4000 days to go - Tuesday 14th August 2001 • London's not planning on bidding for any Olympics, oh no. Instead all eyes are on the 2005 World Athletics Championships, which are scheduled to be held in a new stadium at Picketts Lock. It'll be a triumph, obviously. Planning is well underway, but there are funding worries (the whole project might cost - shock horror - nearly £110m!). Surely the Government wouldn't dream of pulling out... • The workerfolk at Tyrone Ltd, in their big yellow shed up Marshgate Lane, are busy making luxury lace curtains. • I'm just about to move into a flat in unfashionable Bow, less than a mile from a spot that'll be world-famous in eleven years time. Thankfully my letting agents don't yet know this, otherwise my rent could have been considerably higher.
3000 days to go - Monday 10th May 2004 • The Picketts Lock fiasco is long forgotten. Instead all eyes are on London's proposed bid for the 2012 Olympic Games. Seb Coe & Co plan to plonk an Olympic Stadium in the Lower Lea Valley, despite less-than-wild enthusiasm from the businesses on top of whom it would be plonked. • Just like any Monday, there are bits of car for sale at JJ Autos on Carpenters Road. Why worry about the future? London might not reach the final shortlist of five cities at the end of the month, and will almost certainly lose out to Paris in the big vote next year. So it's business as usual. • A London Games will never happen, obviously, but I'm still regularly out and about along Stratford's industrial riverbanks, just in case.
2000 days to go - Sunday 4th February 2007 • It's coming! The Olympics are really coming to London this time, and the Government can't possibly withdraw (however loudly grumpy budget-blasting taxpayers might complain). The Lower Lea Valley is being bought up, patch by patch, and then hundreds of acres will be sealed off in the summer so that they can be transformed from warehouses into grandstands. • At the Manor Garden allotments, hopes remain high that the ODA might want to preserve a patch of sustainable foodstuffs amongst the corporate burgershacks. But every plotholder secretly realises that this spring's planting will be the last. • I think I might go up onto the Greenway and take a photo of the emerging stadium once a month. While I still can.
1000 days to go - Saturday 31st October 2009 • We have a stadium. Its crown of white girders has been dominating the E15 skyline for a while now, reminding local residents that their communities are about to be transformed. The area around the stadium still looks a complete featurelessmess, but the skeleton of several other Olympic venues is already ascending. • Bosses at H Forman & Son now look out towards the stadium from the pinkish balcony of their state-of-the-art salmon smokery. Somewhere beyond the Lea, precisely where their not quite state-of-the-art factory used to be, there's a Royal box and a heck of a lot of ramped terracing. • In Greenwich, angry protesters flock to complain about the terrible damage 75 horses will do to their favourite World Heritage park. Other residents aren't quite so paranoid. Quick - the official consultation period ends today, so there's just time to submit your blinkered bigotry (or otherwise) online.
0000 days to go - Friday 27th July 2012 • London becomes the first city ever to host the Olympics three times. Yah boo sucks to you Paris. • The eyes of the world are on Parkes Galvanising (or, at least, the spot where Parkes Galvanising used to be). Umpteen thousand people have forked out a lot of money to watch the Olympic Opening Ceremony in the pouring rain (and are hoping it's more exciting than Leona Lewis on a bus). • Several security guards want to give me a rigorous patdown before I'm allowed into the Olympic Park to watch the First Night Fireworks from what will one day be my local park. But for the next fortnight, this park belongs to the world.
1000 days after - Thursday 23rd April 2015 • The Olympics are long gone. But there's a nice new swimming pool for the people of Stratford to splash around in, and a shiny Velodrome precisely where the old cycling circuit used to be, and some nice ex-Village flats for rich bankers to spend their bonuses on. That's proper legacy for you. • The Waterside Cafe in the Olympic Park has just opened for its first spring season. Maybe some customers will turn up one day and sit by the river and throw chunks of blueberry flapjack at the swans. • Andrew Gilligan is still complaining that one of the flowerbeds in Greenwich Park looks a bit trampled.
2000 days after - Wednesday 17th January 2018 • Everybody's talking about the Olympics... but the buzz is no longer about London. It's the Winter Games opening ceremony in Reykjavik tomorrow. Do you think Brooklyn Beckham has a chance in the Snowboard Freestyle? • West Ham are playing midweek football at their new 25,000 seater stadium in the Olympic Park. Unfortunately, now that they're floundering in the lower reaches of Division Two, the former Royal Box has been renamed the Tumbleweed End. • Just beyond the Westfield shopping centre, beneath the rusting spire of the Boris Johnson Memorial Tower, thousands of relocated Newham residents are living in elevated shoeboxes and cardboard-wall terraces amongst some of the most expensive parkland on the planet. Some of them even go swimming occasionally. £9.3bn well spent. No, really.
I'm not sure I ever said thanks properly. I think I did, maybe even several times, but it might not have have come across coherently at the time. So here it is again, with a lot more feeling, better late than never. Thanks!
You didn't have to come round, but I'm very relieved that you did. You cancelled everything you had planned, all your weekend activities, and probably woke up a lot earlier than usual too. It was quite a journey, hardly just around the corner, and I can only imagine what you were chatting about on the way down.
You don't know how glad I was to see you. It had been a long night since I phoned, a very strange and troubling night, and I hadn't slept much. So much to do, and so little actually done. And there you were on the doorstep, like a rock of normality, to give me something sane to hang onto. So very glad.
I'm not normally an emotional person, but I think I made up for it when you arrived. I reckon I should react like that more often, to be honest, although without the need for some sort of crisis to bring it about. I'm usually a lot more at ease, and a lot more in control - and I think I have you to thank for that too.
There was plenty needed to be done, and I couldn't possibly have managed it all by myself. A lot of traipsing around, here and there, in and out, and especially up and down. That bewildered kitten kept getting in the way, didn't she? And we spent far too long in the garage, but then I never did travel light.
Then we all sat down to eat lunch, all of us together somewhere other than your place for once. Ham rolls - always a safe and reliable option in such circumstances. You sat there and discussed what was going on in your lives, and I remember feeling totally disassociated from it all, in a little bubble all of my very own.
Another long journey ahead. That cup of tea at the far end was very welcoming, almost normal. I know I didn't stay long, not on that occasion, because I had a lot more falling apart to do elsewhere. But I felt like I was imposing, taking over part of your lives unexpectedly, even though I know you were only too glad to help.
Thanks for never saying "I told you so", even though I bet you were thinking it. Thanks for helping me to move forward with an absolute minimum of fuss. And thanks for your unfailing support, especially on that day when I needed it the most. For always being there, before and since, I so very thank you.
Which explains why it's so bloody difficult to buy a CD single any more. One of those 1.6 million is mine. And none of the 116 million. I'm so behind the times.
• I know how interested all sorts of people are in the River Fleet. Now Camden Council has its own webpage on the borough's very own lost waterway, complete with recently surveyed map. Enjoy the photographs.
• Ooh, now this is interesting. Comparemyradio.com. A new website which compares all the songs and artists played by different radio stations over the last 30 days. Capital Radio is obsessed by JLSand the Black Eyed Peas, playing each more than 10 times a day. Heart love Robbie Williams more than any other station. Radio 1 and Smooth Radio have very little in common. Radio 2 has greater music variety than any other station surveyed. Absolute Radio (whose website this is) are still playing Journey's Don't Stop Believin' several times a month. I could play with this tool for longer than I could listen to most of the radio stations under scrutiny.
• Watching the C4 Heston Blumenthal / Little Chef programme last night, I had an irrational urge (along with half the viewing audience) to go and visit his Popham restaurant. Except it's in the middle of nowhere unless you have a car, and I don't. Ditto the new Kettering revamp. So I wondered where the nearest (bog-standard) Little Chef to London actually is. Alas, the company's website collapses every time I try to do any kind of geographical search.
Do you remember, before Jenson Button became proper famous, his cheesy TV infomercial for the BBC's Red Button service. If so, you may have been tempted to start pressing red to access a whole variety of interactive (and not quite so interactive) televisual features. The digital replacement for Ceefax, for example, which manages to stick even fewer words on your screen than the old Mode 7 Teletext graphics ever did. The News Multiscreen service, perhaps, which loops the latest news headlines and weather forecasts in miniature hard-to-view quadrants. Or one of the additional interactive channels hidden away behind the scenes, probably showing sport or music or background features. Extra content, extra choice.
Until yesterday. Yesterday the BBC's Red Button content slimmed down, or at least it did for those of us watching on Freeview. Less content, less choice. Two of the services were snuffed out, now available only to folk with Sky, cable or Freesat. Taking their place, for the time being, absolutely nothing. This change isn't about saving money, it's about realigning Freeview's services for the far distant future. I count myself amongst the many people who aren't terribly happy about it, not happy at all.
The first casualty of Tuesday's extinguishing is the News Multiscreen service. Want to catch up on the latest news headlines right now without waiting up to 30 minutes for the BBC News Channel to get round to telling you. Sorry, you can't have news "now" any more, you'll have to wait. Want to watch that two-minute catch-up on the latest Afghan situation or the credit crunch? Maybe one of your neighbours with a satellite dish will let you pop round and have a look. Want to check the weather forecast as spoken by a real human being, rather than relying on the BBC website's embarrassingly inaccurate short range graphics? No longer an option. Not good.
And the second casualty is channel 302, the second of the BBC's additional red button channels. Everyone can still get 301, but 302 has gone dark to the entire Freeview audience. This means there's now only one place to view 'extras', not two, so expect to see fewer additional sporting events, fewer interesting Grand Prix camera angles and only half as many alternative stages at Glastonbury. On Monday, for example, Freeviewfolk wanting an Electric Proms catch-up could have chosen between Shirley Bassey on 301 or Robbie Williams on 302. On Tuesday Robbie (and 302) disappeared, leaving only Dame Shirl on looping repeat. Half the options, half the fun.
