1½million: Sometime this morning, probably just after nine o'clock or thereabouts, diamond geezer will receive its million and a halfth visitor. Actually that's not quite true, it'll just be the million and a halfth time that my slightly ropey stats package has registered a unique visit, which isn't the same thing at all. And not in the slightest bit correct. Thanks to the relentless rise of the RSS feed, considerably more people read this blog than visit it. But I can't count my feedreaders accurately, so I'll have to stick to counting visitors instead. And there have been one and a half million of them. Blimey, gosh and wow.
Of course one and a half million is nothing really, not when spread over seven years. It's the equivalent of one in every five Londoners looking at my blog, once and only once, at some point between 2002 and today. It's one visitor every two and a half minutes, which is nothing to be sniffed at, but pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It's crap, really. But still wow.
So it's time once again for an update of my regular 'league table' of top linking blogs, ordered by volume of visitors clicking here from there. As usual I've also included details of the 'highest climbers'. I was going to include the highest climbers since my last update (at 1¼ million), but the chart's hardly changed at all since then so I've gone back to 1 million instead. It still hasn't changed much.
Nearly a quarter of my Top 30 consists of blogs that are long dead, but nothing's ever come along to demote them. At least two of the remaining blogs delinked me several years ago. Three of the rest don't have a blogroll, they just linked to me in posts (in one case only once). The only new entry since 1 million visitors is at number 26, leaping into the list with the power of a major publishing company behind it. Other than that I'm increasingly convinced that this 'linking chart' is an irrelevance, whereas it used to be a touchstone dynamic summary.
I assembled this list by updating a spreadsheet, and one thing that struck me was how little the number of incomers had changed since last time. Half a million extra visitors may have turned up since April last year, but only a tiny proportion of them have come from these top linking blogs. Links from other people's blogs used to be crucial for gathering an audience, and now they're almost an irrelevance. You have a blogroll? Nobody cares, not like they used to anyway.
In 2009, people are more likely to create brief transient links to a blog in their status updates. Murmurings on Facebook, mutterings on Twitter, that's where bloglinks appear these days. I've totted up the statistics and, if I'd included them in the list, both Facebook and Twitter would now appear just outside the Top 20. Give it a few more months and they'll be considerably higher. Short snappy mentions can bring in the punters, a handful at a time, and they all add up.
But I've still got a blogroll of my own because I believe it's important (even if you RSS-ers can't see it). About half of my 20-strong blogroll are extremely long established, and the remainder are more recent and fresh. About half of these bloggers I've met in real life, which was nice, and the other half are joys yet to come. And about half are in my top 20 linking blogs, and the other half aren't. No matter. I'm more than grateful for my million and a half, so thank you all for linking and clicking. But I'm not convinced it'll be worth cataloging this list again when, or if, two million rolls around.
Sometimes I wonder if I've got my priorities right.
• "There's an interesting event in town tonight, interested?" "Sorry, I'm attempting to code a table of Jubilee line closures." • "We're all doing drinks in the West End." "I might see you later, but I need to compose 750 words about my local Tesco first." • "You wanna come out tonight?" "Er, no thanks, I'm uploading geotagged photos of the South Coast." • "I think we should meet for sex right now." "No can do, there's a new station in West London needs writing about."
Sometimes I'm too busy blogging about life to actually experience it.
So last night I forgot about blogging and did some useful things instead.
Frothed up the sink to do several days worth of washing up. Recycled last week's newspapers (not all of which I ever got round to reading) Caught up on far too many emails I should have sent to far too many people (far too long ago) Recharged my camera battery (because I appear to have used it a lot lately) Attempted to complete my income tax form online (started with good intentions, gave up) Sat on the sofa (unheard of!) to watch FlashForward(yeah yeah) Glared through the curtains at my new neighbours (who insist on smoking regularly on the balcony outside) Tried getting a ticket for some arty event in the Kingswaytramtunnel(woo, got a ticket!) Filed away some paperwork (I really must get better at filing away paperwork) Actually, replying to emails is a real time-killer, isn't it? (and still three to go)
A new station opened in London yesterday. It's close to the Thames in Chelsea, on the West London Line branch of the London Overground. It's in Zone 2. It's called Imperial Wharf. [see 6 photos]
Imperial Wharf station opened yesterday. It's right next to the enormous Imperial Wharf luxury development, and a significant proportion of the station's funding was provided by the developers. It's also right next to the existing Chelsea Harbour luxury development. Geographically speaking, "Chelsea Harbour" would be a much more helpful name for describing the station's location, but they didn't fund it, so the station's not named after them. Before luxury developments came along, pre-sponsorship, this part of town was called Sands End. Not a hope of the station being called Sands End, obviously.
Imperial Wharf station opened yesterday. And about time too. It's been scheduled to open for years, but never quite has. Plans were first mooted in the mid 1990s, but it wasn't until 2001 that estate developers St George agreed to help pay for construction. By 2004 the station was being included on the London Connections rail map, in the expectation that it would be "opening summer 2005". But then it disappeared again, until Hammersmith and Fulham Council managed to wheedle some more cash out of the developers in 2007, and construction finally began last summer. Hey presto, after a protracted 15-year journey, one new station.
Imperial Wharf station opened yesterday. The station plugs one of the gaping holes in inner London's rail network, in riverside Chelsea, by (cheaply) piggybacking a new station onto an existing railway line. Before yesterday the Sands End area was linked to the tube network only by bus, and residents of these shiny riverside towers aren't really the sort who take buses. Taxis are far more their style, and black cabs swarm around the area in large numbers. It's yet to be seen whether the provision of a shiny new station will ever prise the majority of locals away from their preferred four-wheeled alternatives.
Imperial Wharf station opened yesterday. Some might wonder why TfL bothered, because the station has a desperately infrequent level of service (by inner London standards, at least). During the rush hour London Overground are putting on three trains an hour (some of these now to/from Stratford), whereas off peak and at weekends it's only two. Southern Trains generally run one additional train an hour, specifically linking Milton Keynes to East Croydon, but that's your lot. Hardly a turn up and go service, more a turn up and wait.
Imperial Wharf station opened yesterday. I made the mistake of trying to arrive by rail from Clapham Junction, and suffered an even worse than usual weekend service. All that was scheduled was one northbound train at five past and another at ten to, with a gaping train-free desert inbetween. By quarter past there were already 30 bored-looking folk waiting on the platform, and by half past nearly a trainful. My wait, by the time the train finally departed, had been ten times longer than the four minute journey to Imperial Wharf. Remember folks - just because the Overground appears on the tube map doesn't mean that using it will be a speedy experience.
Imperial Wharf station opened yesterday. Several of the passengers embarking and disembarking from the occasional trains looked genuinely local, and only a few looked like the sort of blokes who visit stations on their opening day to take lots of photos. The platforms were gleaming and new, obviously, with streamlined canopies and tangerine roundels. I noted that the cretinous TfL "next train indicator" installers had been busy and had ensured that a same-height security camera precisely blocked information about the next northbound train from the furthest half of the platform. Access to ground level is by lift, or for the more energetic via a bright white staircase winding around the central elevator shaft. This makes Imperial Wharf an official step-free station (from street to platform if not from platform to train), although it's not marked on the latest tube map with a big blue blob (which is nice).
Imperial Wharf station opened yesterday. It's going to act as a driver for a lot more housing in the area, notably on the former gasworks site to the northwest of the station at at the former Lots Road power station to the east. It's going to open up additional transport possibilities, and commuting possibilities, and shopping opportunities (Westfield in 9 minutes flat). It's a great example of how London's rail network continues to infill, increase and improve. And that's why Boris will be along tomorrow to open the station officially, ahead of a bumper crop of station openings next year on the DLR and East London Line. But don't expect to see anything new opening in the first half of the next decade, because the only funding now is for network maintenance, not network expansion. Chelsea's new station may be very late indeed, but it's slipped through just in time.
Yesterday, because the weather was great, I took myself off to the Sussex coast for a long walk along the chalky clifftops. I started at Seaford (one of the old Cinque Ports, just past Newhaven, 90 minutes from Victoria), then yomped up and over to Cuckmere Haven (unspoilt river valley, requires major inland diversion, home to myvery favouritemeander), then walked the breathtaking chalky switchback of the Seven Sisters (Haven Brow, Short Brow, Rough Brow, Brass Point, Flat Hill, Baily's Hill, Went Hill Brow), then stopped for an ice cream at Birling Gap, then pushed past the builders at the Belle Tout lighthouse (it'll be opening as a mini-hotel later in the year), then stood on the top of Beachy Head (keeping an eye out for the suicide-preventionvicar), and finally descended into Eastbourne (promenade, bandstand, pier, old people). Altogether, 14 fantastic leg-aching miles.
But I've written about most of this walk before (back in 2007, here), and I have no desire to write up the whole thing again. So instead I'm offering you 30 photographs to give you a flavour of my day out (slideshow here), with plenty of accompanying text should you be interested (one photo at a time, starting here). If you don't mind a tough six hour trek, and aren't worried by walking along potentially crumbling chalky clifftops, I can't recommend it highly enough.
If you've never lived around here, you probably don't know Bromley-by-Bow very well. It has speckles of history and loveliness, but on the whole this patch of London is relentlessly poor, characterised by social housing and tenement blocks. It's home to a large Bangladeshi population, many of whom live crowded into unsuitable apartments hemmed in alongside a gridlocked arterial road. Bromley High Street isn't an alluring retail destination, more a tiny huddle of betting shops, laundrettes and Halal-friendly grocers. If any entrepreneur attempted to open a coffee shop or delicatessen around here, their business would fail within weeks. I wouldn't live anywhere else, obviously.
But, oh boy, is all this about to change? A new amenity-rich district centre for Tower Hamlets is about to be parachuted into the existing neighbourhood, with its focus around unloved Bromley-by-Bow tube station. To the southwest the first part of this transformation is already underway, with Barrett Homes busy erecting shiny blocks on the site of demolished St Andrew's Hospital. But on the opposite side of the A12, around where the Tesco superstore now stands, something rather more astonishing is planned. I'm just back from the consultation event, and I wonder if Bromley-by-Bow is really ready for the approaching onslaught of a cosmopolitan lifestyle.
Tesco are the main protagonists here, making the most of the land they own between the dual carriageway and the river. A patch of neighbouring industrial land will be levelled and a brand new twice-the-size megastore constructed, with a 500-ish capacity car park concealed in a subterranean cavern beneath the store. This new Tesco will be an environmental showpiece, so they say, and is scheduled for completion by 2012 (subject to planning permission). In place of the old supermarket will go 460 new homes, which'll be lovely assuming you like living in a glassy green box in the sky. And there'll also be a much needed primary school tucked in beside the river, literally in the shadow of the new Tesco. The usual stuff when regeneration of an area is mooted.
But it's the surrounding extras that've made me gasp, such as a 100-bed hotel close to the station. Even with the Olympics coming up, I find it hard to believe that any visitor would choose to stay in a hotel in darkest E3 (unless it's because the rooms are ridiculously cheap). A new park is proposed beside the bridge over to Three Mills, which it seems can be achieved by replacing the lower extremes of Tesco's existing car park by grass. An extra junction will be added on the A12, and the existing underpass realigned and brightened up. Tesco may also be helping to fund a new library (sorry "Idea Store") to kickstart learning and training for those who can't be bothered to travel the mile to a similar building in Roman Road. And then a whole new shopping mall is planned at "Imperial Square" outside the MegaTesco, featuring 18 outlets considerably more upmarket than any which grace B-by-B today. The aspiration is for high street chains to move in, selling goods that current residents would have to travel miles to buy. But I suspect that current residents aren't the target audience.
What's planned for medieval Bromley-by-Bow is a sharp regenerative tug to lure in Londoners who might never before have considered living here. The Docklands banker; the professional family; the young couple with a hankering for antipasti, weekend cycling and riverside cappucinos - I don't see many of their kind around here at the moment. It'll be quite frankly astonishing if large numbers of folk with disposable incomes begin to colonise my local area within the next few years, but under these new plans also quite possible. I'm a little uncomfortable that a major supermarket chain appears to be the driving force behind one key quadrant of the revitalised neighbourhood, especially given the unqualified architectural atrocity they've recently opened as part of a block of flats along Bow Road. But Tesco were already a major stakeholder in the Bromley-by-Bow development zone, so any future plans were always going to be shareholder-focused and profit-friendly.
On leaving the exhibition, the consultation team were particularly keen that I make my voice heard by filling in a questionnaire, and maybe also a 'support' form. Positive feedback from residents might, they think, significantly increase the scheme's chance of success when it comes up before the Tower Hamlets planning committee. Outside in Bromley High Street some local pushchair-mums wandered by without giving the exhibition a second look. They don't know what's about to hit them.
This will come as a kick in the teeth to those who travel on the the Jubilee and whose weekends have been completely buggered by a seemingly endless succession of line closures over the last umpteen months. Rail replacement buses are no fun at the best of times, but weekend after weekend after weekend after weekend they really begin to grind passengers down. Tube Lines have made some gobsmacking errors too, like having to replace several miles of mislaid cable, and have been rewarded with several additional line closures creeping into January. The good news is that, by missing their end-of-2009 target, Tube Lines will be financially punished. The bad news is that their fine won't be punishing enough (a mere £10m a month), and meanwhile the rail replacement misery goes on and on and on.
To help make sense what this means for customers, I've had a go at collating all the relevant information from TfL's latest list of future line closures. So here's a table showing all the weekend closures on the Jubilee line for the five months from September to January. Each pair of columns represents a weekend, and grey shading means the line's closed. Grim, innit?
Sept
Oct
Nov
Dec
Jan
5
12
19
26
3
10
17
24
31
7
14
21
28
5
12
19
26
2
9
16
23
30
Stanmore
W Hampst'd
Waterloo
N Gr'nwich
Stratford
For example, over the weekend October 3/4 the entire Jubilee line is closed, while over the weekend October 10/11 it's closed between Stanmore and West Hampstead. Saturday closures aren't always the same as Sunday. And there are two days when the closure isn't all day, so they're in slightly lighter grey.
If you live at the Docklands/Greenwich end of the line, then your weekends are about to get a heck of a lot better. After the first week of October the eastern end of the line clears, and then it's plain sailing round to Stratford all the way up to Christmas.
It's the northern end of the line where the relentless closures are hurting the most. In fact I find this list of closures absolutely unbelievable. The Jubilee line will be closed north of Waterloo almost every weekend until December, and closed north of West Hampstead EVERY SINGLE WEEKEND until mid-January. If you live in Stanmore you're going to be bloody sick of rail replacement buses by the time 2010 comes round. If that's not bad enough, there are also 18 days when the parallel stretch of the Metropolitan line will be shut down (between Harrow-on-the-Hill and Aldgate). I've marked these dates in purple, if you squint carefully enough.
It will all be worth it in the end, obviously, except that the end now seems further away than ever. There's absolutely no guarantee that this list won't change, and extend, and that mid-January onwards will be just as hellish as all that's come before. Given how incompetent Tube Lines' delivery has been so far, I fear they'll be frittering away TfL's cash for some time to come. Lovely Jubbly?
Overheard at a museum near you, in the Borisfuture...
NATIONAL LONDON MUSEUM Admission £10 (recommended voluntary donation)
"Good morning sir, and welcome to the National London Museum. Would you like to step over here to the cash desk and buy a ticket?"
"No that's right sir, when you visited last month we were free. And now, thanks to the mayor's brave arts vision, we're asking visitors to pay."
"Oh absolutely sir, it's still very much your choice whether you pay or not. But we'll try to make you feel uncomfortable if you don't."
"Now there's no need to be abusive sir. We always used to ask for a suggested donation before, it's just that everybody ignored the collecting boxes. So now we're being a bit more forceful. Will you pay up sir, or are you a cheapskate freeloader?"
"It's perfectly simple sir. We have some of London's finest treasures behind these doors, and we think you'll value them more if you've paid to come in. Times are tough, and they're going to be tough for a while yet."
"What's that sir? You were only planning to pop inside for twenty minutes, because you've been before and you only want to see the new exhibits? That's still ten pounds, sir."
"I'm sorry sir, but we can't accept an income tax form as proof of payment. You may think you've already paid for museum entrance through indirect taxation, but I'm afraid our funding body doesn't view it like that."
"Yes sir, we do have a special temporary exhibition in our upper gallery. That's £8 to get in, and it's a compulsory charge - as before. Oh yes, that's on top of the voluntary ten quid sir. And a bargain at the price."
"No you're right sir, it is a lot quieter inside the museum this month. There aren't as many families, or pensioners, or tourists... indeed, far fewer people overall. So why not pay to enjoy the wonderfully crowd-free galleries?"
