Probably not yet, to be honest. But ten London boroughs have taken the plunge and are attempting to interact online with their residents, with varying degrees of success. Some of them are even occasionally interesting, or indeed useful. None of the ten are tweeting prolifically, so don't worry that your council tax is being wasted. Here's a quick summary of how they're doing.
Barnet: twitter.com/BarnetCouncil - 358 followers, 296 updates (first tweet May 2008) » Example: "Could Barnet be more creative in park flower design: Some time ago I made a photo survey of parks in Barnet, Bre.. http://tinyurl.com/dezm74" » Summary: Mostly a link to council news, but with the occasional human interruption » Also - Facebook, Flickr, YouTube
Camden: twitter.com/camdentalking - 178 followers, 193 updates (first tweet February 2009) » Example - "Power cut in the Hampstead Road area, some residents are without electricity: http://bit.ly/qVSL #camdencouncil #eustonroad #camden" » Summary - Started out as a snow update, and still regularly informing residents about changes to services » Also - Flickr
Haringey: twitter.com/LBHaringey - 70 followers, 15 updates (first tweet last week) » Example: "From News Feed: Extra refuse services available for Passover: Special skips will be appearing in .. http://tinyurl.com/d2na7v" » Summary: Very recent; mostly regurgitated newsfeed
Hillingdon: twitter.com/Hillingdon - 215 followers, 207 updates (first tweet June 2008) » Example: "Say hello to @CllrSSD - first Hillingdon councillor to use Twitter" » Summary: Announcements and chat, making a special effort for Comic Relief » Also - Facebook, Flickr, YouTube
Lambeth: twitter.com/lambeth_council - 99 followers, 31 updates (first tweet March 2009) » Example: "New initiative launches in Lambeth to stop knives getting into hands of young people http://bitly.com/hKrIY" » Summary: Still rather new, but almost all press release URLs
Redbridge: twitter.com/LB_Redbridge - 72 followers, 9 updates (first tweet February 2009) » Example: "Redbridge i, the council's innovative website wins a prestigious award http://tinyurl.com/d4faxc" » Summary: Fledgling service, intermittently updated
Southwark: twitter.com/lb_southwark - 180 followers, 52 updates (first tweet December 2008) » Example:@loobs0 "We'd laid down 500 tonnes of grit between Sunday afternoon and yesterday afternoon. Had another 60 people out gritting last night..." » Summary: Mostly updates on council events and services » Also - Facebook, Flickr, YouTube
Wandsworth: twitter.com/wandbc - 209 followers, 84 updates (first tweet December 2008) » Example: "Dry cleaners go green: Two-thirds of Wandsworth's dry cleaning operators attended a council training workshop on.. http://tinyurl.com/79vxkt..." » Summary: Pure press release sausage factory
If you live elsewhere in the UK, or if you want to discover whether your local councillor is tweeting, check out the ever-growing directory at Cllr Tweeps. It's future of local democracy, you know (or perhaps a pointless micro-audience dead end).
Last week the British Museum reopened a major refurbished gallery. Officially it's designated the Paul and Jane Ruddock Gallery of Medieval Europe AD 1050–1500, although it's snappier to call it Gallery 40. Top of the main stairs, straight across the landing, fork left. It's full of pre-renaissance artefacts from across the continent, including a beaker from Venice, a gold cup from Paris and tiles from Tring. There are quite a few monastic bits and pieces, including fine jewellery and intricately carved stonework. But the centrepiece of the room is a glass cabinet containing the famous Lewis chessmen.
The chess pieces are of Norwegian origin, probably 12th century, and are carved from chunks of walrus tusk. The major pieces have beautifully carved faces, almost cartoonish to modern eyes, including a gruff beardy king and a rather huffish queen. There are more than enough pieces for a complete set, so some are displayed on a red and white board and the rest are laid out around the display case either singly or in groups. They make a most impressive strategic army, and are a reminder of the excellence of European craftsmanship almost a millennium ago.
As for the Lewis connection, the 93 chessmen were supposedly discovered inside a sand dune on the beach at Uig sometime around 1831. Nobody's quite sure precisely where, nor how they came to be in this remote Hebridean location, nor indeed whether any Viking overlords ever played chess with them. Why, indeed, is there only one proper rook in the collection, and why were half of the pieces stained red rather than the more usual black? Whatever the uncertainties about their purpose, nobody doubts their authenticity.
It wasn't long before Victorian custodians split the collection. 82 of the Lewis chessmen are now in the possession of the British Museum, while the remaining 11 are held by the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Not surprisingly there is much debate about where they should best be displayed. As a British find they have every right to be in the British Museum, argue some, even though that's 500 miles from the point of discovery. As a Scottish find they should all be in Edinburgh, argue others, so send them back immediately. Some on the island of Lewis believe they should return home to the Hebrides instead, probably to the Museum nan Eilean in Stornoway, even though far fewer people would be able to see them there.
As for the people of Uig, they've only been allowed to see six of the pieces for a single day at the local community centre back at the turn of the century. Uig's such a remote spot that I didn't even get that far when I was exploring the island of Lewis three years ago. I regret not stopping by to see the gloriousbeach, plus the ten-foot-high replica chessman planted in the dunes to remind visitors of the area's great discovery. I got within ten miles, but the relentless drizzle and intervening single-track road diverted my exploration elsewhere instead.
Thanks to the British Museum's persistent possessiveness I can pop in and view the Uig ivory hoard in central Bloomsbury, a few miles from home, whenever I feel the urge. A considerable souvenirindustry seems to have built up around the chessmen, flogging replicas (and keyrings) to visiting international tourists, so the British Museum would probably lose income were they ever to return the pieces to those who might deserve them more. To be honest, given their origin, the 93 chessmen probably ought to be sent back to Norway for permanent display in the country that created them. For the foreseeable future, however, it's stalemate.
Yesterday morning, in fact. In central London. Like you do when it's raining.
My ticket cost £10.70.
I tried paying with a £20 note and the bloke behind the till had the cheek to ask if I had anything smaller. I was very tempted to say "well if you charged a sensible amount to sit in a dark room and watch flashing images, like under a tenner, you wouldn't be having this change problem would you?" And "I'm the fourth person through the door, how can you have run out of five pound notes already?" But I had nothing smaller, so I ended up with a pocket full of pound coins.
The bloke behind the till asked me where I wanted to sit, front or back? So I asked for middle. Then he printed my ticket. Seat J12.
I didn't actually sit in seat J12. It was a ridiculously empty auditorium, and I'm not having some till-monkey tell me which of the 300 empty seats I have to sit in. So I sat in seat J11 instead. Rebel.
I was very pleased with my seat. Slap bang in the middle of the cinema with absolutely nobody in front of me. Everybody else had chosen the back row, and then there was me all alone in the centre. Fab. Draw back those curtains and let's roll.
But it never lasts, does it, cinema seating perfection? Just before the adverts started another couple walked in. They looked around briefly, checked their ticket and then sat down in the two seats directly in front of me. Him in seat H11 and her in seat H12. 298 empty seats to choose from, and they plonked down directly in front of the only other person sat in the middle of the cinema. And why had they blocked my view? Because the idiot on the till had placed them there. There was absolutely no chance of the auditorium getting even 10% full, no chance whatsoever, and yet he still insisted on issuing seats from a tiny block in the middle of the cinema. Bloody Odeons, eh? Attempting to maximise profit at the expense of customer comfort, even when the place is nigh empty. I considered storming out in protest, but instead I just moved along the row to J8.
I watched the trailers for forthcoming films, and they all looked rubbish.
Why do film trailers now insist on telling you in which year the film will be released? They always kick off with a big bold American voice announcing something like "This year... romance becomes an adventure" or "In two thousand nine, death will stalk Manhattan". There's never a proper hint as to precisely when this year the film will be released. Will it be next week, or do we have to wait until Christmas? Why can't film companies actually give us a date, or at least an intended month, rather than forcing everybody worldwide to watch the same generic ambiguous teaser? They've spent millions on the film - why can't they spend a tiny bit more on the trailer?
As the film started, I got a packet of Minstrels out of my pocket.
Don't worry, I didn't buy the Minstrels in the foyer. I bought them in a real shop down the road where a small packet cost sensible money. And don't worry, I ate them really quietly too. Unlike the couple in the row in front who rustled their enormous crinkly packets at every opportunity.
Apart from the enormous plot holes, that is. And the insane premise. And the stilted dialogue. And the sudden change of direction two-thirds of the way through. And the two white rabbits. And the lunatic off-the-wall ending.
There were once a lot of rather special places within the boundaries of the Olympic Park. Reedy pools, leafy retreats, waterside towpaths, hidden gardens, secret backwaters... all scattered across a harsh unforgiving industrial landscape. And now there's a building site in their place. Something world-class is emerging, and a biodiverse legacy should ultimately be delivered, but I still miss the opportunity to visit a favourite local environment with a genuine natural spark.
City Mill River At the tip of Blaker Road, immediately before the elevated sewerpipe, lurked one of my favourite secret places before the Olympics came along. Up the short staircase to the left, then down to a small secluded concrete ledge on the banks of the City Mill River. You couldn't block out the traffic noise from Stratford High Street, but in midsummer you could crouch down unseen and watch the dragonflies skimming and skating across the surface of the weed-topped water. Today, although not quite within the perimeter of the 2012 security zone, the path to that hovering hideaway is blocked by an unsightly hillock of abandoned tyres.
City Mill River ii Through the dank tunnel from my last location, walkers emerged into an artificial hollow sandwiched between a sewer and a railway. Here a silent triangular pool poked out from the neighbouring river, filled with reeds and tall grasses and nesting waterfowl. Unkempt trees and bushes draped over the footpath, bursting into bloom each year with understated grace. It was however important to look down, not up, otherwise you'd see the legs of a giant pylon atop the adjacent slope, and catch sight of passengers in passing trains wondering what the hell you were doing down there. Today those grassy slopes have been flattened and every scrap of vegetation cleared, while the pylon has been dismantled and its electricity channeled underground.
Manor Garden Allotments On a thin ridge beside the River Lea, accessible only across an often-locked footbridge, lay the vegetable gardens of Hackney Wick. These treasured allotments were a fertile strip of urban cultivation where local residents grew runner beans and cabbages and prize-winning roses. Most plots boasted a tumbledown shed or a splintered lean-to, perhaps with a rusty watering can for good measure beside a row of sprouting brassicas. This horticultural hideaway supported a thriving community of seasonal diggers for over a century, until the Olympic diggers arrived to claim the vegetable patch as their own. Today the allotments are nothing but flattened soil, devoid of any plantlife whatsoever, while the former residents attempt to make a new start on a sodden ill-drained replacement site upriver.
Waterworks River For a few weeks before the Olympic Park was sealed off, an unlocked gate allowed temporary access to a lost mile of forgotten meandering footpath. Two summers of vegetation had been allowed to run rampant, creating a just-accessible thicket of shoulder-high grasses and brambles along the waterside. A secret narrow urban jungle had been opened up, for the benefit of myself and any other inquisitive able-bodied explorer wearing sufficient protective clothing. Here dog roses and convolvulus grew unhindered, here magpies and moorhens ruled their roost, here ladybirds clustered on untrampled nettles. Today the riverbank has been cleared and carved and widened, and is once again inaccessible except to an army of construction workers.
Bully Point Nature Reserve The tiny Channelsea River once flowed along a hard-to-find fringe of the Eastway cycle circuit. Its miniature valley was a leafy haven for a wide variety of wildlife, from butterflies and buzzing insects to the occasional reported kingfisher. Every summer the trees and bushes exploded in a riot of green, and only stray cyclists or in-the-know local residents ever disturbed the peace. Today the nature reserve is no more, one of the first casualties of the Olympic bulldozers, and just a stone's throw from the tunnel mouth into which Eurostar trains plunge on their seven minute journey from Stratford to St Pancras. Post-2012 parkland proposals for this spot suggest that all may not be lost, although it'll be some years before any artificial landscape regains the unplanned charm of the original.
Today's cautionary tale is courtesy of the organisers of the London Bridge Festival, a transpontine arts extravaganza coming to the Thames in July. Here's the set-up for their centrepiece event...
Performers and entertainers required: In 1209 King John opened 'Old' London Bridge. This year will mark its 800th anniversary. To commemorate this and to raise money for The Lord Mayor’s Appeal the London Bridge Anniversary Fair will be held on 11th July. London Bridge will be closed to traffic for the day and the historic bridge will be recreated with craftsmen selling their wares as they would have done hundreds of years ago.
Well that sounds like a lot of fun. Nobody's had the creative gumption to attempt this before. Come the summer I expect this'll be a heavily promoted and much attended event. Go on...
What we need: The Appeal has asked us to find performers to entertain the crowds on the bridge during the day. All are welcome – from poets to jugglers to musicians to actors – but should provide entertainment appropriate to the period that the old bridge stood - 1209 to 1831.
Not a terribly accurate historical re-enactment, then. A complete mix of eras, bundling together bell-jangling jesters and frock-coated thespians. But how are the organisers going to find sufficient entertainers to fill the bridge?
What you do: If you're interested in being involved please send a link to your work using Twitter. It's the easiest and quickest way to collect them.