Freeview's sports fans will probably feel the greatest severance. Let's take next weekend's red button sporting action as an example (it's here, if you're interested). Saturday morning's Grand Prix Third Practice, no problem, but the subsequent "Live coverage of Qualifying, with choice of commentaries" is "Not available on Freeview". Likewise you'll be able to watch Final Score with Gabby but not the simultaneous Rugby League Four Nations Forum. The evening's live coverage of the Cycling Track World Cup will be halted on Freeview an hour earlier than for viewers on other services. On Sunday, the 11-hour rolling repeat of the Football League Show will be invisible on Freeview, as will all the extra Grand Prix commentary options and rolling highlights that BBC viewers have recently come to expect. And if you want to watch Cardiff v Nottingham Forest live, sorry, you'll have to wait until the New York Marathon finishes because that's been deemed more important.
And what's the BBC's excuse for these newly-blank channels? High Definition telly, that's what. HD isn't yet available on Freeview, and they think it ought to be, eventually, when suitable set-top boxes and bandwidth exist. You'll need to buy a new (expensive) DVB-T2 MPEG-4-coded digibox, none of which are yet available, in order to watch HD versions of programmes you're already getting. And HD services will be available in some regions faster than others, depending on digital switchover date, and could take up to three years to reach your local transmitter. In the meantime, Grand Prix on-board camera shots and Robbie Williams have been unnecessarily sacrificed. Given that there are currently millions of Freeview sports fans and no Freeview HD viewers, it'll come as no surprise that a succession of BBC blogpostsannouncing the withdrawal have been besieged with angriness.
Never fear, say the BBC, because you can always view these lost streams on our website. The news headlines and weather forecast, they're online, as are all the sporting events and post-mortems no longer available on Freeview TV. Which is fine so long as you have a decent broadband connection and a computer and nobody else in the family is using it to check eBay or shoot aliens. For the significant minority of Britons still not connected to the web, many of them poor or elderly, the BBC website option is as blank as their TV screens. This is particularly galling when the rest of Freeview is still clogged up with rubbish like The Diamonique Hour and the 23rd repeat of Dragon's Den on Dave, but that's how it is.
This week's digital slimdown appears to be an ill-conceived strategic error, and a classic example of removing something before its replacement is ready. No doubt one day, when the entire nation is capable of viewing Jenson Button's wrinkles in full eye-watering close-up detail, we'll wonder what all the fuss was about. But in the meantime, the discriminatory message "Press your red button now (not available on Freeview)" is about to become depressingly familiar.
Another month, another new London station. Don't get too used to this rapid infrastructure rollout, because the run of fresh stations won't last more than another year. But ooh, bright shiny DLR station alert. Have you been yet?
South Quay is a mid-Docklands station used mostly by office workers whose companies can't afford the bigger brasher skyscrapers further up the line. It boasts a turbulent but brief history. Originally constructed in 1987, South Quay was given a major revamp in 1994 when the DLR proved much more popular than expected. Then in 1996 the IRA exploded a ceasefire-breaking bomb close by and the station had to be re-rebuilt. And now it's been completely rebuilt yet again, this time 125 metres further east, as part of the DLR's Three Carriage Capacity Enhancement Project. The previous station was sandwiched inbetween two bends and couldn't be extended to take longer trains, hence the need to start again from scratch alongside a straighter stretch of track. We can only hope that this latest resurrection survives a bit longer.
Aside: TfL are very proud that they've managed to construct the new station immediately adjacent to the railway without disrupting services. Their latest press release boasts that "clever engineering techniques by contractors Taylor Woodrow meant the replacement station was constructed without the line, or the old station, once being closed." This may indeed be true, construction-wise. But the entire arm out to Lewisham was closed last weekend, essentially so that the new South Quay station could be properly 'tested'. And that's why it took me over an hour to get home from Lewisham to Bow by bus on Sunday afternoon, rather than half an hour on the DLR, so I spit in the face of this particular press release.
The new South Quay station opened yesterday with minimal fanfare. Certain local residents managed to get there during daylight hours and take several decent photos. By the time I arrived, however, it was very dark. Very dark, that is, except in the space immediately underneath the station where it was very bright indeed. Somebody's installed lighthouse-strength illumination below the platforms, shining out into the surrounding area like a glaring beacon. Office workers streaming home weren't going to miss their new departure point.
The new station is built above water, spanning the canal between the West India and Millwall Docks. This means it has two entrances - one lesser pair of staircases to the east, and a much flashier main entrance to the west. An occasionally useful byproduct of this will be than when a passing boat causes the swingbridge to be raised, pedestrians will still be able to cross the canal via the platforms above. An annoying byproduct of this is that passengers arriving by train have been given no obvious clue as to which exit is which, nor that one involves a heck of a lot of stairs and the other a nice comfy escalator.
South Quay's main ground-level concourse feels rather unwelcoming, in that it's essentially a gaping chasm beneath a concrete railway track. Good luck working out where to go. I watched one lost commuter walking up to the far end only to discover a useless waterside terrace rather than any useful station access. And then I tried to find the up escalator for myself. I walked up to the obvious one, only to spot that it was barely moving, and downwards. They've installed intelligent energy-saving escalators here which only ramp up to normal speed when approached - and only when approached from the right end. It took me a while to spot the illuminated "no entry" sign on this particular escalator, so then had to wander off in search of the proper 'up' one. Minimal signage meant that it wasn't as obvious as it should have been.
Then a slow glide up to the platform to enjoy the elevated South Quay experience. I bet there's a fine watery view out across the dock during daylight hours, whereas yesterday's rush hour offered only overlookable twinkling lights. Instead I got to stare at the glassy metally walls, and the very bright lights, and the 'next train' indicator. I was pleased that it hadn't been installed by cretins and was therefore fully legible. I was less than impressed by the scrolling message along the bottom which read "Passengers are advised that the new South Quay station is now open". Well, yeah, duhhh, obviously.
These are proper three-carriage-length platforms, although DLR trains are currently still only two. This caused teething difficulties as commuters spread out to enjoy the full length of their new platform, then had to run to catch an arriving train when it arrived shorter than expected. They'll get the hang of it soon. The new South Quay certainly beats the old one, which is already dark and being dismantled a short distance away. Bad news - another line closure will be required to get rid of it.
This is the 10th year that the curators at Tate Modern have invited a world-renowned artist to fill their Turbine Hall. It's not an easy space to fill, what with it being huge and that, but several of them have had a good stab. Light, sound and vision have been all invoked, with some artists concentrating on the floor below and others on the air above. And it's getting tougher and tougher to think of something original, something that'll make the visiting public go "Ooh, that's different, I like that". This year, after a bunkbed duffer last, I think we've anotherwinner.
This year the theme is darkness, with the appearance of an all-enveloping giant steel boxon stilts. It doesn't look terribly exciting from the second level overbridge, more like an oversized freight container, but then it's not the exterior that's important here. The box's creator is Miroslaw Balka, a Polish architectural artist, and he's the first commissionee to create something the Tate audience can actually walk inside. To find the way in, walk up to the far end of the Turbine Hall and stand at the foot of the ramp rising back into the box. Dark, isn't it?
If the intention is to unnerve, then "How It Is" succeeds admirably. You know there can't be anything too terrible ahead, like a pit of snakes or a rotary machete, because nobody inside the box is screaming. But there could be something unpleasant, or fearsome, or potentially painful lurking in the darkness, couldn't there? And that's precisely what the artist is hoping you'll think, evoking echoes of wartime innocents being herded into concentration camps. Don't worry. Take the installation on trust, and step inside. If you don't want to know what's inside the box until you visit for yourself, stop reading now. The rotary machete (or whatever) will then come as a complete surprise.
It is very dark indeed inside the box. Even if you've heard reports of how dark it is, the pitchblackness of the interior will still surprise you. That's so long as all the participants are playing by the rules and keeping their cameras in their pockets, as requested by a polite sign at the entrance to the artwork. While your eyes are attempting to adjust to the darkness, the last thing you want to see is the flash of a camera or the glow of a mobile screen. Needless to say, there are plenty. It's clearly not feasible to tell today's youth to put their mobiles away, because they'd be lost without them. That pinpoint of bright light you can see, that's some selfish twat taking a photo so that they can send dimly-lit facial images to their mates. Please resist the temptation to punch them in the face (even though in the darkness they'd never know who hit them).
As you move forward, you may become convinced that you're about to walk into something. Or more likely someone - walking back the other way and accidentally bumping into you. Relax, it doesn't happen. What's more likely is that you'll reach the far end of this cavernous space without noticing. It's very hard to judge distance in the dark, or at least to match how far you've walked with the length you saw so clearly on the outside. The best indicator that the end is nigh is an increased level of chatter immediately ahead, because everybody stops at the far wall to survey their position. And yes, the far wall is soft and velvety, so don't be too surprised when you end up with a face full of fur.
And then turn round, and see the box for the illusion it truly is. With daylight trickling in from the windows in the Turbine Hall wall, everything between you and the ramp is now visible in eerie silhouette. A sea of cautiously bobbing heads is approaching - slowly, steadily, oblivious to the daylight flooding in behind. And that's why nobody bumped into you on the way in, because you were as wholly visible to them as they were invisible to you. Soak in the view for a while longer, at least until some fresh arrival blunders onto the very spot where you're already standing and displaces you. Then tread carefully back to the world outside, now more certain of precisely where you're heading. Illuminating, that's how it is.
