-treaters. Sssh, they might hear you!
I don't know about you, but I spent a lot of the weekend in hospital. This time it was my mum's turn to be admitted, so I was merely the dutiful son who went visiting (and expressed gobsmacked adoration at how fast she appeared to be recovering). A dodgy knee joint was to blame, half of which has now been replaced by a pseudo-bionic implant (and which hurts like billy-o when you bend it, so I'm told). It's given me yet another opportunity to observe nursing staff and hospital facilities up close. And this time, on the other side of the financial fence.
My mum was admitted as an NHS patient, but she ended up in a private hospital. I'm not quite sure how this switching system works, but it seems that health service reforms now offer greater choice by external outsourcing. Waiting lists are kept down by funnelling off certain patients into private care, and NHS hospitals thereby absolve themselves of providing a sufficient level of services using their own facilities. My mum gets a new half-knee, the NHS "cures" another patient, and private healthcare shareholders rake in profits from their empty beds. Everybody wins, except perhaps the ghost of Clement Attlee who spins ever faster in his grave with every market-driven government health reform.
I recognised the end of town where the private hospital was located - it was a stone's throw from the regional NHS hospital where most of the private consultants have their day job. They spend most of their week operating on the general public in a government funded state-of-the-art operating theatre, and the fifth day up the road in a bijou cottage hospital raking in considerably meatier fees. Fortunately for them it's only a short drive inbetween the two, which makes it easy to keep an intermittent eye on all their patients and tell them how well they're doing. Nobody would sanction such split-site loyalty amongst, say, teachers or police officers, but for senior healthcare professionals it's now seemingly second nature.
I didn't recognise the atmosphere inside the private hospital. Everything seemed calm and relaxed, even down to the "security" (or lack of it) at the front reception desk. No terminal diseases here, no A&E, just nice routine surgical procedures that cure chronic conditions and improve lives. Long carpeted corridors with en-suite bedrooms off to either side - this was more like a hotel than a hospital. A walk-in shower, each, and personal telephones and televisions free from money-grabbing subscription fees. Even the meals came on china plates rather than plastic trays, covered by a clear lid rather than impenetrable clingwrap, and accompanied by proper salt and pepper pots rather than a couple of sachets of mass processed condiment. The service was everything the NHS ought to be, but can no longer afford.
One thing was no different, and that was the care and professionalism of the nursing staff. They ensured that my mum had as comfortable a stay as possible (except when they were deliberately bending her knee) and tended to her every need promptly and with a smile. Rather more of them spoke English than in the NHS hospital over the road, presumably because they'd not had their services contracted out to the lowest bidder. But they too worked stupid ridiculous shifts for not enough money, just like their public sector counterparts.
I'm delighted to have my mum back on both feet again, and pleased that her time in hospital was more pleasant than it might have been. There's nothing like recuperating with dignity in your own private space, and with the maddening witterings of others blocked out while you attempt to sleep overnight. But I'm not quite so comfortable that this was only possible by diverting NHS funding into the private sector. There's something very wrong with a National Health Service that can't treat its own, and is instead beholden to targets, deficits and extended choice networks. I know that "free" healthcare costs, but we'll all end up paying if going private ever becomes the defaultoption.
Tube Week ExtraUpdated tube map Typical. I run a whole blogweek all about the tube, including lots about the tube map and how it needs updating, and then over the weekend TfL only go and update it. It's one of the biggest updates for years, and incorporates the newly rebranded London Overground lines into Harry Beck's once-elegant design. It's all getting terribly overcrowded. Someone somewhere must have decided that the map has to contain as much information as possible, and with every update there are more symbols, more blobs, more angles and more text. Much more inclusive, but far less accessible. For the time being* you can compare the old (jpg) and the new (pdf) on the TfL website. See if you can spot the difference.
*2pm update: Aha, TfL appear to have removed the new map and have stuck the old one back again. Sorry to all my afternoon and evening readers. Still, enjoy the clear clean lines of the old map while you still can!
Here's what I've spotted... • The London Overground: Wham, a big tangerine octopus has suddenly grabbed hold of the old tube network. The North London line may have been on the tube map for years, but now it's bright orange and unmissable. The Gospel Oak to Barking line appears for the first time, although with no indication of how infrequent the service is. The Watford to Euston line reappears (the north end's been on and off the map several times over the years) while the West London line is brand new (ending south of the river at a rather forlorn looking Clapham Junction). All four lines have been inelegantly embedded onto the map with rather too many bends and several over-long stretches. All in all, not lovely. • Four brand new stations: They're opening "soon" and they're new on the map. They're Wood Lane (on the Hammersmith & City line, "station under construction"), Heathrow Terminal 5 (on the Piccadilly line, "under construction"), Shepherd's Bush ("London Overground station under construction") and Langdon Park (DLR, "opening November 2007"). • 19 other stations that weren't there before: All of them are Overground stations, including such backwater dumps as Leytonstone High Road, Kilburn High Road and Hatch End. • 10 new step-free stations: Don't get excited, they're all on the Overground and they were all step-free before. • Three new airport connections: Maybe TfL were listening to our conversation last week. Harrow and Wealdstone now has a red airport symbol , as do new arrivals Watford Junction and Clapham Junction. • Two big orange boxes: one warning of special fares north of Hatch End, the other announcing the demise of the East London line in December. • The longest station name just got longer: Kings Cross St Pancras is now "Kings Cross St Pancras for St Pancras International". You know, just in case you couldn't work that out for yourself. • Lots of superfluous extra text relating to British Rail connections: It doesnt say Moorgate any more, it says "Moorgate no weekend service". Same thing at Old Street and Highbury & Islington. Like anybody cares. It's even wordier at Sudbury Hill on the Piccadilly line, which now reads "Sudbury Hill Sudbury Hill Harrow (no weekend service) 150m". Whatever happened to clarity? • Lots more squashed-up station names: The northern end of the Bakerloo line is a lot more tightly packed. Acton Central almost crashes into the H&C line nextdoor. Turnpike Lane's been bumped nearer to Wood Green. Which of those three neighbouring stations is Blackhorse Road? And whose idea was it to shoehorn the London Overground lines onto a map where they don't really fit?
Pray that your eyesight never gets worse, because future tube maps can only be uglier, more cramped and even less legible. Someone needs to try to convince TfL that increasing inclusivity doesn't always help Londoners get around.
London Journeys: the Willett Way Part 2: Petts Wood → Chislehurst
I hope you enjoyed your extra hour in bed this morning. Let's return to Petts Wood and continue retracing the footsteps of William Willett, the man who came up with the idea of British Summer Time. The man who shifted us all sixty minutes into the future. The man who invented saved daylight by inventing time travel. Thanks Willie.
The Willett Way continues up a side alley, underneath the railway and out into deep green woodland. This is what's left of the ancient forest of Petts Wood, the bit that hasn't disappeared beneath a carpet of suburbia. The wood was bought by public subscription in 1927 and handed over to the National Trust, and has since acted as a buffer against unfettered housing development [photo]. And it's rather delightful. Twisting tracks and muddy bridleways lead beneath a leafy canopy, with the occasional view out across sheep-infested fields. And it must have been much the same when local builder William Willett took his morning constitutional 100 years ago. He was riding his horse through Petts Wood early one morning when he noticed that all his neighbours were still asleep in bed. What a waste of daylight, he thought. What if we could shift an hour of summer daylight from the morning to the evening? Being a man of action he went home and wrote a polemic pamphlet entitled "The Waste of Daylight", and campaigned to get his timeshifting plans forced through Parliament. And what do you know, he was actually successful. Eventually.
Introducing British Summer Time took rather longer than William Willett expected. The first Daylight Saving Bill was introduced in 1908, but struggled to get through Parliament despite support from a majority of MPs. It took a world war to focus Europe's attention on the importance of saving daylight, and therefore fuel, and Germany was first to take the plunge. A coal shortage forced Britain to follow suit shortly afterwards, and on 21st May 1916 a bemused nation turned its carriage clocks and fobwatches forward by 60 pioneering minutes. In 1925 a permanent British Summertime Act was passed, and the grateful people of Petts Wood erected this memorial sundial in honour of its trailblazing inventor. It stands in a silent clearing in the middle of the wood [photo] and commemorates William as "the untiring advocate of Summer Time" [photo]. It's another very special hour-ahead sundial, running on BST rather than GMT, with the Latin phrase beneath the dial translating as "I only keep the Summer hours" [photo]. I arrived in the clearing when the sun was almost exactly overhead, so the shadowed time in my photograph indicates 1pm BST rather the more normal 12 noon GMT. Of all the sights along the Willett Way, this was the most special.
But William never lived to see his ideas come to fruition. He died in 1915, just a year too early, and was buried in the churchyard at St Nicholas's in Chislehurst [photo]. The Willett Way passes his burial site, and you can slip beneath the lych gate into the churchyard and search out his grave in the southeastern corner. It's a sorry sight, at least in comparison to some of the more upright memorials close by [photo]. William's marble cross headstone has been snapped off and now lies folornly across the top of a bare earth grave [photo]. Some of the plot's low stone borders have also toppled over, and the text on what's left of the gravestone is barely readable. You wouldn't ever imagine, looking at this mess from the pavement outside, that here was the last resting place of a man once so revered that he had his own waxwork in Madame Tussauds.
The Willett Way terminates just up the road at William's self-built home - The Cedars [photo]. It's an impressive detached pile overlooking Chislehurst Common, and Bromley Council have placed a plaque by the front door to commemorate "the initiator of British Summer Time". Thank goodness a few people still remember William Willett - the ordinary man whose early morning horse-ride ended up changing the world. Ah, if only changing all those clocks back an hour didn't take so long! Damn you William, damn you!
Everyone appreciates the long light evenings. Everyone laments their shrinkage as Autumn approaches, and nearly everyone has given utterance to a regret that the clear bright light of early morning, during Spring and Summer months, is so seldom seen or used. Nevertheless, Standard time remains so fixed, that for nearly half the year the sun shines for several hours each day, while we are asleep, and is rapidly nearing the horizon when we reach home after the work of the day is over. There then remains only a brief spell of declining daylight in which to spend the short period of leisure at our disposal. Now, if one of the hours of sunlight wasted in the morning could be added to the end of the day, many advantages would be gained by all, and especially by those who would spend in the open air, whatever time they might have at their disposal after the duties of the day have been discharged. The Waste of Daylight, William Willett (1907)
London Journeys: the Willett Way Part 1: Petts Wood → Petts Wood
If you're looking forward to an extra hour in bed tomorrow morning, then the man you need to thank is a builder from Chislehurst. His name was William Willett and he's the visionary genius who, exactly a century ago, first proposed the idea of Daylight Saving Time. William noticed that late-sleeping Britons were wasting valuable daylight every morning and, in 1907, started a national campaign to put the clocks forward. And he came up with his idea whilst riding through Petts Wood. Let's go for a commemorative walk (in pictures)...
The people of Petts Wood in southeast London are understandably proud of William Willett. Look, here he is commemorated on the town sign in Queensway, just outside Woolworths [photo]. The sun and moon in the lower right quarter represent Daylight Saving (and then there's a horse representing Kent, an old coat of arms and an Elizabethan galleon built from local timber). And it's beneath this sign that a very special walking trail begins - the Willett Way. This three mile walk [pdf] has been put together by a local historian as part of a special centenary exhibition at the Royal Greenwich Observatory [link]. It's not a terribly exciting walk, just a trudge down suburban avenues and through a bit of woodland, but there's a certain charm in following in the footsteps of the man who invented BST. And this weekend would be perfect, because you've got an extra hour to do it.
Cross the railway by Petts Wood station and you'll find a matching sign, and a pub. The pub has been named in honour of William Willett (as have a lot of things round here - you'll get the hang of it as we proceed) and it's called the Daylight Inn[photo]. They do beer and food (and a trivia quiz on Tuesdays) just like any normal pub, but they also specialise in badly-repainted pub signs. The sign may look quite impressive, featuring a big smiling sun flanked by two clocks, but only until you peer a little closer [photo]. In the original pub sign one of the hour hands pointed to twelve and the other to one, representing the one hour time difference that's at the heart of Daylight Saving. But the brainless cretins who recently repainted the sign have set both clocks to noon, representing bugger all. Which is a shame. Don't stop to drown your sorrows, there's a long walk still to go.
Onward past a parade of half-timbered Tudorbethan shops (more 1935 than 1539) where the bored daytime wives of Petts Wood go to fritter away their husbands' salaries on tanning salons and interior design. And onward into the leafy avenues that surround the station, into one of the finest garden suburbs in southeast London. A typical avenue, off to your right beside the church, has been named Willett Way [photo]. It's full of exactly the sort of houses that William himself would have built, had he lived 20 years longer [photo]. It's a long street of black and white executive villas with pristine lawns and well-trimmed rose bushes. It's a privileged commuter haven complete with two-car garages and diamond latticed windows. It's the top of the property ladder, or at least as top as most of us could hope to aspire. It's extremely Metroland, apart from being on the wrong side of the capital. And there is, to be honest, absolutely no reason to walk down it apart from its name. Seen enough? Contain your seething jealousy, retrace your steps and head back towards the local recreation ground.
Yes, obviously, this is the Willett Recreation Ground, what else? Within its hedges you'll find the Petts Wood Bowling Club (please take great care - the path to the pavilion is slippery) and the Petts Wood Cricket Club. Surely some mistake there - two sporting facilities that haven't been named after our favourite Edwardian celebrity. But there's a treat in store embedded in the grass by the cricket pavilion [photo]. It's a very special memorial sundial, the hours marked out by colourful Roman numerals designed by pupils at a nearby primary school. There's no central spike - you have to stand in the middle and see which way your own shadow points [photo]. And, rather delightfully, this is a British Summer Time sundial. During the summer months it tells the correct time, while from November to March it runs an hour ahead of GMT. Unlike normal sundials this one tells the correct time for more than half of the year, and for the part of the year with maximum daylight too. Our William would be justly proud.