Hang on? You what? The easiest way for performers to apply to take part in this bridgefest is using Twitter? Are you sure? How is this supposed to work?
First, log in or register with Twitter.
I don't know about you, but I doubt that many Elizabethan jugglers have a Twitter account. I don't see them tweeting away online, sending messages to their friends @HurdyGurdyMan and @WanderingMinstrel. I doubt that the interactive world of social media has yet penetrated the Tudor street entertainment community. But sorry, these are the rules. If you want to juggle piglets on London Bridge in July then you need a Twitter account, no questions asked.
Send a post, also known as a 'tweet', to @LondonFestival, including a link to your work.
The tweet will be seen to the right of this page soon after and it will include your link.
Except that the script on the London Bridge Anniversary Fair website isn't working properly at the moment. The only thing currently visible to the right of the page is Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required '../../includes/festivalpeople.html' (include_path='/home/greglond/public_html/includes') in /home/greglond/public_html/general/anniversaryfair/index.php on line 153 scriptFAIL
We'll take a look at them and put selected links in an Anniverary Fair mosaic below including a photo. Due to space restrictions we can't promise to include them all. Please note this does not mean you have been selected to perform. It's only to help us decide who would best fit the theme of the day.
This appears to be a very public audition process. You put yourself up for selection using Twitter. The fair's organisers might or might not think you worthy of inclusion in their mosaic. And then they might or might not want to hire you on the day. And everybody reading the webpage will be able to discover the precise point at which the organisers lost interest. It's like they're doing you a favour, rather than the other way round.
You can also use various other services to send us the picture. For example, twicpic.com. There are popular twitter clients that have built-in support for TwitPic.
Help, this is all getting a bit complicated, especially for Twitter novices. And the fact that twicpic.com is a spelling mistake may not be particularly helpful either. Whatever happened to simple means of communication?
Twitter most definitely isn't the easiest and quickest way to collect the application information the festival organisers need. They'd do better with email, or an online form, or indeed any modern communication medium which functions using more than 140 characters. But instead the organisers appear hellbent on using Twitter to gather friends and followers and publicity, just to appear popular, even though their attempt at community-building is at the complete expense of practicality.
Sometimes social media isn't the way to go. Sometimes web 1.0 is best. So if you are a medieval acrobat and you fancy a day being historically brilliant on London Bridge, why not just email Greg and be done with it? And see you there?
LONDON A-Z An alphabetical journey through the capital's museums Freud Museum
Location: 20 Maresfield Gardens NW3 5SX [map] Open: Wednesday to Sunday (12noon - 5pm) Admission: £5 (plus £2 for audio guide) Brief summary: where dreams were couched Website:www.freud.org.uk Time to set aside: an hour
In September 1938 the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud fled his home in Austria in an attempt to escape from Nazi persecution. He was 82 years old, with terminal cancer, and longed to live out his final months in a place of safety alongside his beloved family. So he came to England and moved into a large townhouse in West Hampstead, in a leafy suburban avenue just up the hill from Finchley Road station. A year later Freud was dead, but his final home still bears the mark of one of the greatest minds that ever lived.
Freud's house looks particularly alluring in the spring, behind a clipped green hedge beneath blossoming branches. Step through the pale blue front door into the entrance hall and it's equally peaceful inside. The house is very much as it once was, with Sigmund's possessions and collections on display from room to room. The ground floor study reflects many aspects of his personality. At the garden end is Freud's desk, stacked with intricate statuettes from around the world. His specially-made chair, designed for slouching, looks like an abstract torso with open arms (very Freudian). Around the walls are leather-bound volumes interspersed with a number of classical antiquities - this was more Freud's museum than his library.
And up against the far wall, yes it is, it's thatcouch. It was donated by a grateful patient in 1890 and was the centre of Sigmund's greatest work over the subsequent half century. Here his clients reclined to outpour their dreams, while the old man sat in a green tub chair to one side trying to make sense of their free association. The couch is still covered by a beautiful oriental throw, its border illustrated with (what else?!) a row of fertility symbols. Freud saw only a handful of patients during his time in London, so it seems somehow highly unfair that this historic piece of furniture has ended up here rather than at his former residence in Vienna.
Freud was so frail during his year in Hampstead that he never once went upstairs. He never saw the light spacious bedrooms, one now devoted to an exhibition of his life and work, another now somewhere to sit and watch documentaries and home movie footage. An adjacent drawing room is devoted to his daughter Anna, herself a psychoanalyst of note, whose blue plaque graces the front of the house along with her father's. Meanwhile on the landing are further objects, relics and treasures collected over a lifetime of cultural travelling, plus artwork including a Dali portrait and a dreamlike painting by the Wolfman, one of Freud's most famous patients.
The back garden was the great man's pride and joy. He'd never had one before, nothing so green and leafy, so spent much of his final spring and summer sat out in the open conservatory. That conservatory is now a shop where you can buy a mass of Freud-related memorabilia, and I was impressed by the range and untackiness of what was available. A huge selection of books, for a start, some scholarly and others rather more populist. You can buy a SuperEgo badge for your rucksack, or a beardy finger puppet, or even a pair of rather witty Freudian slippers. It's also the place to hire an audio guide on your way in - two pounds well spent to provide much illuminating background information during your walk round the house. With a bit of luck you'll learn a lot about the man who invented psychoanalysis, and learn just a little bit more about yourself along the way. by tube: Finchley Road
» Erith Museum: It's gone. The old Erith Library finally closed down two weeks ago - by complete coincidence on the same day that I posted about its doomed museum. Thanks to Roger for spotting Bexley council's news release. Erith residents will instead be getting a shiny new library (in a block of flats nearer to the town centre) which opens at the end of the week. It'll have wi-fi access, a dedicated area for teenagers, a Council contact point... and of course some books. But the old museum (and its devoted band of volunteers) won't be following. A few Erith-related exhibits will be rehoused in a few display cases, which is something, but the majority of the collection is going into storage. The council promise that a new home will be found, but there's no indication as yet of when and where. They also promise that the future of the Grade II listed Carnegie library "will continue to be considered as part of the wider regeneration of the Erith Western Gateway". That sounds like "flats" to me. But we'll see.
» Only in London: How interesting to see that Visit London amended their Only in London webpage yesterday from "the top 100" to just a "list of 100" (see my update at the bottom of the post below). Coincidence I'm sure. I'm now sorely tempted to test out their list this weekend by picking a random number from 1 to 100, then attempting to visit the "Only in London" attraction suggested. But I'm not convinced that 1, 2, 5, 9, 16, 27, 39, 43, 47, 49, 50, 55, 56, 72, 88, 92 or 99 are possible at short notice. And I live in fear of picking 82. » 5pm update: The Guardian has now responded to the "Only in London" list. How very kind of them to ask me to contribute.
» Newsagent: Last month my place of work relocated, which meant bidding farewell to my favourite central London newsagent. Would I find another suitably friendly retail outlet to sell me my weekly Time Out and Radio Times hot off the press, or would I have to commute home on Tuesdays with nothing to read but a wafer-lite freesheet? Turns out I needn't have worried. New location, new newsagent. The minute she called me "sweetheart" after I paid her with the exact money, I knew I'd found my perfect replacement. She's an independent woman selling newsprint from a big cabin in the street. She engages in brief but cheery conversation about the world, the weather and what the previous customer said to her. And she gives me all the Evening Standard freebies for free without expecting me to buy the Evening Standard in return. Worth every penny, I think.
» Photographs: I can tempt 20% of you to click through and look at a photo of geese in Brixton, but I can't tempt even 5% of you to look any of my photos of Winchester. It's noticeable, and perhaps not unexpected, that the minute I exit the Greater London boundary your photographic interest plummets. I'm not complaining, I'm just saying.
With the pound in freefall against foreign currencies, this year would be the perfect time for overseas visitors to flock to London for a sightseeeing holiday. That's the thinking behind Only in London - a new £2m tourist strategy launched by Boris from the London Eye yesterday. The idea is to promote the idea that certain fantastic things are possible "only in London". Here's what Boris had to say...
Well yes, obviously only in London. One of the attractions is called the London Eye for heaven's sake. It's unlikely to be in Tokyo.
To accompany the campaign, Visit London have produced the Only in London 100 – a list of one hundred examples of what makes the capital a unique place in the world to visit (updated list here). It purports to be "the top 100", although any Top 100 which omits Eltham Palace but includes Walthamstow Market is deeply flawed in my book. So I've had a more detailed look through the list to see if there are any other examples which perhaps ought not to be included. And there are. Starting with number one...
1. See where the Gunpowder Plot was first contrived at Eastbury Manor House in Barking. Who'd have thought Barking was so exciting? How thrilling that such a historic event has its roots in an East London suburb. Alas this fact turns out not to be true. Eastbury's links to conspiracy are mere speculation, based on tenuous family connections, and have no basis in proven fact. So say the Gunpowder Plot Society anyway, and you'd expect them to know. 1 down, 99 to go.
As for Number 3, I can't imagine many foreign tourists wanting to go to Bexleyheath to explore English domestic residential design, but at least number 3's true. Indeed the overwhelming majority of the remaining 98 are true, although some are questionable, some are baffling, some are desperately underwhelming, and some are just plain desperate. Here are a few particular lowlights from the remainder of the Top 100.
Three things which aren't "Only in London" 25. Stand where time begins, on the Greenwich Meridian Line (it's possible to stand on the GreenwichMeridian in Cleethorpes, France, Ghana and Antarctica, to name but a few) 62. Stroll through the home of the world's largest wild plant seed bank, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (no, Kew's Millennium Seed Bank is based at Wakehurst Place in West Sussex) 68. Get your sea legs on HMS Belfast – Europe's largest surviving armoured warship (one thing you definitely can't do in London is experience the sea)
Three things that no sane international tourist would come to London especially to do 38. Look out for "The Diver" in Rainham – the only sculpture to stand in the river Thames (is there a more godforsaken spot in the whole of the capital?) (I really must visit some day) 60. Pay tribute at suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst's commemorative site, Pankhurst Green in Woodford (it's a patch of grass outside a tube station, for heaven's sake) 89. Get back to nature at Mudchute Farm on the Isle of Dogs, the largest urban farm in the UK (yes, come see some goats on a lump of wasteground, why don't you?)
Three things it's questionable any foreign tourist would be able to attempt 27. Moonwalk to Michael Jackson in concert at The O2 (except that's 100% sold out. You'll only get to see MJ now by paying a fortune to a tout) 99. Enter the largest open contemporary art exhibition in the world – the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts (it's already too late to enter this year's exhibition. And do the Royal Academy really take submissions from overseas artists?) 78. Home to the 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (yes, absolutely. But not for ages yet)
Three things which inexplicably made it into "the Top 100" (at the expense of somewhere far more interesting) 29. Play a game on Hackney Marshes, the largest concentration of football pitches in Europe (unbelievably this made it into the Top 100 and Trafalgar Square didn't) 48. Explore the UK's largest geographical collections at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington (unbelievably this made it into the Top 100 and Buckingham Palace didn't) 88. Ride a horse around Rotten Row in Hyde Park, the first artificially lit street in Britain (unbelievably this made it into the Top 100, full stop)
There are some blatant clunkers in the Top 100, but there are also some world-beating experiences. London's a wonderfully diverse city, and this list manages to showcase some of the very best bits. Alas, it fails to showcase many of them particularly well.
But oh yes, definitely... three fabulous things that really are "Only in London" 6. Stroll the gardens of Down House in Bromley, home to Charles Darwin and where he wrote "On the Origin of Species" (only in London!) 11. Marvel at Shakespeare's First Folio, the Magna Carta and Handel's Messiah at the British Library(only in London!) 26. See the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum (only in London!)
6pm update: First thing this morning, the "Only in London" website headed its list with the phrase "Here's a list of the top 100". This was clearly false. But since then the offending phrase has been changed to "Here's our list of 100". And this is undeniably true. So that's a result. The list's URL has also been changed from .../only-in-london-the-top-100 to .../only-in-london-the-100. So that's a result too. There's also been an edit to number 62, which now talks about the plant collections and not the seed banks at Kew, and so is therefore true. That's a result as well. I still think that the list is a perverse mix of gravitas, irrelevance and bluster, but at least it's no longer incorrectly described. Only in London, eh?
Day out:Winchester To the south of the town, along the Itchen valley, stretches a glorious chain of braided river channels and leafy water meadows. Here the poet Keats took his daily constitutional, and I made a similar pilgrimage to enjoy the peaceful riverside stroll. A short detour then led me across chalky heights to the top of St Catherine's Hill, from which the entire valley was visible . Apart from the motorway, that is. Try not to mention the motorway...
Twyford Down Twyford Down is, or rather was, a glorious expanse of unspoilt downland to the southeast of Winchester town centre. A geographical accident then resulted in it becoming the venue for the fiercest environmental protest of recent years. The result of the ensuing battle was Lorries 1 Landscape 0, which is why a six lane motorway now scythes through the heart of this ancient chalkland .