The Turbine Hall 10 (in order of interestingness) 1) Olafur Eliasson - The Weather Project: A giant radiating orange sun which Londoners took to their hearts [2003] 2) Carsten Höller - Test Site: Several slippery twisty-turny metal slides (use at own risk, ouch!) [2006] 3) Louise Bourgeois - I Do, I Undo, I Redo: Three thin sculpted towers to climb, with big mirrors on the top [2000] 4) Miroslaw Balka - How It Is: Walk into a very dark box, and try not to bash your nose into the furry wall [2009] 5) Anish Kapoor - Marsyas: Three steel rings sheathed in a one-piece PVC membrane [2002] 6) Juan Muñoz - Double Bind: Stand beneath a low floor as lifts rise and fall through the space above [2001] 7) Doris Salcedo - Shibboleth: A big crack in the floor (the filled-in trench is still very visible) [2007] 8) Rachel Whiteread - Embankment: Thousands and thousands of white boxes to wander between [2005] 9) Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster - TH 2058: Blue and yellow bunkbeds form a futuristic refugee camp [2008] 10) Bruce Nauman - Raw Materials: 22 audio recordings to stop and listen to (if you can be bothered) [2004]
LONDON A-Z An alphabetical journey through the capital's museums Twickenham Museum
Location: 25 The Embankment, Twickenham TW1 3DU [map] Open: Tue, Sat 11am-3pm (& Sun, 2pm-4pm) Admission: free Brief summary: historical riverside Richmond Website:www.twickenham-museum.org.uk Time to set aside: less than half an hour
There are several small local museums sprinkled around the London suburbs, each telling the story of their neighbourhood to anyone who cares to pop in. Southwest London has a fair few, including historical hideaways in Richmond and Kingston-upon-Thames. But I went to Twickenham, purely because it started with the letter T. It was either there or to the tiny Twinings Museum in the Strand. I might have misjudged.
Twickenham Embankment is a very pleasant spot. It's located away from the High Street, down by the river, facing the midstream boathouses of white-gabled EelPieIsland. This is a great place to feed the swans, or to watch the pleasure cruisers chug by, or to sit outside the BarmyArms for an alfresco post-rugby ale. There's even a cascade dripping with sculptednaked ladies in the gardens of York House, which isn't something you see every day. As for Twickenham Museum, that's to be found in a Grade 2 listed townhouse up winding Church Lane, with proper Georgian windows and a pale green door. Occasionally a blue sign appears on the door, and another on the wall alongside, bearing a boldly welcoming "OPEN". Ten hours a week, the museum's volunteer curators await someone to chat to.
I earned a cheery hello from the jolly retired lady behind the desk, then walked into the alcove behind her desk to take a look at some photos of old Twickenham. There were a lot of photos of old Twickenham in the museum, and of Whitton, Teddington and the Hamptons. Each panel showed some buildings how they used to look, then how they look now, with some meaningful words inbetween. They're no doubt fascinating if you live hereabouts, but I don't, so I nipped round the alcove a little briefly. A grey-haired bloke walked in through the front door who I thought looked suspiciously like very-local inventor Trevor Baylis. Alas not, I was assured, just another volunteer popping in to say hello. Official visitor numbers for the day remained in single figures.
There was only the one room downstairs, bedecked with more old/new photos and a cabinet of TW1 curiosities. Programmes for Twickenham's Charter Day, old bits of printed paper, that sort of thing. Beneath the stairs a diving costume tableau provided a reminder of underwater stuntman 'Professor Cockles', who entertained riverside crowds here from the 30s to the 70s. Museumfolk reconstructed one of his dives a few years back, managing to retrieve a bunch of keys and an eel from the murky depths of the neighbouring Thames, because they're inventive like that.
And there was only the one room upstairs. More history and more bygone photos - again rather more on the walls than in the cabinets. The whole northern-Thames-side stretch of Richmond borough was covered, including various elegant village-ettes I've never personally visited. Depressingly little on EelPieIsland, I thought, given that it was a fascinating location and only 100 metres away. While I was investigating upstairs another couple of visitors nipped into the museum, and nipped round, and nipped back outside again. But I still had time to make one further discovery about the house itself, which is that 25 The Embankment had once been owned by Thomas Twining, the legendary 18th century leaf importer. My museum trip had come up trumps, as I bagged an unexpected two for T. by train: Twickenham
OK, I confess, I was wholly underwhelmed by the Twickenham Museum. I couldn't fault the enthusiasm of the volunteers, and the old house had a bit of character, but the former hadn't really filled the latter with much interesting "stuff". Words and pictures yes, but you don't need to walk through the door to see those, they're just as easily absorbed on the museum's website. And the website's detailed, and fact-packed, and excellent. So go there instead.
Every time my laptop powers up successfully, I breath a small sigh of relief. I've had it nearly four years now, ever since its predecessor failed to fire up properly one Saturday morning and presented me with the notorious Windows blue screen of death. An expensive failure, as it turned out, but my laptop has more than paid its way by providing thousands of hours of uptime service. I use it rather more than your average laptop user, which helps explain why it now runs rather slower than before and why its memory banks are almost full. A replacement laptop is, I suspect, long overdue.
My switch-on sigh of relief has been louder this week. That's because my laptop is old enough to still run on Windows XP, so I've been holding my breath through every week of Windows Vista rollout in the hope that I could leapfrog its innate rubbishness. Had my laptop died prematurely, I'd have been forced to upgrade to some crappy memory-hungry operating system that nobody likes much. But now we've reached the end of October 2009, Windows 7 is finally an alternative option. I need never sully my mouse fingers with Vista, I can buy into a better-thought-out future. Phew.
(Mac users, please, stop right there. I know you're going to tell me to abandon Microsoft's global empire and get myself a Mac instead. Save your breath, it ain't going to happen. See Charlie Brooker for details)
So, er, right, new laptop. I need one that's got Windows 7 already installed, rather than some week-old Vista machine which requires an upgrade. Are they out yet, or will I get a better choice if I wait a bit? I've pretty much filled my old laptop with stuff (mostly photos), so I suspect "amount of available memory" is going to be very important. But I don't use my laptop to play games, or to fire laser guns at lifelike vector graphics of American soldiers, so multi-media processor power isn't top of my shopping list. I don't take my laptop out and about much, although it might be useful if I could, so maybe increased portability is an important option. But I need a decent sized screen - nothing titchy and squinty - so a netbook probably isn't the answer. I also have an old 20th century printer/scanner/copier I'm very fond of, which I suspect is no longer supported by modern printer drivers. Do I need to fork out for the XP emulator in Windows 7 Professional, or can I keep on printing another way?
I've decided that price doesn't need to be too great a restriction. My current laptop may have cost a fair bit up front, but it's had a heck of a lot of use for the equivalent of well under a pound a day. I'm hoping that this next one will last me past the Olympics, so value for money should be assured. Which just leaves me trying to decide which model to get. There's far too much choice out there, and I'd hate to end up regretting buying a substandard inappropriate machine. I must go hunting now that Windows 7 is here, and pick, and choose, and buy. And fast, because sooner or later my current laptop is bound to give up the ghost and die, and I'd hate not to have jumped ship by then.
So look, I've had this idea to save the Royal Mail. And it's brilliant, and no taxpayers money is wasted.
One of the most annoying things about Royal Mail is that they refuse to deliver your post if it has inadequate postage. Some idiot has sent you a letter with insufficient stamps on the front, perhaps, or else been baffled by complex new pricing instructions involving weight and thickness. Sorry, a few pence under, delivery refused. The postie then slips a card through your letterbox, detailing excess charges required, and your intended mailshot is kept hostage back at the sorting office until you agree to pay up.
And it's not cheap is it? Not only do you have to pay back every penny the sender omitted, this is also dwarfed by a whacking great "handling fee". An extra pound or so on top of the surcharge, notionally to cover the cost of the postman scribbling a few illegible details on a card, and a missed delivery can suddenly become very expensive indeed. But you've got to pay up otherwise you'll never find out what your mystery package is, let alone ever get to open it. It's daylight robbery, obviously. But it could also save the business.
Here's my plan.
Get yourself an envelope, stick a folded sheet of waste paper inside, and make sure you definitely don't stick a stamp on the front. Then write down an address of your choice (and here's the cunning bit), preferably of somebody you know but don't like. Pop the envelope into a postbox, and that's your job well done.
Some days later your selected nemesis will receive an "undelivered" card through their letterbox. It'll tell them they've been sent a letter with insufficient postage, but not what that mystery package might be. Imagine their consternation. It might be a bill, but there again it might be a cheque. It might be junkmail, but there again it might be a premium bond win. It might be a letter from a long-lost auntie, except she's stuck it in too big an envelope and fallen foul of complicated breadth and depth regulations. However much they might want to ignore this unexpected missive, they daren't. So they'll head down to the sorting office and pay their one pound thirty something, just in case. You can probably imagine their anger on discovering that the contents of their expensive envelope really weren't worth the money. But by then your financial good deed is done. Outlay (to you) nil, profit (to the Royal Mail) £1. Kerching.
To truly succeed, my plan needs to be multiplied through the collective efforts of the entire population. If we all chip in and we all send an unstamped envelope to somebody we don't like, the Royal Mail will suddenly be tens of millions of pounds better off. And we don't need to stop at doing this only once. Let's all send another unstamped envelope a few weeks later, to somebody different this time. They might be a bit suspicious, but they'll still not resist paying because it might just be a really important letter they daren't miss. Keep this up over several months and the Royal Mail could soon have collected enough £1 surcharges to yank their business back into the black. Result!
This really is something for nothing. It's a bit naughty, admittedly, but it's not illegal. And it manages to annoy somebody you hate without them ever being able to trace the evildoing back to you. Please, feel no guilt, because the benefits to the country as a whole are huge. Indeed this is, I'm sure you'll agree, the perfect solution for rescuing a beloved national organisation from collapse and eventual bankruptcy. My plan cannot fail to succeed, just so long as postmen continue to make regular daily deliveries.... (ah, bugger).