And so ends diamond geezer's fifth annual tube week. I continue to be amazed by how much interactive interest the London Underground inspires, even amongst people who rarely or never use it. And I'm also surprised, every year, that I don't run out of new tube-related stuff to write about. I mean, five years on and I still haven't written a tube week post about disusedstations. Maybe next year...
Tube geek (25)World metro systems London's not the only world city with a "metro" rail system. But it does have the biggest (and was, arguably, the first). For the lowdown on which city has what (with lots of lovely photographs, and data, and anorakky facts) there's the wonderful Metro Bits website. Using which, I've come up with the following international Top 5 Metro lists...
» Longest: London (421km), New York (370km), Tokyo (292km), Seoul (287km), Moscow (278km) » Shortest: Haifa (1.75km), Rouen (2.2km), Newark (2.2km), Volgograd (3.3km), Gelsenkirchen (3.7km) » Oldest: Mumbai (1853), London (1863), Chicago (1892), Budapest (May 1896), Glasgow (Dec 1896) » Youngest: Palma (April 07), Valencia (Oct 06), Daejon (Mar 06), Torino (Feb 06), Valparaiso (Nov 05) » Most stations: New York (468), Seoul (298), Paris (297), London (274), Madrid (219) » Most lines: New York (27), Paris (16), Köln (15), Tokyo (13), Madrid (13)
Tube quiz (25)Going Overground Within the next two months the London tube map is going to change quite dramatically, twice. • In two weeks time, on November 11th, the LondonOverground is born. That's a motley collection of four suburban railway lines (currently run by Silverlink Metro) which will be relaunched and rebranded under the TfL umbrella. The four lines in question run from Richmond to Stratford, from Gospel Oak to Barking, from Willesden Junction to Clapham Junction, and from Watford Junction to Euston. They won't be part of the official Underground network, but they will all appear on the tube map marked by a double orange stripe. It's a welcome shot in the arm for these previously neglected lines, but it's going to make the tube map look a bit of a congested mess. • In two months, on December 22nd, the entire East London Line will close for major redevelopment work. When it reopens in 2010 it'll be part of the East London Railway (from Dalston to Croydon) and part of the new London Overground. Which means that six current stations are about to disappear forever from the official Underground network. They're Shadwell, Wapping, Rotherhithe, Surrey Quays, New Cross and New Cross Gate. Their days are numbered. Their days are 58.
And I'd appreciate your thoughts on how these essential Underground facts will change, and whether you can think of any other pertinent trivia that'll never be the same again.
Tubewatch (25)yet more tube links • If you love all this tube-related stuff, then you ought to consider joining the London Underground Railway Society. They hold monthly meetings and publish a detailed monthly newsletter(all yours for just two quid a month) • Here are a couple of wet and wonderful not-quite-tube-maps, one showing London's waterways, the other London's underground rivers and sewers(both splendid) • Admit it, you've often wondered how many 1930s Grand Union Canal narrowboats share their name with a tube station. • Everybody has to learn how to use the tube the first time they travel. Luckily there are some animated teaching materials at Transport School(where you can also learn about taking the bus, the DLR, a tram, and even a taxi) • You thought they were just litter bins and CCTV cameras, but no. According to TfL's offical Product Standards they're an essential element of a "well designed, confident and consistent visual identity". (mmm, see how "the lack of horizontal surfaces" on that bicycle rack can "discourage the build up of litter and prevent the concealment of suspect packages") • The capital's latest public transport projects are regularly updated at London Connections(where else are you going to find details of the new pedestrian subway at Kings Cross, or see photos of the over-narrow platforms at the new Shepherd's Bush station?)
Tube geek (24)First and last So much for those late running tube trains that TfL had hoped to be bringing us by now. The unions aren't playing ball, and until they do it'll never happen. It was only going to be half an hour later at weekends, nothing seismic, but enough to keep thousands of Londoners off crowded nightbuses. And an hour later on Saturday mornings too, just to balance things out, condemning thousands of early risers to nigh-empty nightbuses. But half an hour later than what? How many of us actually know what times the first and last trains go, because we're never on them. So I thought I'd pick three typical central London stations and use TfL's first & last timetables to find out.
BAKER STREET
First train
Last train
Bakerloo ←
0551
0037
Bakerloo ↓
0550
0027
Jubilee ↑
0545
0040
Jubilee ↓
0521
0040
Circle ←
0600
0001
Circle →
0540
2346
H & City ←
0511
0046
H & City →
0457
0034
Metropolitan ↑
0520
0043
TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD
First train
Last train
Central ←
0555
0031
Central →
0549
0031
Northern ↑
0546
0041
Northern ↓
0553
0031
HYDE PARK CORNER
First train
Last train
Piccadilly ←
0548
0036
Piccadilly →
0545
0031
So, first trains tend to start running just before six, and last trains depart the centre of town just after half past midnight. The Circle line starts latest and stops earliest, which is a bit rubbish. But at least the Hammersmith & City line does the opposite to make up for it. One day, just maybe, all these trains will run a bit later. Until then remember, don't miss the last tube, because minicabs cost a fortune and nightbuses smell of puke.
Tube quiz (24)NSEW Which is the most common compass direction to appear in the name of a London Underground station? Is it North (Harrow), South (Harrow), East (Acton) or West (Acton)? Here's the full list, and North is the winner! North: Acton, Clapham, Ealing, fields, Greenwich, Harrow, Lambeth, olt, Wembley, wick Park, wood, wood Hills [12] South: Clapham, Ealing, fields, gate, Harrow, Kensington, Kenton, Ruislip, wark, Wimbledon, Woodford [11] West: Acton, bourne Park, Brompton, Finchley, Ham, Hampstead, Harrow, Hounslow, Kensington, minster, Ruislip [11] East: Acton, Aldgate, cote, Dagenham, Finchley, Ham, Hounslow, Mill Hill, Putney [9]
Tubewatch (24)Towards an accessible tube It's only been 14 years since wheelchair users were finally permitted to travel on deep level tube trains. Now TfL make every decision with the needs of disabled passengers in mind, and that includes providing step-free access at underground stations. But it's a slow process. There was no DDA legislation a century ago when most of London's tube stations were built, so steps and passageways and escalators provide insurmountable obstacles for two-wheeled traffic. But TfL are trying, slowly and expensively, to turn the entire tube map blue and blobby. Currently only 47 tube stations are rated step-free (one sixth of the total), but there are plans afoot to increase that fraction to one quarter by 2010 and one third by 2013. That'll be the easy stations converted - then it gets much more difficult.
Which is why TfL are currently holding a public consultation to decide what to do next. With limited money to go round, what should be London's step-free priority after 2013? It's a very important issue and, for those of us who might end up in wheelchairs or pushing pushchairs in the distant future, a very relevant one. There are two options on the table, each very different in its priorities, and we're being asked which we prefer.
Approach 1: Journeys Model – focusing on the highest number of step-free journeys "This approach maximises the number of step-free journeys possible with the funds available. This means adding further to the number of step-free stations in central London at the expense of a greater number of step-free stations in the suburbs. It doesn't take account of where disabled and older people live, and ignores the fact that modern buses already make central London reasonably accessible." This would mean, for example... • half of all stations accessible, and half of all tube journeys • 11 of the 21 stations inside the Circle line step-free • no new step-free stations on the Met beyond Harrow-on-the-Hill • neither of my local tube stations step-free
Approach 2: Demographic Model – focusing on where people live, work and shop "This approach concentrates on stations that are close to where people who would most benefit from step-free access live rather than concentrating on the number of step-free journeys. This means adding to the number of step-free stations in suburban London at the expense of central London stations." This would mean, for example... • two thirds of all stations accessible, but only a third of all tube journeys • only 3 of the 21 stations inside the Circle line step-free • 10 new step-free stations on the Met beyond Harrow-on-the-Hill • both of my local tube stations step-free
Read full details of the consultation here, including a 40 page pdf with some blobby maps of two potential futures. The consultation ends on 31st December 2007, so there's plenty of time to make your voice heard. What's your preference?
Tubewatch (23)On your bike With all the emphasis there's been from Mayor Ken on riding your bike to work, you might expect the tube to be more bicycle-friendly. But no. Only 113 tube stations have parking for bikes, and it's of very variable quality. My local station at Bow Road is one of the 113, apparently, although I don't ever remember seeing anyone risk leaving their two-wheeled pride and joy outside. So, if you can't leave your bike at the station, can you take it with you on the train? The answer is yes and no, depending on when and where you're going. Bicycles aren't allowed in the morning and evening rush hour, they're not allowed on escalators, and they're not allowed on any "deep level" tube lines. These restrictions lead to some strange anomalies, especially at the northwest tip of the Northern line. You can take your bike almost all the way from Golders Green to Edgware, which are five stations apart, but you have to get off and ride between Hendon Central and Colindale because the train goes through a short tunnel beneath the A41. Potential safety risk, apparently, should there be a major subterranean disaster (although I'm willing to bet that cycling along the Watford Way is far more dangerous than commuting underneath it).
Here's a very brief summary of where you can take your bike on the tube and where you can't. Everywhere: Circle, District, East London, Hammersmith & City, Metropolitan Somewhere: Bakerloo, Central, Jubilee, Piccadilly, Northern Nowhere: Victoria, Waterloo & City (and DLR)
Tube geek (23)Change here Not everyone in London wants to travel on the tube all the time. There are other means of transport, and the tube map now uses little tiny symbols to show where it's possible to change from one to the other. Just for major forms of transport, that is, not for weedy things like buses or bikes. Even so, the tube map is awash with little tiny symbols, which apparently help travellers to change mode. I'm not convinced.
This little tiny symbol represents a connection with National Rail services. There are 56 of these in total. Not every interchange is labelled (especially where tube and rail lines share the same tracks), but all the Central London termini are included, as well as such far flung interchanges as Greenford, Blackhorse Road and Balham (just in case these ever take your fancy). But watch your eyesight. If the rail station is a short walk from the tube, then the symbol (and the distance) has been written so small that no bifocal could ever read it. Text that's only half a millimetre high? So much for accessibility, TfL! This little tiny symbol labels all the stations where you you can change for riverboat services. Because we all do that, don't we. We all hop off the tube and rush down to the Thames to wait for half an hour on a freezing pier for an empty boat to nowhere. Well, squint at the tube map carefully and you'll spot six places between Westminster and Greenwich where you can do precisely this. But not at Putney Bridge or Temple, apparently, even though the riverboat map says you can. So much for reversible connectivity, TfL! This little tiny symbol represents interchange with National Rail Services to airport. Not one of the three special airport stations (such as Heathrow Terminal 4) whose symbols are black not red. No, a red plane means "change here for the Algarve". And there are 12 of these. Not that there's any clue which station leads to which airport, which is a bit useless. If a tourist laden with three wheelie suitcases picks up a tube map and heads for the red plane symbol at Kentish Town, they're going to wonder where the train to Heathrow is. Sorry mate, we can only offer you Gatwick or Luton. So much for being fit for purpose, TfL!
Here, for the benefit of any frequent flyers, are the London airports that the red plane stations connect to. But I think there's at least one connecting station they've missed out. See if you agree. So much for completeness, TfL! Heathrow: Stansted: Gatwick: Luton:
Tubewatch (22)Oyster offers Is it really only four years ago that I swapped my annual season ticket for an Oyster card? No more trying to feed scrunched up cardboard rectangles into the ticket barriers, now we just beep and go. It's been quite an electronic revolution, hastened by Mayor Ken's insistence on making Oyster fares considerably cheaper than paper travel. Well, now there's a new reason to appreciate your Oyster card, because it can save you money - in some cases a lot of money - at a variety of London events and attractions. Just so long as you've got someone else to go with. A selection of offers are below (and the complete list is here). • 2 for 1 at the London Eye(Mon-Thur 3pm-8pm, until 10 Jan 2008) • 2 for 1 at the London Aquariumand London Dungeon(until 31 Mar 2008) • 2 for 1 at Madame Tussauds(until 15 Jan 2008) • 2 for 1 on selected West End shows (Chicago, Avenue Q, etc) (until 31 Mar 2008) • 20% off at the Ski & Snowboard Show(opens at Olympia tomorrow, runs until Sunday) • 2 for 1 on Fulham FC tickets(home matches against dull opposition only)
Tube quiz (22)Halfway stations Some stations are exactly halfway along the line. Catch a train one way and you can get to exactly the same number of stations as if you cross the platform and travel in the opposite direction. Can you identify each of the 12 Underground lines from its halfway station? (n.b. if halfway is halfway between two stations, I've only listed one of them)
A) Baker Street B) Bank C) Canada Water D) Euston E) Farringdon
F) Hammersmith G) Paddington H) South Kensington I) Waterloo J) no halfway station (3 answers)
Tube geek (22)Bank/Monument I made the mistake yesterday of changing at Bank to get to Monument. In particular I made the mistake of following the signs from the Central line to the District line, down into a tortuous subterranean assault course, which took aaa-ages. Whereas I should have gone via the Northern line platforms, or maybe even exited the station and walked along King William Street instead. While puffing down yet another passageway I realised that I don't understand the layout of Bank/Monument station at all, and I really ought to. So I've had a go at researching it, and simplifying it, and I've come up with the map below. It's not a perfect representation of up and down, it's merely diagrammatic, but it's helped to crystallise the layout in my head. And I shall never walk 3-5-6-8-12-13-11 again.