The A33 Winchester bypass used to crawl along the Itchen Valley between St Catherine's Hill and Winchester's water meadows. It was a notorious bottleneck, adding up to an hour to millions of journeys annually, and by the 1990s had become the only remaining hiatus in the M3 to Southampton. Transport chiefs decreed that the gap had to be filled, and looked around for an alternative route. The valley was wholly unsuitable for a wider road, and there was insufficient cash for a tunnel, so the least worst option appeared to be to drive a deep cutting right through Twyford Down. Local people and environmentalprotestors disagreed. They didn't want to see an ancient hilltop destroyed for the benefit of through traffic, and a roadprotestcamp was established on the ridge to try to hinder construction. Many pitched battles were fought between protestors and contractors, but the road lobby eventually won through and the new chunk of motorway opened to traffic in 1994. Ironically, once the exorbitant cost of the policing effort was added in, it turned out that a tunnel would have been cheaper to build after all.
Visit the northwestern flank of Twyford Down today and the new road is barely visible. From the footpath along the narrow chalky valley below, for example, the land still appears to rise up to the same windswept ridge as before. But it's all an illusion, as the relentless background noise of not-so-distant traffic bears witness. Clamber up the slope and the land suddenly drops away behind a wire fence to reveal a stark white gash, through which thunder cars and lorries and holiday-bound coaches. They pass through this unseen upland in under a minute, a tedious traffic jam avoided but an ancient landscape destroyed.
Around nearby St Catherine's Hill, however, the view is much improved. The A33 at the bottom of the hill has been covered over and landscaped to create a long thin grassy meadow, returning to public use a far greater area of chalky downland than the two hectares which were lost. As environmental mitigation goes it's unexpectedly impressive, and has helped to recreate a continuous green heartland along the Itchen valley. Meanwhile wildlife continues to make the best use of what remains up on the Down. Sheep graze the bracken slopes a few feet from the hard shoulder , butterflies flit undisturbed across the heath and green woodpeckers swoop undisturbed from tree to tree. This remains an absolutely glorious spot for a walk... but only if you're deaf.
St Cross At the southern end of Keats' daily walk, in meadows opposite St Catherine's Hill, stands Britain's oldest charitable institution. It's the hospital of St Cross, and it's been offering hospitality to travellers and the poor for more than 850 years. St Cross was established by Henry de Blois, a grandson of William the Conqueror, to provide shelter and sustenance for 13 frail and penniless men. Twenty-five Brethren still live in the high-chimneyed almshouses on site , and there are many more deserving cases on the waiting list (alas many won't survive the wait). For a small fee visitors are permitted to queue-jump and look around inside, including access to the Brethren's Hall (a medieval dining room) and the walled Master's Garden (still emerging from wintry sleep). One quaint tradition is that travellers are given a free cup of aleand a morsel of bread upon request at the Porter's Lodge (but only if you ask outright, otherwise you don't get). Even though this was never a religious community, there's still a cathedral-shaped Norman church in one corner of the site . It's much too big for the inmates so it doubles up as the parish church, and the interior's mighty impressive for such a small scale place of worship. The transepts may be a bit of a mess at the moment because there's some urgent re-wiring going on, but that's all part of a campaign to get the place spick and span before the arrival of the hospital's new Master on St George's Day. He's in for a treat - this is a delightful and very peaceful place to retire.
Day out:Winchester Long before London was the nation's capital, the seat of kings lay in deepest Hampshire. Winchester was established as the capital of Wessex about 1200 years ago, surrendering its superiority to London only following the Norman Conquest. Its most famous ruler was the legendary King Alfred, the only English monarch ever to be officially deemed 'Great'. His statue now stands at the foot of the High Street , conveniently located for the tourist information office, and looking down over a row of Park and Ride bus stops. Winchester's a bit like that, marvellously old but with a twist of new, and it made for a splendid spring day out. » Visit Winchester
Winchester Cathedral Where else to start but the cathedral? It's the longest Gothic cathedral in Europe, 170 metres in length, and a mighty imposing sight visible across the city . There used to be an Old Minster nextdoor, dating all the way back to 648AD, but that's now visible only in outline on the grass. Five quid will get you inside its replacement, and then you can gawp in wonder at the scale and spectacle of medieval architecture. The nave is most impressive , with a high vaulted ceiling above tall Norman arches, and you may either choose to sit here in quite contemplation or whip your camera out and attempt to take arty shots . Jane Austen is buried beneath a plaque in the northern aisle, and the house in which she spent her last days is only a few yards round the corner in College Street . Beyond the low altar is the medieval quire , packed with ornate carvings and (if you pick your time right) angelic voices in cassocks. Look up on top of the screens in front of the high altar and you'll see six painted mortuary chests containing the relics of several Saxon and Danish kings. Canute's up there, and Ethelwulf, and the odd important bishop too. Alas there's no trace of the most famous bishop of all, 9th century St Swithun. His shrine has been plundered, shifted and destroyed over the years, but you can still see the tiny arch through which pilgrims used to crawl to pay their respects . The glazed floor tiles here are some of the oldest surviving in the country, and it's a joy to step across their delicately crafted heraldic and geometric patterns . Take the stairs in the south transept and you can climb up to view the Winchester Bible, an exquisite document inked by generations of monks with perfect handwriting, and illustrated by vivid gold-leaf drawings. As the building's creators once hoped, this space is still heavenly.
• Great Hall: Only the 13th century Great Hall survived Cromwell's demolition of Winchester Castle. The beam-roofed building's impressive enough, but completely upstaged by the Round Table hanging on the west wall . It's not the genuine Round Table of legend, alas, just an 18-foot oak reconstruction ordered by one of the Plantagenet King Edwards. And that's not Arthur in the centre, that's King Henry VIII who had the table repainted to impress a visiting European monarch.
• City Mill: Recently restored by the National Trust, this 18th century watermill squats over the River Itchen at the foot of the High Street . There are some beams and wheels and ropes to gawp at, and maybe some otters too if you time your visit right. The best bit, almost but not quite worth the £3.50 entrance fee, is the opportunity to stand in a confined space downstairs and watch the river thundering throughthe millrace. • Buttercross: A many-pinnacled monument halfway down the High Street, once the centrepiece of medieval market trading, and now just somewhere to sit and nibble something unhealthy from one of the two neighbouring pasty shops . • St Giles' Hill: The perfect city viewpoint, just a short climb beyond the Itchen, whose grassy slopes are promoted as the best place in town to watch the sunset.
• City Museum: This town has 2000 years of history, so there's a lot to cram in. Top floor Roman (with some impressively large chunks of tiled mosaic), middle floor Alfred's kingdom (and a canter through the subsequent millennium), and on the ground floor Winchester's more recent tourist and commercial heritage (including an evocative recreation of a 1960s corner shop). • Westgate: Another museum, this time accessed by climbing up to rooms above the old city gate. It's not a thriller (ooh look, a complete set of Winchester's historic weights and measures), but the view from the roof almost makes up for it . • Military Museums: If you're the type who loves pottering around museums depicting army life, Winchester has a cluster of six. There's one devoted to the Gurkhas, another to the horseback Hussars, another for the Royal Greenjackets, etc. They're all housed in the former Peninsula Barracks, built on the site of Winchester Castle. Me, I gave them a miss and enjoyed the central formal gardens instead .
Once again I'm on a hilltop, this time higher and more distant from the city centre. It might be easier to imagine this as a Saxon hillfort if there weren't five black-clad teenagers blaring out mid 80s soft metal classics from a picnic blanket nearby. Behind me is an illusory chalkland ridge, beyond which an unloved dual carriageway cowers in a deep cutting. And laid out before me across the valley is everywhere else I've been today, including the retirement home who gave me a free lunch of bread and ale. Now to walk back down through the water meadows past budding trees and courting ducks, then back to the station with Spring in my step. Bet you're Itchen to know where I am...
OK, I've done the cathedral, because you have to do the cathedral. I was too late for the tower tour, and the crypt's closed due to flooding, but the rest of the interior (especially the nave) is magnificent. Gothic spiky bits, geometric roof bosses, and a beautiful medieval bible hand-scribed by monks. And now I'm sitting on the cathedral green, surrounded by gossipy teens and sunbathing cyclists and wine-drinking mummies feeding gurgling babies. Lots more to see, apparently, but it's ever so tempting to stay right here.
Three stops later, and I'm striding down the hill into the historic city centre. The main library, recently remodelled in shiny glass, has a name almost as pretentious as my local Idea Store. The main shopping street has a half-timbered Boots the chemist and a pizza restaurant in a mill cottage, all watched over by a legendary statue. I've bypassed the main tourist spots to hike uphill for a panoramic view over the rooftops. I'm sharing the view with two bouncy kids jumping on the nextdoor bench, and three empty cans of Fosters. Now to get back down and explore more carefully.
dg's Moblogged Mystery Tour: I'm sat on a 95% empty train at a central London terminus, about to set off on a journey of discovery to an anonymous English urban centre. I'm surprised how quick the train journey is, only about an hour, putting this charming location on the edge of the London commuter belt. I've been to this particular place just once before, as a child, so its many tourist delights remain an unsampled mystery. With a bit of luck I'll be able to report back on the interesting bits before my mobile battery runs out. But I'm not going to tell you where I am, because it wouldn't be a mystery tour otherwise. See if you can guess...
With the advent of Google Street View, I've realised I never need to go outside again. Now I can blog about the rest of London from home, using interactive geo-snoop technology, and hopefully you'll never notice the difference. So here's my report on The Cut, a road near Waterloo that I've never ever walked down. Thank you Google, your privacy-busting spycam has saved me hours of effort.
This ancient South Bank street starts at the crossroads outside Southwark station. The tube station squats beneath a railway viaduct, like quarter of a flying saucer, in front of which are scattered a random selection of pedestrians with blurred out faces. On the opposite corner is a blocky glass office block on stilts, on top of which is plonked what looks like an enormous shiny cereal packet. But we're not going that way, we're heading west towards a very ordinary apartment block, past The Ring public house "where boxing started in 1910". Follow the yellow line up onto the pavement, and let's be off.
Three men in safety helmets wander past the entrance to Costcutter, one checking his phone, the other two deep in conversation. The door to Southwark College stands ajar, its bland blue foyer jutting out beneath two hanging baskets dangling from a lamppost. A stern-looking driver, standing in the road beside the door of his black minicab, stares with defiance as the bug-eyed GoogleCam speeds by. Arms crossed, he knows his image has been captured for world-wide distribution and there's not a damned thing he can do about it.
The road narrows past the Anchor & Hope public house, as the shops head steadily upmarket. An appropriately-named florist, a tiled green fish restaurant and a bespoke men's tailoring service each hint that a cultured metrosexual clientele stalks this sapling-lined avenue. It's true. That startling high-meshed building opposite isn't a multi-storey car park, it's the Young Vic theatre. Look carefully behind the orange neon sign above the entrance and you can still see the shopfront nameplate of Wilson Brothers, the family butchers around whose premises the theatre was recreated.
Past Short Street and the Young Vic's terraced patio restaurant, there's off-road parking where a bottle green Honda (registration RV52 FLB) has paused awhile. Its owner has no idea that the GoogleVan rode by while she was shopping, and that her car's identity and location have been compromised for all to see. A man in a blue short-sleeved shirt crouches in the doorway of the Red & White Laundrette, while inside a grey-haired lady waits patiently on a plastic chair for her laundry to spindry. Zoom in, you'll see.
The street's second zebra crossing, equally untroubled by traffic, permits easy passage from The Windmill pavement cafe to the South Bank Grocery. Two policemen in unflattering cycle helmets stand awkwardly outside Evans bike shop, their silver machines propped up beside (but not attached to) a pair of secure metal hoops. Further west and that's no mid-80s secondary school, it's the impenetrable gridlike flank of the National Theatre Studio. Meanwhile a queue of taxis waits patiently at the traffic lights, half vanished beneath a pixellated blur...
(And sorry, but the last stretch of The Cut doesn't officially exist. The Google Streetcar turned left at the traffic lights and never continued along the final 50 yards to Waterloo Road. So I can't pretend to tell you about that bit. Damn, it looks like I will have to continue going out after all...)
Sometimes TfL's maps get better. It seems only fair to point this out when it occurs.
I refer to the Flash map on the TfL Live Travel News webpage, the map which shows which London Underground lines are currently disrupted (if any). It's got better. It now displays information more usefully than used to be the case. And this is a very good thing.
The Flash map still has a list of Underground lines down the left hand side, along with their current status. It might be 'Good service' if all is well. It might be 'Minor delays' or 'Severe delays', depending on how bad things are. Or it might be 'Part suspended' or 'Line suspended' if trains aren't running between some or all stations. And then this information is visualised, as appropriate, by colouring in the line on the map to show travellers where they might face travel problems.
The change on the map relates to 'Minor delays'. Previously, if a line had minor delays it was coloured in. If there were, for example, minor delays on the District line due to a signal failure at Embankment, the entire District line would be coloured green. No matter that the delays might only add a few extra minutes to your journey, in certain places, in one direction - the map would still have shown the entire line as disrupted. If part of the line were suspended while the rest of the line had minor delays, it was impossible to deduce which was which from the shading. All kinds of delays were shaded the same, be they minor, severe or suspended. The map used to show disruption, not possibility, and this often made it less than helpful.