"Yes that's right sir, I used to be one of those chuggers blocking the pavement outside, attempting to get passers by to sign up to charitable direct debits. But this is a much better way to put my powers of persuasion to good use. And it's much warmer in here, and the pay's better."
"Please sir, I beg you. You'll enjoy it more if you pay. You'll value the experience more if you pay. And you won't feel horribly shamefully criminally guilty if you pay."
"Look sir, times are tough, and it's only ten pounds. Sorry, I meant times are tough for the museum. The fact that times are also tough for you is quite frankly irrelevant."
"It's the new taxation paradigm sir. Public services need to be cut, because that's what the will of the public demands. What people want these days is more money in their pockets, and less government spending on mere cultural fripperies. And then people can choose to spend that extra money on whatever they like, be it a plasma TV, a nice meal in a restaurant, private health insurance or a ticket to a museum. Because people prefer choice. And that's why our admission charge is still optional."
"I have to print you a ticket sir. We can't let you in any more without a ticket. See here? Your ticket reads £0.00. How does that make you feel sir? Make you feel good does it?"
"Ladies and gentlemen, we've got a man over here who isn't paying. Do shoot him a withering look if you see him on the way round. If we all stare together, maybe he'll pay on the way out."
I squeezed in one more Open House visit, rather closer to home, at a completed multi-million pound Olympic construction project. Not the Stadium, nor indeed anywhere that'll host a single 2012 sporting activity, but a big concrete barrier on the Bow Back Rivers. This is Three Mills Lock (at Three Mills), which used to be called Prescott Lock (on the Prescott Channel). It's supposed to be a key part of our commitment to a sustainable Games, enabling building materials to be shipped into the heart of the Olympic Park by water instead of by road. Open House provided one of the first opportunities for the public to get up close to discover how £20m has been spent, and to be shown around behind the perimeter fence by a very knowledgeable lockkeeper.
It's a bloody massive lock. After my walk along the Lea last month I'm used to much smaller structures with wooden gates and twee waterside cottages, but this is nothing of the sort. It's three channels wide, with each gate wide enough to take a 350 tonne barge. The gates rotate up, not across, a bit like the Thames Barrier. There's a fish ladder along one side to ensure that scaly finny creatures can still pass up and downstream. And operations are overseen from a squat narrow control tower mid-river, complete with home comforts like a shower for the personnel working within. It's the sort of lock you might expect to find on the Manchester Ship Canal, not on an insignificant East End backwater.
The key to the lock's existence is its location. Downstream the Lea is tidal, with water levels dropping to unnavigable levels for long periods each day. Upstream, now that Three Mills Lock has been built, water levels along the eastern side of the Olympic Park will in future remain constant. That sounds like great news for enabling the import of building materials and removal of waste by river, but unfortunately reality's not quite so simple. Tides in Bow Creek still prevent barges from reaching the lock for 16 hours each day, which cuts back the potential time this route can be operational. As an additional setback the Prescott Channel and Bow Back Rivers haven't been used for major freight traffic for several decades and so have long since silted up. Dredging the channels has taken considerably longer than expected, and so the number of Park-bound barges using the new lock has been, to say the least, disappointing. Just six barges since the lock openedin June, we were told, just six.
Now stop me if I'm wrong, but an average of one big barge per fortnight is a pretty unimpressive strike rate. The whole idea of funding the lock in the first place was to enable the transfer of waterborne cargo during the peak construction window, and that doesn't appear to be happening yet. To give you some idea of the scale of the problem, Three Mills Lock was originally planned to open last summer, four years before the Games themselves. But the body of the stadium's already up, absolutely none of which has arrived by river, and there's a very real risk that few of the building materials for the remaining stadia will arrive via this watery route. The Park's location slap bang beside Stratford station has allowed use of a far more convenient sustainable mode of transport, and that's rail. Who needs slow meandering river traffic when freight can arrive more easily by train (or, to keep costs down, even by road)?
It looks increasingly likely that Three Mills Lock will prove a construction-time white elephant, but a legacy-phase saviour. By stabilising water levels throughout the Olympic Park, the completion of a post-Games residential 'Water City' now becomes possible. Swish riverside apartments, swanky cosmopolitan cafes and bohemian aspirational culture - all suddenly enabled because the Lea no longer drains away every 12 hours to reveal discarded supermarket trolleys and mud. Three Mills Lock adds millions to the potential value of future properties to be erected further upstream, which can only help to pay back the investment our taxes have poured into Olympic funding. But the lock itself looks destined for an underused future, ridiculously large for the few pleasurecraft that might use it post-2012, and never quite the ecological showpiece it set out to be.
• Nobody seems quite sure when the footpaths around the lock will reopen, which is annoying for those of us who used to use it regularly. • Here's a collection of photos of Three Mills Lock, taken by Mat over the weekend • Bits of the Euston Arch were dumped in the Prescott Channel, you may remember. • Legacy plans for the Olympic Park are detailed here (and on this interactive map) • Local residents in Bromley-by-Bow may be interested in Tesco's plans to erect a replacement superstore at Three Mills, relocated slightly nearer the railway, forming the heart of a new district centre for Tower Hamlets. Plans will be on display at TudorLodge this Friday (noon-7) and Saturday (11-4).
I love the way they creep in above lengthening shadows.
I love the way they slowly develop, from a tinge of bright sky to a speckled radiant flash; their gradual evolution from ordinary azure to enchanted glow.
I love their unpredictable splendour, their brief panoramic spectacle, their scarlets and golds and purples and pinks that bloom and burn, then dim and fade, never to reappear.
I love every random cloudbase reflection, each unique dusky spectacle, bewitching the landscape, enhancing the mundane, and heralding night's curtain of darkness.
I love sunsets. I just wish I saw more of them.
That isn't my photo of a sunset, it's Ian's. He took it yesterday evening from his flat in Docklands, from which there appears to be an excellent view both outward and upward. When atmospheric phenomena fill the sky, be they clouds or sunshine or rainbow or storm, these appear as part of Ian's everyday backdrop. And there have been some breathtaking sunsets over the summer, so Ian's been able to act fast and capture manyofthem.
I'm far less fortunate. My flat is shielded by its immediate surroundings. I can see only a tiny patch of northern sky, framed above a deep brick canyon. From where I live, the sun is only visible from one corner of one room at the height of summer. My dawn is forever obscured, while at nightfall no more than a hint of pink ever floats into view (during June and July only). Of nature's aerial spectacles, when I'm at home I see nothing.
If the sunset is magnificent, the first I ever know of it is via Twitter. When the skies above London were lit up by a dramatic electrical storm earlier this year, I missed the lot. Should a UFO ever descend upon the capital and hover menacingly in the air, from indoors I'd never even notice.
Next time I move house, I need to live somewhere with sky. Because I love sunsets. And I miss them.
For the second day of my Open House weekend I devoted my attention to the London borough of Southwark. Three pages of venues to choose from, including City Hall (already been), Dulwich College (fully booked) and the top of the Oxo Tower (damn, Saturday only). But there were still plenty of goodies to view instead, including shiny South Bank towers, elevated millennial libraries and an awful lot of arty people's bedrooms.
1) One street back from the Thames, where once stood Europe's largest 1950s office block, rise three Bankside towers. One of these is the Blue Fin Building, named after the aluminium panels randomly-spaced around the outside, and now home to 2000+ employees of IPC Media. If you read Woman's Own, NME or Country Life then your magazine originates here. IPC HQ forms a bold collection of elevated offices anchored around an airy atrium. It's all very glassy, even the vertigo-inducing walkways that span the central void. For Open House, visitors were allowed to use the lifts unsupervised (that's a rarity, I can assure you) to explore four of the building's eleven floors. Half price magazines (and archive leatherbound Look Ins) on 3. The very non-glam offices of various female-oriented lifestyle periodicals on 7 (Ugly Betty this is not). On the very top floor, the main restaurant (which would have served lunches to visitors had anybody wanted any) [photo]. And down one on 10, as well as a ring of transparent meeting rooms, the opportunity to amble out onto the roof terrace and soak in the view. Oh yes, this is why I do Open House, for the chance to view London in an unfamiliar location from above. The London Eye encircling the Shell Building like a halo [photo]. The Dome of St Paul's peeking out from behind the tower of Tate Modern [photo]. And a few nice plants and two circles of astroturf should employees ever tire of the outward panorama. Unlikely, I suspect.
2) When Southwark council sought to revitalise the centre of Peckham in the late 1990s, their eyes turned to the "temporary" post-war library Hut beside the High Street. As a replacement, they commissioned architect Will Alsop to design a landmarkpublicbuilding, and were delightfully surprised by the result. From end-on, Peckham Library looks like a copper-clad inverted 'L' [photo][photo]. The books and public stuff are all at fourth floor level, with stilts to prop up the suspended edge from below. This makes it rather awkward to change your books if the lifts aren't working, which they weren't on Sunday afternoon, causing several elderly or pregnant visitors to abandon their visit and head home. Our tour group was lucky enough to see some of the behind the scenes areas, including the various 'meeting pods' on the fifth floor. The central pod is shaded by the orange tongue that sticks out over the edge of the roof. Alas the other two aren't quite so well ventilated and can get a bit warm inside, not that readers sitting in the main library underneath would ever realise [photo]. The building's Stirling Prize medal is kept on the top floor in a cabinet, while from the stairwell there's a great orange-shaded view north to the skyline of Central London. On the staff-only 3rd floor we got to peer down below the overhang to watch Peckhamites scuttling across the paved square beneath. And on the 2nd floor we entered Southwark's Local History Library, where the borough archivist greeted us with an eclectic selection of historical documents and shared some Alsop tales. It came as no surprise to discover that the new Peckham Library had boosted visitor numbers sevenfold. If you choose to check in too, keep your fingers crossed that the lifts are working.
3) 4) 5) 6) 7) If you're one of the nine readers who've actually visited my flat, you'll know that interior design isn't one of my obsessions. Nevertheless I spent a considerable proportion of Sunday taking lessons from the experts by poking around inside their stylish abodes. Bunch of show-offs, the lot of them, but then they had a spectacular amount of good taste to show off. At 15½ Consort Road, Peckham, Monty Ravenscroft has crammed an astonishing house into a narrow scrap of unwanted wasteground. The garage at the front doubles up as his wife's dance studio. A glass roof glides across the hole in the top of the living room when it rains [photo]. The bedroom has a showerhead embedded in the ceiling and also a fully functioning bath stashed underneath the bed. It's no surprise that Channel 4's Grand Designs have been here, and maybe that's what drew Sunday's fascinated queues to the front door. Half a mile away, at Quay House, an art studio and architect's residence have been shoehorned into a converted milk depot. I loved the fire-escape-style landing suspended above the hallway, unnecessarily rising and falling to reach four small upper rooms, and I was also particularly taken by an unexpected recycled artwork in the back yard [photo]. Meanwhile, behind the unassuming facade at 49 Camberwell Grove, widower Nick has built an eco-friendly retirement-proof bolthole. His centrepiece is a cylindrical lift to link the two floors, which would have completely replaced the staircase had not Southwark's "bloody" planning department insisted that he put a flight in. But Nick's a mere eco-amateur compared to the owner of 2 Coleman Road, whose two-up two-down is reputedly carbon-negative. Obsessive adherence to an environmentally-friendly lifestyle enables Donnachadh to export electricity to the National Grid (and, for a fee, he'll audit your home to help you do the same). With bags more character than all the other houses put together, however, was the 300 year old townhouse at 67 Grange Walk, Bermondsey. Sympathetically restored, its imperfect angles and slanted stairs had visitors grinning with "I want to live in a house like this" covetousness. Of all the houses I visited, the owners here had made the least attempt to hide away all their belongings, resulting in an 18th/21st century culture clash of most appealing proportions. I may never aspire to live anywhere even vaguely similar, but Southwark's Open House weekend permitted several opportunities to learn from the experts.
Just for a change, I thought I'd spend my Open House weekend scouring two individual London boroughs. And the (unlikely) borough I picked for Saturday was Haringey (think Highgate, Tottenham, and all points inbetween). Haringey merits but a single page in the Open House guide, and few of its attractions will ever draw large crowds from further away. But I did get the chance to do Open House "like a local", in an area I don't know all that well, and there were some real gems along the way.
1) When the London borough of Haringey was created in 1965, one of the urban districts it swallowed up was Hornsey. This left Hornsey Town Hall (on Crouch End Broadway) without a key municipal role, and over the years many parts of the building have fallen into disrepair. Which is a shame, because this flagship 1930s block is one of Britain's first Modernist public buildings. It looks a bit like a mini Tate Modern, with a tall central tower above a stark brick facade. The designer was a New Zealander, not yet 30, and had won a competition against hundreds of more established architects. He blessed the interior with bold light-filled spaces and all-natural finishings (such as marble, limestone and cork). Local people weren't initially taken by their new seat of government, some describing it as a "jam factory", but Uren's radical design has passed the test of time better than many most modern buildings ever will. For Open House we were treated to tours of the interior led by a knowledgeable guide, taking in the old theatre (now used for storage), a basement reception room (EastEnders used it for a wedding aftermath, apparently) and the formal civic wing. The tour was greatly enhanced by a series of understatedcameos from a handful of in-character actors, which really added to the 30s atmosphere (round of applause to the organisers, bravo). The entire town hall is about to undergo major renovation and, by the look of the decaying horse-hair-filled leather chairs in the abandoned council chamber, there's a heck of a lot to be done.
2) 3) One of the joys of Open House in the suburbs is the opportunity to poke around inside other people's houses. Householders may ask you to take your shoes off before venturing within, or to stick blue plastic bags over your shoes to protect the carpet, but that's a small sacrifice compared to allowing the public indoors to scrutinise your hallway clutter, book collection and bedroom arrangements. At Linear House, in leafy Highgate, an award-winning newbuild home has somehow been crammed into a sloping patch of land without intruding too much on the neighbours. This two-winged hillside house has a green roof that links seamlessly to the garden below, and a spacious modern interior to get very jealous about. The centre of the house is based around a glass cube, with the lounge below and a remarkably open bedroom above looking out over the formal swimming pool. Another very different modern family home is to be found across the trees at 30 Cholmeley Crescent, carved out inside a typical 1920s semi. A sympathetic rear extension has created one large lounge at first floor level and a capacious kitchen below, from which stepping stones lead across a koi-filled moat to a ramped (but otherwise fairly ordinary) garden. It could only be the house of two married architects (whose bedroom naturally takes pride of place in the resculpted attic), battling to reach a compromise against council planning regulations. Both of these Highgate homes oozed style and character, and money for once put to excellent use.
4) On the banks of the Lea over Tottenham way (you may remember), lies Markfield Park, and within stands the Markfield Beam Engine. Built in the 1880s to transfer the sewage out of Tottenham, its 100 horsepower pumping engine is a rare survivor of that post-Bazalgette era. Yesterday marked the long-awaited reopening of the museum after an expensive facelift, and the Victorian workhorse was pumping away to the delight of the volunteers who've put in so much effort to maintain it. The flywheel is enormous - nine metres in diameter and weighing 17 tons. It was extremely therapeutic to watch it spin, accompanied by the clonking of the overhead beam and the wheezing of the steam engine below. It was easy to see why so many retired engineers are drawn to spend their time keeping the old beast purring. But as a museum attraction I'm not quite so convinced. The pump house is a marvellous airy building, but once you've watched the engine whirring for ten minutes there's not really much else to keep visitors occupied. Apart from the brand new cafe around the corner, that is, whose entrance I eventually found beyond a semi-vandalised skatepark. I was one of the first-day customers at Pistachios in the Park - a freshly-franchised operation who seemed more than delighted to serve me. I have my doubts that this out-of-the-way park will sustain their fledgling operation, but were I more local I'd be popping by for a chocolate and marshmallow brownie more often. [inaugural steam weekend continues today]
5) One of the joys of Open House weekend is being taken around a building by one of the architects who designed it. Try this in the suburbs and you might even get the architect to yourself. So it was at the Triangle Centre - a community space on St Ann's Road in South Tottenham - where Tom was waiting for someone, anyone to pop in for a visit. "Are you an architect?" he asked. Alas not, but I ventured to sound intelligent as I quizzed Tom during our lengthy walk through the building. We discussed the graffiti-proof green-shield cladding below a layer of already-weathered zinc. We investigated the air-conditioning louvres and mused upon the environmental merits of non-opening windows. We admired the beech-lined central hall and its flexible multi-generational functionality. We explored dedicated areas for the nursery and after-school club, seamlessly linked to their surroundings via lightwells and carefully-oriented windows. Even emptied of its toddlers, teenagers and pensioners, the entire building reeked of deliberate yet understated excellence. Places like this are never going to be popular on OH weekend, and yet its here in the underprivileged suburbs that architecture's really making a difference to the lives of so many.
