So, anyway, back to the Story of London festival website. It's changed a bit since Monday. For the better. And for the worse.
The biggest change is to the website's main search engine, specifically to how you "Find Your Nearest Event". On Monday you had to enter a postcode, and then a map appeared showing the surrounding events. Great if you wanted to search around your own home, but not much use elsewhere in London if you didn't know the postcode. It was also possible to view the results of your search as a list... except that the list showed every event in London, not just those on the map. And now that's changed.
Now you don't have to type in your postcode. Now you only have to type in a "location" of some sort, be it a place name, street name, postcode or neighbourhood. That's a major improvement, or so it would seem. Now it's possible to discover events around Great Portland Street, or along Highgate Hill, or out in Richmond, much more easily. You can even search for the middle of Regent's Park, and so discover this Sunday's Camden Green Fair (...ah, except the event's been cancelled, and the SoL website hasn't realised). Better news - search for Crossness and you'll now be able to discover precisely when the Engines are open, which is a big improvement on Monday.
But there's a downside. Search for Hendon and a event-less map appears. Sorry, announces the website, but "There are no events in your area. Please enter another area or use the events calendar..." Untrue. There is a big Story of London event in Hendon - the Hendon Pageant at RAF Hendon - but the museum's off the edge of the map so it isn't recorded. You might hope that scrolling the Google map, or zooming out, would reveal more, but no. If the event's not within a mile or so or your search point it won't appear, either on the map or on the shortlist generated underneath. Search for Muswell Hill - no events listed. Search for Ealing - nothing, even though there are events elsewhere in the borough. Search for Havering - a blank map, because the goat-related event at Havering Library isn't close enough to the designated pinpoint. I'm guessing many Outer London residents will have given up by now.
The other big difference since Monday is that location is now a "required" field, even in the Advanced Search. If you don't type in the part of London that interests you, no search is possible. Want to see all the Living History Weekend events across London on a map? Not allowed. Want to see all the events being organised by English Heritage. No can do without a location. Want to find the Alfred Hitchcock event? Sorry, you can't type "Alfred Hitchcock" into the search engine because it's not that sort of search engine.
Still, at least there's the opportunity to search by date in the Events Calendar. What's on today, 3rd June? 26 different events, apparently, although onlytwo of these are one-offs. Almost all of the rest are long-term opportunities rather than proper events, available most days this month. This list of "Art" events should give you a flavour of what I mean. But Dave Hill got caught out on Monday when he turned up at the supposedly-open Whitechapel Gallery only to find it was closed, as it is every Monday. I see that this particular date-related error's now been fixed.
But there's an event in Leyton with the opposite problem. It's the M11 Link Road "Linked" walk, an absolutely brilliant social history concept involving radio transmitters hung from lampposts. This is listed on the SoL website as being open "for one afternoon only" but has in fact been open every day since 2003. The walk requires you to hire headphones from local libraries, and only functions because lots of people don't all try to use them at the same time. Watch that system go horribly wrong on Saturday.
If you want a more useful way to find Story of London events, the themed lists in the website's sidebar are the way to go. Museums, social heritage, lectures, that sort of thing. But not the eight themed lists in the textbox at the top of the SoL homepage. Click on any the links for art, architecture, fashion, film, history, literature, music or theatre, and you only get themed events occurring today, not a complete list of all themed events. Seemingly there are no "music" events today, but when are the others? No idea, the website's a blank.
Or you could buy this week's Time Out, which has a pullout Story of London section in the middle. It's not comprehensive, but the map and listings are considerably easier to follow than the official website. For example, I'd never have spotted that the Wandle Festival was on this weekend if I hadn't seen it in print, nor noticed that Tate Britain was doing something big on Friday evening.
The Story of London could have been told so much better. But, this weekend in particular, why not try to make the best of what's available?
So, anyway, back to the Story of London festival website. It's changed a bit since Monday. For the better. And for the worse.