The change TfL have made is that 'Minor delays' no longer appear on the map. Severe delays appear, and suspensions appear, but minor delays don't. And that's great. Now, if any part of a line is coloured in, it's worth avoiding. Previously, you wouldn't have known for sure without clicking on the map. So this is a really practical change. There's also a new message on the map when services are running fairly well, which reads "There are no major disruptions currently reported on the tube". This too is a welcome step forward, reducing unnecessary complexity on the map. Hurrah.
But there is still one problem, and that's the checkbox label above the map. It still reads "Show undisrupted lines and stations in grey", exactly the same as it did previously. Alas this is now less true than before. Only lines with severe delays and above now appear in colour on the map. Just because a line's grey doesn't mean it's undisrupted, it might have minor delays. This may only be a wording problem, but the wording is unhelpful and untrue.
There's also the same old problem with DLR and Overground lines. They always appear in grey, even if they're delayed or suspended, because they're not tube lines. Their disruptions aren't allowed to appear on the 'Underground' map, but appear instead (in text form) on their own separatetab. This is not in any way helpful. It might therefore make sense to remove the DLR and Overground from this Flash tube map, because they're not tube lines, but nobody dares. Or it might make sense to amalgamate the DLR and Overground information with the tube map and show all the disruptions in one place, because that would be more useful. Alas TfL apartheid means we haven't quite reached that level of joined up thinking yet.
But a TfL map has improved, and this is something to smile about. I shall cheer again if it ever improves further.
When I was little, even when I was quite a lot bigger, nobody ever tried to steal my photos. The only people who ever saw them were me and my family and that nice lady at the chemists who sent them off to the developers. I kept them in an album on a shelf in a cupboard, and no website owner ever spotted them.
Things are different today. I now keep my photos in an album on a website. I have more than 2500 photos on Flickr, which means that anybody can look at them, which is nice because it's good to share. But it also means that anybody can nick them, which was never the case with good old printed rectangles.
I attempt to prevent image theft. All of my Flickr photos have a licence attached, which tells would-be copiers what they are and aren't allowed to do with the image. I'm not completely over-protective in a "Thou shalt not use this photo ever" kind of a way. I'm perfectly happy to let people use one of my photos for non-commercial reasons so long as they credit where it's come from. That'd be a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative licence...
You are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work under the following conditions: » Attribution. You must give the original author credit. » Non-Commercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. » No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. • For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the licence terms of this work. • Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
I'd have hoped that this licence was crystal clear, especially amongst big media players who ought to know better. And indeed, many people understand perfectly and only re-use my photos with all due permissions. But some don't. And it appears to be very hard to stop them. Here are some examples...
Photo:Hoover Building Stolen by:Wickes The well-known builders equipment company have been running an online competition to find "The Building Britain is Most Proud Of." The public nominated a shortlist, and that shortlist was then illustrated using photos stolen from Flickr. They nicked my photo of the Hoover Building, and they nicked Rick's photo of Leeds Town Hall and they nicked Dave's photo of Bletchley Park. They used 30 photos altogether, all without asking, which is quite appalling really. The competition looks to have been a biased washout, with 19 of the buildings gaining no votes whatsoever, and it closed last Friday so it's no longer possible to see what the fuss was all about. But it's nothing to be proud of. Shame on you, Wickes.
Photo:Cuckmere meander Used correctly by:BBC Bitesize The BBC will soon be revamping their revision website for GCSE students, and obviously the geography section would be incomplete with a picture of a meandering river. This shot from the Sussex coast is one of my favourite photos, and I'm well chuffed that half the nation's 16 year olds will be using it to further their fluvial understanding. The BBC played this one perfectly by the book, requesting written confirmation that I was happy with them using it on the Bitesize website. Well done BBC.
Photo:IKEA Neasden Stolen by:The Daily Mail When a nasty road accident occurs on the North Circular and you have no photographer in the area, what do you do? If you're the Daily Mail you nick my IKEA photo and use it on your newspaper website, that's what. I complained by telephone when a reader pointed out this transgression, and the Mail instantly apologised (because they know they're not supposed to do this sort of thing) and removed the picture. But perhaps I should have demanded appropriate financial settlement from them, just to make a point.
TICKIslington Tunnel: The Islington Liberal Democrats wanted an Islington photo for the header on their website, so they asked me nicely for use of my canal photo, so I said yes. Presumably no politician in Islington has a camera. CROSS?Olympic Stadium: Jonathan uploaded my latest stadium photo to Twitpic so that he could add a funny caption. He's attributed it to me, sort of, but this still feels rather naughty. And I suspect there are more stolen photos out there...
Whose idea was it to schedule a meeting before 9am? And an important meeting too, one that I couldn't possible back out of. I mean, before nine, that's just wrong. It's too early. We don't all plonk down at our desks at dawn, bright and breezy and raring to start work. We're not all morning people, keen to engage on the business of the day before breakfast. Some people are going to have to move heaven and earth (and childcare arrangements) to be at a meeting this early. Some people are going to have to set off from home at a ridiculous hour to be here before nine. Knowing the temperamental state of London's transport network, some people aren't going to make it here at all. The rest of us will end up sitting in a room full of comatose bleary-eyed souls, propping themselves up with steaming cups of coffee and trying desperately to stay awake while somebody important waffles on about objectives and milestones. And all this because "before nine" was the the only slot in the schedule you could find. There's a reason for that slot being empty, you idiot.
Whose idea was it to schedule a meeting over lunch? And an important meeting too, one that I couldn't possible back out of. It's lunchtime for heavens sake. I mean, there's a clue in the name "lunch time", did you not spot it? Most of us select this period of the day to fill up with food to sustain us through the dark hours of the afternoon. Most of us like to pause from doing work at this time and spend a little while doing not-work. For some of us it's our only chance to actually engage with our co-workers and discover, through conversation and merry banter, that they're real human beings with interesting lives. We don't all feel the need to discuss project outcomes and risk management during this important midday hiatus, some of us prefer eating. Alas, there'll be no chance of eating a decent lunch today. There'll be a plate of curled-up sandwiches on the meeting table, ordered in advance from some limited corporate menu, each filled with an anonymous combination of green leaves and slop. Maybe there'll be a bowl of ready salted crisps and a selection of over-baked fatty parcels plus a token lump of fruit to round off the whole culinary non-event. Nothing filling, nothing tasty, nothing desirable. And all this because "lunch time" was the the only slot in the schedule you could find. There's a reason for that slot being empty, you idiot.
Whose idea was it to schedule a meeting after 5pm? And an important meeting too, one that I couldn't possible back out of. I mean, after five, that's just wrong. It's too late. We don't all stay at our desks into the evening, burning the midnight oil while the rest of London goes home. We're not all keen to drag out the day for as long as possible, just to show willing. Some of us are efficient enough to get all our work done before five, at which point we choose to go home rather than hanging around pointlessly in the office. Some of us are well past our peak by early evening, having been hard at work since early morning. We don't all feel the need to hang around after sunset to discuss stretch targets and portfolio enhancement. But today I'll be ending my day sitting in a room full of desperate clockwatchers, watching their evening ebb away as they struggle desperately to keep their eyes open. On and on until, eventually, that glorious phrase "well if there are no more questions" is heard and everyone stands up, grabs their coat and disappears out into the street. And all this because "after five" was the the only slot in the schedule you could find. There's a reason for that slot being empty, you idiot.
And whose idea was it to schedule all three of these meetings on the same day? That's my early morning blighted, and my lunchtime blighted, and my late afternoon blighted. That's my day unnecessarily extended to accommodate the scheduling inadequacies of others. That's three rounds of misery, three chunks of despair, three sessions of conversational inertia.
I have some real work to do today. I wonder when I'm going to fit it in.
Olympic update (March 08/09) What a difference a year makes
March 2008
March 2009
It's spot the difference time. I've been up on the Greenway again taking another of my monthly photographs of the burgeoning Olympic Stadium. And look at that. Last March there was an empty space cleared for the transition from demolition to construction. And this March there's what looks like a near-complete bowl with grandstand seating and zig-zag supports. It's a bit of an optical illusion, admittedly, because 2012 architects have been careful to construct the side of the stadium facing the Greenway (and the officialwebcams) first. It's also noticeable that other important venues within the Olympic Park, such as the Aquatic Centre or Athletes Village, are nowhere near as far advanced. But look, even the weather's improved dramatically over the last 12 months! Stadium construction looks like it's going to work out just fine, and probably well ahead of schedule.
At 9am on Monday 15th March 1909, to the sound of a bugle, Harry Gordon Selfridge opened the doors of his brand newdepartment store on Oxford Street. The western end of the street wasn't very fashionable at the time, so he'd been able to snap up the land and build his store for just £400,000. Gordon hoped to introduce an innovative concept from America to the West End - shopping for fun. If only ladies would stay for the day, perusing the merchandise, entranced by the displays, recuperating in the restaurant, he'd make his fortune. Those first day crowds spent longer looking than buying, but canny advertising ensured that ultimate success was assured. The store extended northward, swallowing up an entire city block (and even devouring the church in which my great-grandparents got married). A chain of Selfridges spread out across the country, just in time for Gordon's lavish lifestyle to prove his financial undoing. But his iconic Ionic columns still front the building 100 years later, and the Oxford Street branch of Selfridges remains the UK's second largest shop (beaten only by Harrods).
There are many entrances into the building - some grand, others rather less so. It's certainly best not to head round to the service road at the rear of the store. Here staff have their own very yellow entrance, outside which willowy sales assistants puff and flick cigarette butts into the gutter. From this angle the store looks like a 60s office block clad in jarringly coloured tiles - a view thankfully only experienced by car parkers and delivery vans. Far better to enter beneath the central trellised Art Deco canopy on Oxford Street. Above your head is an ornate golden clock fronted by the majestic figure of the Queen of Time, while beneath your feet lies a brassplaque honouring the store's founder owner.
Come on, you know what you'll find behind the revolving wooden doors. Deep breath, it's the perfumery department. It was Gordon's idea to place it at the front, and department stores the world over have followed his lead ever since (much to the annoyance of generations of long suffering men). Preened sales staff stand poised to squirt and spray every passing female, while security guards ensure that nobody runs off with the bloody expensive handbags. If glittery trifles aren't your thing then the only department of interest on this floor will be the food hall. It's compact but characterful, with a wide selection of well-stockeddelicounters offering traditional and international fare. You could do all your weekly food shopping here, no problem, but only if you're the sort of customer who thinks that £7 for four cupcakes is good value for money.
Head upstairs for three floors of clothing. Ladies get two, of course, but even the single menswear floor is comprehensive and vast. Designer labels and high street brands coexist, each concession merging seamlessly into the next. In one corner Top Man, in another Vivienne Westwood, and somewhere along the way Diesel, Prada and Armani. I always feel hopelessly sartorially inadequate as I wander around, even though all the other jaunty fashion-conscious men flicking through the collections appear to be perfectly at home. Meanwhile the fourth floor features furniture - ideally suited for a Kensington flat on a Kensington budget - although thankfully nothing as gauche as might be piled up in Harrods. And be warned, the escalator down from the neighbouring cafe deposits you slap bang in the middle of ladies lingerie, which may or may not be your taste.
Don't overlook the basement, especially if your home requires some unnecessary accessories. I've found many an unusual Christmas gift down here, although I suspect most now gather dust at the back of a forgotten cupboard. The cookshop boasts a wide range of designer utensils you never knew you didn't have. For the well-heeled traveller there's always another item of leather luggage to add to the collection. There's even a Nespresso bar serving extra-pretentious coffee, which seemed inexplicably popular yesterday afternoon. All this plus a remarkably empty HMV, and a well-stocked book department whose WH Smith branding is only revealed when you check your till receipt.
There's no such thing as a typical Selfridges shopper, although certain familiar characters can be spotted all over. The foreign tourist, taking advantage of a preferential exchange rate. Two grey-haired ladies up from the Home Counties, the well-heeled gay couple, the immaculately turned-out Chelsea blonde (there are lots of them). Watch the exits and you'll see smart yellow carrier bags aplenty flooding out onto Oxford Street and beyond. And yet this isn't a snobby store, it retains its inclusivity throughout, even if you're only here to window shop.
So how has Selfridges survived 100 years? I suspect that's mostly down to its staff. You see them everywhere throughout the store, far more in number than are actually required to sell you stuff, standing keenly and poised to assist. If you're looking for a particular product, or need something in silver rather than blue, or are just trying to find the exit, they'll direct you on your way with a smile. There's still plenty to keep a determined customer entertained and busy within Selfridges' walls, and somehow shopping here is still an event. Gordon would, I suspect, be pleased to see how his legacy continues to thrive.