And I also visited... 6) 7) Two very different places of learning: Highgate School, where a blazered sixth former directed me to the 19th century chapel; and Coleridge Primary School, whose vibrant new infant block evolved out of the former Hornsey School of Art. 8)Alexandra PalaceTheatre, a desperately-in-need-of-renovation Victorian treasure, recently deemed unsafe and sealed off. I would have re-visited the BBC's original TV studio nextdoor, but alas the queue was an hour long. 9) 10) Two other locations, one at the start of the day and one at the end, neither of which were in Haringey. I may have 'done' Haringey in five hours flat, but its buildings are just as worthy of exploration as the City's historic jewels and shiny towers.
Earlier in the year, chatting over beer, blogger M@ from Londonist posed me an intriguing question. "What's the most surprising place in London you haven't actually visited yet?" he asked. I had to think for a bit, because I've had more than four decades to explore the capital and I've covered a heck of a lot of it. But I eventually decided that the most iconic place I'd never actually visited was Buckingham Palace. Everyone's done the outside, but I'd never managed to get myself inside. But now I've been to Buckingham Palace, so I can tick that off my list. Which leaves me thinking where's now the most famous place in London I haven't yet been?
I've done Parliament (Commons and Lords, but not yet the trip up the Clock Tower). I've done the Tower (fortress and Bridge, but not yet the Ceremony of the Keys). I've watched the acrobatic show at the heart of the Dome (but never quite felt the urge to go watch any performance at the O2). I've done all of Visit London's Top 10 London Attractions (although I was only little when I visited Madame Tussauds, and wild horses wouldn't drag me back now). And, thanks to London Open House, I've even done the inside of the Hoover Building, the depths of Churchill's Neasden bunker and the top floor of the Gherkin.
Mid-September, and it's London Open House weekend again! Another excellent opportunity to venture inside buildings I've never been inside before. Except that this is now my eighth London Open House, and I sort of feel I've done most of the really special places already. It didn't help that when booking opened for this year's invite-only buildings, I was sitting on a rain-lashed train somewhere outside Blackpool and therefore missed signing up to any of them.
So this year I thought I'd try something completely different. I thought I'd stick to Open Housing in just two London boroughs - one on Saturday and one on Sunday. One'll be north of the river and one south, one'll be central-ish and one rather further out, and both will (I think) be unexpected. I shall see some of the more ordinary special places for a change, and hopefully enjoy the experience all the more.
In the meantime, if you're out Open Housing this weekend, here are ten suggestions for places you might try: • Freemasons Hall (Sat): ornamental inner temple in Holborn, and HQ of the rolled-up trouser brigade (trowel not essential) • Village Underground (Sat): tube carriages on top of a viaduct in Shoreditch (now used as artists studios) • Royal Courts of Justice (Sat): behind the scenes of this vast Gothic building, including courts and cells (a great couple of hours) • Broadgate Tower (Sat, Sun): the new skyscraper north of Liverpool St station (ooh, that's quite special, innit?) • No 1 Croydon (Sat, Sun): otherwise known as the 50p building(because it looks like a pile of coins) • Barnardo's Village (Sat, Sun): charitable village for poor Victorian urchins (get the tube to Barkingside) • City Hall (Sat, Sun): Boris doesn't allow the public in as often as Ken (but you can do roof and ramp this weekend) • Foreign Office & India Office (Sat, Sun): opulent Whitehall building, paid for by the fruits of empire (queues likely) • Slice of Reality (Sun): that sliced ship moored just north of the Dome (yes, you can go aboard) • Roof Gardens (Sun): unlikely horticultural hideaway above Kensington High Street (arrive very early!)
Oh, and the the most famous place in London I haven't yet been? I'm thinking it might be Wembley Stadium. How hard can that be?
Friday 11th September » The Thames flows though London, as normal. Everybody knows where it is.
Saturday 12th September » As tube services close down for the night, TfL station staff start to replace the previous tube map with the new decluttered tube map. The Thames suddenly vanishes. » Mayor Boris Johnson prepares to fly to New York on a drum-beating trip to promote London. He is not currently incandescent. » Hundreds of thousands of Londoners flock to the banks of the Thames to enjoy the Mayor's Thames Festival. All of them know exactly where the Thames is.
Sunday 13th September » The poster-sized tube map continues to be pasted up at stations, although it's still not commonplace (and card versions remain rare). » A few geeky tube types have correctly spotted that the river is missing from the new map, and are also busy discussing the implications of zonelessness. » Hundreds of thousands more Londoners flock to the banks of the Thames to enjoy the second day of the Mayor's Thames Festival. All of them know still exactly where the Thames is.
Monday 14th September » A fewbloggers are running with the "Thames-free tube map" story, but the mainstream media are as yet oblivious. » The new tube map is not yet available on the TfL website. » The working week commences. The Thames has vanished, but most Londoners haven't noticed. They still think it's that wet thing between the Victoria Embankment and the South Bank.
Tuesday 15th September » The Daily Telegraph is the first newspaper to realise that draining the Thames is a newsworthy story. Also noted are the possible negative implications of removing zones from the map. » TfL reassures Londoners that there are many other ways in which zones can be checked, for example using the maps on trains and on ticket machines. They keep quiet about the Thames, but promise to listen to feedback. » Old man river, he just keeps rolling.
Wednesday 16th September » All hell breaks loose as the national and regional press leap on the story. » The river removal scandal makes it to the Daily Mail, to the front cover of an evening freesheet and to several minutes on the BBC London evening news (amongstmanyothers). » The sudden loss of this fluvial icon is an abhorrent disaster and a national disgrace. Public groundswell demands reinstatement. » "Why fix something that's not broken? The tube map was excellent the way it was, and the Thames was an essential part of the design." » "i often use the position of the rivers as a basis for which station i need to get off at, this is a really daft idea, going to have to start catching busses so I can see where i am going." » "they'll have employed a firm of consultants to make this decision, then another one to assess the outcry, then another one to reverse the decision...all paid for by you the stupid taxpayers...to all those people who voted Blair into power all those years ago, I hope you feel an ounce of responsibility and remorse at the joke Britain has become..." » "Further erosion of English History by the Lunatic Left!!". » The new tube map is still not yet available on the TfL website (because it's safest not to let the public actually see it). » Evil TfL operatives continue to roll out the tainted Thames-free tube map across all stations on the network, the bastards.
» So, yes, the upshot of this mega-furore is that the Thames is definitely going back on the tube map in December. The map'll need redoing anyway because the Circle line's being tweaked. No unexpected additional costs will be incurred. » TfL are also "looking again at the provision of zonal information to ensure that it is widely available to customers". Which could mean that the zones go back on the map, or might just mean that they go back in the index. » And then TfL said this: "We will also see what more can be done to respond to the feedback that we have been receiving on the map becoming too cluttered to be useful." And this is actually the best news of the day, whatever the rest of the media thinks.
Friday 18th September » The Thames flows though London, as normal. Everybody knows where it is.
During the summer, while the Queen's out of town at one of her other official residences, the doors of BuckinghamPalace are flung open to the public. Not her Royal Bedchamber and not the Royal Breakfast Room, but the official State Rooms where she entertains foreign dignitaries and other important citizens. This year they're open from 26 July to 30 September, and it only costs a small fortune to get inside. I went the whole hog and spent £29.50 on a "Royal Day Out", for which I was entitled to entrance to Buckingham Palace, the Queen's Gallery and the Royal Mews. It's expensive, but my ticket entitles me to go back to all three as many times as I like over the next year, which is pretty good value. I bought it from the temporary ticket office up the side of the Palace, where they employ a nice lady in a blue jacket to say "Cashier number 3 please" in plummy tones. It took a while to fill in all the Gift Aid details (yes, even the Queen claims back tax so that she can pay her taxes), and then a little longer to negotiate the obligatory security wand-check. Headphones on <check>, press play on audio guide <check>, step into palace through side entrance...
There's nothing overly glamorous to start the tour, just a short walk down an access corridor along the edge of the main quadrangle. An elevated outdoor platform gives a good view of the extensive central space where visitors arrive, surrounded on three sides by private apartments and the offices of the Royal Household. Behind at least one of those windows up there the Queen checks the Racing Post and pats her corgis. But the tour instead follows the ceremonial route into the State Rooms, via the appropriately-named Grand Entrance. It's both cavernous and welcoming, with red carpeted passageways and staircases leading further into the building. In this case ascent is via the Grand Staircase (where again the opulence of pre-Empire is on full display) to explore the entertainment suite on the first floor.
Don't think living space, think somewhere to ply important guests with champagne beneath a series of dramatic Nash ceilings. There's a Green Drawing Room, and a Blue Drawing Room, and a White Drawing Room - each of them significantly bigger than my flat. No monarchs sit around in the Throne Room looking important any more, although I bet they enjoy a stroll along the lengthy Picture Gallery after everybody else has gone home. Keep moving along please, the audio guide hints, because the public need to be kept on the go. My weekday morning visit wasn't too packed out and it was possible to see all the fixtures and fittings with relative ease, but weekends and afternoons are probably rather more crammed.
Every summer there's a different special exhibition halfway round the tour, and this year the theme is the Commonwealth. Yes, I know, don't switch off, especially if you like 20th century dressmaking. Here are several of the Queen's outfits worn on 60-years-worth of tours around the world, along with gifts given to her by the grateful citizens of the lands through which she ventured. A nice touch is that the audio guides continue to give detailed information about the background to these items, even though the exhibition itself will only be open for nine weeks. The crowdedest room on the entire tour, this.
The Ballroom comes as a bit of a shock, but then it ought to be no surprise that the royal dancehall is one of the largest single rooms in London. Once devoted to elegant after-dinner entertainment, it's now the place where the nation's great and good queue up to be invested, dubbed and medalled. Lesser visitors can sit and watch some of the Queen's holiday videos on a small TV, or admire some ethnic art along a nearby corridor. Still to be enjoyed are the State Dining Room, where place settings and porcelain are laid out with military precision, and the airy Music Room whose bow window looks out across the palace's back garden. And that's where the hour-and-a-bit tour ends up.
You'll probably never be invited to one of the Queen's garden parties, not unless you're especially charitable or affluent. But here anyone can enjoy a cup of tea and a cake in a cafe overlooking the lawn, even if they're not allowed on the grass. It's only at this point that the taking of photographs is permitted, either back towards the western facade of the palace or out towards the bottom of the garden. Her Majesty has a marvellously serene enclave here, rolling down to a meandering ornamentallake carved from the remnants of the lost River Tyburn. It's an endearing landscape, a mixture of the formal and the private, where it's almost possible to forget that outer London exists. Guests are permitted a final five minute stroll past the gift shop round the wooded banks of the lake, and then it's back to the non-regal side of the perimeter wall. Come October, the lucky Queen gets the whole lot back to herself again.
LONDON A-Z An alphabetical journey through the capital's museums Queen's Gallery / Royal Mews
Location: Buckingham Palace Road, SW1A 1AA [map] Open: 10am - 5:30pm Admission: £14.50 (combined) (or about £8 each) Brief summary: Art and horses in the Queen's back garden Website:www.royalcollection.org.uk Time to set aside: half a day
In need of a museum I'd never visited before beginning with Q, there was only one option. Even better, nextdoor was a museum I'd never visited before beginning with R. So I visited them both. And I also visited the big house nextdoor, but I'll tell you about that tomorrow.
Q The Queen's Gallery is where HRH ERII displays her art collection to her humble citizens. Being the monarch of a once world-dominant nation she has a heck of a lot of art in her possession, and only a very small building in which to show it off. It's located along the southern edge of Buck House, in what used to be the Palace's private chapel until German bombs hit home, and was later refurbished as an exhibition space. It's all very grand, both on the way in and inside, with a sort of classical vibe to complement the centuries-old artefacts within. Therefore it seems slightly incongruous to see all the visitors wandering around wearing ugly modern headphones. But the audio guide (and its evocative minute-long descriptions) is crucial to enjoyment of the works on show, because without it you'd be in and out of the Gallery far too quickly.
When you're a rich ruler, two things happen. Firstly you can go round buying up as much art as you like because it's your head on the banknotes. And secondly lots of other rich rulers give you very expensive gifts to show off quite how rich they are. So there's some really opulent stuff here. The first gallery contains fabulous furniture, sumptuous sculpture and perfect paintings, for starters. Nextdoor there's a temporary exhibition of the very finest Sèvres porcelain, because it turns out that George IV was a crockery-hoarder extraordinaire. A tiny dim-lit alcove nearby holds some exquisite jewellery, including a Fabergé egg and some droopy diamond earrings. You'll need your reading glasses to be able to see the information about each item, else just gawp and admire.
A second large gallery repeats the formula, but on a larger scale. The Russians once sent our royals a huge malachite vase, so there it stands in the centre. George III bought that pair of Thames panorama Canalettos, so they've been stashed either side of the gold Flemish cabinet. Press audio button 23 for further information. And what's on show here is only a tiny part of the entire collection, so one can only guess at what the Queen might have hung in her own private quarters.
R A short distance down the road is the Queen's garage - the Royal Mews. It's no ordinary garage, obviously, because the HRH's modes of transport are always something special. Around the Mews' spacious quadrangle are parked some top of the range vehicles, as well some four legged hay-munchers. The horses arrived first, shifted into Buckingham House's back garden by George III, and thirty-ish are still stabled on site today. They're all lovingly cared for, and our present equine fanatic Queen knows every one by name. Visitors are able to walk through Nash's elegant long stable block where the horses are groomed and dressed for major ceremonies, although the penned-up Cleveland Bays and Windsor Greys are more likely to be glimpsed in the working stables on the way out.
In pride of place within the Mews is the Gold State Coach, which has been used by the sovereign at every Coronation for the last two centuries. It's magnificent, in a totally impractical showing-off sort of a way, bedecked with shiny sculpted gold at every opportunity [photo]. It's also very hard to manoeuvre and desperately uncomfortable to ride in. Our present Queen has only risked a trip three times - once at her Coronation and subsequently at her Silver and Golden Jubilees. If all goes to plan she'll be back inside for her Diamond in 2012, which will also be the 250th anniversary of the Gold Coach's first royal journey. For slightly lesser ceremonial trips other carriages are available, including the Glass Coach and the Australian State Coach. These have silkier seats and better suspension, and are better suited to lengthy parades with a lot of regal arm-waving.
When something quicker than horse-drawn is required, the Queen has a small collection of top-notch limousines. These include Bentley 1 and Bentley 2, as well as Rolls Royces 1, 2 and 3. One of these is usually on show, most probably the 1950s vintage Roller, whereas the Bentleys are considerably younger and carry out the donkey work on many a royal engagement. Each limo has a small heraldic flag that's raised manually through a hole in the roof, although apparently this has to be lowered whenever the vehicle exceeds 40mph so as not to cause damage. The Mews is a working community, so you might be fortunate enough to see one of the cars (or several of the horses) heading out on royal business. But don't expect to see HRH driving, merely smiling serenely from the back seat. by tube/train: Victoria
Reaction to the new September 2009 tube map can perhaps best be described as "limited furore". The Evening Standard hasn't complained, and nobody in Scotland gives a damn, but a vociferous online minority has been clamouring to have its say. Most people like the changes, apart from the changes they don't like, although others absolutely hate the removal of something and will not be placated until it is replaced. The usual semi-consensus, then.
Here's what people appear to have been talking/shouting about the most...
1) Zones: London has spoken, and London is not happy. How can anyone with Oyster pay-as-you-go know how much they're going to be charged if all of the capital's fare zones are invisible? "Ah never mind," say some, "because a journey costs what a journey costs." But we're not all made of money. Some of us only want to travel as far as our pre-pay allows, and this change reeks of potential profiteering. It's therefore essential that zonal information is still available somewhere, and if that's not on the map itself then we need to be able to find it easily elsewhere. It could appear in the map's index (if there was one). Or there needs to be a London Connections map (or similar) on every station platform, so that those with zonal queries can refer to this instead. But the zones can't go back onto the main map, surely, or else all those lovely simplifying straightenings will have to be undone. Verdict: something will have to be changed, because passengers need to know where the zones are.
2) River: Amongst those who care, there is general consternation about Thameslessness. Surely it's an essential part of any London travel map? How will people ever navigate their way without the river? Quite easily, I'd suggest. The Thames may be a barrier to cross-London travel, but not if you're in a train. Verdict: be bold, keep the river out.