[1] Bank station concourse: Up to street level (several exits); down travelator to [2]; down escalator to [3]; along passage to [4] [2] Waterloo & City line platforms: up travelator to [1]; along long passage to [5] [3] Central line platforms: up escalator to [1]; up staircase between platforms to [5]; down spiral staircase and along passage to [7] [4] Lombard Street entrance (peak hours only): up to street level; along passage to [1]; down stairs and along passage to [5]; lift down to [7] [5] Upper junction: along long passage to [2]; down stairs to [3]; along passage and up stairs to [4]; down escalator to [6] [6] West junction: up escalator to [5]; along short passage to [7]; down escalator to [8] [7] East junction: along passage and up spiral staircase to [3]; lift up to [4]; along short passage to [6]; down stairs to [9] [8] DLR platforms: up escalator to [6]; stairs up to [9]; along passage and up escalator to [12] [9] Northern line platforms: up stairs at north end of platforms to [7]; stairs down to [8]; along passage at south end of platforms and up escalator to [10] [10] District line underpass: down escalator and along passage to [9]; up stairs to [11]; up stairs to [12] [11] District line eastbound: down stairs to [10]; up stairs to [13] [12] District line westbound: down stairs to [10]; down escalator and along passage to [8]; up stairs to [13] [13] Monument ticket hall: up to street level; down stairs to [11]; down stairs to [12]
Tubewatch (21)Reading matters It's always good to see Londoners reading on the tube (unless they've got their reading matter stuck in your face, that is). And there are now more people reading than ever before. But it's not books they've got their nose in, it's newspapers. I did a quick survey in my semi-crowded carriage on the Central line this morning and spotted 20 people reading nearby. 17 of them were reading newspapers (15 the Metro, 1 the Times, 1 The Sun) and three were reading books (1 a computer manual and 2 paperback chicklit). The relentless advance of the disposable newspaper, at both ends of the day, means that commuters no longer get to stare into space quite so often as before. Bored on the tube? Just pick up one of those chucked-away tabloids littering the carriage and your journey will pass more quickly. All this additional reading means that Londoners are better informed about current affairs than ever before. There's not a huge amount of news in these newspapers, but there's enough to make a difference. Greater understanding of everyday issues has to be a good thing, doesn't it? Although I do now fear for the continued circulation of paid-for books and newspapers. Why buy a broadsheet or a red-top when you can pick up some info-lite newsprint for free. Why buy escapist novels when reality is daily thrust into your hand for nothing? We may all be reading more, but I fear we're not reading better.
Tube quiz (21)Name that station a) A station with no buildings above ground. (You've found Bethnal Green, Bond Street, Chancery Lane, Gants Hill, Green Park, Heathrow Terminal 4, Hyde Park Corner, Manor House, Old Street, Piccadilly Circus, Regent's Park, Vauxhall) b) A station in two zones, one of which is Zone 5. (Hatton Cross is the only one, in Zones 5/6)
Tube geek (21)It's not always quicker to walk Back in February a group of students from St Martin's College of Art and Design produced a dead useful map showing how long it takes to walk between neighbouring underground stations at ground level. It only covers Zone 1, but that's OK because that's the bit you're most likely to want to walk round. The map's here, the blog accompanying the map's here, and an interview with the team is here. It was a great idea, and perfectly in tune with the latest anti-obesity zeitgeist. For example, Oxford Circus to Bond Street is only a six minute walk (not worth taking the tube), whereas Oxford Circus to Warren Street takes quarter of an hour (and should be a lot quicker by train).
But the map's not perfect, and has several errors and omissions. Euston station is missing, as are Tower Hill and Aldgate. Many of the rail links don't have times on them (there's nothing immediately east of Kings Cross or east of Monument). And some of the times given aren't between consecutive stations (I'm not quite sure what's going on between Baker Street and Kings Cross but there appears to be a lot of doubling up going on). So I've used the excellent Walkit site to calculate all the missing walking times, and then I've compiled the following Top 10 list. If you're travelling around Central London, these are the ones not to walk.
The ten longest walking times between consecutive stations in Zone 1 1) 21 minutes: Kings Cross → Farringdon 2) 18 minutes: Green Park → Westminster 3) 16 minutes: Angel → Old Street 4=) 15 minutes: Oxford Circus → Warren Street; Waterloo → Bank 6=) 14 minutes: Kings Cross → Angel; Baker Street → Bond Street; Paddington → Bayswater; Green Park → Victoria; South Kensington → Sloane Square
See how far apart many of the stations on the Jubilee and Victoria lines are, unlike the namby-pamby Bakerloo or Piccadilly where stations are rammed tight together. But sorry girls, I'm not convinced that the Top 10 above is 100% accurate. I reckon that Waterloo to Bank should be top of the list, but your map says it can be walked in quarter of an hour. Jogged maybe, but not walked. Alas the students' parting comment that "we hope to have a new and improved map and a shiny new web site available soon" doesn't appear to have come true. And that's a shame because I reckon there's still a lot of mileage left in this walk-minutes idea. I wonder if anybody will ever pick it up and run with it?
Time once again for diamond geezer to go totally tubular with another week devoted to the London Underground. Prepare for five days of quizzes, quirks, commentary and obscure statistics. Four years ago I looked at the busiest stations, picking the right carriage and journeys where it was quicker to walk. Three years ago I investigated the closest stations, the easiest interchanges and the growth of the network. Two years ago I discussed overcrowding, ticket barrier codes and precisely where the underground is underground. And last year I wrote about accessibility, delays and why people never move down the platform. Amongst other things. I hope there's still something left to write about this year. Mind the doors.
Seaside postcard: Whitstable On the map it's not the most alluring of early autumn destinations. A seaside town on the north coast of Kent, with north-facing beaches looking out across the North Sea. But Whitstable is a delightful and distinctive fishing port with a long established maritime heritage, and well worth a visit. Especially if you like oysters.
Whitstable's been renowned for its oysters since Roman times. The waters off the shoreline are perfect for this special shellfish, and the town hosts a big OysterFestival every July to celebrate another successful underwater harvest. Oysters are in season now, and will be until April, should you be interested in sampling some of the local delicacies. Yesterday several boxes of empty shells were piled up beside the sea wall outside some of the seafront restaurants, suggesting scores of diners had been busy topping up their zinc levels inside. Oyster processing goes on down at the harbour, in the rather worryingly named "Purification Centre", and outlets like WestWhelks and the WhitstableFishMarket sell a wide variety of seafood to visiting tourists. Oysters are currently selling for 65p each, or £6.50 a dozen, while a small tub of cockles will set you back £2 and local dressed lobsters are two for £25. Connoisseurs dine out at the Crab and Winkle Restaurant, immediately above the fish market. I'm afraid I copped out and went for a fish luncheon in the High Street instead (butter-battered cod and chips in the rear dining room at VC Jones, very tasty).
This is still a working harbour, with a charming mix of traditional structures alongside. But Canterbury Council have big plans to redevelop the South Quay, imminently, and local residents are up in arms. They fear that the unique character of the harbour could be lost if any of the proposed schemes are implemented, especially when one of the proposed development partners is a company that builds houses. Plenty of folk have been willing to sign a petition against the plans, and there were more adding their names yesterday afternoon. The local paper, meanwhile, seems more interested in its search for an albino squirrel. There's priorities for you.
Although there's quite a lot of beach at Whitstable, it's all pebbly and not perfect for bucket-and-spading. To the west of the harbour, by the yacht club, an extensive carpet of crunchy cockleshells leads down from the lifeboat station to the sea. At low tide a long pebble ridge is visible at Tankerton, just to the east, where rows of beach huts line the foot of a steep grassy slope. Up top is the town's "castle", which is really just a late 18th century manor house with ornamental battlements (now used for conferences and weddings). Watch out for the rat-faced feral lads swigging lager in the shrubbery. And from the flagstaff atop the hill you can look out across a broad 180° panorama, from the Isle of Sheppey round to Herne Bay, with the southeast tip of Essex just visible in the distance. Yes, that's a wind farm, but more intriguing are the clumps of metal tripods poking out of the water several miles offshore. These are the Maunsellsea forts, tall towers that were part of our defences against German invasion, now rusting away in mid-channel. One day I must take a boat trip out to see them, but alas there are no more tours until next spring.
Back in the old part of town there's more to see, including some extremely narrow beachside walkways, Pray you don't meet a fat man with a wheelie suitcase along SqueezeGutAlley. You might have met Peter Cushing here several years ago - he moved to Whitstable in 1959 and became one of its most celebrated residents. A seat he donated to the town now looks out over West Beach, across "Cushing's View". You can find out more about his life and acting career in a small corner of the splendid Whitstable Museum where, of course, there's also a lot more about oysters. It's easy to see why this has been a favourite coastal destination for many years, so if you fancy a salty treat you know where to come.
I hate rugby. It's just 80 minutes of controlled violence, played by two packs of lumbering beefcake. It's 30 overgrown men charging up and down a muddy pitch while the opposing team repeatedly attempt to grab their legs. It's an excuse to kick the hell out of other people and not get arrested for it. It's a direct route to casualty, played only by those who haven't been suspended due to serious injury. It's organised sadism. It's played by men whose oversized bodies contravene government obesity guidelines. It's a lot of running around with a strangely shaped ball which can only be thrown backwards. It's an over-complicated mass of perverse rules coupled with a non-intuitive scoring system. It's not football, is it?
I've always hated rugby. I probably didn't realise it existed before I was 11, because my enlightened primary school played (proper) football instead. OK, so I may have been rubbish at playing that too, but at least my life wasn't in danger every time I had a PE lesson. My secondary school, alas, believed that rugger was the one true sport. I spent every winter for five years freezing to death in a stripy jersey while boys who'd already hit puberty wrestled with each other in muddy puddles. I spent every match trying hard to keep out of the way, in case the ball might accidentally be thrown in my direction and a horde of lumbering animals launch themselves on top of me. I cowered every time I was selected for the scrum in case some crucial body part of mine be squashed or wrenched off in the grunting mêlée. And I scored a try only once, when my sadistic PE teacher noticed me standing beside the touch line and threw me the ball, no doubt expecting me to fumble it and then be crushed in a pile of adolescent limbs. He was disappointed, but only on this one single miserable occasion.
I still hate rugby. It's taken far too seriously by too many men, especially those with a middle class background. Some still play the amateur game at weekends, risking ligament injury and cauliflower ear, then drinking to excess after every match whilst singing raucous misogynistic songs. Most rugby fans are too mature, or too unfit, to play properly (often as a result of the drinking) and so have moved on to spectating. They wear oversized replica jerseys and drone on and on about scrummage tactics and Wilko's right foot, as if the rest of us care. Some even pay good money and travel business class to stand in corporate boxes at international matches, presumably as an excuse to get away from the wife for a few glorious pissed-up weekends every year. No thanks, not for me.
I have nothing against people who play rugby. Just don't expect me to be interested in your pointless violent sport. And I have nothing against people who watch rugby either. Just don't expect me to join you in the pub tonight, cheering on "our lads" as they battle against the mighty Springboks. I really couldn't give a damn who wins - life's less disappointing that way. There's only one World Cup, and that's not happening again until 2010. Good luck to England tonight, if it really matters, but I shan't be watching. I am not converted.
It's good to know that not every heritage feature on the London Underground has been ripped out and replaced by something plastic, modern and accessible. Not yet, anyway. Here's a mighty fine example, seen somewhere on the Hammersmith and City line.
This is the bottom half of the big sign in the ticket hall at Barbican station, at the top of the stairs down to the platforms. But where's the pink Hammersmith & City line gone? It appears to exist only as a bolt-on panel just below Barking. And that's because this is a pre-1990 sign, before the H&C was introduced, back when the Metropolitan line used to go all the way to West Ham and beyond. Nowadays the Metropolitan line terminates at Aldgate, and the Hammersmith and City has taken over the old route out east.
And there's more. The orange of the East London line is missing too. Prior to 1990 the track from Shoreditch to New Cross and New Cross Gate was part of the "Metropolitan line - East London Section". That Metropolitan purple stretched everywhere in those days. No longer. And Shoreditch station isn't open any more, and Canada Water station (apparently) hasn't been built yet (it ought to be between Rotherhithe and Surrey Docks Quays). This sign just doesn't reflect 21st century reality.
And there's more. The Docklands Light Railway appears to exist only as a connection at Bow Road (via another bolt-on panel). It ought to get a mention at Shadwell too, and probably at Tower Hill, but it doesn't. No matter that the DLR's been open for 20 years, it barely gets a look-in on this sign. Ditto the 1999 Jubilee line extension, which ought to have a connection at West Ham, but doesn't.
This sign is at least 20 years out of date, and quite possibly 30. The network depicted on this sign no longer exists. Several new lines, new connections and even new stations are not included. Any visitor to London relying on this sign for accurate transport information is being seriously misled. This sign is, quite clearly, wholly unfit for purpose. And yet it hasn't been replaced, and it hasn't been significantly updated, and it remains only because nobody quite has the heart to replace it. And I for one am delighted by that. Thank goodness that there are still people working for TfL who have a sense of heritage, rather than a passion to modernise. And let's hope that this tiny corner of Barbican station stays safe from the ravages of the evil redesign barbarians for at least another 20 years.
Big cuts are to be announced today at the BBC. They didn't get quite the increase in the licence fee that they were hoping for, so lots of jobs need to be lost. Which is a shame. Obviously £3 billion a year doesn't go far, especially when you have Jonathan Ross's salary to pay. But where are these swingeing cuts to be made? How can the BBC "secure maximum value out of every licence fee"? Here are some obvious suggestions...