As anyone who lives outside the capital will have noticed, London's busservice is bloody marvellous. Buses go everywhere, often and cheaply, even late in the evening and on Sundays. And that's because London's bus service is planned and coordinated by a non-profit-making body which aims to serve the resident population, not far-distant shareholders. We're bloody lucky, we are.
The TfL bus network has four key performance targets, as follows: Comprehensive - routes should be designed to run within 5 minutes (or 400m) of most homes Frequent - as many routes as possible should run at least every 12 minutes (i.e. a "turn-up-and-go" service) Simple - the route should be as simple as possible, and operate at the same terminals at weekends Reliable - journey times along routes are regularly tested
In total, London's buses run more than 500 million kilometres each year. That may sound like a heck of a lot, but it's actually less than 200 metres per Londoner per day. If you travel further than that, then you're enjoying more than your fair share. But Boris's latest transport plans are about to cause the London bus network to contract, because a £150m cut to bus service subsidy will result in running 26 million fewer kilometres per year. That's a 5% cut, equivalent to one in every 20 buses scrapped or cancelled. Coming soon, to a bus stop near you.
But what to cut? A few rush hour buses, so that we can all pack in more tightly together? That's likely, apparently. How about reducing bus frequencies, so that the gap between services is a bit longer than before. That's also likely, on certain routes, although (to give one very specific promise) nothing quite so drastic as doubling waiting times from 6 to 12 minutes. Or how about shortening routes, especially those bits near to the terminus where buses run almost empty. Curtailment might mean passengers have to change more often, and wait longer, and pay twice, but they'd still be able to reach their desired destination eventually. Not an option, obviously, is the cancellation of Boris's debendification plan, nor the derailing of his Routemaster replacement. Which leaves one final possibility - scrapping routes altogether.
There are a number of buses in London which carry very few passengers. Take the U10 through Ickenham, for example, or the 464 to Biggin Hill, or the 375 to Passingford Bridge. Why not scrap those? Their loss would inconvenience only a tiny minority of Londoners, wouldn't they, and the money saved could then go on preserving services in Inner London instead. Except that such actions wouldn't ensure the running of a socially inclusive bus network. Increase the number of places unreachable by bus, or reachable only irregularly or infrequently, and many more of us will need to buy cars. Surely London doesn't need to move in that direction, sacrificing the welfare of many to the great god Austerity.
So look, I'd like to propose a bus local to me that I think ought to be cut, erased, eradicated. A bus that I believe is burning up taxpayers money with every journey, rumbling around nigh empty, going nowhere special, five times an hour. A bus whose loss nobody would mourn, and whose sacrifice might help to preserve more socially-necessary routes eleswhere. It's the 425. It runs from Stratford to Clapton, past my house, in a big indirect dog-leg via Mile End. Let's scrap it.
The 425 is a new-ish bus, introduced last year as part of a major reorganisation of routes in the Bow area. Its route is almost entirely duplicated by other services. If you want to get from Stratford to Hackney you can catch a 276. If you want to get from Stratford to Mile End you can catch a 25. If you want to get from Bow to Clapton you can catch a 488. If you want to get from Mile End to Hackney you can catch a 277. And if you want to get from my house to Homerton Hospital (because bus routes always go to hospitals) you can catch either the 276 or the 488, there's no need for a 425 option as well. Indeed the hospital loop is a real diversionary blight on the 425's route, crawling round the backstreets of Homerton in a jam-snarling figure of eight, and putting a real dampener on anybody intending to ride the 425 as a rapid through service. Because it isn't.
And all this explains why I rarely see a 425 bus even a quarter full. Believe me, I've looked, I've checked, and I know. Rumbling along Bow Road they go, these brightly lit double-decker boxes on wheels, with 60-odd vacant seats and only a handful occupied. And then again, 12 minutes later, another nigh-empty subsidy-gobbling vehicle rolls by. There's probably one whizzing past my front door even now, taking nobody in particular to nowhere much. At the very least the entire service should be downgraded from double decker to single decker, and soon, because in 15 months I've almost never seen a 425 so full that a single decker couldn't have coped. Utter waste, the top deck is.
I'm reassured that Boris isn't thinking of cutting back London's bus services more severely, slashing the network root and branch in line with market forces. But if 5% has to go, I offer up my local 425 for sacrifice. It'd not be missed, and the savings made might help rescue an outer London lifeline that really matters. So come on TfL, how about a 425% cut?
Stuff climate change. What London needs, obviously, is a new carbon-guzzling airport. Otherwise international air travellers will go somewhere else and the UK will become less important and that would never do. If you accept this argument, then a new runway or two in the southeast appears inevitable. Heathrow wouldn't be popular, because that would involve bulldozingcommunities and blighting the lives of vociferous constituents. So Boris is looking east to somewhere where nobody lives and no Londoner votes. To an artificial island in the middle of the Thames Estuary. Yeah right.
Unlike the great majority of Londoners I've actually been to Boris Airport. Or at least I've taken a boat to the watery spot where it's most likely to possibly end up, five or so miles off the North Kent coast. The site's a long way out, nearly halfway to Essex in the middle of the majorThames-bound shipping lanes. I must say I wasn't thinking "airport" when I visited, I was thinking "oh my word blimey, look at these magnificent wartime Maunsell forts, aren't they bloody wonderful (if a bit rusty)". But if the Mayor gets his way then, sorry folks, the atmospheric wartime survivors at Shivering Sands will all have to be demolished. Typical - these iconic anti-aircraft platforms spent most of World War Two trying to shoot down swarms of German bombers, and now in the 21st century some foreigner called "Boris" wants to drop an entire bloody airport on top of them.
And then there's the adjacent wind farm. 30 massive turbines whirring in mid-channel, each towering more than 100 metres above the water, transmitting umpteen megawatts of eco-clean energy via a long cable to the coast. They're an important part of SE England's contribution to sustainable energy, but they'll have to be demolished too. That's according to a feasibility report published this week, which points out numerous impracticalities related to a proposed estuary airport but suggests that none are insurmountable. If politicians really want to plonk an airport at the mouth of the Thames, only insufficient money will stop them. And if they start planning soon, you might all be out here catching flights by 2029.
Obviously airport users wouldn't be catching an inflatable boat out from Herne Bay, they'd be arriving by train. Access would be via a five mile tunnel beneath the estuarine sands - a bit like the Channel Tunnel Rail link only not quite so deep. There'd actually be two tunnels, one per floating runway. Trains would whizz in underground from London, either north via Shoeburyness(ish), or south via Sheppey. The airport terminals would be a long way from the centre of town (the report says 96km), which would be quite a trek even on the high speed trains of the future. They're bound to be expensive trains too, adding a premium to any BorisDrome flight, and rather more costly than the Gatwick or Stansted Express or the Piccadilly line to Zone 6. If the airport ever happens, that is.
The latest feasibility report has been produced by "The Thames Estuary Research and Development Company", a company now well positioned to build on Boris's interest in this airport scheme. One of its founding members is a floating runway engineer who's the former Chairman of Crossrail... and he's come up with a scheme which relies on Crossrail-like railway connections to a floating runway. Funny that. The report also attempts to add credibility to Johnson's pipedream by suggesting how positive the entire project might be. An estuary barrage could help to protect London's World Heritage sites (and 16 hospitals) from North Sea flooding. Tidal lagoons could help to boost renewable energy targets in a post-peak-oil world. The economic centre of London could shift east, bringing prosperity to the Thames Gateway (and jobs, houses and industry to the marshes of Foulness and Sheppey). The airport could run 24 hours a day, because there'd be nobody local to complain about the noise. And if an evil terrorist decided to blow up a plane on takeoff, nobody in London would get killed. So that's alright then.
Except, even if it is technically feasible, does anybody really want to build an airport in the middle of the sea? It'd be inconveniently located, and prone to closure when the weather's bad, and at risk from birds flying into jet engines, and a pain for shipping. Rather than being able to change flights at Heathrow, long-haul passengers would find themselves having to travel umpteen miles across the southeast for their onward connection. The people of north Kent and southeast Essex would have to sacrifice their Thames-edge landscape so that Londoners could breathe in a bit less pollution and sleep with their windows open. And the view from Southend or Whitstable would be permanently tarnished by offshore swooping jumbos and a giant duty-free shed on the horizon. Thank goodness this flight of fancy will surely never be built - and I'll only ever visit once, to some rustingforts, on an insignificant bobbing boat.
Somewhere historic: Firepower Another day, another museum beginning with F. This one's at Woolwich Arsenal, which I blogged about so comprehensively earlier in the year that I wasn't sure there was anything left to see. But there was still this repository of death and killing, so I went there. It's a favourite venue for young children, obviously, one of whom I ended up queueing behind for a ticket. "He's four", said Dad, nodding towards the admissions charge list to the side of the till. "Yes I'm definitely not five, I'm really only four, it's not my birthday for ages," added the small boy, protesting rather too much. But he got in scot-free anyway.
The museum's in two parts, on opposite sides of Number 1 Street, with the main collection housed in a large two-storey hangar. Downstairs are a heck of a lot of guns and wheeled weapons, but don't start there, start upstairs. The entire history of British artillery is laid out before you, including a few missable panels about battles and who beat who. I was more interested to discover how Britain led the world in ballistics, targeting its firepower with increasing accuracy to gain the advantage in campaigns from Napoleon to WW2. And less interested in the minutiae of gunners' uniforms over the ages (was it strictly necessary to provide labels announcing "size 8 trainers" and "women's warm weather slacks", eh?). Quickly, back to the big guns instead, made all the more atmospheric by the sound of rocket fire and shelling thundering away in the background.