• Today (3-14) is PiDay! • Alright, today isn't really 3-14, it's 14-3. Alas, Pi Day is a purely American invention. But there are only 12 months in a year, and the UK will never have a 3-14, so we're going to have to pretend to be American just this once. • Pi (or π) is the ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter. • The first mathematician to use the symbol π for this circular ratio was Welsh mathematician WilliamJones in 1706. He abbreviated the Greek word for perimeter ("περίμετρος"). • π = 3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679... (etc etc etc, forever) • The digits of π never repeat (but there are six consecutive 9s at the 762nd decimal place, which is a bit unlikely). • π can't be represented by a fraction, because it's an irrational number. But 22/7 is quite close (0.00126 out), and 355/113 is astonishingly close (0.00000027 out). • If a circle has a diameter of 2 units, then its area will equal π units. • apple, banoffee, blackberry and apple, cherry, custard, key lime, lemon meringue, mince, mississipi mud, pecan, pumpkin • At the San Francisco Exploratorium, where Pi Day was initiated, they also celebrate Pi Minute at 3-14 1:59pm. This afternoon they'll be inviting visitors to sing the Pi Day song and then walk round the Pi Shrine 3.14 times (and then eat free pie). Here are some photos from Pi Day 2007 and 2008. • Pi Day is also Albert Einstein's birthday. • Piems are poems which represent π. You have to count the number of letters in each word to discover the sequence of digits. Here's a simple piem: "May I have a large container of coffee?" And here's a famous longer one: "How I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics." • In binary, π = 11.00100100001111110110… • The world record for memorising pi is currently held by Chao Lu who remembered 67890 decimal places in 2005. • Here are the first million digits of π (you may have to wait while it loads). The millionth digit is a 1. • The sequence of digits "...2009..." occurs within π at the 8184th decimal place. Meanwhile "...14032009..." occurs at the 46,555,644th decimal place. You can check any string of digits here. Or check your birthday here. • Take the Pi Day Challenge (Hmmm, I'm stuck on puzzle 1) • Kate Bush singsthe first 137 digits of π on her 2005 album Aerial. Unfortunately she omits the 79th to 100th decimal places (presumably in error). • chicken and mushroom, cottage, pork, shepherds, stargazy, steak and kidney, veal and ham • Listen to 15 minutes of π on Radio 4 • More π-related links here and here (and some geekier maths stuff here and here). • The second pizza theorem states that the volume of a pizza of thickness a and radius z = pi zz a
LONDON A-Z An alphabetical journey through the capital's museums Erith Museum
Location: Walnut Tree Road, Erith DA8 1RS [map] Open: Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays (2:15pm-4:45pm) Admission: free Brief summary: local life remembered Short term prospects: imminently doomed Website:www.erithmuseum.org.uk Time to set aside: half an hour
Most museums are about history. But Erith Museum is different - it's about to become history. And I visited only just in time.
That's Erith, pronounced Ee-rith. It's on the south-eastern flank of London, alongside the ThamesEstuary, and not somewhere on any tourist itinerary. Even if you turned up out of curiosity you'd never notice the museum, not unless you knew it was there. It's close to the station, but not on the main walking route to the town centre. It's hidden inside Erith library (an ornate 1906 building), not that there's an obvious sign outside announcing the museum's existence. Step inside, past the librarian's desk, and look towards the stairs to your left. For just seven and a half hours a week a small sign hangs here reading 'MUSEUM OPEN'. But not for much longer. Not for very much longer at all.
Erith Museum is little more than a library's attic - an upper chamber divided into two well-stocked rooms. The place is run by volunteers, a couple of whom who sit patiently at the desk at the top of the stairs awaiting infrequent visitors. It's only thanks to these good folk that the museum has survived this long, battling heroically against the indifference of the local council. That battle may soon be lost.
There's a modest collection of local exhibits and ephemera to explore. The usual flints and fossils feature in one cabinet (I think it's mandatory for all small museums to include these), plus a collection of objects excavated from nearby LesnesAbbey. King Henry VIII's warship the GreatHarry was fitted out in Erith dockyard, so there's a model of that, along with a selection of more recent Thames boats and barges. There's a pianola, presumably because the museum was bequeathed it, and also "the popular Edwardian kitchen display" - not proper local, but proper history all the same. A recurring theme is the industry that once thrived here beside the estuary but no longer exists. Borax Consolidated Ltd, long shut; Atlas preservatives, gone; Sovex, departed; Royal Doulton, moved on. More poignantly, older Erith residents will appreciate the photographic display of vanished shops, pubs, schools and other buildings. The library's next on the deathlist.
A new Erith library is under construction closer to the heart of the town. It's very nearly finished, indeed it should have been open a couple of weeks ago, but until it's completed the old library lingers on. The new place will have lots of computer terminals for public use, and some books, and greater footfall, and did I mention the computers? But there'll be no attic, nor any appropriate space for the museum to inhabit, so the collection can't follow on. And there's no way that the museum can continue in the old building once all the library staff have moved out, so an enforced limbo awaits.
The volunteers who run the museum are worried. They have nowhere to go, and none of the other heritagesites in Bexley fancy taking on an Erith-specific exhibit, so the entire collection may be about to be split up or mothballed. As for the old library, it may be Grade II listed but there are genuine fears that its vacant shell will prove too tempting a target for destructive vandals. No simple padlock will keep them out, and some fear that the council are just looking for an excuse to knock the place down and sell off the land to property developers.
I had a lovely long conversation with the lady and gentleman on duty. They'd not been expecting to have the place open into March - every additional week is a bonus at the moment. They told me of the expansion plans they've had to put on hold - there's no point opening up the back room to visitors if there are no visitors. They told me that their group of volunteers aren't getting any younger, and it's nigh impossible to find replacements to make up their declining numbers. They expressed concerns for the future of their enterprise with an eloquent mixture of despair and resignation. They gave me three souvenir bookmarks, presumably because they couldn't see any subsequent visitors ever taking one. They even made me a mug of hot chocolate and offered me a custard cream while we chatted. You don't get service like that in the V&A.
The rest of London won't miss Erith Museum, won't miss it at all. But the local community, if only they were interested, are about to lose a lovingly preserved slice of their social and industrial heritage. Living history needs tangible connections to the past, not digitised artefacts on a computer touchscreen in a virtual learning centre. I'm delighted that my alphabetical trek brought me here before the museum shut down for good, but saddened that the place probably won't survive until the end of the month. Like so much in Erith, progress has wiped the past away. by train: Erith
diet update: It's exactly one year since my doctor jabbed me in the arm, crunched some numbers and told me that my cholesterol levels were too high. He gave me a badly photocopied sheet donated by a margarine company and sent me away to see what changes I could wreak in two months flat. I embarked upon a puritanical low-fat diet, cutting out excess stodge and living off only permitted foodstuffs. No crisps, no pie, no pizza, no chocolate, but plenty of oily fish and un-sauced chicken. It was grim, but blimey it worked.
mid-March
X stone 7
mid-April
X stone
mid-May
(X-1) stone 7
By mid-May I'd lost a whole stone and my cholesterol was down by a third. My doctor was delighted by the latter (and decided he didn't need to prescribe me tablets for the rest of my life), whereas I was rather chuffed by the former (and the fact I'd dropped an entire waist size). My two month crash diet over, I took a reality check and reverted to a semi-sensible food intake. Cheese sometimes not never, salmon usually twice a week, biscuits thankyou, porridge most mornings, chocolate yeah why the hell not. Realistic, but not rigid. And I carried on weighing myself to see what happened.
mid-Sept
(X-1) stone 2
mid-March
(X-2) stone 13
Blimey, look at that. This morning I weigh a full stone and a half less than I weighed this time last year. That's an extra eight pounds lopped off my weight since May, despite the fact I'm no longer trying quite so hard as I used to. But I am still trying. And I have ten top weight-loss tips if you'd like to know how I'm doing it.
1)Stop eating pie: I love pie. Lovely thick pastry with meat and gravy stuffed inside. Gorgeous flaky casing containing stewed apple topped with cream. Plump fatty pork inside a thick pastry shell. Terribly tempting, but all that saturated fat is terribly bad for you. So I never buy pie any more, not ever. I'll happily consume it if someone else has cooked it, but I never stick pie in my shopping basket.
2)Cut back on puddings: What would you rather have? A steaming hot bowl of chocolate sponge topped off by thick sweet gloopy chocolate custard, or a yoghurt? Think again.
3)Snack on fruit: Sometimes, when the munchies strike, I'll head for the kitchen in search of something to nibble. I used to delve into the cupboard for a biscuit or a packet of crisps or even a Creme Egg, but now I have a bunch of grapes positioned on the worktop which I spot first. A handful of grapes satisfies my instant craving, and then I can return to what I was doing without touching the evil stodge-packed snacks. Most of the time, anyway.
4)Don't join a gym: No really, what's the point. I've lost all this weight without once crossing the threshold of a changing room, without once lifting a weight, without once leaping onto a treadmill, without once paying four hundred quid to some scuzzy establishment with dodgy showers and inadequate equipment. It can be done. Don't waste your money.
5)Use your feet: If there's a choice of riding somewhere or walking somewhere, and there's not much time difference between the two, then walk.
6)Stay single: I remain convinced that one of the worst things you can do to your waistline is to enter a relationship. Once there are two people to satisfy it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid food. Fancy lunch? Can I take you to a restaurant? I've knocked up a late night snack. Let's share this box of popcorn. I'm bored, let's go for a coffee. Stay single, however, and it's far easier to stick to your principles.
7)Weigh yourself daily: A daily weight check might make some people depressed, but I've found it the perfect inspiration to cut back. I weigh myself at the same time every morning (just before I climb into the bath), so I know if I'm heading down, staying stable or creeping up. And I then know whether I ought to eat less during the next 24 hours or whether I can afford to treat myself. It's a perfect feedback loop,
8)Don't trust what the scales say: Now that I've collected 365 days of data, it's become very clear that weighing oneself is a terribly inexact science. You can eat more and your weight go down, or you can go for a ten mile walk and your weight increase. Even something as simple as drinking a glass of water can affect your weight by a pound or two, so always remember there's a margin of error around what the scales are reading. I've taken to calculating a rolling seven day average, because I'm a geek with a spreadsheet, and these figures are rather more realistic.
9)Life's too short: If you allow a diet to rule your life, life won't be much fun. So always find time for a few treats, just to keep yourself happy. Over the last long birthday weekend, for example, I've gorged on a giant sirloin steak, one of my Mum's excellent roast beef dinners, half a lemon meringue pie, far too much birthday cake and an entire takeaway pizza. All very banned, officially, but stuff officially.
10)Have faith: It's perfectly possible to lose 22 pounds in twelve months and still eat badly sometimes. Take it from one who knows.
Bus 44: Victoria - Tooting Location: London south Length of journey: 7 miles, 55 minutes
Another birthday, another numerically significant bus journey. Two years ago I took the 42 to Dulwich, and last year the 43 to Barnet. So this year I thought I'd ride the 44 to Tooting. That's an hour of my life I'll never get back...
A heck of a lot of buses start their journeys from Victoria station, or thereabouts. But the 44 doesn't start from anywhere obvious, like the bus station or the pavement immediately outside the mainline station. Instead I had to thread north to Victoria Street, outside the least busy Underground entrance, and wait patiently in front of a parade of rundown shops. Joining me at bus stop G were a trio of Chelsea pensioners, each with a telltale RH insignia on their cap and a bright red pinstripe down their immaculate trousers. I hoped that they might be joining me on my journey but no, they were off to Chelsea and I was off on a guided tour of the London borough of Wandsworth. I think they got the better deal.
When my bus finally emerged from beyond a barrier of roadworks, I nipped up to the top deck in order to enjoy the best possible view. We drove off down Buckingham Palace Road, towards the end the Queen definitely wouldn't live at. The bus sped past Victoria Coach Station, beyond which a herd of parked-up police cars filled the central reservation. A pile of rubble alongside Ebury Bridge Road marked the site of Chelsea Barracks, sold off last year and destined to re-emerge as Britain's most expensive residential development. The owners hope to create "the 21st century equivalent of the great estates of Mayfair and Belgravia", but they'll more likely create a pile of bog-standard towers with zero character.
Highlight of the journey was the Thames-top panorama viewed from Chelsea Bridge, alas over too swiftly. There followed a cliff-face of upmarket apartments opposite Battersea Park, and the Lego-block cathedral of QVC's TV studios. By this point I had the entire top deck of the bus to myself, as if nobody else felt the need to venture any further into deepest Battersea. Three old ladies wearing woollen hats and headscarves waited to board outside the Eagle Tavern, then thought better of it and stayed to chat on the pavement. On we chugged past non-glam non-clone shops, plus the rather more alluring sight of Battersea High Street market. For some reason the 44 seemed to be stopping at different bus stops to all the other routes, perhaps experiencing some form of segregated apartheid.
As Wandsworth approached, the sky to the north grew thicker with tall glassy riverside apartments. A futuristic nuclearsculpture hung above the centre of the main roundabout, its artistic integrity considerably weakened by four advertising hoardings hung at its centre. It came as no surprise to discover that the bleak concrete underpass beneath the roadway was the location of the opening beat-em-up scene in Kubrick's classic A Clockwork Orange. Rather more charming was the narrow street of shops past the railway bridge, all independent fish bars and artisan outlets - a rare outpost of class amid what was to come.