3) BIN THE BLOODY BLOBS: There's still considerable residual anger about something that hasn't changed. When so many things on the map have been simplified and decluttered, why on earth haven't TfL gone the whole hog and removed the ugly blue wheelchair blobs as well? They publish a separate step-free tube map which is much more useful, so why don't people with limited mobility print that out and use it instead so that the rest of us can enjoy our real tube map in peace? I know, not very politically correct is it? But these blobs are an illusion anyway, depicting only that one aspect of a journey is step-free, and absolutely no guarantee of a flat journey. Verdict: the other changes on the map may be radical, but we're an ungrateful bunch and we're going to keep on moaning about these lumps until they disappear.
4) East London Line: Why is it still on the map at all, when it isn't still there in real life? Verdict: good question.
5) Daggers drawn: Not so many complaints about these † additional symbols, probably because they only appear on the card map and not on the poster. But there seems to be no rational reason why some daggers are included and some aren't, nor necessarily any easy way to determine which particular special arrangement each dagger actually represents. Verdict: Max and I would love nothing better than to force the TfL mappers to explain, one by one, why each dagger is absolutely essential. And then cull the unjustifiable.
6) Footnote: There's a line at the bottom of the new tube map which says "Correct at time of going to print". Verdict: made me laugh, that did.
A final aside... I was trying to take the District line home at the weekend, even though planned engineering works and line closures meant that trains were travelling no further east than Tower Hill. At Temple a group of foreign tourists stood patiently on the platform, waiting for a Circle line train that would never appear. Our train driver took pity on them, and leaned out of his cab to ask where they were going. "Kings Cross," came the eventual reply. For these visitors, it seemed, the existing tube map was far too difficult to comprehend. But they had inwardly digested the Circle line, and were intent on chugging slowly round to reach their destination rather than taking a more efficient more direct route. "Hop on," said the driver, helpfully. "You can change at Monument for the Northern line". So they hopped on. And at Monument they hopped out, and discovered they couldn't change to any other lines because of escalator work, and so faced a lengthy street level slog via Bank to get down to the Northern line platforms only a few yards away. And this story has three very important conclusions. i) No tube map can reflect every difficulty that travellers will face. ii) Whatever Londoners think of the new map, it's definitely more accessible for tourists. iii) However radical the new map, it's only true five days a week.
It's out. It's been released. It's the September 2009 TfL tube map. And omigod, have you seen what they've done to it?
Probably not, not yet. There are quite a few poster versions up at stations already, although by no means everywhere. The paper maps are harder to find, although Canary Wharf was well stocked over the weekend. And the new map's not yet linked from the TfL website, sorry. In the meantime you can make do with Darren's blurry cameraphone snap of the new poster map here, and blech's photo of the new card map here [small/big]. The old map from March can be seen for comparison here [small/big]
There's one word to describe the new tube map, and it's a word I never thought I'd be able to use again. It's "decluttered".
No, really. Lots of the surplus extraneous information that's blighted the tube map in recent years has been swept away, erased, vanished, just like that. And what remains is far closer to Harry Beck'soriginal design than has been seen for some time. It's as if TfL finally listened to the groundswell of opinion saying "blimey that's an unhelpful mess" and "too much information is worse than too little", and took a great big axe to several seemingly unbreakable conventions. The result is a huge step forward (although still with a few steps back, because progress is like that).
Here's a long list of some of the major (and minor) changes I've spotted so far. Apologies, it's a bit long, but then this is the most radical redesign of the tube map in decades.
» Omigod, no river! It's been on the tube map since 1932, marking the divide bewteen tube-hungry North London and the tube-desert to the south. For many it's a useful anchor to the real world, but now it's completely drained away. That's going to shock people. When even the Thames is thought to be clutter, you know that this graphic cull is going to be brutal. There remains a slight hint to the river's location because the symbol for "Riverboat service" has been retained at certain stations, but nobody's really going to be taking much notice of that. I can hear the Evening Standard sharpening its knives in abject horror.
» No fare zones: Possibly the hugest change, visually at least, is that all the fare zones have gone. All nine of them, completely removed, and the end result is a map with a clean, sharp, white background - not seen since, ooh, 2002. What a difference! But there is a downside. Some of us like to know where the zones start and finish because it makes a difference to how much our journeys cost. I have a Zone 1-3 travelcard, so I like to know where the Zone 3/4 boundary is so I don't cross it without realising. That's no longer possible. Just to add to my problems, the zones used to be listed in the index on the back of the paper map, and now they're not. The map's gone from an excess of zonal information to absolutely none at all, and this may not be a brilliant move.
» Realigned lines: Once the zones and river had gone, TfL's contracted designers were free to twiddle with the orientation and arrangement of the various tube lines. No longer did they have to ensure that all of Zone 3 hung together, for example, so various un-knottings and straightening-outs were suddenly possible. The Central line now heads due north to Epping without bending to the right after Buckhurst Hill. The Beckton, Woolwich and Lewisham arms of the DLR are straight lines, not dog-legs. There's also more equal spacing of stations, for example on the northern end of the Piccadilly and the eastern end of the District. Because, as Mr Beck realised, what's important is which station's coming next, not what direction it's in. These are the changes on the poster map at stations, whereas the lines on the card map haven't been tweaked like this and so most of the old bends remain. The Hainault Loop definitely looks better on the poster.
» East London Line: Now this is strange. The East London Line closed for major works in 2007, and has since been shown as a series of replacement buses (and future stations). No longer. The buses have disappeared, and all the future stations (such as Hoxton) have vanished even though they'll be open in under a year's time. The map is suddenly about now, and right now the East London Line isn't there. Instead there's a dotted orange strip showing the old route and old stations (with Shoreditch replaced by Shoreditch High Street). It's retro, and it's pointless, but it's a lot better than the bus overload that was there before. In nine months time the complete extended line will have to go back in, but for now revel in the simplicity.
» Simplified interchanges: Over the past few tube maps, certain interchanges have been getting complicateder and complicateder. Ridiculous multi-blob aberrations disfigured by unnecessary text, for example at West Hampstead, Bow and Shepherd's Bush. Now each of these has been simplified, in some cases dramatically, as the emphasis switches from "how do I change here?" to "can I?". The biggest improvement is at Canary Wharf, where the nightmare depicted on the old map has been replaced by a single interchange blob with two lines crossing north/south and east/west. Hurrah. Passengers interchanging at Canary Wharf may, however, be surprised (and annoyed) to discover that there's a five minute walk between the Jubilee and DLR stations. Just because interchange is possible, doesn't mean it's easy.
» Additional interchanges: The unwary tube traveller is also in for a surprise around Paddington. All three Paddington stations are now shown as interchangeable, whereas previously the far-flung H&C station was kept isolated and distinct. Ditto at Edgware Road, where two completely separate stations are now shown as one, which'll surely catch a lot of future travellers out. I suspect that these Paddington and Edgware Road changes are in readiness for the new extended Circle line, arriving before Christmas, for which yet another new tube map will be needed. And if one day somebody could make the uglified interchange at Waterloo look nice, then we'll all be happy.
» Removal of superfluous text: There used to be a lot of unnecessary extra words on the map, telling travellers things they might (but almost certainly didn't) need to know. "Improvement works may affect your journey..." - gone. "East London line is closed..." - removed. Mention of special fares to Watford Junction - deleted. Even the blue textbox at Heathrow Airport has been taken away, and the word "Heathrow" reinstated in each of the stations' names. Every mention of how far one station is away from another has also gone (hurrah!), so you'll have to work out for yourself that Clapham North is 100m from Clapham High Street, or that Southwark's the closest station to Waterloo East. There's no need to read any more that Sudbury Hill has no weekend service or that Greenford has no trains on Sundays. King's Cross St Pancras now has the word "International" appended at the end of its name, rather than requiring a separate line mentioning St Pancras International. But my very favourite deletion is at North Greenwich, where the phrase "for the O2" has been removed (I'm jumping for joy about this one, which sticks the evil branding bandwagon firmly into reverse gear). On the card map much of this additional information is still referenced by daggers, and then explained in more detail in a panel to the side. On the poster map, however, all of this information (and every single dagger) has completely disappeared. And the poster-map index has disappeared too! If you don't know where Bounds Green or Boston Manor are, bad luck, you'll have to scour the entire diagram until you find them. There's room for an IKEA advert across the bottom of the poster but not a station index. Priorities, eh?
» Removal of unnecessary symbols: Only four types of little blue symbol are now deemed necessary to convey additional information on the network diagram alongside the station names. The National Rail symbol is the most prolific, and then there are a few for connections to riverboat services. Next up is the Tramlink symbol, which on this map applies only to Wimbledon and absolutely nowhere else. And finally airports, which is where another major cull manifests itself. On the old map there was a separate symbol for stations beside an airport, and another (inconsistently used) for stations with "interchange with National Rail services to airport". All of the latter have gone, no doubt because they didn't indicate which airport they linked to and so were worse than useless. On the new map only airports themselves are shown, and there are only two of these - one symbol at Heathrow and another at London City Airport. TfL have really thought about this, you know, and the airport solution is elegantly brief. But one bloody ugly symbol remains, and that's the blue blobby wheelchair denoting step-free access from the platform to the street. No matter how graceful the rest of the map, no matter how lovely Beck's interlocking lines, they're all tarnished by these whopping dark circles that draw the eye screaming "me me look at me". The DLR's especially badly disfigured. After all that effort to straighten out the lines and make them look nice, these accessibility blobs leave the DLR network looking like a a daddy long-legs with virulent blue eczema. It's a shame that nobody could come up with a less intrusive symbol, one that wasn't the same size and shape as a normal interchange station. I know it's important at a handful of stations like Waterloo and Bank to make it clear which platforms have step-free access and which don't. But it's only the relative lack of step-free stations outside Docklands that's keeping the latest tube map from blue-blob hell.
A quick example - Blackfriars: Here's what the tube map used to look like at Blackfriars. No underground trains stopping here, but still plenty of symbols beside the crossed-out name. Change here for National Rail (except you can't). Change here for riverboat services (except you can't). Change here for trains to Gatwick Airport (except you can't). And a dagger linking to a comment elsewhere noting that "Blackfriars Underground station is closed until late 2011", which was pretty much exactly what was already stated on the map. Scary useless clutter. And here's what Blackfriars looks like now. A single word crossed out by a red line, and nothing else. Because right now, in September 2009, all you need to know is that trains don't stop here. Nothing more. Simple.
A few other changes: » Peak hour routes: All distinction regarding limited-time routes has been scrapped. At Chalfont and Latimer, Finchley Central, Woodford and Kennington, where once were confusing dotted lines, now much simpler junctions have emerged. » DLR blue: Is it just my copy, or is the DLR now a lighter shade of turquoise than it used to be? » The Uxbridge arm: It looks fine on the poster, but on the card map there's an unnecessary gap inserted between the Metropolitan and Piccadilly lines. Mistake, I think. » New cover design: Yes, there's a new Richard Long picture on the front cover. But if you're still excited by that, you've been looking at the wrong piece of art.
So there you have it - a brand new minimalistic tube map for Londoners to get used to. Some will love it, and some will hate it, and most of the rest of us will quite like most of it. Expect the disappearing Thames to create the most aggravation, even though it's the vanishing clutter which is the true headline story. Any bets on how long it'll be before some of this gets reinstated? In the meantime smile, because simple is good, and simple is back. Who'd have ever thought, eh?
Last month, when I ventured up onto the Greenway bridge to take my monthly photo of the Olympic Stadium, I was disturbed to discover that major footpath 'upgrade' work was underway. Vegetation was being stripped back to make way for tarmac, a series of bus shelters had been installed, and temporary barriers had been erected to seal off the half of the path closest to the stadium. This wasn't entirely unexpected. There have long been plans to spruce up the Greenway prior to the Games, and a resurfaced linear mini-park is on the cards. I was reassured to hear that the bus shelters aren't for vehicles, they're to give the security guards somewhere less exposed to shelter when the weather turns grimmer over the winter. But the barriers worried me, as did the mysterious foundations being laid immediately behind. And I was right to be concerned, because my Olympic viewpoint is a viewpoint no more. Damn, drat, and sigh. [latest photo]
The security fences all around the outer perimeter of the Olympic Park are being upgraded. They used to be blue-painted wood, evidently temporary, but entirely capable of keeping out your average mischief-seeking trespasser. In places the fences were a bit more impressive, covered by logos and photos and uplifting illustrations, plus warning messages for parents to keep their offspring well away from dangerous building sites. But now they're all being replaced by permament metal mesh barriers - several metres tall and with a series of electrified wires strung across the top. Nobody's going to be cutting through this, or vaulting over it, which ensures that construction of the 2012 stadia can continue in secluded security. The new fences are see-through, unlike the previous blue wood, which means that the public now have a far better view of the scale of the Park and what's being built inside. But it's impossible to take a decent photograph through them, because the slats are too close together, and so my Olympic photography project is buggered.
The Greenway bridge used to be edged by some very ordinary low metal railings. There were occasional fenceposts, at about waist height, and I used to rest my camera on one of those. It wouldn't have been difficult to leap over the top, although there was a nasty drop on the other side which would have deterred all but the beserkest nutter. More recently there's always been a guard and a snarling dog on the bridge keeping an eye on things, and anyone attempting to enter the park over this sewertop perimeter wouldn't have got far. But apparently even that level of security's not good enough in this risk-paranoid age, so the extra-tall metal fence has been installed as well. It's about four metres away from the edge of the bridge, on both sides, narrowing the walkway through the middle and creating an inaccessible quarantine zone where once I used to stand. But no longer. Dammit.
Having said all that, I have to warn 2012 bosses that their security is still rubbish. When I popped up onto the Greenway bridge yesterday there was no guard or guard dog to greet me, just a solitary security bloke ambling slowly northwards with his back to me. Normally I get at least a querulous look from a man in a yellow vest whenever I start taking photos, but not this time. He missed me taking photos of the fence, he missed me taking obstructed photos of the stadium and he missed me taking photos of his back. Five minutes later he was still shuffling slowly forwards, oblivious to my existence, and mumbling something into a walkie talkie or mobile phone. I could (easily) have slipped through the temporary barrier and then through the gap in the megafence, where one remaining segment has yet to be installed. I could then have dashed along to my favourite viewpoint, no problem, and taken one last photo for posterity before sneaking back onto the path all nonchalant and innocent.
Or else I could have abseiled over the edge of the bridge, run across to the edge of the stadium worksite and detonated the dirty bomb concealed in my rucksack, had I been an evil terrorist intent on blighting the Olympic site with Games-cancelling radioactivity. Because no matter what security precautions are introduced there'll always be some way around them, and taking advantage of human error will always be top of the list. But, alas, there'll be no getting around this bloody annoying Outer Perimeter Security Fence for the next three years, so my monthly stadium photo project is officially terminated. It's fortunate that almost all of the transformation and arena-building has already taken place, and I did at least capture that for posterity. Anybody seeking a view over the fence now needs to seek permission to go up the ODA's new yellow 'Viewtube' observation tower, so it's official photos only from the Greenway from now on. And not from me. I should be amazed that the view lasted as long as it did, but instead I'm disappointed by the continued rise of Fortress 2012.
Don't worry, there are still more than 100 days to go before <that event in December>.
But worry, because supermarkets are already stacking their shelves with <that event in December> foodstuffs.
I know, I shouldn't be surprised, it happens every year. But 15 weeks early?
Back of Sainsbury's, next to the fondant fancies and Mr Kipling's, a stack of shelves piled sort-of high with festive treats. Nothing yet on the top shelf, the one reserved for Hallowe'en-based comestibles. But the three shelves beneath are now packed with sugary Yuletide comfort food, as if fully prepared for the inevitable rush of seasonal shoppers. Only a couple more months to wait.
First, a whole array of Christmas cakes. Stodgy ones, luxury ones, icing-topped slabs wrapped in plastic, and thick round discs packed with almonds and peel. OK, September might be a sensible time of year to start making your own Christmas cake - there's plenty of mixing time, and it'll mature nicely in a tin at the back of the larder. But why buy a ready-made cake now instead, and then have to store it somewhere for umpteen weeks. It makes no sense whatsoever, and so selling Christmas cakes in September surely makes no sense either. Plus, come on, who actually likes Christmas cake anyway? It always sounds like a good idea in advance, but then you stuff yourself with turkey and roast and trimmings and stuffing and pud, and suddenly topping up your packed stomach with dried fruit mixture is the very last thing you fancy. Best left well alone.