A lot of young men in uniform, mostly camos, were wandering around the museum. I think they had an office somewhere, and I guess they were volunteers from the nearby barracks helping out with stewarding and running activities and drinking coffee in the café. The museum seemed very keen to promote their in-house catering facility, which is open to folk off the street as well as to paying visitors and soldiers. But, not being much of a café-frequenter myself, I left the museum thinking I hadn't seen much. Partly my fault for being on a whistlestop schedule. If I'd hung around an extra half hour I could have looked inside the medals gallery upstairs, and if I'd hung around an extra hour I could have watched the 'introductory' film and the special audio-visual smoke-and fire presentation. But I'd have had to wait several months to explore the second half of the museum - the Cold War Gallery across the street, because it's currently closed for storage purposes. So I'd recommend that you save your money and come back in 2010... unless you can persuade the nice lady on the front desk that you're only four. by DLR, train: Woolwich Arsenal
To get from Woolwich (above) to Thamesmead (below), you could take the bus. But I walked. It only took an hour, and meant that I got to walk a blissfully obscure section of the riverside Thames Path [map]. Blimey, do people actually choose to live on the eastern banks of Gallions Reach? Maybe it's more attractive when the sun's out. Onward past an expanse of bleak undeveloped wasteground where some future Mayor of London might one day build the Thames Gateway Bridge. To the remote extremity of Tripcock Ness, where a navigational light-tower keeps guard over a sharp kink in the Thames (highlight of the walk, in a flat grey way). And on east towards Thamesmead Clock Tower, which was much harder to reach than it first appeared. On the riverbank I discovered an extraordinarily over-optimistic example of urban planning - a raised concrete viewpoint (with a view of, erm, Barking Reach flood barrier, some incinerators and big piles of rusty containers) plus thirty-or-so landscaped benches (some with a view of the aforementioned Dagenham shoreline, others staring straight into a brick wall). And all for a usership of nil, because nobody ever got round to building flats on the strip of wasteland behind. Obviously I loved it. And I'll be back to do this walk properly, in its entirety, in sunshine, one day.
Somewhere retail: Thamesmead Town Centre When you live on a reclaimed munitions testing site in the shadow of a sewage works, a trip to the shops could really brighten your day. But for the fifty thousand residents of Thamesmead, the local town centre leaves much to be desired. Forty years ago things seemed very different. A bold futuristic 'floodproof' town had been constructed on the Erith marshes to rehouse London residents displaced after slum clearance. It must have seemed ideal to locate the shopping centre non-centrally on a lakeside near the Thames, even though this meant that most residents would have to drive or catch a bus to get there. And it must have seemed ideal to build shops on either side of an artificial canal beneath a giant Clock Tower, all to add a bit of character. Alas, the place doesn't feel quite so ideal now.
Most shoppers arrive by car. There's a huge car park (hemmed in between the Argos Extra warehouse and the Post Office) where flocks of unflappable starlings fight to peck the meat off discarded chicken wings. Grocery-seekers have a choice of Aldi, Iceland or a rather large Morrisons, while other more highbrow high street names are notable by their absence. Hell, there's not even a Greggs pastry outlet in the neighbouring arcade, which struck me as something of a wasted opportunity. No Starbucks either, but the atmosphere-free Diana Coffee and Sandwich Bar seemed to keep the local caffeine-slurpers happy.
Joyce Dawson Way is the canalside parade bit, boasting two betting shops, a fried chicken and fish bar, a tanning lounge, a florist and a large runaround space for dropping your kids off in. Somewhere out the back is an enclosed area once home to Thamesmead Market, now stall-free, open to the skies and desolate. There's also a pub called the CuttySark, which scared the life out of me even from outside, but which I noted is fully accessible to alcoholics in mobility scooters. Down by the water's edge a young girl called Kelly was running amok frightening the swans with a whistle, which was almost as loud as her screeching Mum yelling down from the overbridge that it was time for her and her sisters to leave and go home. When overhead bongs from the top of the clock tower added to the cacophony, I decided it was time to follow suit. by train: afraid not by bus: 177, 229, 244, 401, 472, B11
And if you're wondering where the "Clockwork Orange" report is, the eastern half of Thamesmead (with the concrete-edged lake) is in the London borough of Bexley, so rest assured I'll be back to explore Southmere some other jamjar day.
Somewhere random: The Fan Museum London boasts many weird and eclectic museums, but few more unlikely than a museum devoted exclusively to fans. That's right, the small semicircular pleated flappy objects that ladies used to wave before the days of aircon. A whole houseful of the things, open three days a week at the foot of Crooms Hill SE10 (opposite the Greenwich Theatre). I'd been meaning to visit for ages, but thought I'd better hang on until my Greenwich jamjar day arrived. Which it just did. Stuff the meridian, I had a date with my fans.
The museum is based in a restored Georgian terraced house, which ought to have been hint enough to its diminuitive size. I walked into the first small room to pay my £4 to the girl behind the (rather elegant) desk, and accepted her offer of a guidebook consisting of photocopied sheets in a plastic wallet. It was only at this point I realised that the room in which I was standing formed half of the permanent exhibition. Eight or so exquisite fans hung from the walls, each beautifully painted or etched, although I'd have failed to appreciate them properly without the printed notes in front of me. Some were fans proper, while others were semicircular works of art not yet snipped, trimmed and folded. Once I'd grasped the concept that 18th century fans were merely handheld paintings for hot ladies, the rest of the collection made more sense.
A second lower room explained, in appropriate detail, how fans were constructed and about the materials from which they were constructed. That was a lace fan, surely... blimey no, it was intricately carved ivory. Other special fans were assembled from tortoiseshell or mother of pearl or even, in one unusual case, Welsh slate. All the display cases had been mirrored to permit peeking at the underside of each exhibit, which was especially useful when one fan turned out to have an entire emergency sewing kit hidden away inside. All kinds of fans were on show in this minimal yet complete collection, even in the final cabinet a wall-mounted Vent-axia extractor. Explains why you so rarely see ladies fluttering fans today.
Upstairs the museum puts on a thrice-yearly special exhibition, the theme of which (at the moment) is War & Peace. 18th century courtiers loved nothing better than to flap some noble battle scene in front of their face, especially if it featured pert soldiers in uniform or buff heroes from Greek myth. Commemorations of great victories were also de rigueur, even into the early 20th century, sometimes across broad pleated folds and sometimes in elaborate miniature. This was an impressive show of more than 200 fans, allegedly just the tip of the museums' in-storage iceberg, covering a broad perspective of eras and cultures. For greatest enjoyment it was crucial to read each accompanying label carefully, because somebody's gone to a heck of a lot of effort to write them.
But that's the lot. There's a shop, of course, selling unusual fan-related gifts that certain female relatives might love come Christmas, although that didn't detain me for long. There's also an Orangery out the back where tea and cakes are served on Sunday and Tuesday afternoons, but which looked rather lonely on a nippy autumn Saturday. For more information, check out Londonist who are highlighting the Fan Museum as their museum of the month. And if you're ever in Greenwich accompanied by someone debonair and classy (not me, then), do consider taking them here rather than the usual tourist hotspots. by DLR: Cutty Sark, Greenwich
Somewhere pretty: Well Hall Pleasaunce Down to Eltham, not to the Palace (been there, blogged that) but to visit E Nesbit's house. She's the prolific turn-of-the-century author who wrote The Railway Children, amongst many other things, and wrote it here in an old house on Well Hall Road. Edith's home no longer stands, having been demolished after a fire in 1926, after which the council set about transforming the surrounding land into an attractive set of gardens. And didn't they do well? An astonishing number of garden types and habitats have been crammed into thirteen urban acres. Part is wooded and part parklike, but other areas include sloping rockeries, ornamental flowerbeds and a bowling green. There are also two formal gardens, one sunken Italian, the other rather larger and laid out around a central fountain. Three holes in the western wall once housed Tudor bee skeps, unique in London, and the rosebushes must look a spectacular sight in the summer.
But not in mid-October. The entire Pleasaunce was extremely quiet at the weekend (apart from the roar of passing Dover-bound traffic), attracting few visitors despite the allure of its assorted autumn colours. One woman pushing a well-wrapped toddler, two girls gossipping on a bench, one youth engaged in an important phone call, and me. Plus lots of squirrels, who know a good nut source when they see one. Rather busier was the moat-side Tudor Barn, a two-storey gabled outbuilding originally owned by Sir Thomas More's daughter. It's been many things in its time, notably a pub, but has relaunched this month as a cafe/brasserie/eventspace. I popped in to try it out (yes, welcoming, cosmopolitan, full) but didn't really have time to sit down for a bite. "Do you do take away?" I asked. That threw her. "Er, we can do," she replied, no doubt wondering why I'd want to take my hot chocolate outside with the squirrels when I could have stayed in with proper crockery. My drink was tepidly so-so, although another customer at the counter assured me that the late-opening Sunday roasts are great. The Tudor Barn's website is as yet unhelpfully information-light, but both Brockley Central and the Greenwich Phantom have eaten here recently and posted reviews. Me, I'd stick with the outdoor garden-wandering experience, which is absolutely more than pleasaunt. by train: Eltham by bus: 132, 161, 286
Ten to one against, but out of my jamjar came the London borough of Greenwich. Sorry. I know you've just suffered a week of suburban ramblings down the Greenwich meridian, but my latest random safari has taken me straight back again. But don't worry. Greenwich is a large and diverse borough, most of it well to the east of the town of Greenwich, so there was plenty of opportunity to go absolutely nowhere near the meridian at all. I headed instead along the banks of the Thames, and deep into the southeast London hinterland, to explore the lovelier and less lovely parts of this historic borough. It's not all about time.