Just past the Town Hall, the traffic jams began. I had rather too long to look down at what used to be the Ram Brewery (closed) and what used to be the Wandsworth Museum (closed) and what is still the Southside mall (very open). Here the top deck refreshed, with Battersea residents flooding down to spend their time and money shopping, and a fresh collection of passengers climbing the stairs to journey into residential suburbia. I ended up sharing the front seats with a Polish dad and his daughter, jabbering away in k's and z's and w's. We negotiated Garrett Lane in slow mode, running parallel to the River Wandle down to Earlsfield and beyond. A brief upmarket patch was marked by a cluster of antique shops and delicatessens, but otherwise it was launderettes and tiny front gardens all the way.
And finally Tooting, home to the first tube station we'd passed since Victoria, and therefore another very popular destination. Only a short distance to go now, so none of the crowds waiting along Mitcham Road wanted to board the 44. I still had much to see. That Gala Bingo Hall, the one with the towering Italianate columns, used to be one of the most spectacularcinemas in Britain and is Grade I listed. There's Smith Brothers department store, a traditional family-owned outlet (alas with no connection to local renegade Citizen Wolfie Smith). And that West Indian bakery used to be a recording studio, where one of my favourite 80s bands produced their very finest work.
A last turn round Amen Corner (it's nothing spiritual, just a set of traffic lights where a trinity of roads meet) and then my ride was at an end. The 44 terminates just before Tooting station, immediately before Wandsworth metamorphoses into Merton, in the shadow of a stark brick policestation. As the doors beeped open I was unceremoniously dumped outside an international convenience store selling pineapples, melons and butternut squash. High on its facade, moulded into the plasterwork and dated 1934, was a bright flaming sunrise labelled 'Progress'. I took a brief look round, and progressed swiftly back the way I had come.
I shouldn't be here. I really shouldn't. And yet somehow I've made it through to another birthday. How the hell did that happen?
I should have made at least one fatal mistake by now. Crossed the street into the path of an unseen car. Ventured too close to the edge of a platform and stumbled. Walked down the wrong alleyway and met some angry criminal with a knife. Picked up some nasty virus, choked on a careless bone, swallowed from the wrong bottle in the kitchen. Tumbled from a mountainside, fallen off a ladder, slipped down some stairs. There are so many things that could have gone terribly, terminally wrong - and it only takes one. But I've been lucky.
I really shouldn't be here at all. I blame my parents, it's all their fault. One random summer's day in 1964, that's when the crucial deed happened. I wasn't there, obviously, but it remains the most important event in my entire life. They couldn't have known what they were letting themselves in for. They can't possibly have imagined how it might all turn out. But nine months later I appeared, on my mother's birthday no less, and I wouldn't be here otherwise.
The chances of me actually being here are astronomically small. I could so easily have been somebody completely different. I could have been a girl - heads I was, tails I'm not. I could have been taller, shorter, darker, frecklier, hairier, stupider, disableder, whatever. I could have inherited a gene for shopping, or a sporting talent, or a dyslexic inability to spell. It's all a matter of genetics, and only one sperm out of 50 million could have generated me.
I definitely shouldn't be here at all. If there'd been something good on the telly that night, I'd never have been created. If my parents had lingered over dessert for a few additional minutes, a different set of chromosomes would have combined. Even 24 hours earlier, the circumstances just wouldn't have been right. I'd be so utterly completely different - with a different personality, and a completely different outlook on life, in completely different circumstances. Hell, I might even have gone through the same process and generated a few random offspring myself.
I'm only here courtesy of my parents. I'm only here because they happened to meet, by chance, in an unlikely corner of Hertfordshire. I'm only here because they fancied each other, and eventually got married, and didn't have any other children before they had me. But my parents shouldn't be here either, for precisely the reasons of improbability I've outlined above. And neither should any of my grandparents, or my great-grandparents, and so it goes on.
Indeed I'm only here following an incredibly unlikely series of emotional attractions and geographical coincidences dating back to the dawn of time. I'm only here because all my ancestors happened to meet, and have sex with, precisely the right person, and because none of them got killed off by illness or accident before child-bearing age. The chances of this happening must be absolutely infinitesimal. But here I am.
You shouldn't be here either. You really shouldn't. And you shouldn't be reading this, because I shouldn't have written it. And today really shouldn't be my birthday. Viewed like that, becoming another year older is a complete triumph.
When I was young, music was something to be noted. Beats and rhymes and tunes. And then music became something to be performed. I joined in, I sang along. And then music became something to be heard. Transistor on, radio calling, listen in. And then music became something to be watched. Thursday evenings, BBC1, half past seven.
And then music became something to be enjoyed. That's good, I like that, who's singing? And then music became something to be admired. That's really good, I want to hear that again. And then music became something to be collected. That's brilliant. I must have every record they release. And then music became something to be purchased. Woolworths, Our Price, WH Smiths.
And then music became something to be spun. Lower the needle, hit the groove. And then music became something to be wound. Press play, rewind, fast forward. And then music became something to be pirated. Press record, try to chop off the DJ's voice. And then music became something to be mixtaped. My choice, my selection, my C90.
And then music became something to be lasered. 73 minutes of spinning silver disc, pause, play. And then music became something to be treasured. A physical library, defining my taste. And then music became something to be classified. Shelves of cases, arranged into alphabetical order. And then music became something to be carried. Walkman on belt, headphones in ear, off I go.
And then music became something to be digitised. Saved onto my PC, wav, mp3, tinny speakers. And then music became something to be shared. You steal from my library and I'll steal from yours. And then music became something to be consolidated. Every tune I've ever owned, absorbed into iTunes. And then music became something to be downloaded. Why go to a shop when the music can come to me?
And now music is something liberated. YouTube, MySpace, Spotify - everything's freely available. And now music is something timeless. Sample any back catalogue, sample any future hit. And now music is something transient. Love the song today, ignore it tomorrow. And now music is something for nothing. Whatever I want to listen to, whenever I want listen to it.
40 years ago today, on 7th March 1969, the Victoria line was officially opened by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. She took a one-stop tube journey from Victoria to Green Park, and she even bought her own ticket.
Every station along the line was represented by a unique tiling motif inlaid within the seating recesses on the platforms. Forty years on, the designs are still rather wonderful.
» Point at each thumbnail to see which station it represents (try to guess first!) » Click to view a larger photo and to see what the design represents (try to guess first!)
Victoria line tile-collecting is no easy photographic assignment. It involves catching at least 15 trains to travel stop-by-stop from one station to the next. It needs to be carried out when the platforms are quiet, otherwise you end up with people sitting in front of the designs. It requires a strong sense of purpose, especially when other passengers start staring at you and questioning what you're up to. It's not quite possible to capture the whole of each pattern square-on, not without stepping backwards off the platform onto the live rail. And sometimes (as at Green Park) you discover that all the tiles have been removed during station refurbishment, leaving nothing more than a boring concrete wall above a wooden bench. I can't claim to be the first person to photograph all 16 designs. But, as a child of the Sixties myself, I found this a fascinating assignment to complete. And, unlike the Queen, I did at least make it to the end of the line.
I won't go into the full details because we discussed them here last year. But the Circle line isn't going to be a circle any more. The circle is being broken, at Edgware Road, and one end yanked out to Hammersmith. Like a tape measure. Like a yo-yo. Like one of those lasso things that cowboys used to wave. But not like a circle.
Because circles are bad. Circles go round and round, in circles, so they never terminate. And terminating is important, otherwise it's very difficult to keep trains to timetable. All reliable underground lines terminate, especially those which share tracks with other underground lines. But a circle doesn't terminate, so it's not very reliable, and it only takes one little disruption somewhere and the entire line is shot to buggery. So circles are bad.
Here's how TfL announced the change in one of their press releases:
OK, I understand the rationale. But a circle that starts and finishes? That's just wrong. Starting and finishing are not things that circles do. Not ever. Maybe I should throw all my geometry books away.
Curiouser and curioser. Here's what Howard Collins, who's a top tube bod, says:
"Shown as a circle" on the tube map? Really? But it's not even a circle at the moment. It's a sort of elliptical bottle shape. It's a ring with squashed-in bits. It's sort of oval-ish. Of all the things it is, it most definitely isn't a circle. And it's going to be even less like a circle in the future.
There are many better names that the new line could have. The Spiral line, for example. The Hammersmith & Not City. The Extended Circle. I'm even quite tempted by the Paperclip. I'm sure you can think of a better name for a non-circular shape like this. Here, have yourselves a comments box in which to write some better ideas.
But none of this matters. The new line, that neither looks like a circle nor is a circle, will still be called the Circle line. It would be churlish to change the name now that Londoners have had 60 years to get used to it. It would also be bloody expensive. The last thing TfL wants is to go round changing every single sign on the entire tube network which mentions the word 'Circle' to something else. Keeping the name is a value for money solution, even if not a topological one.
So, come December, who fancies explaining all this to tourists? I bet they won't work it out from the tube map (which may well look something like this). It's called the Circle line, but it isn't a circle. It starts at Hammersmith and heads to Edgware Road, and then it carries on... to Edgware Road. Then it turns round and goes back again. On the way back it goes to Paddington, one stop after Edgware Road, and later to Paddington, one stop after Edgware Road, but they're different Paddingtons. Just look out for the train which says "Circle Line" on the front. It'll take you to Hammersmith, either fairly quickly or very slowly. Because the Circle line threads through itself like a shoelace. Because the Circle line isn't actually a circle. Yes, it'll be crystal clear. No, really, what could go wrong?
The results are in, and the 10 winners in Boris's park popularity vote have been announced. You probably haven't heard of many of them, but there's likely to be one near you that's won some dosh. They each get £400000 to spend on things like playground equipment, wild flower meadows and restored waterways, and in return Boris pledges not to push a free newspaper through your letterbox for the next three years. One additional park has also been selected (by a mysterious "panel of experts") to get a whopping £2m, and that's BurgessPark in Southwark. Good choice, panel of experts. Meanwhile there are also a lot of losers - the 37 London parks which were nominated but have won absolutely no money at all. You can see the full voting figures here, and the ten winners here (including details of what's planned in each park).
As an illustration, I've picked one of the winning parks to compare and contrast.
That's rather different to how the area is today. I can't imagine many nature lovers making a special effort to visit Little Wormwood Scrubs, especially when there's the more interesting expanse of big Wormwood Scrubs nextdoor. You'd never stumble upon LWS by accident, tucked away between two railways and a deprived Victorian housing estate on the edge of Hammersmith & Fulham. It's a park of two halves, the lower section bland and more municipal, the upper section more overgrown and remote. You might let your kids play in the safe area the bottom, but they'd take one look at the playground and want to escape to the wild half up top. Visitors are greeted by the sandy square of a dog toilet - great if you're four-legged but not a wonderful sight otherwise. Looking around it may appear that the entire park exists solely for the benefit of dogs and their owners. It's hard to walk very far without encountering some trotting squat canine, or else discovering unpleasant evidence that one was all too recently beneath your shoe. On my last visit to the park I was charged and inquisitively sniffed by a particularly unpleasant specimen called "Jayder" (I'm guessing that's how the pink-fleeced owner would spell the bitch's name). The local alcoholics watched my plight from one of the Scrub's few benches, from which they and their cans of 6-for-£5 lager held court.
The properly interesting part of LittleWormwoodScrubs is the big patch of scrubland above the featureless grass. It's still a bit artificial in places, but sufficiently unplanned elsewhere to feel properly off the beaten track. There are meandering pathways to explore through a central area of bushes and undergrowth - back in July 2005 the perfect spot to abandon an unexploded rucksack. There are raised pathways to trace in the wooded fringes along the northern perimeter - close to an invisible railway and an inaccessible canal. There's also a long path round the back of the park - the perfect length for a daily jog, but only so long as you feel safe venturing alone into this screened and secluded corner. I felt a little uneasy on my walk round, but the demons and hellhounds of my imagination never quite materialised.
Little Wormwood Scrubs has great potential, rather more than your average hectare of kickabout grass. Providing almost half a million pounds to enhance and improve the park should make a huge difference, and make the place far more welcoming for families, joggers and budding naturalists. Let's hope that local residents on the Dalgarno Estate (and their dogs) finally get to enjoy the unpolished diamond on their doorstep.
There's a new tube map out. It's only five months since the last issue, but there have been a few significant changes to the network since October so a new map is called for. The pocket-sized edition is now pick-up-able in tube stations, and you'll recognise it from the black and white picture of a medieval guitarist on the front cover. Goodness knows what a 'Troubadour Carrying a Cytiole' has to do with London or the tube, but this is 'Art' so that doesn't matter. Alternatively you can scrutinise the new map via the TfL website, should you be so inclined.
To save you the effort, I've had a quick look at the new tube map to see what's changed since last time. Here's what's new...
• Blackfriars: Of course. The underground station closed earlier this week until the end of 2011, so the map now shows that the station is closed. But it shows this in a mighty cumbersome way. The station's name has been crossed out with a thin red line, but it's rather faint and hard to spot. There's some incredibly small explanatory text, which is approximately font size 3 on the pocket version and therefore unreadable to anyone with less than perfect vision. The text announces that Blackfriars underground station is closed from March 2009 until 2011. Given that this map wasn't available before March 2009, the phrase "from March 2009" is completely superfluous. The interchange symbol remains undeleted, even though this won't be an interchange station for the next 30 months. There are rail, boat and aeroplane symbols pictured alongside the station, all now irrelevant to tube passengers because you can't get a tube train to Blackfriars any more. There's also a small dagger, which alerts travellers to read the explanatory note posted alongside the map. This note states that "Blackfriars Underground station is closed until late 2011", which is no more information than already appears on the map itself. Pointless. In summary, Blackfriars station is depicted as a confusing illegible irrelevant mess. Good start.