• More repeats. • You know that BBC radio station you never listen to? The one with the presenter you really can't stand? They could switch that off. Send the mouthy bastard to the job centre. • The new Blue Peter stick insect needs a name. The phone vote for that should raise thousands (and then we'll call her Sticky anyway) • How about paving over the Blue Peter Garden and building a block of flats on the site instead? I mean, they only use it on screen for three minutes a month. • The BBC's just a bunch of liberal leftie pinkos, spouting their biased Marxist propaganda across the global airwaves. So we should save money by sacking any employee who's ever voted Labour (and, to be on the safe side, Liberal Democrat). That should make the whole organisation a lot less biased, don't you think? And cheaper. • Is it too late to rebrand "Children In Need" as "DG In Need"? • Don't show the new series of Doctor Who on BBC1 - release it as an exclusive box set. 10 million viewers @ £49.99 each - that should stuff Auntie Beeb's coffers. • Would introducing 8 minutes of adverts every hour [The new Argos Christmas catalogue, out today!!!] really be so intrusive? And it would make the programmes 13% shorter too, which could only save money. • They should switch off those analogue transmitters in Whitehaven and then never switch the digital signal back on again. • More repeats. • Who needs daytime telly? Replace it with the test card (at least until I retire, and then they can bring it back). • BBC3's a bit rubbish, isn't it? Let's trim it down a bit, say to BBC2.6 • Do you know how much money is spent on the BBC World Service every year? And most of its listeners aren't even British taxpayers! • If those TV licence detector vans actually worked, then maybe the rest of us law-abiding citizens wouldn't have to pay so much. (I mean, 37p a day for all those BBC services, it's both criminal and extortionate) • They should do a lot more of those property shows - you know, the ones where some stuck-up posh tart takes a run-down villa in Putney and sells it for a million three weeks later. The BBC could make a fortune from that. • Sack the bloke whose job it is to remove random letters from all Ceefax pages. Sack him now. • Does it really take two newsreaders to read the news? Surely one should be enough. They should get that Moira Stuart back - she's capable, she's authoritative, and she's cheap. • Here's an interesting idea sent in by a Mr R Murdoch. Scrap all BBC services and give the entire licence fee money to Sky TV instead, and then we can all watch lots of lovely American mini-series and endless repeats of The Simpsons. • Sell off Television Centre, sack lots of journalists and stick adverts on the BBC website (ah, hang on on, that's actually going to happen...) • More repeats.
Sorry, but your connection to this blog has been terminated.
Digital switchover begins in the UK today, and unfortunately your internet connection has been affected. If you're reading this message then it appears you've been attempting to access this blog via the Whitehaventransmitter. Well that's not possible any more, sorry. We switched it off at two o'clock this morning, just after the snooker on BBC2, and it's not coming back on again. So now you're going to have to make alternative arrangements. It's the future, you know. Get used to it.
Britain needs to clear more space on the electromagnetic spectrum, and that's best done by wiping away all the old signals. The UK can't afford to waste valuable online resources on outdated technology, not when we could be broadcasting glittering modern content across the airwaves instead. Imagine how much lovelier the internet could be with all that tedious text, waffle and gossip eradicated. And just think how much spare bandwidth that'll leave available for streaming video, hi-definition pornography and animated adverts. Britain has to switch off to turn on.
So, sorry, but if you ever want to want to read your favourite blogs again then you'll need to upgrade your online set-up. Terrestrial analogue connections aren't good enough any more, you're going to have to go digital. A single electronic box attached via cable or wireless should do it. Don't worry, it's quick and easy, and it's almost inexpensive.
There are several options to consider: 1) The Rupert Murdoch option: Connect digitally via Sky. It'll only cost you £360 a year, and for that you get Coca Cola Division One football and repeated episodes of Lost thrown in for free. 2) The Freeview option: Connect via a cheap electronic decoder using the BBC's open access platform. But be warned - royal documentary podcasts may not be edited in the correct order. 3) The Ostrich option: Connect via your old dial-up and watch all your screens go blank. If you're reading this, then that's almost certainly already happened.
And there are several important things to remember: • Remember that every computer in your home will need to be upgraded. Even the laptop in your daughter's bedroom and the old 20th century PC in the spare room. Oh yes, this is going to cost. Lots. • Remember that if you want to refresh one webpage while reading another you'll need to get a digital web recorder. More expense. • Remember that if you live in a block of flats and share an aerial and your landlord doesn't give a damn about digital switchover, then you're screwed. Sorry.
There have been many Great Storms in British history, including the Really Great Storm of November 1703 and Dawn French's Great Storm that hit the village of Dibley approximately every six months during the 1990s. But today we remember the GreatStorm that flattened southeast England during the early hours of Friday 16th October 1987, exactly twenty years ago today. And we remember this for three very good reasons.
1) It's within living memory for most of the population. 2) It really was a very great storm, the fiercest since 1703. 3) It hit southeast England, which is where 90% of the UK's media is based.
Never mind that Scottish islands see storms of this ferocity more like every 30 or 40 years. Never mind that more people died in the great Burns Day Storm of 1990. Never mind that most of the British population have never even been to Kent, let alone care how many trees grow there. This storm was great, QED.
Those of us who lived beneath the path of the Great Storm of 1987 all have deep-seated memories of the event, which we love to recount in tedious anecdotes. Assuming we were awake between midnight and 6am, that is. I was, just about. I went to bed just after one, having listened to rather a lot of gale warnings at the start of the late night Radio 4 shipping forecast. "Outside the wind goes mad," I noted in my diary at the time, and then fell asleep. I was woken at half past three by the racket outside, stumbled from my bed and closed the rattling window tight shut. And then I slept on oblivious, until my alarm woke me up at seven. I was luckier in this respect than the unfortunate lady crushed to death by a falling chimney in a hotel less than a mile away. All four TV channels were off air at this point, until the BBC managed to resurrect a very makeshift service from what looked like the inside of a cupboard. On my walk to work I had to step over several fallen branches, and detour around two felled trees. It was unusual to see the ground completely covered with green leaves, untimely ripped before autumn proper had begun. And at work a window had blown in, covering my desk with damp and general wetness. Not that you care about what happened to me, of course.
If you want to remember more about the Great Storm of 1987, here's some proper stuff: » A detailed analysis of what happened from the Met Office » The storm developed very suddenly over the Bay of Biscay, in an area devoid of weather ships, during a French meteorologists strike and before the introduction of automatic buoys. Here are some (not terribly distinct) satellite photos. » Hurrah for YouTube - here's Michael's Fish's infamous weather forecast, here's ITN's 5:45 news summary and here's Fred Dineage and Fern Britton doing TVS's regional news bulletin » Ah, poor MichaelFish. He wasn't talking about this storm, it wasn't a hurricane, and he really did warn of "really stormy weather" ahead. But we pretend not to remember that. » During the storm the highest recorded wind speed (117 knots) was actually in France, on the coast of Brittany. England's highest gust (100 knots) was felt at Shoreham in Sussex. » 18 people were killed in Britain that night and 15 million trees were felled (12 million of them in forests, and 3 million individual trees elsewhere). The Forestry Commission remembers. » The National Trust are holding a series of anniversary events in properties devastated by the storm (see before and after photos from Kent and Sussex here) » The storm was accompanied by unprecedented rapid changes of temperature (from 8°C to 17°C in 20 minutes in Hampshire) and pressure (up 25mb in 3 hours in Dorset) » All European high and low pressure systems are given official names, a bit like American hurricanes. But all the European names are up for sale. If you want to "adopt a vortex" then you need to send either €199 (Low) or €299 (High) to the Berlin Institute of Meteorology (or else bid for the leftovers on eBay). Honest, it's official. Names for 2008 are now up for grabs (makes a lovely Christmas present). » The next Great Storm might come this year, or it might not arrive for centuries. So don't have nightmares.
londonerama the capital fanzine online edition 1 - October 2007
Welcome to London's essential new newsletter! londonerama is the number 1 online mag for Europe's number 1 city. We have all the news, all the goss and all the up-front info. Well, some of it anyway. Read on...
FREE EUROSTAR TRIP! If you have a weekday spare around the end of the month, maybe you'd like to assist those kindly folk at Eurostar in testing out facilities at St Pancras. They need volunteers to pretend to be passengers (going through security checks and passport control and everything), just to check that everything works properly before the grand launch on 14th November. Don't expect to get to France, although if you're lucky your test train might get as far as Ebbsfleet. Maybe. You'll need 6 hours spare, and you get a free lunch and travel expenses. Oh, and there is a real bonus. You also get a ticket for a free round trip to either Paris, Lille or Brussels to be redeemed later. Ooh la la. Register your details here.
WEAPONS OF MASS COMMUNICATION The new exhibition at the Imperial War Museum is a minor treat. It features wall upon wall of wartime propaganda posters, not just from Britain ("Eat Less Bread") but from the US ("I'm buying Victory Bonds") and right across Europe ("All Hail the Glorious Fourth Anniversary of the Comintern"). They stretch as far back as World War I, and as recently as a certain skirmish in Iraq. Our posters tend to be a bit wittier and more direct, whereas the German contingent are more visionary and uplifting. Admission to the exhibition is free (though the accompanying book costs £20). Expect to spend a good 15 minutes looking round. Let us go forward together. Review here, admission details here.
LONDON IS THE PLACE FOR ME Rivington Place is a brand new public gallery just opened in Shoreditch (where else) with a remit to represent diversity through art and photography. It's had £6m of lottery cash thrown at it, and the resulting building is both striking and functional (and full of community spirit). The free opening exhibition is split across two levels, with "phoning home" photographs downstairs and a trio of dislocated audio-visual presentations in a dark room upstairs. Try not to get very lost walking inbetween (and, whatever you do, don't wander into the Stuart Hall Library by mistake). It's a brave new venture deserving of support, but I wonder how many Londoners will ever notice it exists. Gallery here, exhibition here.
SMITHFIELD UNDER THREAT Developers are always threatening wholesale destruction at London's historic meat market, and English Heritage aren't too pleased. They've commissioned a 60 page masterplan for the area, heavy on the history, geography and sustainable options for the future. And they're holding a special "Market Values" exhibition in nearby Cowcross Street so that locals and stakeholders can give their opinions. It's only open on Tuesdays and Fridays, which suggests they're not trying very hard to be heard, but if you're in the area before 2nd November it might be of interest. More information here, masterplan (pdf) here.
LET'S ASK KEN If there's anything you've ever wanted to ask the Mayor of London (especially if it relates to policing, transport, the environment or 2012), you might get your chance next week. On Thursday 25th October at 7pm, to be precise. At People's Question Time. In Ilford Town Hall. I don't think that questions about Boris are on the agenda, but I bet somebody asks Ken all the same. Free tickets available here.
London's well known as a place for difference, dissent and refusal to conform. For more than three centuries the city's been home to many famous religious Noncomformists (that's Protestants who aren't Anglicans, such as Methodists and Quakers and Baptists and Puritans). Even on a very short walk across the north of the City of London, it's amazing how many you can find.
BunhillFields:Just off the City Road, in a secluded park beneath a canopy of trees, lie the buried remains of 123,000 Londoners. The first bones belonged to plague victims, unceremoniously dumped here in 1665, and the last belonged to a lady called Elizabeth, interred in 1854. The site was never attached to a church, never consecrated, and so became the burial plot of choice for London's Nonconformists. And there are some right famous ones if you know where to look. Pick up a free leaflet from the groundsman's hut and you can spot them yourself. Just don't expect to get right up close, because most of the cemetery lies out of bounds behind locked-off iron railings.
The grandest memorial in Bunhill Fields belongs to John Bunyan. He may have been born in Bedford, but he died of a fever in London, and this pilgrim progressed no further. Look further beyond the iron railings and you might also spot the tomb of Richard Cromwell. He ruled Britain for eight months back in 1658, following in the footsteps of his rather more famous (and considerably more successful) father Oliver. Behind you stands a tall white obelisk, erected in memory of the great author Daniel Defoe. He was one of Britain's first novelists, and many a 1970s childhood would have been emptier without Robinson Crusoe on the telly every summer. And in Defoe's shadow, surrounded by fallen brown leaves, is a rather too modern gravestone etched with the name of William Blake. He was the visionary poet and artist who wrote Jerusalem, much beloved by Last Night of the Prommers and the ladies of the Women's Institute. But Blake's tombstone is actually a fake, because his real grave has long lain unmarked in the grass nearby. Earlier this year a little detective work using burial plot coordinates paid off, and his final resting place (on the edge of a muddy lawn) has now been uncovered. There's no memorial yet, but let's hope there will be.
Wesley's Chapel: Immediately opposite Bunhill Fields, on the other side of City Road, stands one of the largest Methodist chapels in the country. And with good reason. It's nextdoor to the Georgian townhouse where John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, lived out the last decade of his life. His house is open to the public, as is the grand chapel itself. Step in through the glass partition and admire the marble columns, stained glass and raised altar. If you're lucky, there might even be someone twiddling on the impressive organ. But there's another attraction, just along the corridor (past the nice lady pouring cups of tea) and down into the crypt. Yes, it's the Museum of Methodism (you knew there had to be one somewhere). Here you can find Wesley's original pulpit, and the odd bust, and some relevant ceramics, and several information boards telling the story of the Methodist religion from the 18th century to the present day. At the moment there's also a mini exhibition in one corner comemmorating the tercentenary of Charles Wesley, John's brother, and the hymn writer responsible for Love Divine and Hark The Herald. It's all very homely and understated, as one might expect. And I wonder if I've finally been to a London museum that none of you have.
The Aldersgate Flame: And finally, half a mile away through the Barbican estate, to the spot where Methodism began. John Wesley was attending a prayer meeting one Wednesday evening, just off Aldersgate Street, when he felt his heart "strangely warmed". It was this single experience that transformed his ministry, and started him off on a lifelong tour preaching all around the country. No sign of the house in Old Nettleton Court remains, but a rather large memorial now stands on a walkway immediately above the spot, right next to the front entrance to the Museum of London. It's a tall metal flame, inscribed with words from Wesley's own journal from 24th May 1738. Today it seems an odd location for religious conversion, surrounded by City offices and a concrete roundabout, but millions of Methodists across the world give thanks for its strangely warming properties.