Somewhere famous: The Greenwich Meridian Greenwich's fame spread around the world 125 years ago this week when a line of longitude through the Royal Observatory was selected as the starting point of space and... Stop it, stop right there. Obviously I had to pick the meridian and the Observatory as the most famous things in the borough, but I think I've covered both of those in sufficient depth recently. So, if you don't mind, we'll take that as read, thanks.
Somewhere infamous: The Millennium Dome It was never meant to be this way. Ten years ago a nation held its breath as Peter Mandelson struggled to build a big tent on the North Greenwich Peninsula before Big Ben struck 2000. The MillenniumDome wasn't quite the spectacle he'd hoped, and once 2001 came round the site faded away into mothballed desolation. Government didn't have a clue, but big business eventually spotted a major opportunity (knockdown price, tube station alongside, kerching) and transformed the DustbinLid into an entertainment supernode. Two years on and the rebranded Oxygenmolecule is a huge commercial success, luring in a succession of musical megastars to perform in a huge arena surrounded by tapas bars. In 2012, the Olympic gymnastics and wheelchair basketball competitions will be played out beneath the MobileNetwork's glass fibre ceiling. And this weekend they've been having a practice.
The World Artistic Gymnastics Championships have come to North Greenwich. I could tell this because there were an awful lot of supple folk in tracksuits hanging around Peninsula Square, rather than the usual spotty youths and tourists in Michael Jackson t-shirts. Some of the gymnasts were pulling suitcases, some babbling away in foreign, others merely looking disturbingly fit. A telltale laminated badge dangled from their clothing, distinguishing them from the mere spectators, friends and family. The latter could be seen hanging around outside the Warm Up tent in London Plaza, or nipping off to one of the multitude of restaurants for a nibble while their proteges prepared.
Outside the arena there were only a few nods to the presence of the world's best pommel-horsers and ring-hangers. Adidas had a stand near the entrance selling stripy lycra merchandise, and souvenir t-shirts were also available from stalls located in front of the void where the luxury casino isn't. Further round, near the bored-looking Herta hotdog sellers, security staff guarded a rare additional back-of-house exit. Outside the building, just out of view, taxis and coaches waited to whisk athletes and press back to wherever in not-Greenwich they were staying. But most excitingly, the barriers beyond the British Music Experience were down, allowing curious visitors a rare opportunity to wander into the Dome's undeveloped southwestern quadrant. No cafes here, nor overpriced exhibitions, just a curved pathway in a gaping void beneath the original tented ceiling. This route was open for access to media accreditation facilities, not that there was anybody around other than a cleaner, so I thoroughly enjoyed looking at the space as it used to be before the pizzerias invaded.
Without a ticket (what? £45!), I wasn't getting inside the main arena to watch the tumbling, flexing and rolling. So I wandered back outside instead for one of my favourite walks, around the circumference of the Dome2000 along the curving banks of the Thames. A lot of demolition's been going on along the western side of the Greenwich Peninsula, with the industrial area around Delta Wharf being rapidly reduced to heaps of unlovely rubble. A variegated trio of new-build office blocks near the QE2 pier gives some hint as to the ugliness of what might be replacing them. Round the back of the Ohtwo, one end of the millennial wetland garden has recently been turfed over to provide a helipad for visiting performers with tight schedules. I much preferred the long grasses and bullrushes, but needs must. And nearby, beyond the locked-away Greenwich Pavilion, somebody has shifted a bench across the paved line that marks the Greenwich Meridian... Stop it, stop right there. by tube: North Greenwich
Somewhere sporty: The Valley Somewhat unexpectedly, Greenwich boasts a surprisingly high number of sporty locations. The Royal Blackheath Golf Club is the oldest golf club in the world (caveats and qualifications apply) and Blackheath Rugby Club is similarly the oldest public rugby team (ditto). Arsenal FC were founded in deepest Woolwich (been there, blogged that). And competition for the 2012 Olympics will take place not just in "North Greenwich Arena 1" but also, controversially, in GreenwichPark and at Woolwich Barracks. So much choice. But on a mid-season footballing Saturday there was only one place to go, and that was the home ground of CharltonAthletic.
It's called TheValley for a reason - the surrounding land really does slope down from surrounding heights, so the stadium's fairly well hidden if you don't know where to look. It stands on the site of a levelled chalk quarry, now engulfed by a sea of surrounding terraced and council housing. The pitch is surrounded by a red and grey construction with a web of metal poles perched on top, augmented by a giantclub badge slapped onto the front wall of the north stand. The team's not always been based here, in particular exiled for a lengthy spell to Selhurst Park two decades ago while The Valley fell to rack and ruin. But the place has perked up rather since, and yesterday it was the scene of a mighty top-of-the-table Division One clash.
I turned up mid-morning, well before the earliest spectators arrived, but the ground (and street outside) were already a hotbed of crucial pre-match action. Several stocky black-suited blokes were massing by the East Stand turnstiles, preparing to do whatever men in black suits do at football clubs. Security, or stewarding, or selling Courage Best - something like that. Other lesser folk stood around in fluorescent orange tabards, waiting to direct a crowd that wouldn't be arriving for several hours, and waving in the Huddersfield Town team coach through the stadium gates. Charlton's official doughnut van had been wheeled into position beneath the giant club badge, while a gaggle of burger trolleys stood idling off-road waiting to have their spitting grills fired up. A girl in a white trailer looked nearly ready to serve up her first hotdog of the day, but there were no queues as yet for her one-quid cups of steaming Bovril. Over at the Charlton Athletic Superstore, a fresh delivery of krbs-sponsored kit arrived in the back of a UPS van. But this early in the day, apart from myself, the only unpaid passer-by was a black cat darting through the pedestrian arches beneath the nearby railway. It brought good luck for Charlton who, by five in the afternoon, were celebrating being back on the top of Division One. Ah, for a return to the golden days when CAFC being in the First Division really meant something. by train: Charlton by bus: 380, 486
Two thirds complete, and only one third of my random exploration of the capital to go. A meandering western strip and an eastern chunk are all that remain, although they still form a hugely diverse set of boroughs. I've not picked anywhere in central London for ages, so maybe today I'll finally head back towards the tourist hotspots of Westminster or Camden. Or I could be fated again to tour the attraction-lite outskirts, be that Barnet, Bexley or Barking and Dagenham.
Once I've researched my randomly-chosen borough online I'll then head off and visit some of its most interesting places (assuming it has any). As usual I hope to visit somewhere famous, somewhere historic, somewhere pretty, somewhere retail, somewhere sporty and somewhere random. I might even take lots of photographs while I'm at it, if the borough's photogenic enough. Then after I've made my grand tour I'll come back tomorrow and tell you all about it. Let's see where I'm going this time... (and, after my meridian week, it had better not be Greenwich!)
Marking the meridian (a week-long trek due south from Greenwich)
Shortlands / Park Langley xxiii) After crossing the Bromley South railway line just west of Shortlands station, the Greenwich Meridian gets proper suburban. Residential street after residential street, occasionally flats but more usually houses, and increasingly houses with more garden than house. I traipsed up and down hills, and wandered along winding avenues only to retrace my steps, all in an attempt to follow an invisible line through the neighbourhood. I kept hoping that some interesting feature might lie along the zero line of longitude but I was disappointed. Enid Blyton's house on Shortlands Road? Missed. The hilltop Celtic cross of the Shortlands War Memorial [photo]? Close, but not quite. Anything that wasn't a house, a road or a garden. Absolutely not. xxiv) I was briefly excited, strolling along Hayes Lane, to discover an entire London suburb I'd never heard of before. Park Langley doesn't have its own station, nor any terminating buses, and therefore risks non-existence in the eyes of anybody living more than a few miles away. This 100-year-old neighbourhood (southeast of Beckenham) dates from an age when "estate" meant "quality", and boasts a thousand or so detached properties laid out along gently curving streets. The meridian clips the first house on the southern side of Top Park, at the entrance to the Park Langley Conservation Area. Immaculate clusters of bright orange flowers surrounding each ornamental street tree, still blooming brightly even in October [photo], provided convincing evidence that local residents have both pride and considerable time on their hands. » And on, and on, crossing aspirational avenue after aspirational avenue, more of the same, very des res, highly unaffordable.
West Wickham / Coney Hall xxv) After traversing the West Wickham Sports Grounds, and crossing the final stretch of the railway line to Hayes, the Greenwich Meridian nudges the playing fields of Glebe School. Most secondary schools have a wooded hideaway right at the bottom of the playing field where the smokers usually hope to hide out, and that's the part we're talking about here. Staff and pupils have marked the meridian's passage with not one but two special markers - one a 7ft stone pillar, the other a squat dish-shaped compass a few metres away. Or so I'm told. It's impossible to see any more than a glimpse of either monument through the trees from the adjacent footpaths, so my attempted photograph is worse than useless [photo]. Don't worry, I took it on a Sunday when the school was deserted, and pupil privacy in Meridian Corner is assured. xxvi) You know the roundabout in ConeyHall where Glebe Way crosses Addington Road? The roundabout sponsored by Profascia Direct Ltd, purveyors of UPVC fascias, flat and tile roofing? The meridian crosses it. [photo] xxvii) One final within-London meridian marker can be found at the Coney Hall Recreation Ground. It's likely that you'll never ever visit this recreational plateau, not unless you have a penchant for obscure 1930s suburbs, or ever choose to walk section 4 of the London Loop long distance footpath. The zero-degree post resembles a sort of OS triangulation point, except made from considerably cheaper materials, and with a lumpy hemisphere protruding from the top [photo]. Two sides are inscribed with not very much writing, and the whole thing looks like a couple of hefty kicks from some local youth would cause it considerable damage. Thankfully, when I visited at least, local youth were much more interested in kicking a football around instead. Alas they were deliberately ignoring the nearby goalposts and had chosen to play up close to the meridian post, which made photographing it slightly awkward. But I sort of managed [photo]. And then rapidly made my exit.