• Tower Gateway: This DLR terminus was reopenedon Monday after several months of major refit. This is good news, not just for commuters but also because a slew of additional text, strikethroughs and daggers have now been removed from the map. Double hurrah.
• Woolwich Arsenal: More hurrahs. This DLR station opened back in January, so it's now shown on the map as open instead of "opening early January 2009". This should remove the previously ridiculous situation where the tube maps at Woolwich Arsenal showed the station as not yet open. One further small change - the line beneath the Thames from King George V to Woolwich Arsenal has been simplified to a straight line rather than a westward curve. This is less geographically accurate, but since when was the tube map ever geographically accurate?
• Imperial Wharf: New station alert! Appearing for the first time on the tube map is a brand new Overground station-to-be, located on the West London Line near Chelsea Harbour. Imperial Wharf has appeared on rail maps before, however, most notoriously on the London Connections map in 2004 which promised that the station would open in "summer 2005". The final opening's only four and a half years late, but it's taken this long to secure funding and finally begin construction. In the meantime, residents of Chelsea Harbour continue to keep the London taxi industry afloat almost single-handed.
• Victoria line: All those nightmare after-10pm weeknight shutdowns are now a thing of the past, so TfL have kindly removed the ugly blue textbox located approximately on top of Brockwell Park. Now only four ugly textboxes remain.
• Roding Valley: Woo-hoo! TfL in step-free access victory! Another station has been labelled with a big blue blob, reflecting the fact that wheelchair users now have one more station they can travel to. Sounds like a triumph, doesn't it? Except for one thing. Roding Valley is the least used station on the entire underground network. It serves an average of only 500 passengers a day (that's 250 in and 250 out). In which case, I wonder how many additional passengers will choose to use this station now that it's step free? Ridiculously few, if any, I bet. All that public money spent, and almost nobody will benefit. But it adds one to TfL's step-free total, for what it's worth.
That's all I've spotted which is new. There's plenty more that's ugly, but all of this was there before. And don't expect another tube map update before December, because nothing else on the network (so far as I know) is due to get tweaked or changed until then.
Yet again the BBC's name has been dragged into the gutter, becoming a target for national ridicule. Yet again scandalous revelations have exposed deception at the heart of public service broadcasting. And yet again it's a lack of scrutiny by BBC employees which is to blame. You useless lot, you bunch of slackers.
The latest University Challenge fiasco is an embarrassing debacle which could so easily have been avoided. Did nobody think to double-check the academic credentials of Corpus Christi's goody-goody foursome? Was it not obvious that one of the team had evolved mid-series into a cheating accountant, in direct contravention of unwritten rule 6 clause 7b? The whole country knows the truth today. Why couldn't just one of us have spotted that truth before transmission?
So today I'm announcing a major internal inquiry (yes, another one) to attempt to uncover future cover-up catastrophes. Is there another reputation-shattering liar amidst our scheduled programming? Has anyone else been telling porkies with public money? It's up to all of us to uncover ingrained falsehood before the tabloids find us out. The BBC must be unblemishable.
I've got my eye on a few programmes which I suspect might be breaking the BBC Trust's new Extra-Rigid Code of Prim and Proper Conduct.
• Dragon's Den: Look, I can't help noticing, but those four entrepreneurs striding towards the camera in the opening shots aren't actually dragons. They're just slightly unpleasant money-launderers with poor dress sense. Can we rename this one please? • EastEnders: I've been watching this fly-on-the-wall documentary for several years now, and I've started to wonder whether the events depicted might just possibly be fabricated. I mean, is there really an East London square where everyone still speaks English and uses the launderette? Let's have some gritty realism please. • Cash In The Attic: But there isn't any. We need to rename this one Junk In The Loft, to take effect immediately. • Desert Island Discs: You can't fool me. This programme's coming from a studio just north of Oxford Circus, and Kirsty never plays any vinyl. It's lies, all lies, I tell you. • BBC News: We have a public duty to report the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So why are we giving airtime to politicians? History shows us that at least 50% of everything they say is either an exaggeration or a downright lie. Let's not give them a platform to spout their unbridled deceit, let's stick to news stories about kittens instead. • Songs of Praise: I think we're on rocky ground here. This weekly programme acknowledges a supreme being whose existence is backed up by absolutely no conclusive evidence whatsoever. What if we're wrong, what if this deity is merely a deluded figment of a collective imagination? Get me proof, or I'm pulling Aled.
University Challenge has got to go too, obviously. We can't leave this elitist quiz show hanging around in the schedules, not when any old Oxbridge scum could take us for a ride and leave egg on our corporate faces. The only sure way to prevent future scandal is to scrap the show entirely. Sorry Jeremy, you'll have to stick to making documentaries about art instead.
The BBC must become risk-proof and scandal-free. We have a duty of care to the licence payer, and public trust is more important than creativity. Transparency must be our watchword, and if ensuring morality means tedious broadcasting then so be it. Please let me know of any other potential programming outrages immediately, or I'll sack you.
If ever a London transport project had an inappropriate name, it was Thameslink 2000. Plans to improve the Bedford to Brighton railway through central London were first mooted in the mid 1990s, with a tentative completion date of the end of the century. Instead 2000 merely saw the start of the delayed public inquiry, during which many controversial deficiencies were exposed (Borough Market, who needs it?) and the Government threw the plans out. It took until 2006 for revised plans to pass through a follow-up inquiry, and only now in 2009 is the project finally getting underway.
This morning, finally, London's commuters get to feel the initial impact of the Thameslink programme. Not surprisingly, the initial impact is bad. The changes are at Blackfriarsstation, one of the bottlenecks on the cross London route, where the platform layout has to be completely reorganised. There are two through-lines, which will remain, but the other three platforms have to be closed so that they can switched from the east side of the station to the west. It's only when you realise that Blackfriars station sticks out onto a bridge across the Thames that the impact of this shift becomes apparent. Something very flashy will eventually emerge, but at significant short-term cost.
Twoof my favourite photo opportunities are about to vanish. One is the lunatic painting at the tip of platforms 1 and 2, where two yellow lines coalesce making it impossible to stand simultaneously behind both . And the other is the view from the Embankment looking out across the disused piers of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway. This bridge was abandoned by goods traffic in 1964, and 20 years later the main span was removed leaving a dozen lonely red columns sticking out of the Thames . Waste not, want not. These isolated abutments are to be used to support the new west-side platforms at Blackfriars station, and engineering work is already afoot to begin linking them together.
But commuter hell isn't destined to encroach upon this part of Blackfriars station. Rail services across the Thames will continue, even in three weeks time when platforms 1 to 3 close for good. Instead it's the underground that suffers, because the underground ticket hall is in the way of where the flashiest innards of the new overground station are due to be. So, bad luck tube travellers, because Blackfriars tube station closes today. Until the end of 2011. This closure is deadly serious.
Trains on the District and Circle lines will still pass through Blackfriars beneath a protective steel shield, unaffected, but they'll no longer stop. This is particularly annoying for commuters arriving from Sevenoaks, Beckenham Junction or Brighton, because they'll no longer be able to make a swift interchange onto the tube to continue their journeys to work. Official leaflets offer some patronising upbeat advice for those affected. Why not walk to nearby Mansion House or Temple stations and catch the tube from there? (Because they're 10 minutes walk away, which means wasting an extra hour and a half every week for two and a half years) Why not catch the 388 bus, which now conveniently runs to Mansion House and Temple stations? (Because the bus only runs every 10 minutes, and it's probably quicker to walk than to wait) Why not continue on your train to the cavernous and underused City Thameslink station, and walk from there? (Because there are no tube stations anywhere near City Thameslink either, for heaven's sake). Or why not vary your inbound journey and change at some other station on the way into town? (Because all the other routes are already jam packed in the rush hour, and you'll never squeeze on board).
My condolences if your daily commute involves interchanging at Blackfriars tube station, because you're about to be very seriously inconvenienced for a very long time. Me, I'm rather pleased, because my recently revised District line commute passes straight through Blackfriars station. Now that trains aren't stopping to pick up passengers I reckon I should save about a minute on the way into work and another minute on the way home. By my calculations that's approximately 2000 minutes saved altogether over the next 2¾ years. Perhaps Thameslink 2000 was well named after all.
I love deadlines. I love the way they start off distant and creep up. I love their definitive finality. I love the impending sense of completion that deadlines bring. I love the way that, without deadlines, humanity would slip back into a morass of sloth.
I conquer deadlines. I have a reputation for meeting every deadline. Every deadline is a challenge, but a challenge I can meet. When there's a deadline coming up, I reorganise my life to make sure I hit it. If I prioritise properly, every deadline can be met. I know I have the self-discipline and determination to succeed. I always meet my deadlines, always.
My blog is little more than a series of daily deadlines, to which I apply myself with care and diligence. There is always something new for you to read each day because every new day is a new deadline. There has to be a post tomorrow, so I always force myself to knuckle down and write it. I'm dedicated like that.
I need deadlines. I need a precise time by which something must be done. I can't be doing with woolly deadlines, otherwise things don't get done. I have to know what needs doing first, what needs doing next, and what I can leave until later. I need to set myself a timed target, else I let things slip. I need priorities. Without a deadline, I procrastinate.
My blog would never get written without deadlines. Tomorrow's deadline is the only thing that forces me to knuckle down and be creative. I don't have a single post waiting on standby in case I run out of inspiration. I can't write a stack of posts for future consumption and file them away in readiness. The post you read tomorrow was invariably written less than 24 hours before. I have to write fresh, with the scream of a deadline approaching fast, or I don't write at all.
I only narrowly hit deadlines. I always faff about and waste time until the deadline is imminent, and only then do I force myself to get down to work. If I have a deadline at the end of March, I'll finish on March 31st. If the deadline's at midnight, I'll finish at five to. All my projects expand to fill the time available, however much time that might be. Give me two months and I'll take two months, give me two hours and I'll take two hours.
I can only work to genuine deadlines. If a deadline isn't genuine, my subconscious refuses to recognise it. It's no good pretending that something needs to be finished by Tuesday if it isn't really needed until Friday. I'll let that fake Tuesday deadline pass by and finally pull my finger out on Friday afternoon, even though I could have got the whole thing sorted much earlier. I know a genuine deadline when I see it.
I hate deadlines. They hang around like a bad smell, poisoning my life. They loom on the horizon, reminding me that I need to get something finished, and that I can't rest until I do. Deadlines fill my time and stop me from doing other things. I know I should be working towards the deadline, I know I could be working towards the deadline, but I also know that I don't need to be working towards the deadline. Not yet anyway. Right now I can find a million and one displacement activities to do instead, so I always delay the important stuff until later. It's never the right thing to do, but that's the way I work.
I hate the way I approach deadlines. I should finish work early and then go off and enjoy myself, but instead I do things in reverse. I sit around tinkering and toying, making a half-hearted attempt to get nowhere, whilst distracting myself with trifles and fripperies. I waste umpteen days a year not quite getting round to doing things. My life is blighted by inefficient and untimely practices. I cannot complete work in advance, I can only complete work for deadlines. But I always, absolutely always, manage to meet them.
I have a deadline to meet today. But I wrote this instead.
What's on this week? Christmas Past Geffrye Museum, until 3 Jan
Festively-decorated rooms. Museum of Docklands Free admission 27 Dec - 3 Jan
All the usual, for nothing.
Probably not yet, to be honest. But ten London boroughs have taken the plunge and are attempting to interact online with their residents, with varying degrees of success. Some of them are even occasionally interesting, or indeed useful. None of the ten are tweeting prolifically, so don't worry that your council tax is being wasted. Here's a quick summary of how they're doing.
The chess pieces are of Norwegian origin, probably 12th century, and are carved from chunks of walrus tusk. The major pieces have beautifully carved faces, almost cartoonish to modern eyes, including a gruff beardy king and a rather huffish queen. There are more than enough pieces for a complete set, so some are displayed on a red and white board and the rest are laid out around the display case either singly or in groups. They make a most impressive strategic army, and are a reminder of the excellence of European craftsmanship almost a millennium ago.
It wasn't long before Victorian custodians split the collection. 82 of the Lewis chessmen are now in the possession of the British Museum, while the remaining 11 are held by the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Not surprisingly there is much debate about where they should best be displayed. As a British find they have every right to be in the British Museum, argue some, even though that's 500 miles from the point of discovery. As a Scottish find they should all be in Edinburgh, argue others, so send them back immediately. Some on the island of Lewis believe they should return home to the Hebrides instead, probably to the Museum nan Eilean in Stornoway, even though far fewer people would be able to see them there.