Then the Christmas puddings. Lots of different types of pudding, from the luxury to the basic, and from the traditional to the toffee (er, yes, honest). There's even a ridiculously lowbrow pudding, proper family size, for a mere £1.09. I hate to think what baseline ingredients must have been used within (or, more likely, how huge the mark-up on the other puds must be). But again, why would anyone want to buy one now? Even Stir-up Sunday, when we're traditionally supposed to mix our Xmas Puddings, is more than two months off. But there are no baking ingredients on this shelf, only the finished article, and surely no takers. OK, so I bought one. A very small one, single-serving-size, of the sort that lonely people without families buy to eat during the Queen's Speech. 40 seconds in a microwave, ping. I bought three actually, because they were on 3 for 2 special offer, and because I haven't eaten one for months, and I like Christmas pudding I do. And I ate it last night with custard. Probably a mistake.
Then the mince pies. Boxes of six, because they always come in boxes of six, and again a choice of cheap or special. Usual problem, though - they won't keep. If you want mince pies to eat during Advent, you should buy them no earlier than November. The mince pies I scrutinised yesterday had a use-by date of 19 October - more than two months before the big day - which is just gobsmackingly pointless. And yet the supermarket wouldn't stock them if they couldn't sell them, would they? And shop-bought mince pies are always such a disappointment, aren't they? It's doesn't matter whether you pick Best or Basic, because they always taste not very nice. Dry sweet pastry with a dollop of mincemeat inside, sprinkled with sugar and then some twee festive design imprinted on the top. So incredibly different, and inferior, to anything home-made. Once you've tasted a fresh flaky mince pie hot from your oven, anything from a factory is surely a complete disappointment.
And finally the panettone (that's rich Italian fruit cake to you, squire). Hidden down on the bottom shelf, in a dark corner, where almost nobody's ever going to notice it. Not that anybody needs to, yet, obviously. And anyway this is Sainsburys in Stratford, not Waitrose at Canary Wharf. The local population aren't exactly known for their mass purchase of extravagant Mediterranean comestibles, but there they sit there on the shelf all the same. Even more of a waste of space than the other Yuletide goodies already appearing on our supermarket shelves.
Look, I apologise for mentioning <that event in December> so early, but they started it, not me. And I wish they'd stop. I also walked out of the store with six hot cross buns. Yum. And a Happy Easter to all my readers.
Every now and then (and more now than then) PR folk send me emails wondering whether I might be interested in something they're promoting. No, really, they still do, even though I regularly remind regular readers never to bother. I'm not the sort of blogger who waxes lyrical about campaigns and product endorsement, because I write about what I want, not what you want. So sometimes I enjoy nothing better than publishing some of these desperate requests for publicity, but with all the brand names heartlessly deleted. And I hope it's damned frustrating for all those concerned.
Hi Diamond Geezer, We’ve recently released an <well known Apple product> application called <really rubbish name>, it is a location based activity suggestion tool that offers fun and exciting things to do in and around your area. In a bid to spread awareness about this new application and its cool features, we are looking for city centric bloggers that would be interested in experiencing the applications offerings. I noticed your blog matches most of the criteria required for taking part...
All the criteria except actually owning an iPhone, you idiot.
Dear <my email address>, I am shortly going to send you a media release about <Mexico-based environmental congress>. We hope that you find the details of interest and would like to share with your readers. (...then, six minutes later...) Organizers say planning is intense during the final 100 days leading up to the <Mexico-based environmental congress> the high-profile global forum of debate, agenda-setting and action on wilderness-related environmental issues.
100 days advance warning? In two emails? Unsubscribe me please.
Dear Diamond Geezer, Having read your blog, I thought that you might be interested in an event taking place in London tomorrow...
Stop right there. Absolutely not.
Good afternoon, I am contacting you on behalf of my client, <well-known insurance company>, to see whether or not it would be possible to get a link onto your website. I believe that visitors to your website would find a link useful as there is a great deal of related information and I feel it will sit well on your site. Would you be interested in discussing adding a potential link?
Not even for a premium. So desperately mistargeted, Alex.
Dear Sir, My name is <name> and I work for an advertising agency in London called <name>. At the moment we're driving buzz online around <alcohol-sponsored riverside bar>. We're keen to facilitate a gathering of notable London Bloggers interested in food, drink and lifestyle and would love you to come and enjoy the ambience of the <bar> and discover the story of <branded spirit>. I stumbled across your site Diamond Geezer and enjoyed browsing your inspired posts on various attractions in and around London. Your eclectic and informed outlook on London would be a great asset to our programme and in return we'd like to think we could offer you an experience that would interest you and your readers. We're going to host 2 meet-up evenings on Monday 14th & Thursday 17th September for yourself and other notable London bloggers for a chance to relax and socialise. The focus of the night will be a complimentary session with our head mixologist...
Any email which contains the phrase "driving buzz online" goes straight into my junk folder, obviously. But if you see any London blogs praising a certain brand of gin to the skies next week, this is why. [*cough*][*cough*][*cough*][*cough*][*cough*][*cough*]
So just to reiterate, if you're a social marketing guru with a product or service to pitch, please take the hint and go whore your goods elsewhere. Many thanks.
Bus 205: Bow Church - Paddington Location: London east/central Length of journey: 9 miles, 70 minutes
When I moved to Bow it wasn't blessed with buses, but now you can't move for them. The latest arrival is the 205 - a post-millennial route that originally ran from Paddington to Whitechapel, then got extended to Mile End, and has just been extended again to Bow. Why run the bus empty to Bow Garage, argued the bus company, when we could pick up passengers along Bow Road instead. Which is great. There's now, finally, eventually, at last, a 24-hour alternative to the bendy 25 all the way from Bow up to Aldgate. And I'd much rather sit on a half-empty top deck in a comfy seat than stand shoulder to armpit in TfL's East End cattle truck. So that's what I did.
They stand out, the new 205 buses, because they're very new, very red and very shiny. Let London's hordes aboard for more than a fortnight and that'll change, but for now every trip is like a pristine maiden voyage. Hop on at Bow Church and you can pretty much guarantee getting a grandstand front seat for the glide down the A11. All human life is here. Thankfully very little of it ever attempts to climb on board. Most westbound passengers seem to want to squeeze onto a 25 instead, which is great because the 205 can overtake and overtake some more and speed down to Aldgate rather quicker. In only 15 minutes, when I gave it a try.
There's a definite change in buzz as the bus crosses from Tower Hamlets into the City. The only serious skyscraper has been the new Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, but now there are gleaming towers and seated coffee-sippers and rushing suits everywhere. I swear that last time I passed the Heron Tower it was a hole in the ground, and now its skeleton is umpteen storeys tall. The 205 doesn't have a lot of competition on the Angel run, apart from the Northern line that is, so there's rather more upper deck passenger action from here on. Polite, ordinary folk - the sort you're always very pleased to be travelling with, but who'll never make for an interesting blogpost.
Along the City Road there are workmen making a racket with a digger outside a hospital. Our bus queues patiently to squeeze past, then manoeuvres precariously between a traffic island and a grab bucket. It's going to be a slow journey from this point on. I had expected quite the opposite - a broad straight-ish road from here to Paddington, what could possibly hold us back? But no, we don't get to do the straight line, we keep being diverted off round one-way loops. Roadworks at Angel - two extra traffic lights. Wedge-shaped detour before King's Cross - one more. Lack of room for bus lane on the Euston Road - double extra red-light. I'm reminded why I pay extra to take the tube, when I can, because it's amazing how much of life is wasted above ground in traffic at junction after junction after junction.
By Baker Street the 205 has peaked. Not so many want to trail too far up the Marylebone Road, and nobody's interested in yet another off-Road detour to the station of the same name. I'm momentarily distracted by a semi-familiar bloke poking around in the boot of a blue Audi outside the local gym. He looks like Michelle's husband out of EastEnders from 20 years ago, only considerably more than 20 years older. Everything circumstantial tells me I'm correct, but my eyes can't quite believe that Lofty's grown up quite so far.
We've nearly caught up with the 205 in front, but it stays tantalisingly out of reach, creeping through every consecutive traffic light one green ahead of us. We skim across Edgware Road into hotel country, and the last few straggling passengers disembark. The driver is no doubt wondering what on earth I'm still doing upstairs as he pulls off from Paddington station one stop round the corner to Eastbourne Terrace. There's no earthly reason for someone from Bow to want to ride to this tedious street full of queued taxis and parked-up buses, except for the sake of it. And not when I could have taken the Hammersmith & City line and got here in half the time. So hurrah for the extended 205 - it's lovely to know it's there, although I can't see any reason to ever want to use it quite this far again.
Other London bus-route bloggers: » Ben(doing them all from 1 to 499, not in order) » One at a time(doing them all in order, on a Freedom Pass)
[Please don't stick any of the answers in the comments box, and no blatant hints please, but do tell us how you get on]
999 puzzle: Pick nine numbers. In each row, the three different numbers must add up to 9. In each column, the three different numbers must add up to the total at the bottom of the column. Easy, just pick nine numbers.
Yet another 999 puzzle: The letters A, B, C and D each stand for a different digit. Use them correctly to complete this multiplication and this division. The answer's always 999.
Blogging is dying Not immediately, not even imminently, but slowly, inexorably, inevitably. It's a damned shame, but that's the way it is. I've now been writing this blog for seven years. I wonder how much longer it's got.
Blogging has had its day Ten years ago, blogging was a little-known activity undertaken by the very few. Even when I started, back in 2002, blogging was still very much an inconspicuous overlooked activity. That changed, didn't it? Once people realised that they could publish stuff, and maybe get themselves listened to, they started taking far more of an interest. And now if you say the word 'blog' in public people generally know what you mean. But they don't get excited any more. When this blog started out, it was read by almost nobody. And then it got noticed, and the numbers crept up slowly, oh so slowly, for a number of years. There were a few blips, both up and down, but always a generally upward trend. Until just over a year ago, that is, when this gradual rise stalled, stopped and levelled out. If there are new visitors today, they're balanced out by readers drifting away.
Blogging has peaked People used to make time to read blogs. They bookmarked them, they visited and revisited them, and they arrived in numbers. Bloggers had created their own online destinations, a showcase for their outpourings, a carefully planned environment. But then there were too many blogs to read daily, there was too much quality out there, and so people switched to reading just the content instead. Why bother reading a blog when it's much easier to consume via an RSS reader? Now the audience sits passively elsewhere, watching a stream of other people's posts feeding through, and maybe reading the ones that interest them if they have time. There's not enough time to be anything other than ruthlessly selective. RSS crept above the event horizon about four years ago. I let you nab this blog's feed in 2006, and by 2007 I had as many subscribers as actual visitors. Today RSS is victorious by a factor of about three to one, which means that you're probably reading this somewhere else, stripped of twiddly formatting, because it's easier that way. Which is perfectly fine, if a little bland, but it's not really blogging any more.
Blogging is in decline It's comments that make a blog. A blogger can churn out as much interesting content as they like, but it's only the interactive feedback of the comments box that makes it come alive. There used to be a greater number of comments, generated by a network of interested collegiate commenters, each with something to say or add or mention or criticise. But now people read too many blogs to have time to comment on them all, even occasionally, notwithstanding that in an RSS feed the comments tend to be completely invisible anyway. Too much effort to notice, too little time to bother. I used to get more comments. I know I still get quite a lot, relatively speaking, but I know I used to get more. Half as many in 2008 as in 2006, for example, and on course this year for even fewer. I like to think that current comments aren't as good as past comments either, but this turns out to be an ill-advised rose-tinted view of the past. Proportions of great comments, moaning comments and bloody inane comments are no different to before, just more thinned out.
Blogging is on the wane Blogging started out as an insular little club, with everyone supporting and linking to each other. As this club expanded it also fractured - webgeeks over there, political commentators over here, hilarious manipulated photos of kittens somewhere else. But people still linked to things that other bloggers had written, and to more professional content elsewhere, until that professional content became the more interesting thing to take notice of. What the media had to say about important stuff was much more appealing than what some online diarist had to say about her weekend. Without the oxygen of attention, newbie bloggers abandoned their writings unnoticed and disillusioned. Blogging won't make you famous, not any more. According to Technorati, the blog search engine, diamond geezer used to be one of the 2000 most influential blogs in the world. They calculated this by counting the number of blogs that linked here, which was relatively high, which was nice. But today I'm only in the top 120000, because far fewer fresh bloggers link here any more, because they're all too busy linking to real news and content instead. I get brief links via Twitter, thanks very much, but these fade fast and leave no permanent trace. I'm glad I started out blogging early, otherwise you might never have noticed me.
Blogging has been superseded The conversation's not on blogs any more, because blogs take too much effort to write. These days it's easier to post your thoughts in little bite-sized chunks, more like a hundred characters than a thousand words. Why spend ages writing something long and meaty when you could disseminate a personal mini-update in seconds. Twitter messages and Facebook statuses take no effort, and yet gain immediate feedback. Hell, why bother with text at all? A photo is worth 1000 words, and also hugely quicker to process. Audio-based posts are increasingly popular, even if the recipient has to spend far longer listening to them than they would reading. And the future's YouTube anyway, as the nation sits down to laugh at some videoed mishap rather than actually making the effort to read something. Action beats text, and blogging's gradually following suit. I write about stuff. I often write about stuff in dense text at considerable length. I thank you for turning up and reading it, but the majority of online consumers will never ever be interested. I'm consumed daily by the equivalent of 0.01% of the population of London. I'm insignificant.
But blogging is still a heck of a lot of fun While it lasts. Oh yes, I'll be carrying on, because what else would I do?
Seven things to do in: Sevenoaks For reasons that may shortly become obvious, I thought now would be the perfect time for a trip to Sevenoaks. That's "Commuter Kent" to us Londonfolk, located just beyond the M25 atop the Greensand ridge. Here are seven reasons to visit...
1) See the seven oaks: Except there are now eight. None are the originals after which the town was named in the 9th century, they've been replaced (and have changed location) several times over the years. The latest oaks are now to be found around the northern boundary of the Vine Cricket Club, spaced out so that it's nighimpossible to take a photo of all of them simultaneously. There were seven trees until the great storm of 1987 felled all but one, and this has since been joined by seven younger oaks to make the unlikely total of eight. One more fierce storm, heaven forbid, should cut back the numbers again. 2) Watch ancient cricket: The Vine is one of England's oldest cricket grounds, located on a wind-whipped slope at the top of the High Street (so it's no wonder all those trees toppled). They've been batting and bowling here for nearly 300 years, and this is reputedly the spot where three stumps were first used instead of two. On Saturday, as I stalked the boundary, the first XI were busy fielding against Blackheath in the Kent Premier League. Most of the benches beneath the oaks were empty, but an appreciative crowd of 20 locals and a dog looked on as the home team swept slowly to victory.
3) Walk the High Street: Sevenoaks has a pleasant old High Street, which you'll enjoy more if you can find the Tourist information office (under the library) and pick up a Millennium Walk leaflet. There's a historic wiggly feel to this street, and also to some of the medieval lanes alongside - which are full of the sorts of shops that stockbrokers and their spouses like to spend money in. Yes the Saturday Market sells brie and hand-crafted jewellery, and yes there's a big Bang & Olufsen showroom - these two facts should tell you everything you need to know about the place. Famous literary Sevenoaksresidents have included HG Wells (shacked up with a student), Charles Dickens (he got everywhere) and most especially Jane Austen, whose uncle lived in The Red House (now a solicitors).
4) Meet the deer in Knole Park: Just off the High Street, really not very far away at all, lies a delightful 1000-acre medieval deerpark. It's freely accessible, courtesy of the local landowner, and a quite marvellous place for Sevenoakers to slip away to. The first time I encountered two deer, halfway down a wooded slope foraging for grass, I thought I'd stumbled across something enchanting and rare. But then I met another, and then three more running across the path, and later an entire herd clustered on the grass and nuzzling up to inquisitive Kentish offspring. It's like having a risk-free safari park on your doorstep, only with antlers.
5) Look round one of England's largest private houses: The Sackville family have been living at Knole for more than 400 years, and it shows. Their home (in the centre of the deer park) is huge and, although it's been tweaked over the centuries, remains an ancient stately home par excellence. Visitors are allowed inside thirteen staterooms to enjoy the art, tapestries and decoration, and most particularly the unique collection of Royal Stuart furniture (worn and decaying a bit by now, but still an astonishing survival). Meanwhile the rest of the house is still a family home, as I deduced from the football posts in the garden and the overnight tent pitched on the rear lawn. Entry to Knole is expensive, unless you're one of the family or a National Trust member, but then everything's on the deer side round here.