New Addington xxviii) The last place the meridian hits before exiting the capital is the overspill estate of NewAddington. The very top of New Addington in fact, which is about as far from desirable as the borough of Croydon gets. The precise location is at the summit of King Henry's Drive, and then south through the grounds of Addington High School. I considered visiting for a final photo, but there was no convenient footpath from Coney Hall and the Sunday afternoon bus service was less than enticing. So I resisted. So you'll have to make do without a picture. I suspect that's no great loss.
And then, continuing south... Surrey: the M25, Oxted (passing through Paydens the chemist), Lingfield Park racecourse (almost). W SussexEast Grinstead (there are various stonemarkers at East Court, and the town's coat of arms features a vertical white line representing the meridian - also home to Meridian FM) E Sussex:SheffieldPark (on the Bluebell railway, plaque on station wall), Chailey (meridianstone erected 1953, see map), Lewes (another near-hit on a town centre), Peacehaven (theMeridianMonument looks out over the English Channel). France: (the French don't believe in our meridian, but it goes from Normandy to Lourdes anyway). Spain: from the Pyrenees south to (just outside) Benidorm, then into the Mediterranean. Africa:Algeria, the Sahara, Mali (straight through Gao on the the river Niger), Burkina Faso (through the northern town of Dori), Togo (just a tiny sliver in the northwest corner), Ghana (through Lake Volta, reaching the coast at Tema). The Atlantic Ocean:the Equator, more than 5000 miles of ocean. Antarctica: Queen Maud Land South Pole
Downham xvii) There are lovelier parts of London than the sprawling estates of Downham, but the Greenwich Meridian sensibly attempts to pass through via the remains of an ancient forest. A zigzag strip of footpathed woodland remains, somehow, which the meridian line duly crosses three times. The first crossing is outside a row of squashed cottages, the second close to a lonely bench and dog waste bin [photo], while the third is a little more secluded [photo]. Along this narrow leafy corridor, part of the long distance Green Chain Walk, I stood and watched two parakeets squawking shamelessly in the upper branches of a zero-located oak. xviii) At the foot of Bromley Hill, close to yet another roadside pub converted into a McDonalds, there's a rather ordinary parade of shops [photo]. Off licence, pizzeria, minimarket, that sort of thing. But just beyond the Tandoori restaurant, outside the Cleartone Dry Cleaners, is one of the southern meridian's rare pavement markers [photo]. It's a labelled rectangular stone with a precisely aligned groove pointing directly towards the front door of this esteemed laundry establishment, now under new management. So new in fact that when I arrived the owner was on his hands and knees in front of the shop painting the woodwork in alarmingly bright shades of pink and purple. "Don't mind me," I said, "I'm only taking a photo of that slab". So he carried on painting, and I got my close-up photographs [photo], and his shop gets an unexpected plug on this blog today. xix) If you've ever wondered where Millwall FC have their training ground [photo], it's nowhere as inner-city as the Den. Instead the Lions head several miles south to a very green playing field in the Ravensbourne Valley and practise kicking footballs across the meridian.
Bromley xx) Don't get your hopes up. The Meridian's not going anywhere well known like Bromley town centre. Instead it slinks through the western outskirts, almost edging into Beckenham, to various places you've never been. Like the Warren Avenue Playing Fields. This is a kickabout space for local sportsmen not good enough to play for Millwall, with a very ordinary square sports pavilion positioned almost perfectly on the Greenwich Meridian [photo]. There's also a desperately unloved children's playground consisting of little more than an ex-roundabout and three decaying swings [photo]. The latter, if given a lick of paint and shifted a couple of metres to the east, would make for a fine (and extremely cheap) meridian sculpture. But no need, because there's a real one coming up almost immediately to the south. xxi) On Farnaby Road, at the precise point where the gardens make way for a golf course, a stumpy metal post lurks beside an overgrown fence. It was put there by the Ravensbourne Valley Preservation Society to mark both the millennium and the meridian, and still presents two mirrored faces to west and east [photo]. Few pedestrian visitors pass this way and the neighbouring bus stop offers only a token service six days a week. Be in no doubt, most local residents cross the meridian by car. xxii)Ravensbourne Avenue is quintessential stockbroker country. A mile of detached homesteads alongside a golf course, stretching from one commuter-friendly railway halt to another. Ideal for bonus-blessed workers, ladies with golden glows and the recently retired. The street's not right at the top end of the affluence scale, as you can tell by the minimal gaps between neighbouring villas and the relatively narrow front gardens. But the gardens are prim, and the hedges are perfectly clipped, and the curtains of the spare bedrooms twitched invisibly as I walked by. Living on the meridian adds no value to the cluster of white-fronted villas in the centre of the road [photo], but I bet the local estate agents could talk it up as a desirable interior feature.
See also: • Marking the meridian (N) - my blog from five years ago, crossing London north from Greenwich (and 50 photos) • Marking the meridian (S) - my blog from this week, crossing London south from Greenwich (on one page, in the right order) • I know that what you really want is an accurate map showing the path of the Greenwich Meridian across England. So here's one(zoom in for London) • And what of meridian markers across the rest of England? View a lineful in my special gallery here.
Hither Green xi) The meridian clips the bottom right corner of Manor Park, a recently revamped Lewisham greenspace, although nobody thought to spend any of the council's money to mark its passage. Instead there's a rather nice twizzly wind-blown sculpture further up the park, and a few wildflower meadows bordered by a narrow wetland zone. Across the precisely-zero line flows one of London's lesser known rivers - the Quaggy - at the very point where it slips from pleasant parkland shallows to ugly concrete channel [photo]. I promise to come back and follow the Quaggy another time, but for now it's due south to a direct hit. xii) Only a handful of railway stations lie precisely on the meridian, and HitherGreen is the only one south of the Thames. Even better, you don't have to enter the station to see its meridian marker. A pedestrian subway leads beneath the tracks [photo], linking the shopping parade in Staplehurst Road to a bleak plaza on the opposite side of the tracks. Midway through, almost precisely where a ramp leads upward to the ticket office, a silver arch crosses the darkened roof of the tunnel [photo]. A red strip up and over the centre divides the western hemisphere from the east [photo]. Top marks to whoever thought up this idea, which beats the usual council-friendly scrawled mural depicting worthy services from the local community. Step beneath in awe and wonder, and let's be on our way. xiii) Lewisham Council have had another go at marking the meridian outside a new residential development on the corner of Hither Green Lane and Woodlands Street. They teamed up with Barratt Homes, whose dead-ordinary living-boxes are piled up alongside, and installed a line of eight metal plaques across a paved piazza beside a car repair shop [photo]. Each plaque depicted an English town or location straddling the meridian, some more local than others, which was a rather charming way of twinning the area with Sussex, East Yorks and points inbetween. That was in April 2007, but unfortunately the developer's optimism has proved unplaced. A bunch of metal squares lightly bolted to the ground, in southeast London - what were they thinking? All but one have been duly nicked, presumably for scrap, leaving only the plaque for "Peacehaven" intact on the pavement. Maybe just as well, because it's only taken 2½ years for the graphic etched on the Peacehaven plaque to become almost completely illegible [photo]. If that's Barratt quality, one can only fear for residents of the adjacent flats.
Catford xiv) Beyond the South Circular, at the heart of the Corbett Estate, the local parish church lies directly on the zero degree line [photo]. This Edwardian pile ought perhaps to be called St Andrew's-on-the-Meridian, but alas not. It has (reputedly) the widest Gothic nave in Britain, a whopping forty feet across, plus a newly restored organ. I didn't get to peek inside, however, because The Free Pentecostal Apostolic Church of the Lord Jesus Christ were in full flow within. xv) It's not quite perfectly aligned, but Torridon Road SE6 is London's most meridian-y street. It heads almost precisely due south for a full kilometre, with the zero degree line running through every single one the residential terraces on the eastern side of the street [photo]. Gardens at the top of the road, then back rooms further down, then front rooms, then front gardens - an unseen link between a complete row of neighbours. We should, perhaps send some of the Greenwich Observatory's thousands of tourists to stand instead on the traffic island outside the post office [photo], or to take photos of Torridon's 0° mini-roundabout [photo]. xvi) And then, oh blimey, I really wasn't expecting this. I knew that Catford had an enclave of surviving post-war prefabs, but I wasn't expecting to turn a corner on my Meridian journey and stumble upon them [photo]. Altogether there are 189 low-rise temporary chalets here, each set in its own fenced off patch of land, and each lovingly cared for [photo]. A few fluttering Union Jacks here, a few gnomes there, and all around the feeling of being amongst a defiantly proud and tightly knit community. Residents christened this the Excalibur estate, and the byways are all named after lesser known knights of the Round Table. Meliot Road (named after Sir Meliot de Logris) runs closely parallel to the meridian, with the line passing through one particularly fine example of a half-timbered prefab [photo][photo]. Oh to discover that such a building even exists, let alone in such a significant location. In the 1950s a prefab-packed estate such as this might have been a common sight in many parts of South East England, but this Catford hideaway is a rare (and uncommonly large) survivor. Six chalets have recently been protected with Grade II listed status, but long-term residents won't be reassured until the council finally designate the whole of Excalibur an official conservation area. Long may this unique lifestyle continue, it's magic.
Greenwich Observatory (south) i) The meridian exits the rear of the Meridian Building virtually unnoticed, its path marked only by an astrolabe (or, more precisely, an armillary sphere) on a plinth in a flowerbed [photo]. ii) From the hilltop, it's straight down the sloping lawn of the Old Royal Observatory Garden. Even if you think you know Greenwich you may never have been here, gated and secluded behind stepped terraces and trees. Access is from a twisting path that kicks off below the front of the Observatory, and the Greenwich Phantom has the full lowdown.