Olympic reflections
City Mill River
City Mill River ii
Manor Garden Allotments
Waterworks River
Bully Point Nature Reserve
Freud's house looks particularly alluring in the spring, behind a clipped green hedge beneath blossoming branches. Step through the pale blue front door into the entrance hall and it's equally peaceful inside. The house is very much as it once was, with Sigmund's possessions and collections on display from room to room. The ground floor study reflects many aspects of his personality. At the garden end is Freud's desk, stacked with intricate statuettes from around the world. His specially-made chair, designed for slouching, looks like an abstract torso with open arms (very Freudian). Around the walls are leather-bound volumes interspersed with a number of classical antiquities - this was more Freud's museum than his library.
Freud was so frail during his year in Hampstead that he never once went upstairs. He never saw the light spacious bedrooms, one now devoted to an exhibition of his life and work, another now somewhere to sit and watch documentaries and home movie footage. An adjacent drawing room is devoted to his daughter Anna, herself a psychoanalyst of note, whose blue plaque graces the front of the house along with her father's. Meanwhile on the landing are further objects, relics and treasures collected over a lifetime of cultural travelling, plus artwork including a Dali portrait and a dreamlike painting by the Wolfman, one of Freud's most famous patients.
, from which the entire valley was visible
Visit the northwestern flank of Twyford Down today and the new road is barely visible. From the footpath along the narrow chalky valley below, for example, the land still appears to rise up to the same windswept ridge as before. But it's all an illusion, as the relentless background noise of not-so-distant traffic bears witness. Clamber up the slope and the land suddenly drops away behind a wire fence to reveal a stark white gash, through which thunder cars and lorries and holiday-bound coaches. They pass through this unseen upland in under a minute, a tedious traffic jam avoided but an ancient landscape destroyed.
At the southern end of Keats' daily walk, in meadows opposite St Catherine's Hill, stands Britain's oldest charitable institution. It's the hospital of St Cross, and it's been offering hospitality to travellers and the poor for more than 850 years. St Cross was established by Henry de Blois, a grandson of William the Conqueror, to provide shelter and sustenance for 13 frail and penniless men. Twenty-five Brethren still live in the high-chimneyed almshouses on site
Where else to start but the cathedral?
• Great Hall: Only the 13th century Great Hall survived Cromwell's demolition of Winchester Castle. The beam-roofed building's impressive enough, but completely upstaged by the Round Table hanging on the west wall
This ancient South Bank street starts at the crossroads outside Southwark station. The tube station squats beneath a railway viaduct, like quarter of a flying saucer, in front of which are scattered a random selection of pedestrians with blurred out faces. On the opposite corner is a blocky glass office block on stilts, on top of which is plonked what looks like an enormous shiny cereal packet. But we're not going that way, we're heading west towards a very ordinary apartment block, past The Ring public house "where boxing started in 1910". Follow the yellow line up onto the pavement, and let's be off.
The road narrows past the Anchor & Hope public house, as the shops head steadily upmarket. An appropriately-named florist, a tiled green fish restaurant and a bespoke men's tailoring service each hint that a cultured metrosexual clientele stalks this sapling-lined avenue. It's true. That startling high-meshed building opposite isn't a multi-storey car park, it's the Young Vic theatre. Look carefully behind the orange neon sign above the entrance and you can still see the shopfront nameplate of Wilson Brothers, the family butchers around whose premises the theatre was recreated.
The change TfL have made is that 'Minor delays' no longer appear on the map. Severe delays appear, and suspensions appear, but minor delays don't. And that's great. Now, if any part of a line is coloured in, it's worth avoiding. Previously, you wouldn't have known for sure without clicking on the map. So this is a really practical change. There's also a new message on the map when services are running fairly well, which reads "There are no major disruptions currently reported on the tube". This too is a welcome step forward, reducing unnecessary complexity on the map. Hurrah.
Photo: Hoover Building
Photos: Beckton Alp / Rammey Marsh
Photo: Cuckmere meander
Photo: IKEA Neasden
At 9am on Monday 15th March 1909, to the sound of a bugle, Harry Gordon Selfridge opened the doors of his brand new department store on Oxford Street. The western end of the street wasn't very fashionable at the time, so he'd been able to snap up the land and build his store for just £400,000. Gordon hoped to introduce an innovative concept from America to the West End - shopping for fun. If only ladies would stay for the day, perusing the merchandise, entranced by the displays, recuperating in the restaurant, he'd make his fortune. Those first day crowds spent longer looking than buying, but canny advertising ensured that ultimate success was assured. The store extended northward, swallowing up an entire city block (and even devouring the church in which my great-grandparents got married). A chain of Selfridges spread out across the country, just in time for Gordon's lavish lifestyle to prove his financial undoing. But his iconic Ionic columns still front the building 100 years later, and the Oxford Street branch of Selfridges remains the UK's second largest shop (beaten only by Harrods).
Come on, you know what you'll find behind the revolving wooden doors. Deep breath, it's the perfumery department. It was Gordon's idea to place it at the front, and department stores the world over have followed his lead ever since (much to the annoyance of generations of long suffering men). Preened sales staff stand poised to squirt and spray every passing female, while security guards ensure that nobody runs off with the bloody expensive handbags. If glittery trifles aren't your thing then the only department of interest on this floor will be the food hall. It's compact but characterful, with a wide selection of well-stocked deli counters offering traditional and international fare. You could do all your weekly food shopping here, no problem, but only if you're the sort of customer who thinks that £7 for four cupcakes is good value for money.
Don't overlook the basement, especially if your home requires some unnecessary accessories. I've found many an unusual Christmas gift down here, although I suspect most now gather dust at the back of a forgotten cupboard. The cookshop boasts a wide range of designer utensils you never knew you didn't have. For the well-heeled traveller there's always another item of leather luggage to add to the collection. There's even a Nespresso bar serving extra-pretentious coffee, which seemed inexplicably popular yesterday afternoon. All this plus a remarkably empty HMV, and a well-stocked book department whose WH Smith branding is only revealed when you check your till receipt.
That's Erith, pronounced Ee-rith. It's on the south-eastern flank of London, alongside the Thames Estuary, and not somewhere on any tourist itinerary. Even if you turned up out of curiosity you'd never notice the museum, not unless you knew it was there. It's close to the station, but not on the main walking route to the town centre. It's hidden inside Erith library (an ornate 1906 building), not that there's an obvious sign outside announcing the museum's existence. Step inside, past the librarian's desk, and look towards the stairs to your left. For just seven and a half hours a week a small sign hangs here reading 'MUSEUM OPEN'. But not for much longer. Not for very much longer at all.
A new Erith library is under construction closer to the heart of the town. It's very nearly finished, indeed it should have been open a couple of weeks ago, but until it's completed the old library lingers on. The new place will have lots of computer terminals for public use, and some books, and greater footfall, and did I mention the computers? But there'll be no attic, nor any appropriate space for the museum to inhabit, so the collection can't follow on. And there's no way that the museum can continue in the old building once all the library staff have moved out, so an enforced limbo awaits.
I had a lovely long conversation with the lady and gentleman on duty. They'd not been expecting to have the place open into March - every additional week is a bonus at the moment. They told me of the expansion plans they've had to put on hold - there's no point opening up the back room to visitors if there are no visitors. They told me that their group of volunteers aren't getting any younger, and it's nigh impossible to find replacements to make up their declining numbers. They expressed concerns for the future of their enterprise with an eloquent mixture of despair and resignation. They gave me three souvenir bookmarks, presumably because they couldn't see any subsequent visitors ever taking one. They even made me a mug of hot chocolate and offered me a custard cream while we chatted. You don't get service like that in the V&A.
Bus 44: Victoria - Tooting
A heck of a lot of buses start their journeys from Victoria station, or thereabouts. But the 44 doesn't start from anywhere obvious, like the bus station or the pavement immediately outside the mainline station. Instead I had to thread north to Victoria Street, outside the least busy Underground entrance, and wait patiently in front of a parade of rundown shops. Joining me at bus stop G were a trio of Chelsea pensioners, each with a telltale RH insignia on their cap and a bright red pinstripe down their immaculate trousers. I hoped that they might be joining me on my journey but no, they were off to Chelsea and I was off on a guided tour of the London borough of Wandsworth. I think they got the better deal.
And finally Tooting, home to the first tube station we'd passed since Victoria, and therefore another very popular destination. Only a short distance to go now, so none of the crowds waiting along Mitcham Road wanted to board the 44. I still had much to see. That Gala Bingo Hall, the one with the towering Italianate columns, used to be one of the most spectacular cinemas in Britain and is Grade I listed. There's Smith Brothers department store, a traditional family-owned outlet (alas with no connection to local renegade Citizen Wolfie Smith). And that West Indian bakery used to be a recording studio, where one of my favourite 80s bands produced their very finest work.
I shouldn't be here. I really shouldn't. And yet somehow I've made it through to another birthday. How the hell did that happen?
When is a circle not a circle?
That's rather different to how the area is today. I can't imagine many nature lovers making a special effort to visit Little Wormwood Scrubs, especially when there's the more interesting expanse of big Wormwood Scrubs nextdoor. You'd never stumble upon LWS by accident, tucked away between two railways and a deprived Victorian housing estate on the edge of Hammersmith & Fulham. It's a park of two halves, the lower section bland and more municipal, the upper section more overgrown and remote. You might let your kids play in the safe area the bottom, but they'd take one look at the playground and want to escape to the wild half up top. Visitors are greeted by the sandy square of a dog toilet - great if you're four-legged but not a wonderful sight otherwise. Looking around it may appear that the entire park exists solely for the benefit of dogs and their owners. It's hard to walk very far without encountering some trotting squat canine, or else discovering unpleasant evidence that one was all too recently beneath your shoe. On my last visit to the park I was charged and inquisitively sniffed by a particularly unpleasant specimen called "Jayder" (I'm guessing that's how the pink-fleeced owner would spell the bitch's name). The local alcoholics watched my plight from one of the Scrub's few benches, from which they and their cans of 6-for-£5 lager held court.
• Blackfriars: Of course. The underground station closed earlier this week until the end of 2011, so the map now shows that the station is closed. But it shows this in a mighty cumbersome way. The station's name has been crossed out with a thin red line, but it's rather faint and hard to spot. There's some incredibly small explanatory text, which is approximately font size 3 on the pocket version and therefore unreadable to anyone with less than perfect vision. The text announces that Blackfriars underground station is closed from March 2009 until 2011. Given that this map wasn't available before March 2009, the phrase "from March 2009" is completely superfluous. The interchange symbol remains undeleted, even though this won't be an interchange station for the next 30 months. There are rail, boat and aeroplane symbols pictured alongside the station, all now irrelevant to tube passengers because you can't get a tube train to Blackfriars any more. There's also a small dagger, which alerts travellers to read the explanatory note posted alongside the map. This note states that "Blackfriars Underground station is closed until late 2011", which is no more information than already appears on the map itself. Pointless. In summary, Blackfriars station is depicted as a confusing illegible irrelevant mess. Good start.
• Imperial Wharf: New station alert! Appearing for the first time on the tube map is a brand new Overground station-to-be, located on the West London Line near Chelsea Harbour. Imperial Wharf has appeared on rail maps before, however, most notoriously on the London Connections map in 2004 which promised that the station would open in "summer 2005". The final opening's only four and a half years late, but it's taken this long to secure funding and finally begin construction. In the meantime, residents of Chelsea Harbour continue to keep the London taxi industry afloat almost single-handed.
• Roding Valley: Woo-hoo! TfL in step-free access victory! Another station has been labelled with a big blue blob, reflecting the fact that wheelchair users now have one more station they can travel to. Sounds like a triumph, doesn't it? Except for one thing. Roding Valley is the least used station on the entire underground network. It serves an average of only 500 passengers a day (that's 250 in and 250 out). In which case, I wonder how many additional passengers will choose to use this station now that it's step free? Ridiculously few, if any, I bet. All that public money spent, and almost nobody will benefit. But it adds one to TfL's step-free total, for what it's worth.
Dear BBC Employee
This morning, finally, London's commuters get to feel the initial impact of the Thameslink programme. Not surprisingly, the initial impact is bad. The changes are at Blackfriars station, one of the bottlenecks on the cross London route, where the platform layout has to be completely reorganised. There are two through-lines, which will remain, but the other three platforms have to be closed so that they can switched from the east side of the station to the west. It's only when you realise that Blackfriars station sticks out onto a bridge across the Thames that the impact of this shift becomes apparent. Something very flashy will eventually emerge, but at significant short-term cost.
Trains on the District and Circle lines will still pass through Blackfriars beneath a protective steel shield, unaffected, but they'll no longer stop. This is particularly annoying for commuters arriving from Sevenoaks, Beckenham Junction or Brighton, because they'll no longer be able to make a swift interchange onto the tube to continue their journeys to work. Official leaflets offer some patronising upbeat advice for those affected. Why not walk to nearby Mansion House or Temple stations and catch the tube from there? (Because they're 10 minutes walk away, which means wasting an extra hour and a half every week for two and a half years) Why not catch the 388 bus, which now conveniently runs to Mansion House and Temple stations? (Because the bus only runs every 10 minutes, and it's probably quicker to walk than to wait) Why not continue on your train to the cavernous and underused City Thameslink station, and walk from there? (Because there are no tube stations anywhere near City Thameslink either, for heaven's sake). Or why not vary your inbound journey and change at some other station on the way into town? (Because all the other routes are already jam packed in the rush hour, and you'll never squeeze on board).