6) Hike the Greensand Way: This (very) long distancefootpath follows a sandstone ridge across Hampshire, Surrey and Kent, which means a lot of hill climbing and fine views. I only walked four miles of it but, because destination number 7 was wholly inaccessible by public transport, I walked those four miles there and back again. A first mile across the deer park, then a solitary jaunt between fields and wooded slopes. It's not a popular or well-frequented path, this, but probably all the better for it. There was a National Trust interlude at One Tree Hill (which is most inaccurately named), and then some trunk-topped escarpments to enjoy before climbing back down to the valley below. And not a river in sight, which made a pleasant change for me after the last month.
7) Explore Ightham Mote: And finally, my intended far flung destination - another National Trust treasure. It's Ightham Mote, which is (according to Pevsner) "the most complete small medieval manor house in the country". Picture a chimney-topped square building set around a central courtyard, surrounded by a tranquil moat. It's early 14th century, no less, and still with its Great Hall, old Chapel and Crypt intact. One of the reasons for its survival is Ightham's sheltered remote location, and another is a steady succession of careful owners. The last of these was American businessman Charles Henry Robinson, who lived here until his death in 1985, and this explains the plastic light switches scattered in amongst the bookcases and Chinese wallpaper. This mixture of eras and styles gives the place realcharacter - it's not every home which boasts a Jacobean wood-panelled staircase, a hand-painted half-barrelled Tudor roof and a Grade I listed dog kennel. The National Trust have spent a fortune restoring Ightham Mote, which may be why gaining admittance costs nearly a tenner. But for that money you also get a the landscaped gardens and an apple orchard (and a tea room and a gift shop, obviously). On Saturday I was also treated to a gathering of eight vintage Rolls Royces, driven here by limo-loving afficionados and parked up in front of the West Lawn. While they pootled off for a look around the house, other visitors peered close-up at the shining metalwork, archaic steering and pleated leather. And then off they drove, over the hills back to wherever, whereas I still had to face the five miles walk back to Sevenoaks station. But all in all Ightham Mote's a rare treat, and I'm glad I made the effort to go. Four Ightham Mote photos: chimneys / moat / dog kennel / Rolls Royces
It was a very tasty Bakewell flapjack from a well-known High Street health food store, and it cost 69p. I was pleased when the assistant didn't offer me a carrier bag, or even ask me if I wanted one, because that would have been wholly unnecessary. But then she gave me something almost as offensive. My receipt.
[Bear with me, I'm going to ramp this up imminently]
My receipt was huge. It flopped out of my hand, all giant and white, like a bleached banknote. It must've been at least 25cm long, getting on for a foot, which is surely needlessly large for recording the purchase of a single item. I checked, and yes, the receipt was considerably larger than my flapjack. Its dimensions made me shudder, and sigh, and despair.
[See where I'm going now?]
What could possibly be so important that it needed to be printed out on my receipt to make it so long? An inch or two of blank space at the top, then the name of the company, and then (over four separate lines) the company's far-distant trading address. Then the branch and its telephone number, then the date and time of my purchase, and then a fifteen-digit receipt serial number. I discovered below that the cheery lady who'd served me was called Nicola (this information presumably so that if she'd been a moany old cow I could have rung up and complained with some hope of success). Next a completely over-the-top section detailing item codes, unit prices, VAT codes, prices with and without tax, a couple of blank lines, the number of items purchased, the total amount of sale (twice, on two separate lines), how I paid and what change I got. Phew. And finally, the name of the shop again, its not-very-witty strapline, a VAT reference and another gaping chasm of blank space. In amongst all of this, the name and cost of the single item I'd bought took up only a tiny fraction of the entire wasteful sheet.
[Ooh, I'm getting into the swing of this]
What a complete and utter waste of paper! My receipt was useful in only two ways. Firstly it prevented any store detective from arresting me on the two yard journey from the cash till to the store entrance. And secondly it provided me with all the information I'd have needed to make a stern complaint had I then bitten into my flapjack to find a roasted organic maggot. Admittedly the receipt might have had other more important uses had I been buying a year's supply of fish oil and glucosamine sulphate capsules, and needed something physical to convince my accountant of legitimate business expenses. But no, these 200 square centimetres of rainforest were destined only for the litter bin outside the shop (or maybe the recycling bin back home if I could be bothered). A quite unforgivable waste of the planet's resources, I'm sure you'll agree.
[Let's broaden the argument a bit]
And it's not just this one company that's to blame. The last time I was in Selfridges I emerged with an absolute whopper of a receipt for a single-item purchase. Nearly half of my latest HMV receipt is their logo. Waitrose use an unnecessarily large font size which increases the size of their receipts by over 10%. When I visit Tesco they now insist on churning out extra receipts with vouchers on, even petrol vouchers despite the fact that their computer must know I don't have a car. Sheer lunacy! High Street businesses are increasingly obsessed with printing out mega-receipts full of superfluous information, and it's got to stop.
[Now I'm going to draw a guilt-ridden (and slightly unhinged) conclusion, like environmental devotees often do]
Forget plastic bags - we need to start a campaign against gratuitous distribution of unnecessarily huge receipts. We live in a crazy world where retail giants insist on plastering their brand message all over a monstrous sheet of paper every time we buy something, whereas a tiny printed receipt would clearly suffice. Small is beautiful, but environmental shame lasts forever.
[And one final moment of eco-induced campaign madness]
Now is the time to start boycotting all stores and businesses that issue oversized receipts. How many trees must die before our obsession with excessive printed information destroys the planet? Next time a polar bear drowns on a melted glacier, or a child dies from starvation when the harvest fails, be sure to ask yourself "WAS MY PURCHASE TO BLAME?"
[Oh you may mock, but in ten years time the printing of large receipts will be as socially unacceptable as doling out plastic carrier bags at the till. They'll stick all receipts online, to be accessed from your credit card balance or bank account. Or they'll bluetooth receipts instantaneously to your mobile. Or else the world will end, you see if I'm wrong]
Rewind a week, and let me take to the east end of London. Not quite to London's easternmost settlement (which is North Ockendon, which I must tell you about one day). But to Cranham, which is the next suburb in, where TfL's Upminsterdepot is based. They had an openweekend last weekend to celebrate half a century of District line shed operations, and yes I went along.[some otherpeople'sphotos]
Upminster depot noticings • Look, almost everybody in the queue is male. Some have dragged their wives along, and some have brought their offspring (i.e. their sons), but this is going to be a testosterone-filled visit. • Ooh, the LT Museum's 1938 stock. It may never have been a District line train, but couldn't you just lick it. Best not, though. Let's just look inside the driver's cab and sit on the luxurious seats and admire the oldtube maps and revel in the sheer non-21st-centuryness of it all. [photo] • Ooh, if we put on a protective Metronet helmet they'll allow us to go down into an inspection pit and see what a train looks like fromunderneath. There are a heck of a lot of motors and electronics and hydraulics under there, all hidden away beneath the carriage floor. Suddenly it's very clear why TfL needs such a big depot out here in Upminster to ensure they're all maintained properly. • There's no electric current along the rails in the inspection shed, so the maintenance staff have to attach giant electrical jump leads to the trains when they want to get them back outside. [photo] • Just as interesting as the trains are the staff noticeboards, which reveal what really makes this place tick. Union announcements, health and safety info, and lists of important telephone numbers. There's even an 'Own Goals' board where recent service faults and irregularities are catalogued and investigated, along with lessons learned. • Ooh, a steam train. Ah, it's only going slightly forwards and then slightly back again, but it's drawing an enraptured audience. • Here's TfL's mock-up of the new Circle/Met/H&C/District carriages (the ones with aircon), along with one of the managers responsible for their introduction. I note he's having to answer an awful lot of questions from visitors about reduced seating capacity in the new carriages. His answer is that improved signalling will mean more frequent services... but that may still be a decade away. • Mmm, a rare opportunity to sample TfL canteen cooking. It's bloody cheap, isn't it? • It's not every day you're allowed to walk up close to a wholesidings-ful of tube trains. Worth a couple of photos at least. [symmetrical photo][asymmetrical photo] • More heritage trains, lovely. A 1920s red carriage still undergoing renovation. A 1950s silver car with those characteristic flared windows. The Sarah Siddonselectriclocomotive that ran on the Met in the 1920s (and we can walk around inside? Fab). • Oh, and there had to be some stalls selling stuff. Little model trains, and books about trains, and commemorative Upminster 50 mugs, and even more train-related ephemera. No, really, I can resist buying all of it. Except, damn, for that old in-carriage tube map. I hope it doesn't rain on the way home.
Riding the Routemaster back to the station • Damn, I was hoping to travel on RM1 (the first ever Routemaster) or RM2760 (the last ever Routemaster) [photo]. Never mind, RT3871 will do. • We're travelling along the normal 248 bus route, stopping at all the normal 248 bus stops. The normal passengers are, to say the least, surprised. • A Cranham family are off to celebrate their Mum's birthday, and are mighty chuffed to be travelling for free on a "proper" old bus. • A Cranham dad tries to explain to his young son that the conductor is giving him something called a 'ticket'. How quickly history moves on. • A Cranham granny beams broadly as the bus of her childhood pulls up to take her into Upminster. Hop on, love. She only gets to travel a few stops on this nostalgia trip, but gives the driver a genuinely friendly wave as she steps back into real life. Way to go.
One look out of the window and it's very obviously September. Early sunsets, breezy trees, falling conkers. But London always puts on a last flurry of events and activities and happenings before the frost rolls in for October, and we're all invited. Here's my weekend by weekend guide to free September delights, because it's never too soon to plan ahead.
Weekend 1: September 5/6 » The Great River Race (Sat, 11-5): A spectacular paddle up the Thames from Greenwich to Richmond. » E17 Art Trail (continues next weekend): A bumper bundle of installations in and around Walthamstow. Make sure you take a copy of the Art Trail Guide with you, because (if last year is anything to go by) you won't be able to find anything without one. » Liberty (Sat, 1-6): Celebrating the contribution of deaf and disabled people to London's culture, in Trafalgar Square. » Ignite 09 (Fri-Sun): Cultured innovatory art at the Royal Opera House - free (but bookable) by day, and unfree after dark.
Weekend 2: September 12/13 » Thames Festival (Sat & Sun, noon-10): An extensive programme of rammed riverside entertainment along the South Bank, including a bridge-top feast on Saturday, and culminating with a huge firework display on Sunday. » Heritage Open Days (Sat, Sun): 100s of buildings that aren't usually open, are open. Most of them are outside London - the Home Counties are swarming - but there are plenty open in Kingston (which is spending the weekend pretending it's in Surrey). » Green Chain Walking Festival (continues until next weekend): 14 guided walks along the ten sections of the Green Chain (for all those of you who've always wanted to walk to Erith).
Weekend 3: September 19/20 » Open House London (Sat, Sun): The grand-daddy of architectural festivals, with hundreds of weird and wonderful buildings throwing open their doors across the capital. All the really special events have been fully booked for weeks, but there'll be tons more to see over the weekend. Be there, or regret it for the next 52 weeks. » Bermondsey Street Festival (Sat, noon-5): Food, Fashion, Film and Fun (plus Zandra Rhodes and a dog show). » Tour of Britain (Sat, from 2pm): The final stage of this cross-country bike race is a lycra-tastic sprinty circuit around sealed-off central London. » London Skyride (Sun): Family friendly cycling event aimed at the less confident rider (and potential satellite dish purchaser), as all four-wheeled traffic evacuates the roads between Buckingham Palace and the Tower. » London Design Festival (continues until next weekend): Hundreds of design-er events are taking place across the capital (but it'll be tricky ploughing through the longlist trying to find the true highlights).
Weekend 4: September 26/27 » Great Gorilla Run (Sat): Dress up as a gorilla and run 7km to raise money for charity (or just come along and watch sweaty knackered apes). » Hackney Wick Festival (Sat, 1-5): Arts-inspired fete on Eastway Village Green (although the website's no help yet). » Eid in the Square (Sat pm): As Ramadan ends, this Eid ul-Fitr celebration takes over Trafalgar Square. » Regent's Street Festival (Sun, noon-8): A pedestrianised day with street performers and food stalls (and rebranded radio stations), for those who like their sponsored entertainment to be very close to some expensive shops. » Dig for Victory Harvest Fair (Sat, Sun, 11-4): End-of-season harvest-based arts and crafts (and shire horses and a petting zoo) at the allotment in St James' Park. » Autumn Ambles (Sat, Sun): Guided walks around London's strategic footpath network. Enjoy peripheral bits of the capital you'd never normally dream of visiting. Recommended. » London Fashion Weekend (Thur-Sun): If this excites you, you're probably an accidental visitor to my website.
And at the start of October... » Thames Barrier Closure (Sun 4 Oct, 10-6): Annual all-day maintenance closure (peaking around high tide at 2:30pm). Come and see water piled up on one side only... while it's only a practice.)
As anniversaries go, 70 is nothing special. We normally go a bit wild for 50, 60 and 75, while leaving 70 unrecognised. But when the event's big enough, remembering 70 is only right and proper. And the beginning ofWorld War Two is about as big as big events get.
These are the first words you hear as you enter the Outbreak 1939 exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, and they continue to echo in a loop as you progress around the room. I always find this radio broadcast unerringly chilling - the moment at which our country finally grasped the inevitable and commited itself to uncertain years of mass slaughter. Hearing the words repeated over and over doesn't dampen their effect.
The Prime Minister's declaration of war was sent around the world, and the first part of the exhibition shows how. Coded telegrams to ships at sea, neatly typewritten letters on Government paper, and a series of newspaper headlines bracing the civilian population for attack. Everybody knew what was coming - the blackout had started two days previously, and thousands of evacuees had already started their journeys to relative safety in the English countryside. A short film shows various preparations being made to ready our civil defences, including the construction of bomb shelters and lots of fiddling with sandbags. All absolutely no use if a bomb hit you directly, but greatly increasing your chances of reaching peacetime intact if it fell further away.
For some Britons, Sunday 3rd September 1939 was already scheduled to be a momentous day. The exhibition recounts one baptism and one wedding that took place that morning, the guests rushing home to their bomb shelters when the sirens sounded shortly before noon. Out in the Atlantic that same evening, the cruise ship SSAthenia was mistakenly torpedoed by a German U-Boat uncertain of the new rules of wartime engagement. More than 100 passengers and crew lost their lives, half of these when a lifeboat accidentally reversed into the ship's propellor, and so the war's casualty list started to grow. A display case tells the story of the incident, along with tales from the (mostly Canadian or American) survivors.
But the autumn of 1939 saw only the 'phoney war', before Hitler turned his might to battle and bombardment, and civilians faced greater risk from pitch-black road accidents than from any foreign incursion. Many chose to enlist in the armed forces, with little idea when, or even whether, they might be coming home. Another screen shows clips of films from the time, including propaganda shorts and morale-rousing musicals. It's enlightening to watch Gracie Fields as "Shipyard Sally", setting off to London to save the jobs of Clydebank dockers, singing the much-loved "Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye". The song I always thought was about waving troops off to war is instead set on a Glasgow station platform amid much grinning and cavorting.
Outbreak 1939 isn't a particularly large exhibition, and there's more here for adults than for children, but it's evocative enough of a turning point in our nation's history. The really chilling experience is in the extensive Holocaust exhibition upstairs, which really drives home why this six year conflict was so completely necessary. And I found it a sobering thought that if a similar war kicked off today, 70 years later, this might not only be the first day of hostilities, but also the last.
Today's blog is brought to you not from the heart of London, but from a mattress on the floor of my parents' spare room. It's lovely being in Norfolk. It's much quieter than back home, and there's a lot less pollution, and the view from the back window is of a rolling field rather than a brick wall.
The only problem is, though, that there are things in London I'd like to blog about, but can't.
• The Time Out relaunch: They're tweaking London's favourite listings magazine this week. The Big Smoke section at the front - the one with the quirky interesting snippety London bits - has been scrapped, and I'd quite like to see what they're putting in its place. More pages on shopping, maybe, or possibly another celebrity interview. Or it could be that the number of pages in the magazine has been culled to save money. But I don't know. If I was in London I'd have bought a copy by now, but I've had a look inside various newsagents up here and there's not a single Time Out to be seen. I found several copies of Suffolk Norfolk Life, and it was quite easy to locate a Farmers Weekly, but there's no sign of anything listing central London art galleries or cinema programmes in Croydon. So I can't yet decide if I hate the new Time Out and can save £150 a year by never buying it again, or if there's really still nowhere better to squint at a few hints of what might be worth doing at the weekend. One thing I do know, though, is that they've just scrapped the only section that ever asked me to write something for them. I wonder if Suffolk Norfolk Life would be interested instead.