Sports fans may be interested to know that I shall be liveblogging tonight's Rugby World Cupsemi-final, right here, starting from 8pm. I'll be bringing you all the most exciting moments from England's clash with France at the Stade de France, in what may just be the most important sporting event of the century. I wonder if you're as excited as I am?
20:00 Kick off! 20:43 Half time! 20:58 Second half! 21:42 Final whistle! 21:43 onwards Drinking!
Let me assure you that I really did change my template yesterday. I tweaked all the font sizes I've had since day 1, converting them from rigid points to flexible ems. Point size is the same on every machine, whereas ems vary according to what you've set as normal. I was deliberately losing control over exactly what size text you see, in the interests of global accessibility. And I was definitely expecting widespread random chaos, as several of you complained that things just didn't look right any more. That doesn't appear to be what happened.
It seems that, for most of you, your normal is the same as my normal. We haven't tweaked our browser font size from its default setting, so we all see the same thing. That's good. But for a few people, especially those with dodgy eyesight, they'd reset normal to be rather bigger that that. On their browsers the body text on my blog suddenly went giant sized yesterday - a really quite significant shift which made my blog look very odd. Very odd indeed.
And it's not just personal preference. Not all browsers and operating systems work the same way. I checked a variety of combinations using the "comparison" weblink I offered you yesterday, and was surprised to see how different they all now look. In some the text was huge, in some the text was normal and in others the text was tiny. Not good.
Allowing flexibility appears to have messed things up for more people than it helped. I can't live with that. I don't want some visitors seeing giant largeprint and others seeing microscopic script, because that's not how this blog is meant to be. I'm a control freak and I like everyone to see my blog "properly". So I've switched all my text sizes back to how they used to be, back to normal. No ems, just rigid inflexible points. And I'm sorry if this goes against the spirit of accessibility legislation or DDA compliance, but that's how it's going to be.
The power to tweak how the fonts on a webpage look is already in your hands. If you have Firefox then try pressing [Control][+] or [Control][-] a few times until you like what you see. If you have Internet Explorer then a more permanent tweak is buried in the Internet Options menu somewhere. I've decided I'm not doing it for you. I'm going to concentrate on the text, not the text size, because it's the content that matters.
One thing about having a five year-old blog is that I also have a five year-old blog template. No cutting-edge XHTML or cascading style sheets for me. This page is still generated by HTML code that's almost out of the ark. These ancient instructions create a single slab-like grey sidebar down the right-hand edge, plus a free-flowing text-space to the left that expands to fill the width available. As far as I'm concerned, if it ain't broke don't fix it. Except you never know, my code might just be broke.
I can't be sure which browser you're using to view my site. Because I use out-of-date coding you may well be seeing this blog completely differently to me. Internet Explorer users, your line spacing isn't always the same as what I'm seeing in Firefox. You Safari users, your font looks completely different to me and your bold is definitely a lot bolder. And if you're not using a browser at all because you're viewing my RSS feed instead, you may well just be looking at raw barely-formatted text. I must never assume that anyone else is seeing what I intended. Never second guess your readers. • see what your website looks like in Safari • see what your website looks like in 20+ different browser/platform combinations (be patient, it might take an hour)
Being rather old, my blog template also makes several assumptions about text size. There are no proportional adjustable dimensions on this blog, just clunky fixed font sizes. That big "diamond geezer" title across the top, that's always in font size 36, even if your screen is rather narrow and those two words don't fit. Those dates across the top of each post, they're always 14 pixels high, whatever the peculiarities of your operating system. And my ordinary text, like what I'm writing now, is set permanently at "10 point", no matter whether your eyesight can cope with that or not. Web accessibility experts despair at sites like mine, trapped permanently in a potentially illegible 2002 netherworld. Apologies to my partially-sighted readers, it's not good enough is it? • see my blog struggling to fit onto a particularly narrow cameraphone • see my blog shrunk to tiny size on one of those new fangled iPhones
So I've made a few tentative steps towards cross-platform accessibility. I've tweaked my template so that various font sizes are now more scalable, and I wondered whether you can spot any difference. My big "diamond geezer" title at the top of the page is no longer "font size: 36pt", it's "font size: 3em" (that's three times normal, whatever normal is). The dates on my horizontal blue strips are no longer "font size: 14px", they're now "font size: 1.1em". And my ordinary text size (like what you're reading now) is no longer "font size: 10pt", it's "font size: 0.8em". I'm told that these three changes should make my blog a lot more accessible and adaptable, as well as a bit more DDA-compliant. But I can't be sure.
• If you think that what you can see is an improvement, do tell me why it's better. • If you can't see any difference at all (like I can't), then great, let's carry on. • But if these changes have buggered up how you view this blog and you're sitting there going "oh hell, whatever has he done, I can barely read the site any more", do let me know and I'll revert back to my disabled-unfriendly 2002 template again. • (assuming you can read any of this in the first place, that is)
However close to civilisation the milestone in High Street may suggest, most Londoners have never ventured out to Henbrook. You won't find this charming suburb on any railway map of the capital - territorial Victorian landowners saw to that - but that's the way the residents seem to like it. House prices round here certainly reflect Henbrook's unique mix of community and exclusivity. To the west of town, surrounding the recreation ground, stand row upon row of elegant Edwardian terraces. Out east, in contrast, there's considerable council overspill, as well as the famous Stephenson Estate with its Art Deco brick façades. But continued outward sprawl has blurred the borders between Henbrook and the surrounding commuter belt, and some fear that the entire neighbourhood now risks losing its identity.
It was Henry VIII who first brought the area to prominence, although all trace of his royal palace has long since disappeared. It was here that Anne of Cleves lived out her last pre-divorce summer, banished to what was then the heart of the Middlesex countryside. Residents in Aragon Avenue still occasionally claim to find valuable gold coins and pottery buried in their gardens, but experts remain divided as to its authenticity. More tangible are the stumpy remains of the windmill on the slopes overlooking the old village green. Previous inhabitants of this unusual residence include Henrietta Banks, widow of the second Londoner to be killed by the new-fangled motor car, and an early campaigner for road safety. She would no doubt be pleased by the many speed bumps recently installed down Mount Hill, although I suspect local petrol-heads (and bus passengers) find their number somewhat excessive.
Henbrook is named after the river that threads through the centre of town - now more a concrete flood channel than an idyllic pastoral stream. More of the river used to be visible until half of the town was built on top of it. From the tunnel mouth in Kings Park the water continues underground for several meandering miles, before eventually joining up with another of the Thames's vanished subterranean tributaries. According to local tradition if you stand at the entrance to the tunnel at sunrise on midsummer morning it's still possible to hear the screams of two children murdered in the long-gone water mill several centuries ago - although I suspect this tale owes more to alcohol and screeching cats than having any basis in reality.
John Betjeman was a regular visitor to the town, and to St Luke's Church in particular. He loved the half-timbered nave with its ornately carved font, and often attended Evensong when his busy schedule allowed. A commemorative plaque in the Lady Chapel remembers a poem he wrote in respectful tribute.
"She lifts the latch and nips inside, Her yellow duster raised in prayer; The brass will gleam, the pew will shine, And lilies by the chancel stair." Henbrook Pride (1955)
One further direct link to the past is Henbrook Fair, held every year on the second Sunday in September. Founded by royal charter in 1638, this annual celebration still attracts considerable crowds to the streets of the Old Town. Nowadays the dog show is the biggest draw, but for many it's still the Apple Hurling contest that provides the highlight of the day. The event begins, as in olden times, with a carefully selected adolescent maiden picking "the golden-est apple" from Lord Milton's Orchard. Two teams, one from each side of the river, then compete to propel the harvested fruit across town without letting it touch the ground. Shops and businesses board up their windows in preparation before the procession passes through, although these days this is more to prevent asbo-centric adolescents from doing too much damage. Sadly the Applepip Princess went uncrowned this year after the foot and mouth crisis put paid to the event.
Despite the best efforts of Henbrook's elected representatives, this is no pastoral Arcadia. The multi-storey car park behind Woolworths casts a nasty 70s blot on the town centre, and the graffiti on the bus shelter in Mulberry Lane tells its own sorry story. There are pound shops in the High Street now, and even a couple of kebab emporia in the less desirable corners of town. Knife crime is on the increase, as is car theft, and the community centre runs self defence classes for fearful pensioners. As the sorry woes of the capital continue to encroach upon this overlooked location, residents fear that one day Henbrook might fade away altogether, as if it had never existed.
In fact, thank you for your three remarkably similar emails sent during the course of the day. Rest assured that I had not forgotten this evening's "close of play" deadline. I shall of course be sending you the [petty bureaucratic document] that you require before I go home. Do be patient. Our team is quite conscientious actually, and not like the usual hopeless inadequates you must be used to ordering about.
However, I would like to point out that we believe your newly-imposed [petty bureaucratic document] to be wholly unnecessary. We've been running projects here since you were still at business college, and we know what we're doing. Our considerable talents don't require the introduction of a brand new planning system based on an enormous multi-coloured spreadsheet. You may enjoy spending your days endlessly updating cells from green to amber to red and back again, but we prefer to get on and do some real work.
We know that there's a key deadline in mid-November without having to label it "Milestone 6". We know precisely how to hit that deadline without compiling a detailed list of fully-costed sub-processes. We have vast experience of coping successfully with the unexpected without needing to think up 50 things that might go wrong and pre-planning contingencies for each. We can get perfect results without being manacled to your scaffolding. Please learn to treat us like capable human beings, even if you're not.
Thank you also for the endless stream of meeting requests that you've dropped into my inbox recently. I should point out that we generally try to avoid 5pm meetings at all costs, even if that's the only gap you thought you could find in our calendars. You bastard. I've "accidentally" deleted your regular fortnightly [Tedious Objective Review 1-1s], especially given that these recur (somewhat optimistically) into the 22nd century and beyond. And I've declined the meeting you scheduled for Boxing Day morning, because I have some understanding of the calendar and you're a temporal inadequate.
I'm afraid that we all think your weekly [Pointless Management Meetings] are a complete waste of time and effort. You may enjoy discussing updated risk and quality protocols on a regular basis, but some of us have a life. I know we look like we're awake and stimulated when we attend, but that's just our superior acting ability. We're actually bored out of our skulls and hoping desperately that, if we nod a lot, you might terminate the meeting a little earlier.
You're new here, aren't you? That would explain why you're blundering in making inappropriate requests and nannying us around like we're a bunch of six year-olds. We're not. We're a team of highly competent professionals, and we're used to being trusted. We don't want to be part of your process-based revolution. We do things a certain way round here. And we're not letting your MBA-inspired bureaucracy destroy everything we've built up. Now sod off.
15 things I wondered at the weekend (and 15 sub-things too)
in Central London • Blimey, they didn't waste any time gutting and boarding up the New Piccadilly Cafe, did they? (how sad is it that, less than two weeks on, only memories remain?) • Why is nobody in this pub talking to me? (ah you dull bunch, you're all watching the rugby aren't you?) • Is painting your face gold and standing motionless on a box the easiest way to make your fortune in London? (why oh why do so many tourists stop to take photos and encourage these chancers?)
at the London Eye • Why is there a lady with a guide dog waiting to board the world's largest observation wheel? (or is she just giving her dog a visual treat?) • That queue-jumping wedding party waiting on the ramp to board their capsule, are they already married or are they about to get spliced at 450 feet? (actually, didn't one of my regular commenters do exactly that last Christmas?) • What's the point of taking photographs from inside the capsule given that the glass is filthy and the curved surface just reflects the sunlight? (will I ever learn to spend my time enjoying the amazing view rather than wasting my time attempting to photograph it?) • Is it over already? (and why can't we go round again?)
at Stratford station • Does this station have the longest, most frustrating ticket queues of any station in London? (and just how difficult would it be to build some new ticket windows, and indeed staff them?) • Why didn't I notice the grinning Newham youth tailgating me through the ticket barrier? (and was it perhaps unwise to call him a "bastard" to his face after he'd slipped through?) • Which idiot has hung hanging baskets full of artificial plastic flowers all along the subways beneath the station? (I mean, they're underground for heavens sake, who could possibly believe that these blooms were real?) • Why is there a man in a woolly hat on the DLR platform beating out a seven-minute rhythm on two bongo drums? (oh come on, where is the next train?)
on a rail replacement bus somewhere between Colchester and Ipswich • Did I not spend enough of my life driving down this bloody road? (oh fate, why are you doing this to me?) • Will that loudmouth student sat behind me please shut up? (OK, so everyone except you thinks that you're Tom's girlfriend and it's causing you grief, but nobody else on the top deck gives a damn, OK?) • Do all coaches smell of sick? (is there perhaps an EU directive requiring it?)
in a Norfolk pub • Awww, was it really 46 years ago that you two got married? (Happy anniversary, and do you want your pudding with cream, custard or ice cream?)
If you want to see London, see it from the river. And for a unique view of London, there's nothing quite like taking a ride in a Rigid Inflatable Boat. Skipping along the Thames in an orange inflatable is a great way of seeing the sights, at speed. It's also a great way of emptying your wallet. Twenty-six quid, for 40 minutes? It had better be good. Thankfully I was able to take advantage of a friend's Christmas gift voucher (trip for two, expires imminently, can you come?), so my bank balance remained intact. But yes, it was good anyway.
London RIB Voyages is the brainchild of a former City stockbroker with a taste for high-speed river boating. His company now owns two 12-seater craft, moored up at the pier beneath the London Eye, and that's where we rolled up yesterday afternoon. Our tour guide offered us fetching red waterproof fleeces to wear, along with a compulsory lifejacket, and held our hand as we boarded the narrow fluorescent craft. Useful tip - if you book early, you get the front seats (like what we did, much to the obvious annoyance of the small child sat behind). Each voyage varies according to the tide, but we started by nipping across the river for a close-up look at the Palace of Westminster's waterfront terrace. Our guide had a wonderful line in dry humour, and an effortless linguistic talent. When he described the trees on the Albert Embankment as showing "the first amber blush of autumn", I knew we were in for an entertaining ride.