• The new tube map: I hate new tube maps, but only because I fear scouring them to discover what new functionality crimes some so-called designer has committed on the network diagram. A new tube map is due out dated 'September 2009', with a Richard Long design on the front cover, and I'm eager to discover why TfL thinks a new map is needed. No new stations have opened, and none are scheduled to close or open this month. All I can imagine is that somebody thinks the new DLR West India Quay flyunder needs to be explicitly depicted, lest some peaktime eastbound traveller accidentally end up having to walk five minutes extra to get to the office, and that this somehow justifies pulping the thousands of 'March 2009' maps lying around uncollected in tube station ticket halls. But I don't yet know the true reason because the Central line doesn't quite reach this far, so there aren't any maps up here. Indeed, the good people of Norfolk don't seem to believe in having any train or bus maps readily available because most of them drive everywhere. The village I'm staying in only has two buses a day, rather than two buses every minute like I'm used to, so I can't actually catch a train without getting in a car first. Maybe this thought will temper my anger when I finally see the new tube map and probably hate it.
• The 10:10uk project: A major environmental campaign kicked off in London yesterday aimed at reducing the nation's carbon footprint by the end of next year. The idea of the 10:10 project is that we all sign up and pledge to reduce our own carbon emissions by 10%, and then our grandchildren won't all drown beneath a rising tide of iceberg-melt. It's all wonderfully laudable, except that nobody in Britain actually knows what their precise carbon footprint is, let alone being able to eventually calculate whether it's one tenth lower or not. Our nation's maths will always be far weaker than its good intentions. Whatever, the big launch was on the South Bank yesterday afternoon, and if I'd been in London I might have walked there after work to collect my free keyring. I'd also have moaned to the organisers about the free glass of champagne being dished out to the first 1000 signatories, because nothing quite sends the wrong message like an unnecessary free gift imported from abroad and fizzing with with food miles. But I still logged onto the website, where I was presented with the following message: "Stop staring at your computer screen and get yourself down to the Tate Modern on London's South Bank". Erm, dear organisers, I'm not in central London, I'm in Norfolk. If I head down to the Tate Modern I'm going to have to get in a CO2-spewing car, then travel for two hours on trains, and all solely so that I can appear in your big PR-splash photo opportunity. Honestly, we don't all live in bloody London, and this blinkered SE-centric approach to publicity is alienating the rest of the country where most of the carbon-guzzling population actually live. I hope the capital's grandchildren are good at swimming.
Sorry, there's no space to tell you all about my day trip to Thetford, or to post a few paragraphs on how drought is affecting the local sugar beet crop, or to report on the nearby balloon-free balloon festival. Maybe later, when I'm back in London.
» If you're on Twitter, now would be the perfect time to follow samuelpepys. He's currently tweeting his diary from 343 years ago, and what he doesn't yet know is that the first week of September 1666 is destined to be the most notorious in London's history. » If you're not on Twitter, now would be the perfect time to bookmark the Diary of Samuel Pepys. Website owner Phil Gyford has been posting daily entries from the great man's 17th century London diary for several years, and reading the complete long-hand text is by far the better way to experience history for anyone without 140-character-limited attention deficit disorder. Quick now, because there's less than 24 hours before Pudding Lane burns.
Note to self: That's 12,000 words on the Lea Valley - conceived, researched, explored, comprehensively photographed and all written up in less than two months flat. So it can be done. But it was only possible to complete because of my self-imposed discipline in meeting several daily deadlines for online publication. Alas, in choosing to publish every last detail online, I have effectively given the whole lot away for free. In terms of cost/benefit analysis and best value time management, this Lea-walking project has been a big fail. It's taken a heck of a lot of effort, it's stifled my social life for several weekends, and I shall earn absolutely nothing from completing it. But it was also an enticingly fascinating challenge, and that to me has always been far more important than any possible financial reward. Sorry Murdochs, but the world is full of amateur enthusiasts (like me) spewing forth free online content day-in day-out, and if this somehow destabilises your fragile global news-media/print-publishing economy then so be it. And be warned that I'm already wondering what to waste my life on next August...
What's on this weekend? Festival of Reading 2009 Fri 4th - Sat 12th December
Meet East End authors at Tower Hamlets' Idea Stores (including Dan Cruickshank).
A new station opened in London yesterday. It's close to the Thames in Chelsea, on the West London Line branch of the London Overground. It's in Zone 2. It's called Imperial Wharf. [see 6 photos]
Imperial Wharf station opened yesterday. The station plugs one of the gaping holes in inner London's rail network, in riverside Chelsea, by (cheaply) piggybacking a new station onto an existing railway line. Before yesterday the Sands End area was linked to the tube network only by bus, and residents of these shiny riverside towers aren't really the sort who take buses. Taxis are far more their style, and black cabs swarm around the area in large numbers. It's yet to be seen whether the provision of a shiny new station will ever prise the majority of locals away from their preferred four-wheeled alternatives.
Imperial Wharf station opened yesterday. Several of the passengers embarking and disembarking from the occasional trains looked genuinely local, and only a few looked like the sort of blokes who visit stations on their opening day to take lots of photos. The platforms were gleaming and new, obviously, with streamlined canopies and tangerine roundels. I noted that the cretinous TfL "next train indicator" installers had been busy and had ensured that a same-height security camera precisely blocked information about the next northbound train from the furthest half of the platform. Access to ground level is by lift, or for the more energetic via a bright white staircase winding around the central elevator shaft. This makes Imperial Wharf an official step-free station (from street to platform if not from platform to train), although it's not marked on the latest tube map with a big blue blob (which is nice).
Yesterday, because the weather was great, I took myself off to the Sussex coast for a long walk along the chalky clifftops. I started at Seaford (one of the old Cinque Ports, just past Newhaven, 90 minutes from Victoria), then yomped up and over to Cuckmere Haven (unspoilt river valley, requires major inland diversion, home to my very favourite meander), then walked the breathtaking chalky switchback of the Seven Sisters (Haven Brow, Short Brow, Rough Brow, Brass Point, Flat Hill, Baily's Hill, Went Hill Brow), then stopped for an ice cream at Birling Gap, then pushed past the builders at the Belle Tout lighthouse (it'll be opening as a mini-hotel later in the year), then stood on the top of Beachy Head (keeping an eye out for the suicide-prevention vicar), and finally descended into Eastbourne (promenade, bandstand, pier, old people). Altogether, 14 fantastic leg-aching miles.
If you've never lived around here, you probably don't know Bromley-by-Bow very well. It has speckles of history and loveliness, but on the whole this patch of London is relentlessly poor, characterised by social housing and tenement blocks. It's home to a large Bangladeshi population, many of whom live crowded into unsuitable apartments hemmed in alongside a gridlocked arterial road. Bromley High Street isn't an alluring retail destination, more a tiny huddle of betting shops, laundrettes and Halal-friendly grocers. If any entrepreneur attempted to open a coffee shop or delicatessen around here, their business would fail within weeks. I wouldn't live anywhere else, obviously.
Tesco are the main protagonists here, making the most of the land they own between the dual carriageway and the river. A patch of neighbouring industrial land will be levelled and a brand new twice-the-size megastore constructed, with a 500-ish capacity car park concealed in a subterranean cavern beneath the store. This new Tesco will be an environmental showpiece, so they say, and is scheduled for completion by 2012 (subject to planning permission). In place of the old supermarket will go 460 new homes, which'll be lovely assuming you like living in a glassy green box in the sky. And there'll also be a much needed primary school tucked in beside the river, literally in the shadow of the new Tesco. The usual stuff when regeneration of an area is mooted.
How difficult can it be to upgrade the Jubilee line? Very, as it turns out. Contractors Tube Lines had promised to upgrade all the signalling on the Jubilee by the end of the year, enabling all the trains to run quicker. But we now know that they won't hit this New Year target because the work's taken longer than they hoped, and (apparently) because they weren't allowed half as many weekend line closures as they'd have liked.
Olympic update
It's a bloody massive lock. After my walk along the Lea last month I'm used to much smaller structures with wooden gates and twee waterside cottages, but this is nothing of the sort. It's three channels wide, with each gate wide enough to take a 350 tonne barge. The gates rotate up, not across, a bit like the Thames Barrier. There's a fish ladder along one side to ensure that scaly finny creatures can still pass up and downstream. And operations are overseen from a squat narrow control tower mid-river, complete with home comforts like a shower for the personnel working within. It's the sort of lock you might expect to find on the Manchester Ship Canal, not on an insignificant East End backwater.
Now stop me if I'm wrong, but an average of one big barge per fortnight is a pretty unimpressive strike rate. The whole idea of funding the lock in the first place was to enable the transfer of waterborne cargo during the peak construction window, and that doesn't appear to be happening yet. To give you some idea of the scale of the problem, Three Mills Lock was originally planned to open last summer, four years before the Games themselves. But the body of the stadium's already up, absolutely none of which has arrived by river, and there's a very real risk that few of the building materials for the remaining stadia will arrive via this watery route. The Park's location slap bang beside Stratford station has allowed use of a far more convenient sustainable mode of transport, and that's rail. Who needs slow meandering river traffic when freight can arrive more easily by train (or, to keep costs down, even by road)?
1) One street back from the Thames, where once stood Europe's largest 1950s office block, rise three Bankside towers. One of these is the Blue Fin Building, named after the aluminium panels randomly-spaced around the outside, and now home to 2000+ employees of IPC Media. If you read Woman's Own, NME or Country Life then your magazine originates here. IPC HQ forms a bold collection of elevated offices anchored around an airy atrium. It's all very glassy, even the vertigo-inducing walkways that span the central void. For Open House, visitors were allowed to use the lifts unsupervised (that's a rarity, I can assure you) to explore four of the building's eleven floors. Half price magazines (and archive leatherbound Look Ins) on 3. The very non-glam offices of various female-oriented lifestyle periodicals on 7 (Ugly Betty this is not). On the very top floor, the main restaurant (which would have served lunches to visitors had anybody wanted any) [photo]. And down one on 10, as well as a ring of transparent meeting rooms, the opportunity to amble out onto the roof terrace and soak in the view. Oh yes, this is why I do Open House, for the chance to view London in an unfamiliar location from above. The London Eye encircling the Shell Building like a halo [photo]. The Dome of St Paul's peeking out from behind the tower of Tate Modern [photo]. And a few nice plants and two circles of astroturf should employees ever tire of the outward panorama. Unlikely, I suspect.
2) When Southwark council sought to revitalise the centre of Peckham in the late 1990s, their eyes turned to the "temporary" post-war library Hut beside the High Street. As a replacement, they commissioned architect Will Alsop to design a landmark public building, and were delightfully surprised by the result. From end-on, Peckham Library looks like a copper-clad inverted 'L' [photo] [photo]. The books and public stuff are all at fourth floor level, with stilts to prop up the suspended edge from below. This makes it rather awkward to change your books if the lifts aren't working, which they weren't on Sunday afternoon, causing several elderly or pregnant visitors to abandon their visit and head home. Our tour group was lucky enough to see some of the behind the scenes areas, including the various 'meeting pods' on the fifth floor. The central pod is shaded by the orange tongue that sticks out over the edge of the roof. Alas the other two aren't quite so well ventilated and can get a bit warm inside, not that readers sitting in the main library underneath would ever realise [photo]. The building's Stirling Prize medal is kept on the top floor in a cabinet, while from the stairwell there's a great orange-shaded view north to the skyline of Central London. On the staff-only 3rd floor we got to peer down below the overhang to watch Peckhamites scuttling across the paved square beneath. And on the 2nd floor we entered Southwark's Local History Library, where the borough archivist greeted us with an eclectic selection of historical documents and shared some Alsop tales. It came as no surprise to discover that the new Peckham Library had boosted visitor numbers sevenfold. If you choose to check in too, keep your fingers crossed that the lifts are working.
3) 4) 5) 6) 7) If you're one of the nine readers who've actually visited my flat, you'll know that interior design isn't one of my obsessions. Nevertheless I spent a considerable proportion of Sunday taking lessons from the experts by poking around inside their stylish abodes. Bunch of show-offs, the lot of them, but then they had a spectacular amount of good taste to show off. At 15½ Consort Road, Peckham, Monty Ravenscroft has crammed an astonishing house into a narrow scrap of unwanted wasteground. The garage at the front doubles up as his wife's dance studio. A glass roof glides across the hole in the top of the living room when it rains [photo]. The bedroom has a showerhead embedded in the ceiling and also a fully functioning bath stashed underneath the bed. It's no surprise that Channel 4's Grand Designs have been here, and maybe that's what drew Sunday's fascinated queues to the front door. Half a mile away, at Quay House, an art studio and architect's residence have been shoehorned into a converted milk depot. I loved the fire-escape-style landing suspended above the hallway, unnecessarily rising and falling to reach four small upper rooms, and I was also particularly taken by an unexpected recycled artwork in the back yard [photo]. Meanwhile, behind the unassuming facade at 49 Camberwell Grove, widower Nick has built an eco-friendly retirement-proof bolthole. His centrepiece is a cylindrical lift to link the two floors, which would have completely replaced the staircase had not Southwark's "bloody" planning department insisted that he put a flight in. But Nick's a mere eco-amateur compared to the owner of 2 Coleman Road, whose two-up two-down is reputedly carbon-negative. Obsessive adherence to an environmentally-friendly lifestyle enables Donnachadh to export electricity to the National Grid (and, for a fee, he'll audit your home to help you do the same). With bags more character than all the other houses put together, however, was the 300 year old townhouse at 67 Grange Walk, Bermondsey. Sympathetically restored, its imperfect angles and slanted stairs had visitors grinning with "I want to live in a house like this" covetousness. Of all the houses I visited, the owners here had made the least attempt to hide away all their belongings, resulting in an 18th/21st century culture clash of most appealing proportions. I may never aspire to live anywhere even vaguely similar, but Southwark's Open House weekend permitted several opportunities to learn from the experts.
1) When the London borough of Haringey was created in 1965, one of the urban districts it swallowed up was Hornsey. This left Hornsey Town Hall (on Crouch End Broadway) without a key municipal role, and over the years many parts of the building have fallen into disrepair. Which is a shame, because this flagship 1930s block is one of Britain's first Modernist public buildings. It looks a bit like a mini Tate Modern, with a tall central tower above a stark brick facade. The designer was a New Zealander, not yet 30, and had won a competition against hundreds of more established architects. He blessed the interior with bold light-filled spaces and all-natural finishings (such as marble, limestone and cork). Local people weren't initially taken by their new seat of government, some describing it as a "jam factory", but Uren's radical design has passed the test of time better than many most modern buildings ever will. For Open House we were treated to tours of the interior led by a knowledgeable guide, taking in the old theatre (now used for storage), a basement reception room (EastEnders used it for a wedding aftermath, apparently) and the formal civic wing. The tour was greatly enhanced by a series of understated cameos from a handful of in-character actors, which really added to the 30s atmosphere (round of applause to the organisers, bravo). The entire town hall is about to undergo major renovation and, by the look of the decaying horse-hair-filled leather chairs in the abandoned council chamber, there's a heck of a lot to be done.
2) 3) One of the joys of Open House in the suburbs is the opportunity to poke around inside other people's houses. Householders may ask you to take your shoes off before venturing within, or to stick blue plastic bags over your shoes to protect the carpet, but that's a small sacrifice compared to allowing the public indoors to scrutinise your hallway clutter, book collection and bedroom arrangements. At Linear House, in leafy Highgate, an award-winning newbuild home has somehow been crammed into a sloping patch of land without intruding too much on the neighbours. This two-winged hillside house has a green roof that links seamlessly to the garden below, and a spacious modern interior to get very jealous about. The centre of the house is based around a glass cube, with the lounge below and a remarkably open bedroom above looking out over the formal swimming pool. Another very different modern family home is to be found across the trees at 30 Cholmeley Crescent, carved out inside a typical 1920s semi. A sympathetic rear extension has created one large lounge at first floor level and a capacious kitchen below, from which stepping stones lead across a koi-filled moat to a ramped (but otherwise fairly ordinary) garden. It could only be the house of two married architects (whose bedroom naturally takes pride of place in the resculpted attic), battling to reach a compromise against council planning regulations. Both of these Highgate homes oozed style and character, and money for once put to excellent use.