And then we were off, downriver, just the 12 of us. Nothing excessively fast to begin with, but still noticeably speedier than the usual Thames tourist cruisers chugging by. From Westminster to the Tower we enjoyed a quick-witted tourist commentary, and a slightly different view of central London from a bit lower in the water than usual. And then, after passing beneath Tower Bridge, our guide retreated to the back of the boat and allowed the pilot to let rip. Woooo. The boat curved effortlessly between the banks, tipping one way and then the other, and splashing us all with frothy Thames water. I reassured myself that the river's a lot cleaner than it used to be (I hope). There wasn't a single other boat in the Thames between Wapping and Limehouse, so we were treated to an unobstructed virtuoso performance.
At the far end of the journey, with the towers of Canary Wharf now in view, we were spun round at speed in a whitewater 180° turn. Oh how we smiled, and yelped, and laughed. I'm not sure that the riverside residents of Limehouse and Rotherhithe enjoy the spectacle quite so much, not twice an hour five times a day, but for us on board it was an exhilarating experience. And then we were back to gliding merely "quite fast", back through the Pool of London and beneath Tower Bridge. Our boat made light work of the two miles back to the Eye, with one last half-turn flourish at Westminster before docking. It had been a bit like a normal tourist trip, significantly speeded up, but with five minutes of Alton Towers tagged on in the middle. I'd therefore heartily recommend a RIB voyage, should you have £26 to burn (but you might prefer to hope that someone buys you a trip for Christmas).
Gallowatch: A week is indeed a long time in politics. Take one dithering PM, and a few well-spun promises on deceased parents' taxation, and suddenly there'll be no general election this autumn. I'm gutted. Gordon's decision (or, indeed, indecision) means that George Galloway continues as my MP into the forseeable future. A bit of Prime Ministerial courage (and a less competent opposition) and our George would have been out of a job by Tuesday. Damn. Ah well, at least his 18 day Commons suspension for being a foul-mouthed disreputable Parliamentarian starts tomorrow. And that suspension ends on... November 1st. Sigh, it could have been a day to remember.
My thanks to London resident Mr G Brown for contributing the final cash to my "Please spare a fiver for Crossrail" campaign. How very kind of him, during this extremely busy week he's having, to find time to make this very special announcement. Funding for Crossrail has been stuck at £15.6bn for so many years (sorry, nowhere near enough, sorry) but arm-twisting in the City has finally upped the available cash to acceptable levels (£16bn? Perfect, go ahead). Anyone would think that there was an election (or two) in the offing, or something. But bring it on.
Not yet, obviously. There's still three years before construction even begins, and then seven years of unsightly digging across the capital. The tunnel's burrowing within 100 metres of my house, which means local residents face "adverse visual impacts" for "four years and three months". That'll include turning my nearest park into a building site, closing off the main A12 road for a month, moving a DLR station, and knocking down several factories that survived the Olympics so that the northeast tunnel portal can be constructed. All that mess, and I still won't get the benefit of a local station afterwards. Pah.
West of Paddington: None of that "getting off the train at Paddington and switching to the tube" any more. One train only, right into the heart of the West End and the City. First Great Western commuters will be big winners. Paddington: Crossrail will provide a direct link to Bond Street and Tottenham Court Road for the first time. But, erm, you can already get to Farringdon, Liverpool Street and Whitechapel on one train, via the Hammersmith & City line. Just rather slower. Bond Street: And from here you can already get to Tottenham Court Road, Liverpool Street, Stratford and Canary Wharf on one train. But I'm sure the massive number of people who want to travel direct from Bond Street to Farringdon will find this multi-billion pound link extremely useful. Oxford Circus: Sorry, not stopping. The nearest Crossrail exit will be in Hanover Square, from which connecting passengers will have to take a 300 metre walk above ground. Oxford Circus may be London's second busiest underground station, but Crossrail won't be easing any of the congestion here. Tottenham Court Road: This is the central hub of the Crossrail line and will eventually (probably after you're dead) link to the proposed "Crossrail 2" Chelsea-Hackney line. Building this station means knocking down the Astoria (and several surrounding buildings) and remodelling the road junction beneath Centre Point. But by 2017 you'll be able to travel direct from here to Ealing Broadway, Bond Street, Liverpool Street and Stratford. Just like you already can on the Central line. Farringdon: One of the very first underground stations is about to become one of the very newest. Crossrail trains are very long, so this station will stretch between two exits, one at Farringdon and one at Barbican. Change here for the newly-revitalised north-south Thameslink service. Eastbound travellers will have a choice of four different direct routes to Liverpool Street - via Crossrail, Circle, Hammersmith & City or Metropolitan lines. Which is a bit pointless. Liverpool Street: Travelling east? The new direct link to Whitechapel is unnecessary (Hammersmith & City), as is the new direct link to Stratford (Central). But the direct link to Canary Wharf will be greatly appreciated. Whitechapel: You can't currently get from here to either Stratford or Canary Wharf on one train. But you will in 2017. Stratford: Change here for Eurostar trains to continental Europe (except that trains to continental Europe probably won't be stopping at Stratford). And Essex commuters will be able to change here onto Crossrail to ride into central London (just as they can already change onto the Central line). Canary Wharf: There's not much room out here in Docklands to hide a 250m-long station, so the new Crossrail station is being built beneath the North Dock (which is going to look a right mess for up to five years). Official documents confess that it's not going to be located terribly conveniently... "West India Quay and Poplar DLR stations are close to the proposed station. Canary Wharf and Heron Quays DLR stations are within ten minutes walking distance. The Canary Wharf Jubilee Line station is within five minutes walk of the proposed station." Erm, great. Still, at least you'll be able to take the train to Woolwich quicker than you can walk to the foot of Canary Wharf tower.
Crossrail is coming. And it'll be great. But probably not quite as great as you expected.
Last night, when I arrived home after 12 hours at work, I had a choice.
Either sitting down with the notes for the presentation I've been busy writing at work, and reading through it again, and attacking it with a few more crossings out and amendments, and flicking through the accompanying 100 page document full of key information that I need to know inside out, and reading through my presentation again crossing out all the bits that don't actually match, and checking I've mentioned all the key messages, and making sure I've included the phrase "mitigating risk" at least five times, and keeping well away from the internet so that I could concentrate on the task in hand, and setting my video to record all the programmes I'd rather have been watching on TV instead, and going to bed early so that I look bright and fresh when I get to stand in front of some important people with my future in their hands first thing this morning.
Or writing you a fascinating, erudite blogpost on some topical topic.
50 years ago today, on October 4th 1957, a small silver satellite was fired into the sky above the Soviet Union. It orbited the Earth once every 96 minutes and it beep-beep-beeped its way across the skies. It looked like a four-legged football, and it scared the willies out of the US government. Its name was Sputnik1, and its launch heralded the start of the Space Age. How things have changed since then.
1957-1982: During the first half of the Space Age, humankind made great strides towards the stars. The Russians sent the first dog and the first man into space (the man came back, the dog was not so lucky). The Americans responded by throwing billions at the Apollo programme which ultimately delivered twelve mento the Moon. This period also saw the first space station, the launch of the interplanetary Voyager missions, a robot on Mars and the first flight of the reusable Space Shuttle. All in all, bloody impressive. Well done humanity.
I am a child of the first half of the Space Age. I grew up during an era of infinite possibilities, where the night sky was the limit. I had (and still have, in a box somewhere) several books about space travel and astronomy. One of my first memories is of watching flickery black and white pictures of astronauts in big white suits bouncing around on the Moon. Some of my favourite TV programmes looked out to the planets, and the stars, and beyond. It seemed as if my future could, even would, involve venturing above the atmosphere at some point. How very wrong I was.
1982-2007: During the second half of the Space Age, humankind sort of gave up on space. Voyager reached the edge of the solar system and explored the outer planets, but not much followed. The Space Shuttle's heyday was shortlived, scuppered by accidental tragedy. Men and women set endurance records in the International Space Station, but they didn't really do anything exciting. Countless satellites were launched into orbit, but most of them pointed down to earth rather than out towards the universe. And most disappointingly of all, nobody's been back to the Moon since I was at infant school, more than a third of a century ago. The final frontier appears to be closed.
When I was little, "21st century" was a watchword for our dazzling technological future. In the new millennium we thought we'd all be rushing round in hovercars wearing silver suits and chatting to aliens on our wrist radios. No such luck. Stanley Kubrick's 2001 seemed perfectly attainable in 1968, but somehow reality hasn't kept up with our expectations. Space travel hasn't delivered lunar shuttles or extraterrestrial discovery, just all-pervasive satellite networks and teflon non-stick saucepans. So much for those Sputnik dreams.
2007-: Today there's seemingly no political will to reach for the skies. Inner space has become a playground for über-rich billionnaire tourists, and outer space is pretty much off the radar. There's no sign of any immediate return to the Moon, nor are any serious interplanetary missions scheduled for the forseeable future. Space exploration doesn't make economic sense, so it doesn't happen. Which is a damned shame, and a very blinkered view of the universe.
As we become increasingly aware of planet Earth's limitations and fragility, maybe it's time to look beyond our overheating atmosphere and once again to reach for the skies. May that first pioneering spaceflight not have been in vain. Beep-beep-beep.
There are far too many books about London. Amazon can sell you 79000 of them. There are more and more in our bookshops every week, clogging up that special set of shelves labelled "London". Here you can find anything from erudite literary tracts to weedy wafer-thin pamphlets, but particularly that special breed - "lots of nuggety facts about London reassembled together in a slightly different order". There's only so much London trivia to go round ("Sweeney Todd lived in Fleet Street", "Buckingham Palace has 240 bedrooms", "The Ritz sells expensive sandwiches") but it's amazing how many times locals and tourists are willing to buy this stuff. Well, this week there's another historical trivia book out, packed with London facts, which claims to be a bit different. And it's called...
I saw a copy of the book in Foyles, and checked out the back cover to see if it might be interesting. "Neasden is the home of the largest Hindu temple in Europe." Yes, I blogged that last month. "Britain's oldest and largest tidal mill can be found at Stratford in East London." Yes, I know, I live just up the road. "...wedding cake... St Brides..." Yeah, yeah, yeah. "Vauxhall gave its name to the Russian word for station." OK, that's a bit different. So I took a look inside, and flicked through a bit, and noticed lots of things I didn't actually know (in amongst the stuff I did). The book has lots of geographically arranged sections, each containing meaty textual chunks, and it's rather nicely illustrated too. All the big facts are picked out in capital letters to make them easier to spot, and there are plenty of them. I've picked ten of the more interesting ones to test you out, and to test the book out. Do you know the places in question, or are they things you never knew about London?
1) LONDON'S NARROWEST ROAD BRIDGE 2) LONDON'S ONLY CROSS-EYED STATUE 3) BRITAIN'S FIRST OFFICIAL ROUNDABOUT 4) THE NEAREST WINDMILL TO CENTRAL LONDON 5) THE FIRST PUBLIC STATUE IN THE WORLD TO BE MADE FROM ALUMINIUM 6) THE ONLY LARGE LONDON PARK NOT TO BE ENCLOSED BY RAILINGS 7) THE OLDEST RAMPED MULTI-STOREY CAR PARK IN BRITAIN 8) THE OLDEST MANUFACTURING COMPANY IN BRITAIN 9) LONDON'S OLDEST PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL CLUB 10) THE OLDEST MULBERRY TREE IN BRITAIN [Pick one, if you know it, and identify its location in this comments box]
So anyway, I bought a copy of the book and took it home and had a good read. There was lots on the City, and Westminster, and Chelsea, and Southwark, and... hang on, not all of London has been included. All the riverside boroughs from Wandsworth to Greenwich are here, but only the bits of those boroughs that are sort of near the river. The Old Bailey is here, but the British Library isn't. Canary Wharf gets in, but Stratford doesn't. Hang on, the back cover suggested that the tidal mill at Stratford was in the book. It lied. It also lied about Neasden, because the nearest the book gets to the big Hindu temple is a railway depot in East Acton. Or, in other words, half of the facts flagged on the back cover don't actually appear in the book at all. The publisher's website contains similar lies ("unearth the original Big Brother house in Bromley" - not included) ("See the Brentford river views that inspired Turner" - not included) which is a bit naughty. Or perhaps even downright deceptive. The book would be better titled "I Never Knew That About Central Riverside London". Sorry Barking and Dagenham, sorry Havering, you're miles away from being included.
I've emailed the publishers to tell them that I think the information published on the book's back cover (and on their website) is highly misleading. I got their Out of Office. Maybe I'll have better luck hearing back from the author. It's a shame, because this is actually an interesting and informative book, and a good one to file away on your own "lots of historical triviaabout London" bookshelf. Just don't buy it expecting to read very much about Greater London. Maybe someone else'll have to write that one.
I don't often do this, but I need to jot down some of the great TV programmes coming up over the next few days, just so that I don't accidentally forget to watch them. Like I nearly did last night. Only at the last minute did I spot that More4 was broadcasting an evening of shows from the very first night of Channel 4, not-quite-25 years ago. So I spent several delightful hours revisiting the first edition of Countdown (the first consonant was a T), the first episode of Brookside (how young was our Damon?) and the very first Comic Strip Presents... Five Goes Mad In Dorset (Uncle Quentin! And lashings of ginger beer). I'd have been gutted to miss those. And that's why I'm jotting down the following, OK?
• Stephen Fry: HIV and Me (BBC2, Tuesday, 9pm) If you remember Mr Fry's excellent documentary on depression, this can only be as illuminating (oh, and you had noticed Stephen's blogging now, hadn't you? At length...) • Batman (BBC4, Tuesday & Wednesday, 7:30pm) Holy Classic Sixties Repeats! This week, Mr Freeze zaps, wacks and pows. • Ripping Yarns (BBC4, Tuesday, 9pm) Michael Palin's tongue-in-cheek Boys Own adventure tales, this one feating Eric Olthwaite and his Spear and Jackson number 5. • Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe (BBC4, Tuesday, 10pm) A caustic attack on modern telly, in another fine witty haranguing monologue. • Porterhouse Blue (More4, Tuesday, 11:05pm) That classic Oxbridge drama starring Mr D Jason, playing all this week. And followed tonight by, ooh, Vic Reeves Big Night Out! • Jericho (ITV4, Wednesday, 8pm) First Freeview outing for the apocalyptic US mini series in which a mid-west town finds itself seemingly alone after nuclear Armageddon. • The Life and Times of Vivienne Vyle (BBC2, Thursday, 9pm) Jennifer Saunders takes aim at the easy target of daytime chatshows. • 50 Years of the Today Programme (BBC4, Thursday, 9pm) Actually I'm not interested in this one at all, but I know how to give my readers what they want. • Eurotrash (More4, Thursday, 11pm) The very first über-camp episode, avec Antoine de Caunes. • Ugly Betty (Channel 4, Friday, 9pm) New series! Watch it now and save £50 on buying two box sets in six months time. • House of Cards (BBC4, Sunday, 9pm) Another 80s drama ripe for a repeat, especially in a possible election-calling week. • The Sarah Jane Adventures (BBC1, Monday, 5pm) It may be on kids telly, but this Doctor Who spin-off featuring 59-year-old Ms Smith is actually dead good. You've missed two episodes already, but it's evil nuns next week and you wouldn't want to miss them too.
So there you have it. Almost half of my readership appear to be Radio 4 devotees. It's an absolute runaway victory for the BBC's premier speech station, and maybe I shouldn't be surprised that you lot are more attracted to words than to music. Radios 1, 2, 5 and 6 have all been jockeying for second place, with Radio 2 just pipping the others by a few votes. My favourite Radio 1 came in third, which means I'm probably wasting my time should I ever decide to post a review of Dizzee Rascal's new album. And down at the bottom of the heap it's BBC local radio, which is even less popular than Radio 3 (and that's saying something). Thank you all for your 242 collective votes. But if you think I'm going to start posting endlessly about The Archers and Gardeners' Question Time then I'm afraid you're very much mistaken. In the meantime, anyone for a game of MorningtonCrescent?
I SPY Almost-LONDON the definitive DG guide to places a few yards over the border Part 2:Rainham Marshes
Location: New Tank Hill Road, Purfleet, Thurrock RM19 1SX [map] Very nearly in: the London Borough of Havering Admission: £2.50 6-word summary: reclaimed rifle range, now RSPB sanctuary Website:www.rspb.org.uk/reserves/rainhammarshes Time to set aside: two hours plus
It's not easy to find something nice to say about Thurrock. Not when place names like Grays and Mucking unintentionally reveal rather too much about the area. Thurrock's very flat, rather industrial, and boasts the retail hell of Lakeside slap bang in the middle. And it's extremely estuarine, clinging onto the grey Thames as it wriggles out to sea past Sheerness and Southend. Not lovely. But now there is something nice to say about the area, and it's all thanks to the Ministry of Defence. Most of the Thurrock riverside has long been irretrievably lost beneath factories, warehouses and dockyards, but 900 acres of Rainham Marshes were appropriated by the MOD for use as a rifle range which unintentionally preserved the natural landscape. This wetland paradise is now under the protection of the RSPB, and last year they opened up the gates to visiting twitchers (and members of the local community). Fancy a visit?
First head for Purfleet, not Rainham. For drivers it's just a few yards off the A13, but those coming by train face a long walk from Purfleet station. The footpath takes you along the Thames, where the dominant feature is the giant power station on the opposite banks, and past the Purfleet Heritage and Military Centre. And also, I'm afraid, past the white van enclave of the aptly-named Garrison housing estate. I had to dodge out of the way of a speeding mini scooter ridden by a teenage dad and his giggling son, and avoid the enormous dog guarding a phalanx of Vicky Pollards holding court by the swings. This urban wildlife was in sharp contrast to what was coming up round the corner.
Entrance to the Rainham Marshes bird reserve is through a striking orangey-brown visitor's centre. You won't get through the metal perimeter fence unless you venture inside. Head up to the cash desk by the observation window where a learned volunteer will point out the highlights of what you're about to see. You could pause here to peer at distant waterfowl through a telescope, or else keep the café staff busy by ordering a jacket spud or toastie. I resisted both and continued out through the swing doors, down a long ramp and onto the wheelchair-accessible boardwalk. You're not allowed to walk wherever you like, so there's a 2½ mile path around the perimeter which allows you to keep a binoculared eye on any resident bird life. Not that there was much flapping around this weekend, it not being migration season, not yet.
I took the anti-clockwise path, through the Woodland Discovery Zone (ooh look, trees) and up along the northern perimeter. The A13 and Channel Tunnel Rail Link both run alongside, both on stilts, and from next month Eurostar passengers will be able to look down and birdwatch for themselves. There's a better view from inside the Aveley hide, or at least there will be when some avian interest turns up. More action was evident up on Aveley Flash, where a single long-legged wader stood proudly in the marshy water surrounded by swans, ducks and flapping waterfowl. It was a magnificent bird, a bit larger than a heron, but I have no idea what it was because I'm a rubbish ornithologist. And because there was nobody else around to ask. I only passed five other paying visitors, four of them in a big Barbour-jacketed huddle blocking the path with a giant tripod. No problem, because birds don't really like being watched, so the fewer humans the better.
The path continued inbetween a reedy river and a 600ft-long shooting shelter. Even ten years ago, had I been standing here, an entire battalion of trained marksmen would have been busy using me as target practice. Now their flimsy lean-to stands slowly decaying in the wilderness, with splintered wooden benches and discarded rusting equipment scattered where they fell. The frog-filled river is no less interesting. Look carefully and you may spot a colony of rare water voles (or, indeed, one may come scampering towards you along the path, desperately careering out of sight before you can whip out your camera). A bit further ahead the boardwalk crosses the middle of a bullrushed pool, where I stopped for a sit down on one of the benches and let dragonflies nip and dart around my feet. And in the next pool I stumbled upon a heron proper, strutting around his watery domain gulping down whitebait until two coots scared him off.
Rain forced me to speed up on the walk back to the visitor centre, through clouds of midges and light drizzle. A field of cows and bulls gave me a stern look as I passed, while a family up on the Thames-side path whipped out an umbrella and ran for cover. Back in the observation lounge I was stopped by a smiling volunteer, who duly noted my lack of zoom-lens mega-camera and asked the killer question. "Much about?" Erm. I burbled something about there not being many birds at this time of year, but didn't dare mention any by name in case he spotted that I didn't have a clue what I was talking about. Instead I slipped out, past the frozen gaze of the café staff who couldn't quite work out why I wasn't stopping for a panini and a cuppa. Sorry, Maybe I'll come back again when proper migration begins, and next time I'll make sure I bring a bird book and a decent pair of binoculars. by train: Purfleet
What's on this weekend? A.V. Roe Centenary Sunday 12 July, 2pm
A replica triplane celebrates one hundred years since Britain's first ever flight on Walthamstow Marshes.
7 simple steps to an eco-friendly Hallowe'en
Tube Week Extra Updated tube map
, as do new arrivals Watford Junction and Clapham Junction.
no weekend service". Same thing at Old Street and Highbury & Islington. Like anybody cares. It's even wordier at Sudbury Hill on the Piccadilly line, which now reads "Sudbury Hill
The Willett Way continues up a side alley, underneath the railway and out into deep green woodland. This is what's left of the ancient forest of Petts Wood, the bit that hasn't disappeared beneath a carpet of suburbia. The wood was bought by public subscription in 1927 and handed over to the National Trust, and has since acted as a buffer against unfettered housing development [photo]. And it's rather delightful. Twisting tracks and muddy bridleways lead beneath a leafy canopy, with the occasional view out across sheep-infested fields. And it must have been much the same when local builder William Willett took his morning constitutional 100 years ago. He was riding his horse through Petts Wood early one morning when he noticed that all his neighbours were still asleep in bed. What a waste of daylight, he thought. What if we could shift an hour of summer daylight from the morning to the evening? Being a man of action he went home and wrote a polemic pamphlet entitled "The Waste of Daylight", and campaigned to get his timeshifting plans forced through Parliament. And what do you know, he was actually successful. Eventually.
Introducing British Summer Time took rather longer than William Willett expected. The first Daylight Saving Bill was introduced in 1908, but struggled to get through Parliament despite support from a majority of MPs. It took a world war to focus Europe's attention on the importance of saving daylight, and therefore fuel, and Germany was first to take the plunge. A coal shortage forced Britain to follow suit shortly afterwards, and on 21st May 1916 a bemused nation turned its carriage clocks and fobwatches forward by 60 pioneering minutes. In 1925 a permanent British Summertime Act was passed, and the grateful people of Petts Wood erected this memorial sundial in honour of its trailblazing inventor. It stands in a silent clearing in the middle of the wood [photo] and commemorates William as "the untiring advocate of Summer Time" [photo]. It's another very special hour-ahead sundial, running on BST rather than GMT, with the Latin phrase beneath the dial translating as "I only keep the Summer hours" [photo]. I arrived in the clearing when the sun was almost exactly overhead, so the shadowed time in my photograph indicates 1pm BST rather the more normal 12 noon GMT. Of all the sights along the Willett Way, this was the most special.
But William never lived to see his ideas come to fruition. He died in 1915, just a year too early, and was buried in the churchyard at St Nicholas's in Chislehurst [photo]. The Willett Way passes his burial site, and you can slip beneath the lych gate into the churchyard and search out his grave in the southeastern corner. It's a sorry sight, at least in comparison to some of the more upright memorials close by [photo]. William's marble cross headstone has been snapped off and now lies folornly across the top of a bare earth grave [photo]. Some of the plot's low stone borders have also toppled over, and the text on what's left of the gravestone is barely readable. You wouldn't ever imagine, looking at this mess from the pavement outside, that here was the last resting place of a man once so revered that he had his own waxwork in Madame Tussauds.
The Willett Way terminates just up the road at William's self-built home - The Cedars [photo]. It's an impressive detached pile overlooking Chislehurst Common, and Bromley Council have placed a plaque by the front door to commemorate "the initiator of British Summer Time". Thank goodness a few people still remember William Willett - the ordinary man whose early morning horse-ride ended up changing the world. Ah, if only changing all those clocks back an hour didn't take so long! Damn you William, damn you!
Everyone appreciates the long light evenings. Everyone laments their shrinkage as Autumn approaches, and nearly everyone has given utterance to a regret that the clear bright light of early morning, during Spring and Summer months, is so seldom seen or used. Nevertheless, Standard time remains so fixed, that for nearly half the year the sun shines for several hours each day, while we are asleep, and is rapidly nearing the horizon when we reach home after the work of the day is over. There then remains only a brief spell of declining daylight in which to spend the short period of leisure at our disposal. Now, if one of the hours of sunlight wasted in the morning could be added to the end of the day, many advantages would be gained by all, and especially by those who would spend in the open air, whatever time they might have at their disposal after the duties of the day have been discharged.• Walk the Willett WayThe people of Petts Wood in southeast London are understandably proud of William Willett. Look, here he is commemorated on the town sign in Queensway, just outside Woolworths [photo]. The sun and moon in the lower right quarter represent Daylight Saving (and then there's a horse representing Kent, an old coat of arms and an Elizabethan galleon built from local timber). And it's beneath this sign that a very special walking trail begins - the Willett Way. This three mile walk [pdf] has been put together by a local historian as part of a special centenary exhibition at the Royal Greenwich Observatory [link]. It's not a terribly exciting walk, just a trudge down suburban avenues and through a bit of woodland, but there's a certain charm in following in the footsteps of the man who invented BST. And this weekend would be perfect, because you've got an extra hour to do it.
Cross the railway by Petts Wood station and you'll find a matching sign, and a pub. The pub has been named in honour of William Willett (as have a lot of things round here - you'll get the hang of it as we proceed) and it's called the Daylight Inn [photo]. They do beer and food (and a trivia quiz on Tuesdays) just like any normal pub, but they also specialise in badly-repainted pub signs. The sign may look quite impressive, featuring a big smiling sun flanked by two clocks, but only until you peer a little closer [photo]. In the original pub sign one of the hour hands pointed to twelve and the other to one, representing the one hour time difference that's at the heart of Daylight Saving. But the brainless cretins who recently repainted the sign have set both clocks to noon, representing bugger all. Which is a shame. Don't stop to drown your sorrows, there's a long walk still to go.
Onward past a parade of half-timbered Tudorbethan shops (more 1935 than 1539) where the bored daytime wives of Petts Wood go to fritter away their husbands' salaries on tanning salons and interior design. And onward into the leafy avenues that surround the station, into one of the finest garden suburbs in southeast London. A typical avenue, off to your right beside the church, has been named Willett Way [photo]. It's full of exactly the sort of houses that William himself would have built, had he lived 20 years longer [photo]. It's a long street of black and white executive villas with pristine lawns and well-trimmed rose bushes. It's a privileged commuter haven complete with two-car garages and diamond latticed windows. It's the top of the property ladder, or at least as top as most of us could hope to aspire. It's extremely Metroland, apart from being on the wrong side of the capital. And there is, to be honest, absolutely no reason to walk down it apart from its name. Seen enough? Contain your seething jealousy, retrace your steps and head back towards the local recreation ground.