4) On the banks of the Lea over Tottenham way (you may remember), lies Markfield Park, and within stands the Markfield Beam Engine. Built in the 1880s to transfer the sewage out of Tottenham, its 100 horsepower pumping engine is a rare survivor of that post-Bazalgette era. Yesterday marked the long-awaited reopening of the museum after an expensive facelift, and the Victorian workhorse was pumping away to the delight of the volunteers who've put in so much effort to maintain it. The flywheel is enormous - nine metres in diameter and weighing 17 tons. It was extremely therapeutic to watch it spin, accompanied by the clonking of the overhead beam and the wheezing of the steam engine below. It was easy to see why so many retired engineers are drawn to spend their time keeping the old beast purring. But as a museum attraction I'm not quite so convinced. The pump house is a marvellous airy building, but once you've watched the engine whirring for ten minutes there's not really much else to keep visitors occupied. Apart from the brand new cafe around the corner, that is, whose entrance I eventually found beyond a semi-vandalised skatepark. I was one of the first-day customers at Pistachios in the Park - a freshly-franchised operation who seemed more than delighted to serve me. I have my doubts that this out-of-the-way park will sustain their fledgling operation, but were I more local I'd be popping by for a chocolate and marshmallow brownie more often. [inaugural steam weekend continues today]
5) One of the joys of Open House weekend is being taken around a building by one of the architects who designed it. Try this in the suburbs and you might even get the architect to yourself. So it was at the Triangle Centre - a community space on St Ann's Road in South Tottenham - where Tom was waiting for someone, anyone to pop in for a visit. "Are you an architect?" he asked. Alas not, but I ventured to sound intelligent as I quizzed Tom during our lengthy walk through the building. We discussed the graffiti-proof green-shield cladding below a layer of already-weathered zinc. We investigated the air-conditioning louvres and mused upon the environmental merits of non-opening windows. We admired the beech-lined central hall and its flexible multi-generational functionality. We explored dedicated areas for the nursery and after-school club, seamlessly linked to their surroundings via lightwells and carefully-oriented windows. Even emptied of its toddlers, teenagers and pensioners, the entire building reeked of deliberate yet understated excellence. Places like this are never going to be popular on OH weekend, and yet its here in the underprivileged suburbs that architecture's really making a difference to the lives of so many.
During the summer, while the Queen's out of town at one of her other official residences, the doors of Buckingham Palace are flung open to the public. Not her Royal Bedchamber and not the Royal Breakfast Room, but the official State Rooms where she entertains foreign dignitaries and other important citizens. This year they're open from 26 July to 30 September, and it only costs a small fortune to get inside. I went the whole hog and spent £29.50 on a "Royal Day Out", for which I was entitled to entrance to Buckingham Palace, the Queen's Gallery and the Royal Mews. It's expensive, but my ticket entitles me to go back to all three as many times as I like over the next year, which is pretty good value. I bought it from the temporary ticket office up the side of the Palace, where they employ a nice lady in a blue jacket to say "Cashier number 3 please" in plummy tones. It took a while to fill in all the Gift Aid details (yes, even the Queen claims back tax so that she can pay her taxes), and then a little longer to negotiate the obligatory security wand-check. Headphones on <check>, press play on audio guide <check>, step into palace through side entrance...
Q The Queen's Gallery is where HRH ERII displays her art collection to her humble citizens. Being the monarch of a once world-dominant nation she has a heck of a lot of art in her possession, and only a very small building in which to show it off. It's located along the southern edge of Buck House, in what used to be the Palace's private chapel until German bombs hit home, and was later refurbished as an exhibition space. It's all very grand, both on the way in and inside, with a sort of classical vibe to complement the centuries-old artefacts within. Therefore it seems slightly incongruous to see all the visitors wandering around wearing ugly modern headphones. But the audio guide (and its evocative minute-long descriptions) is crucial to enjoyment of the works on show, because without it you'd be in and out of the Gallery far too quickly.
R A short distance down the road is the Queen's garage - the Royal Mews. It's no ordinary garage, obviously, because the HRH's modes of transport are always something special. Around the Mews' spacious quadrangle are parked some top of the range vehicles, as well some four legged hay-munchers. The horses arrived first, shifted into Buckingham House's back garden by George III, and thirty-ish are still stabled on site today. They're all lovingly cared for, and our present equine fanatic Queen knows every one by name. Visitors are able to walk through Nash's elegant long stable block where the horses are groomed and dressed for major ceremonies, although the penned-up Cleveland Bays and Windsor Greys are more likely to be glimpsed in the working stables on the way out.
In pride of place within the Mews is the Gold State Coach, which has been used by the sovereign at every Coronation for the last two centuries. It's magnificent, in a totally impractical showing-off sort of a way, bedecked with shiny sculpted gold at every opportunity [photo]. It's also very hard to manoeuvre and desperately uncomfortable to ride in. Our present Queen has only risked a trip three times - once at her Coronation and subsequently at her Silver and Golden Jubilees. If all goes to plan she'll be back inside for her Diamond in 2012, which will also be the 250th anniversary of the Gold Coach's first royal journey. For slightly lesser ceremonial trips other carriages are available, including the Glass Coach and the Australian State Coach. These have silkier seats and better suspension, and are better suited to lengthy parades with a lot of regal arm-waving.
1) Zones: London has spoken, and London is not happy. How can anyone with Oyster pay-as-you-go know how much they're going to be charged if all of the capital's fare zones are invisible? "Ah never mind," say some, "because a journey costs what a journey costs." But we're not all made of money. Some of us only want to travel as far as our pre-pay allows, and this change reeks of potential profiteering. It's therefore essential that zonal information is still available somewhere, and if that's not on the map itself then we need to be able to find it easily elsewhere. It could appear in the map's index (if there was one). Or there needs to be a London Connections map (or similar) on every station platform, so that those with zonal queries can refer to this instead. But the zones can't go back onto the main map, surely, or else all those lovely simplifying straightenings will have to be undone.
There's one word to describe the new tube map, and it's a word I never thought I'd be able to use again. It's "decluttered".
» Realigned lines: Once the zones and river had gone, TfL's contracted designers were free to twiddle with the orientation and arrangement of the various tube lines. No longer did they have to ensure that all of Zone 3 hung together, for example, so various un-knottings and straightening-outs were suddenly possible. The Central line now heads due north to Epping without bending to the right after Buckhurst Hill. The Beckton, Woolwich and Lewisham arms of the DLR are straight lines, not dog-legs. There's also more equal spacing of stations, for example on the northern end of the Piccadilly and the eastern end of the District. Because, as Mr Beck realised, what's important is which station's coming next, not what direction it's in.
» Additional interchanges: The unwary tube traveller is also in for a surprise around Paddington. All three Paddington stations are now shown as interchangeable, whereas previously the far-flung H&C station was kept isolated and distinct. Ditto at Edgware Road, where two completely separate stations are now shown as one, which'll surely catch a lot of future travellers out. I suspect that these Paddington and Edgware Road changes are in readiness for the new extended Circle line, arriving before Christmas, for which yet another new tube map will be needed.
» Removal of unnecessary symbols: Only four types of little blue symbol are now deemed necessary to convey additional information on the network diagram alongside the station names. The National Rail symbol is the most prolific, and then there are a few for connections to riverboat services. Next up is the Tramlink symbol, which on this map applies only to Wimbledon and absolutely nowhere else. And finally airports, which is where another major cull manifests itself. On the old map there was a separate symbol for stations beside an airport, and another (inconsistently used) for stations with "interchange with National Rail services to airport". All of the latter have gone, no doubt because they didn't indicate which airport they linked to and so were worse than useless. On the new map only airports themselves are shown, and there are only two of these - one symbol at Heathrow and another at London City Airport. TfL have really thought about this, you know, and the airport solution is elegantly brief.
A quick example - Blackfriars: Here's what the tube map used to look like at Blackfriars. No underground trains stopping here, but still plenty of symbols beside the crossed-out name. Change here for National Rail (except you can't). Change here for riverboat services (except you can't). Change here for trains to Gatwick Airport (except you can't). And a dagger linking to a comment elsewhere noting that "Blackfriars Underground station is closed until late 2011", which was pretty much exactly what was already stated on the map. Scary useless clutter.
And here's what Blackfriars looks like now. A single word crossed out by a red line, and nothing else. Because right now, in September 2009, all you need to know is that trains don't stop here. Nothing more. Simple.
The security fences all around the outer perimeter of the Olympic Park are being upgraded. They used to be blue-painted wood, evidently temporary, but entirely capable of keeping out your average mischief-seeking trespasser. In places the fences were a bit more impressive, covered by logos and photos and uplifting illustrations, plus warning messages for parents to keep their offspring well away from dangerous building sites. But now they're all being replaced by permament metal mesh barriers - several metres tall and with a series of electrified wires strung across the top. Nobody's going to be cutting through this, or vaulting over it, which ensures that construction of the 2012 stadia can continue in secluded security. The new fences are see-through, unlike the previous blue wood, which means that the public now have a far better view of the scale of the Park and what's being built inside. But it's impossible to take a decent photograph through them, because the slats are too close together, and so my Olympic photography project is buggered.
Having said all that, I have to warn 2012 bosses that their security is still rubbish. When I popped up onto the Greenway bridge yesterday there was no guard or guard dog to greet me, just a solitary security bloke ambling slowly northwards with his back to me. Normally I get at least a querulous look from a man in a yellow vest whenever I start taking photos, but not this time. He missed me taking photos of the fence, he missed me taking obstructed photos of the stadium and he missed me taking photos of his back. Five minutes later he was still shuffling slowly forwards, oblivious to my existence, and mumbling something into a walkie talkie or mobile phone. I could (easily) have slipped through the temporary barrier and then through the gap in the megafence, where one remaining segment has yet to be installed. I could then have dashed along to my favourite viewpoint, no problem, and taken one last photo for posterity before sneaking back onto the path all nonchalant and innocent.
Don't worry, there are still more than 100 days to go before <that event in December>.
Bus 205: Bow Church - Paddington
They stand out, the new 205 buses, because they're very new, very red and very shiny. Let London's hordes aboard for more than a fortnight and that'll change, but for now every trip is like a pristine maiden voyage. Hop on at Bow Church and you can pretty much guarantee getting a grandstand front seat for the glide down the A11. All human life is here. Thankfully very little of it ever attempts to climb on board. Most westbound passengers seem to want to squeeze onto a 25 instead, which is great because the 205 can overtake and overtake some more and speed down to Aldgate rather quicker. In only 15 minutes, when I gave it a try.
By Baker Street the 205 has peaked. Not so many want to trail too far up the Marylebone Road, and nobody's interested in yet another off-Road detour to the station of the same name. I'm momentarily distracted by a semi-familiar bloke poking around in the boot of a blue Audi outside the local gym. He looks like Michelle's husband out of EastEnders from 20 years ago, only considerably more than 20 years older. Everything circumstantial tells me I'm correct, but my eyes can't quite believe that Lofty's grown up quite so far.
999 puzzle: Pick nine numbers. In each row, the three different numbers must add up to 9. In each column, the three different numbers must add up to the total at the bottom of the column. Easy, just pick nine numbers.
1) See the seven oaks: Except there are now eight. None are the originals after which the town was named in the 9th century, they've been replaced (and have changed location) several times over the years. The latest oaks are now to be found around the northern boundary of the Vine Cricket Club, spaced out so that it's nigh impossible to take a photo of all of them simultaneously. There were seven trees until the great storm of 1987 felled all but one, and this has since been joined by seven younger oaks to make the unlikely total of eight. One more fierce storm, heaven forbid, should cut back the numbers again.
3) Walk the High Street: Sevenoaks has a pleasant old High Street, which you'll enjoy more if you can find the Tourist information office (under the library) and pick up a Millennium Walk leaflet. There's a historic wiggly feel to this street, and also to some of the medieval lanes alongside - which are full of the sorts of shops that stockbrokers and their spouses like to spend money in. Yes the Saturday Market sells brie and hand-crafted jewellery, and yes there's a big Bang & Olufsen showroom - these two facts should tell you everything you need to know about the place. Famous literary Sevenoaks residents have included HG Wells (shacked up with a student), Charles Dickens (he got everywhere) and most especially Jane Austen, whose uncle lived in The Red House (now a solicitors).
4) Meet the deer in Knole Park: Just off the High Street, really not very far away at all, lies a delightful 1000-acre medieval deer park. It's freely accessible, courtesy of the local landowner, and a quite marvellous place for Sevenoakers to slip away to. The first time I encountered two deer, halfway down a wooded slope foraging for grass, I thought I'd stumbled across something enchanting and rare. But then I met another, and then three more running across the path, and later an entire herd clustered on the grass and nuzzling up to inquisitive Kentish offspring. It's like having a risk-free safari park on your doorstep, only with antlers.
5) Look round one of England's largest private houses: The Sackville family have been living at Knole for more than 400 years, and it shows. Their home (in the centre of the deer park) is huge and, although it's been tweaked over the centuries, remains an ancient stately home par excellence. Visitors are allowed inside thirteen staterooms to enjoy the art, tapestries and decoration, and most particularly the unique collection of Royal Stuart furniture (worn and decaying a bit by now, but still an astonishing survival). Meanwhile the rest of the house is still a family home, as I deduced from the football posts in the garden and the overnight tent pitched on the rear lawn. Entry to Knole is expensive, unless you're one of the family or a National Trust member, but then everything's on the deer side round here.
6) Hike the Greensand Way: This (very) long distance footpath follows a sandstone ridge across Hampshire, Surrey and Kent, which means a lot of hill climbing and fine views. I only walked four miles of it but, because destination number 7 was wholly inaccessible by public transport, I walked those four miles there and back again. A first mile across the deer park, then a solitary jaunt between fields and wooded slopes. It's not a popular or well-frequented path, this, but probably all the better for it. There was a National Trust interlude at One Tree Hill (which is most inaccurately named), and then some trunk-topped escarpments to enjoy before climbing back down to the valley below. And not a river in sight, which made a pleasant change for me after the last month.
7) Explore Ightham Mote: And finally, my intended far flung destination - another National Trust treasure. It's Ightham Mote, which is (according to Pevsner) "the most complete small medieval manor house in the country". Picture a chimney-topped square building set around a central courtyard, surrounded by a tranquil moat. It's early 14th century, no less, and still with its Great Hall, old Chapel and Crypt intact. One of the reasons for its survival is Ightham's sheltered remote location, and another is a steady succession of careful owners. The last of these was American businessman Charles Henry Robinson, who lived here until his death in 1985, and this explains the plastic light switches scattered in amongst the bookcases and Chinese wallpaper. This mixture of eras and styles gives the place real character - it's not every home which boasts a Jacobean wood-panelled staircase, a hand-painted half-barrelled Tudor roof and a Grade I listed dog kennel. The National Trust have spent a fortune restoring Ightham Mote, which may be why gaining admittance costs nearly a tenner. But for that money you also get a the landscaped gardens and an apple orchard (and a tea room and a gift shop, obviously). On Saturday I was also treated to a gathering of eight vintage Rolls Royces, driven here by limo-loving afficionados and parked up in front of the West Lawn. While they pootled off for a look around the house, other visitors peered close-up at the shining metalwork, archaic steering and pleated leather. And then off they drove, over the hills back to wherever, whereas I still had to face the five miles walk back to Sevenoaks station. But all in all Ightham Mote's a rare treat, and I'm glad I made the effort to go.
• Ooh, the LT Museum's 1938 stock. It may never have been a District line train, but couldn't you just lick it. Best not, though. Let's just look inside the driver's cab and sit on the luxurious seats and admire the old tube maps and revel in the sheer non-21st-centuryness of it all. [photo]
These are the first words you hear as you enter the Outbreak 1939 exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, and they continue to echo in a loop as you progress around the room. I always find this radio broadcast unerringly chilling - the moment at which our country finally grasped the inevitable and commited itself to uncertain years of mass slaughter. Hearing the words repeated over and over doesn't dampen their effect.
Note to self: That's 12,000 words on the Lea Valley - conceived, researched, explored, comprehensively photographed and all written up in less than two months flat. So it can be done. But it was only possible to complete because of my self-imposed discipline in meeting several daily deadlines for online publication. Alas, in choosing to publish every last detail online, I have effectively given the whole lot away for free. In terms of cost/benefit analysis and best value time management, this Lea-walking project has been a big fail. It's taken a heck of a lot of effort, it's stifled my social life for several weekends, and I shall earn absolutely nothing from completing it. But it was also an enticingly fascinating challenge, and that to me has always been far more important than any possible financial reward. Sorry Murdochs, but the world is full of amateur enthusiasts (like me) spewing forth free online content day-in day-out, and if this somehow destabilises your fragile global news-media/print-publishing economy then so be it. And be warned that I'm already wondering what to waste my life on next August...