Yes, obviously, this is the Willett Recreation Ground, what else? Within its hedges you'll find the Petts Wood Bowling Club (please take great care - the path to the pavilion is slippery) and the Petts Wood Cricket Club. Surely some mistake there - two sporting facilities that haven't been named after our favourite Edwardian celebrity. But there's a treat in store embedded in the grass by the cricket pavilion [photo]. It's a very special memorial sundial, the hours marked out by colourful Roman numerals designed by pupils at a nearby primary school. There's no central spike - you have to stand in the middle and see which way your own shadow points [photo]. And, rather delightfully, this is a British Summer Time sundial. During the summer months it tells the correct time, while from November to March it runs an hour ahead of GMT. Unlike normal sundials this one tells the correct time for more than half of the year, and for the part of the year with maximum daylight too. Our William would be justly proud.
And so ends diamond geezer's fifth annual tube week. I continue to be amazed by how much interactive interest the London Underground inspires, even amongst people who rarely or never use it. And I'm also surprised, every year, that I don't run out of new tube-related stuff to write about. I mean, five years on and I still haven't written a tube week post about disused stations. Maybe next year...
Tube quiz (25) Going Overground
Tubewatch (25) yet more tube links
This little tiny symbol labels all the stations where you you can change for riverboat services. Because we all do that, don't we. We all hop off the tube and rush down to the Thames to wait for half an hour on a freezing pier for an empty boat to nowhere. Well, squint at the tube map carefully and you'll spot six places between Westminster and Greenwich where you can do precisely this. But not at Putney Bridge or Temple, apparently, even though the riverboat map says you can. So much for reversible connectivity, TfL!
Blue: station entrances
On the map it's not the most alluring of early autumn destinations. A seaside town on the north coast of Kent, with north-facing beaches looking out across the North Sea. But Whitstable is a delightful and distinctive fishing port with a long established maritime heritage, and well worth a visit. Especially if you like oysters.
Although there's quite a lot of beach at Whitstable, it's all pebbly and not perfect for bucket-and-spading. To the west of the harbour, by the yacht club, an extensive carpet of crunchy cockleshells leads down from the lifeboat station to the sea. At low tide a long pebble ridge is visible at Tankerton, just to the east, where rows of beach huts line the foot of a steep grassy slope. Up top is the town's "castle", which is really just a late 18th century manor house with ornamental battlements (now used for conferences and weddings). Watch out for the rat-faced feral lads swigging lager in the shrubbery. And from the flagstaff atop the hill you can look out across a broad 180° panorama, from the Isle of Sheppey round to Herne Bay, with the southeast tip of Essex just visible in the distance. Yes, that's a wind farm, but more intriguing are the clumps of metal tripods poking out of the water several miles offshore. These are the Maunsell sea forts, tall towers that were part of our defences against German invasion, now rusting away in mid-channel. One day I must take a boat trip out to see them, but alas there are no more tours until next spring.
Digital switchover begins in the UK today, and unfortunately your internet connection has been affected. If you're reading this message then it appears you've been attempting to access this blog via the Whitehaven transmitter. Well that's not possible any more, sorry. We switched it off at two o'clock this morning, just after the snooker on BBC2, and it's not coming back on again. So now you're going to have to make alternative arrangements. It's the future, you know. Get used to it.
londonerama
The new exhibition at the Imperial War Museum is a minor treat. It features wall upon wall of wartime propaganda posters, not just from Britain ("Eat Less Bread") but from the US ("I'm buying Victory Bonds") and right across Europe ("All Hail the Glorious Fourth Anniversary of the Comintern"). They stretch as far back as World War I, and as recently as a certain skirmish in Iraq. Our posters tend to be a bit wittier and more direct, whereas the German contingent are more visionary and uplifting. Admission to the exhibition is free (though the accompanying book costs £20). Expect to spend a good 15 minutes looking round. Let us go forward together.
Rivington Place is a brand new public gallery just opened in Shoreditch (where else) with a remit to represent diversity through art and photography. It's had £6m of lottery cash thrown at it, and the resulting building is both striking and functional (and full of community spirit). The free opening exhibition is split across two levels, with "phoning home" photographs downstairs and a trio of dislocated audio-visual presentations in a dark room upstairs. Try not to get very lost walking inbetween (and, whatever you do, don't wander into the Stuart Hall Library by mistake). It's a brave new venture deserving of support, but I wonder how many Londoners will ever notice it exists.
London's well known as a place for difference, dissent and refusal to conform. For more than three centuries the city's been home to many famous religious Noncomformists (that's Protestants who aren't Anglicans, such as Methodists and Quakers and Baptists and Puritans). Even on a very short walk across the north of the City of London, it's amazing how many you can find.
The grandest memorial in Bunhill Fields belongs to John Bunyan. He may have been born in Bedford, but he died of a fever in London, and this pilgrim progressed no further. Look further beyond the iron railings and you might also spot the tomb of Richard Cromwell. He ruled Britain for eight months back in 1658, following in the footsteps of his rather more famous (and considerably more successful) father Oliver. Behind you stands a tall white obelisk, erected in memory of the great author Daniel Defoe. He was one of Britain's first novelists, and many a 1970s childhood would have been emptier without Robinson Crusoe on the telly every summer. And in Defoe's shadow, surrounded by fallen brown leaves, is a rather too modern gravestone etched with the name of William Blake. He was the visionary poet and artist who wrote Jerusalem, much beloved by Last Night of the Prommers and the ladies of the Women's Institute. But Blake's tombstone is actually a fake, because his real grave has long lain unmarked in the grass nearby. Earlier this year a little detective work using burial plot coordinates paid off, and his final resting place (on the edge of a muddy lawn) has now been uncovered. There's no memorial yet, but let's hope there will be.
Wesley's Chapel: Immediately opposite Bunhill Fields, on the other side of City Road, stands one of the largest Methodist chapels in the country. And with good reason. It's nextdoor to the Georgian townhouse where John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, lived out the last decade of his life. His house is open to the public, as is the grand chapel itself. Step in through the glass partition and admire the marble columns, stained glass and raised altar. If you're lucky, there might even be someone twiddling on the impressive organ. But there's another attraction, just along the corridor (past the nice lady pouring cups of tea) and down into the crypt. Yes, it's the Museum of Methodism (you knew there had to be one somewhere). Here you can find Wesley's original pulpit, and the odd bust, and some relevant ceramics, and several information boards telling the story of the Methodist religion from the 18th century to the present day. At the moment there's also a mini exhibition in one corner comemmorating the tercentenary of Charles Wesley, John's brother, and the hymn writer responsible for Love Divine and Hark The Herald. It's all very homely and understated, as one might expect. And I wonder if I've finally been to a London museum that none of you have.
It seems that, for most of you, your normal is the same as my normal. We haven't tweaked our browser font size from its default setting, so we all see the same thing. That's good. But for a few people, especially those with dodgy eyesight, they'd reset normal to be rather bigger that that. On their browsers the body text on my blog suddenly went giant sized yesterday - a really quite significant shift which made my blog look very odd. Very odd indeed.
I can't be sure which browser you're using to view my site. Because I use out-of-date coding you may well be seeing this blog completely differently to me. Internet Explorer users, your line spacing isn't always the same as what I'm seeing in Firefox. You Safari users, your font looks completely different to me and your bold is definitely a lot bolder. And if you're not using a browser at all because you're viewing my RSS feed instead, you may well just be looking at raw barely-formatted text. I must never assume that anyone else is seeing what I intended. Never second guess your readers.
However close to civilisation the milestone in High Street may suggest, most Londoners have never ventured out to Henbrook. You won't find this charming suburb on any railway map of the capital - territorial Victorian landowners saw to that - but that's the way the residents seem to like it. House prices round here certainly reflect Henbrook's unique mix of community and exclusivity. To the west of town, surrounding the recreation ground, stand row upon row of elegant Edwardian terraces. Out east, in contrast, there's considerable council overspill, as well as the famous Stephenson Estate with its Art Deco brick façades. But continued outward sprawl has blurred the borders between Henbrook and the surrounding commuter belt, and some fear that the entire neighbourhood now risks losing its identity.
Henbrook is named after the river that threads through the centre of town - now more a concrete flood channel than an idyllic pastoral stream. More of the river used to be visible until half of the town was built on top of it. From the tunnel mouth in Kings Park the water continues underground for several meandering miles, before eventually joining up with another of the Thames's vanished subterranean tributaries. According to local tradition if you stand at the entrance to the tunnel at sunrise on midsummer morning it's still possible to hear the screams of two children murdered in the long-gone water mill several centuries ago - although I suspect this tale owes more to alcohol and screeching cats than having any basis in reality.
One further direct link to the past is Henbrook Fair, held every year on the second Sunday in September. Founded by royal charter in 1638, this annual celebration still attracts considerable crowds to the streets of the Old Town. Nowadays the dog show is the biggest draw, but for many it's still the Apple Hurling contest that provides the highlight of the day. The event begins, as in olden times, with a carefully selected adolescent maiden picking "the golden-est apple" from Lord Milton's Orchard. Two teams, one from each side of the river, then compete to propel the harvested fruit across town without letting it touch the ground. Shops and businesses board up their windows in preparation before the procession passes through, although these days this is more to prevent asbo-centric adolescents from doing too much damage. Sadly the Applepip Princess went uncrowned this year after the foot and mouth crisis put paid to the event.
If you want to see London, see it from the river. And for a unique view of London, there's nothing quite like taking a ride in a Rigid Inflatable Boat. Skipping along the Thames in an orange inflatable is a great way of seeing the sights, at speed. It's also a great way of emptying your wallet. Twenty-six quid, for 40 minutes? It had better be good. Thankfully I was able to take advantage of a friend's Christmas gift voucher (trip for two, expires imminently, can you come?), so my bank balance remained intact. But yes, it was good anyway.
And then we were off, downriver, just the 12 of us. Nothing excessively fast to begin with, but still noticeably speedier than the usual Thames tourist cruisers chugging by. From Westminster to the Tower we enjoyed a quick-witted tourist commentary, and a slightly different view of central London from a bit lower in the water than usual. And then, after passing beneath Tower Bridge, our guide retreated to the back of the boat and allowed the pilot to let rip. Woooo. The boat curved effortlessly between the banks, tipping one way and then the other, and splashing us all with frothy Thames water. I reassured myself that the river's a lot cleaner than it used to be (I hope). There wasn't a single other boat in the Thames between Wapping and Limehouse, so we were treated to an unobstructed virtuoso performance.
Gallowatch: A week is indeed a long time in politics. Take one dithering PM, and a few well-spun promises on deceased parents' taxation, and suddenly there'll be no general election this autumn. I'm gutted. Gordon's decision (or, indeed, indecision) means that George Galloway continues as my MP into the forseeable future. A bit of Prime Ministerial courage (and a less competent opposition) and our George would have been out of a job by Tuesday. Damn. Ah well, at least his 18 day Commons suspension for being a foul-mouthed disreputable Parliamentarian starts tomorrow. And that suspension ends on... November 1st. Sigh, it could have been a day to remember.
Farringdon: One of the very first underground stations is about to become one of the very newest. Crossrail trains are very long, so this station will stretch between two exits, one at Farringdon and one at Barbican. Change here for the newly-revitalised north-south Thameslink service. Eastbound travellers will have a choice of four different direct routes to Liverpool Street - via Crossrail, Circle, Hammersmith & City or Metropolitan lines. Which is a bit pointless.
50 years ago today, on October 4th 1957, a small silver satellite was fired into the sky above the Soviet Union. It orbited the Earth once every 96 minutes and it beep-beep-beeped its way across the skies. It looked like a four-legged football, and it scared the willies out of the US government. Its name was Sputnik 1, and its launch heralded the start of the Space Age. How things have changed since then.
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I SPY Almost-LONDON
It's not easy to find something nice to say about Thurrock. Not when place names like Grays and Mucking unintentionally reveal rather too much about the area. Thurrock's very flat, rather industrial, and boasts the retail hell of Lakeside slap bang in the middle. And it's extremely estuarine, clinging onto the grey Thames as it wriggles out to sea past Sheerness and Southend. Not lovely. But now there is something nice to say about the area, and it's all thanks to the Ministry of Defence. Most of the Thurrock riverside has long been irretrievably lost beneath factories, warehouses and dockyards, but 900 acres of Rainham Marshes were appropriated by the MOD for use as a rifle range which unintentionally preserved the natural landscape. This wetland paradise is now under the protection of the RSPB, and last year they opened up the gates to visiting twitchers (and members of the local community). Fancy a visit?
Entrance to the Rainham Marshes bird reserve is through a striking orangey-brown visitor's centre. You won't get through the metal perimeter fence unless you venture inside. Head up to the cash desk by the observation window where a learned volunteer will point out the highlights of what you're about to see. You could pause here to peer at distant waterfowl through a telescope, or else keep the café staff busy by ordering a jacket spud or toastie. I resisted both and continued out through the swing doors, down a long ramp and onto the wheelchair-accessible boardwalk. You're not allowed to walk wherever you like, so there's a 2½ mile path around the perimeter which allows you to keep a binoculared eye on any resident bird life. Not that there was much flapping around this weekend, it not being migration season, not yet.
The path continued inbetween a reedy river and a 600ft-long shooting shelter. Even ten years ago, had I been standing here, an entire battalion of trained marksmen would have been busy using me as target practice. Now their flimsy lean-to stands slowly decaying in the wilderness, with splintered wooden benches and discarded rusting equipment scattered where they fell. The frog-filled river is no less interesting. Look carefully and you may spot a colony of rare water voles (or, indeed, one may come scampering towards you along the path, desperately careering out of sight before you can whip out your camera). A bit further ahead the boardwalk crosses the middle of a bullrushed pool, where I stopped for a sit down on one of the benches and let dragonflies nip and dart around my feet. And in the next pool I stumbled upon a heron proper, strutting around his watery domain gulping down whitebait until two coots scared him off.