Greenwich Park iii) A narrow line of Meridian-marking granite slabs crosses The Avenue - the inclined roadway running from the bottom of the Park to the top. [photo] iv) Mind that horse! The proposed route of the Olympic Cross Country course wiggles twice across the zero degree line (and another twice to the north of the Observatory too). It's just as well that the 2012 course won't be following the meridian precisely, else there'd be a big tree needing major surgery, and groundsmen would also need to clip the edge of an overgrown old reservoir. Olympic bosses continue to reassure us that the historic Park will be be perfectly well protected from the trampling hooves of global equestrians and, moreimportantly, perfectly safe from the massed paranoia of certain local neigh-sayers. v) These could be renamed the Meridian Tennis Courts. vi) The semicircular Rose Garden is an elegant and peaceful part of Greenwich Park [photo], in bloom even in October! If you fancy a nice sit down, some of the benches around the hedged perimeter are in the western hemisphere, and some are in the east. vii) Next up, the Ranger's House once used to be home to the Greenwich Park ranger [photo]. More surprisingly, in 1815 that park ranger was Princess Sophia Matilda, the niece of George III. Today English Heritage run the place, and use the house to display a diamond magnate's decorative arts collection. Unfortunately it's shut for the winter to casual visitors at the end of September, and so I arrived a week to late to look inside. The Greenwich Meridian passes through the dining room, the Crimson Parlour and the Gallery, and is marked by a metal plaque on the outside of the southern garden wall [photo]. » Various large enamelled maps around Greenwich Park purport to show the location of the meridian. Be warned that these aren't terribly accurate, and show (for example) the line passing through the putting green and the wrong bit of the Observatory. Too expensive to replace, presumably, although I'm pleased to see that the Royal Parks website includes an updated and rather more precise version.
Blackheath viii) Ah, the vast grassy plateau of Blackheath, across which the meridian spans the boroughs of both Greenwich and Lewisham. If you mind the footballs, kits and peace campers, it's possible to walk along the invisible line almost completely unobstructed (apart from a rather awkward crossing of the busy A2 near the BlackheathTeaHut). On the southern edge a slightly-toppled litter bin (on the corner of Hare & Billet Road and Mounts Pond Road) really ought to be an official meridian marker, but sadly isn't [photo]. ix) Onward through the verdant detached gardens of The Orchard and the big villas on Eliot Vale. (Blimey, isn't undulating Heath Vale lovely?) Then across the Lewisham-Kidbrooke railway line, and through the heart of the Sacred Heart Convent on Belmont Hill.
Lee x) On Lee High Road, near the bus stop at the junction with Halley Gardens [photo], is the southern meridian's first pavement plaque [photo]. I had to negotiate a passing couple with a snappy staffie, but once they'd gone I paused by the roadside to take a proper look. This groovy flat stone was laid by the local Mayor in 1984, and apparently commemorates both the meridian's centenary and Lewisham's Anti Racist Week [photo]. The significance of this combination completely escaped me, but maybe there was a special 2-for-1 offer on chiselled slabs at the time. Whatever the reason, the complete ordinariness of this inner suburban street highlights the quintessentially random passage of Greenwich's longitudinal legacy.
The Prime Meridian is 125 years old this week. That's the imaginary north-south line through Greenwich which divides the world into western and eastern hemispheres, and from which longitude and universal time are measured. It passes less than a kilometre from my house. And we'd be lost without it.
Noon was once simply the time when the sun was directly overhead. The advent of rail travel in the 19th century forced many countries to standardise time based on a national meridian. The UK adopted Greenwich Mean Time in 1880, while the French preferred their own meridien through Paris instead. A global standard was required, so in 1884 US President Chester Arthur invited delegates from around the world to Washington to attend the first (and last) InternationalMeridianConference.
There are an infinite number of possible meridians, each stretching from the North to the South Pole, and any one of these could have been chosen. However, the Greenwich Meridian was pre-eminent because it had already been adopted by both the UK and USA and was therefore being used by 72% of the world's shipping. The French eventually backed down, but only in return for the rest of the world agreeing to think about adopting their system of metric measures. The crucial conference vote was taken on 13 October 1884, with France and Brazil abstaining and only San Domingo in opposition. And so time began at Greenwich (latitude 51°28'38"N, longitude 0°).
To celebrate tomorrow's anniversary I'm taking you on a week-long journey down the zero degree line of longitude, south from Greenwich, stopping off at all the places where the meridian has been marked in some way. There are plaques and monuments, bollards and arches, plus an awful lot of random everyday objects that just happen to lie on this most special of lines. I did exactly the same thing five years ago, but travelled north from Greenwich instead [words][photos]. There aren't quite so many official markers on the trek south towards the edge of London, but there's a lot more than zero.
Marking the meridian: The Royal Greenwich Observatory
Our prime meridian goes through Greenwich thanks to a 17th century astronomer's telescope. John Flamsteed was the first Astronomer Royal and made all his observations from a hilltop shed in the grounds of the newly established Royal Greenwich Observatory. An imaginary line drawn from north to south through this telescope became the marker from which celestial measurements of longitude were taken. But Flamsteed's was the only the first of four Greenwich meridians, each defined by a different successive telescope, and each now marked by a silver plaque on the observatory wall.
Meridian 1: based on John Flamsteed's telescope, 1685 Meridian 2: based on Edmund Halley's telescope, 1725 (185cm east of Flamsteed's meridian) Established when Flamsteed's original telescope began to subside into the ground. Meridian 3: based on James Bradley's telescope, 1750 (11m east of Halley's meridian). Still used by the Ordnance Survey for map-making purposes. Meridian 4: based on George Airy's telescope, 1851 (5.79m east of Bradley's meridian). Selected as the Prime Meridian of the world exactly 125 years ago this week.
It's the last of these lines which draws thousands of tourists to the summit of Greenwich Park every year. Legs astride the meridian they scramble to take photos of one another in the front courtyard, one foot in the west and the other in the east. You've probably stood here yourself, although if you've not visited recently you may not yet be aware that the public face of the Observatory has had something of a presentational revamp. There's no longer direct admittance to the courtyard, so folk now have to venture inside through a turnstile in the main Equatorial Building. No charge, it's still free, but they've finally got rid of the ridiculous requirement to collect an unnecessary ticket on the way in. Turn left to visit the two-year-old Astronomy Centre and bold bronze conical planetarium[photo]. Both are excellent, but time instead requires us to turn right onto the "Meridian route".
The Observatory's rear courtyard has recently been remodelled, replacing a nondescript patch of grass with a flower border and raised path [photo]. Visitors aren't made aware that they're crossing the meridian here, presumably to avoid congestion, but a metal globe on a plinth marks the invisible line across the garden [photo]. Onward past a rather huge telescope to the information desk, where a beaming girl would quite like to flog you an audio guide for £3.50, then out into a landscaped Garden of Time [photo]. Ahead is Flamsteed House[photo], whose Wren-built Octagon Room would have been perfect for the first meridian telescope had not the building accidentally been aligned 13 degrees off true north. An excellent exhibition of time and timepieces is housed within, including John Harrison's longitude-beating nautical chronometers, although most foreign vistors whizz through here fairly fast. They're after that definitive photo astride the famous brass meridian line in the main courtyard [photo], or maybe an ice cream from the first trailer kiosk in the western hemisphere [photo].
And then visitors pass back inside, this time for a rapid chronological jog through Greenwich's zero degree telescopes. Flamsteed's first, then a room aligned for Halley, then the room in which James Bradley took his measurements. The final chamber is almost completely filled by Airy's Transit Circle, which points outward across the milling snappers in the courtyard towards the stars beyond. If the Greenwich meridian could have an epicentre this would be it, not that most of the passers by seem to recognise the instrument's true significance. A variety of Prime Meridian souvenirs are available nextdoor - perfect if you're ever short of a fridge magnet or two. And don't forget to take the detour up the stairs to the Time and Society Gallery (important, but underwhelming), because this leads on to the Onion Dome perched at the very top of the building. Housed inside is the largest refracting telescope in the UK, a pert 28-incher built in 1893, through which the public are still invited to take a look at least once a month. Had this monster have been in place a decade earlier, then the Greenwich Meridian would probably have passed through these giant crosshairs instead. But it's Airy's line of sight that's been immortalised here at Greenwich and, quite literally, all around the world.
n.b. With the advent of global positioning technology in the 1990s, a new virtual meridian has been introduced. It lies 102½ metresfurther east than the official Greenwich meridian and is the line used for all air and sea navigation. That's why when you stand in the courtyard at Greenwich wielding a handheld GPS device it doesn't show a longitude of precisely 0°0'0".
I went back to the Greenway yesterday to check whether my view of the Olympic Stadium was permanently obscured. And it was. The metal mesh in the towering new electric perimeter fence is far too tightly spaced to allow the snapping of any decent photos, dammit, but that's overbearing security for you. Additional temporary fences are also in place, blocking off a long strip of newly-laid concrete as the Greenway continues to be transformed from a bramble-edged footpath into a landscaped multi-modal thoroughfare. It's ugly as hell at the moment, with the last vestiges of pre-Olympic undergrowth now stripped from the surface. Where once was a perfect always-open viewing platform, the whole area now feels like an unwelcoming building site within an unwelcoming building site. Who'd ever want to come up here now?
But a new panoramic opportunity is taking shape a little further south, alongside the railway. A collection of bright lime-green containers, some for shelter, another upturned like a tower, now fill a previous Greenway dead end. There's no access for the public yet, and the opening's already running at least a month later than scheduled. But smile, because this is the View Tube, and it's here to give taxpayers their line of sight back.
The View Tube is a project from Leaside Regeneration, a "community-based social enterprise" mildly obsessed with the use of metal containers. Sometimes they stick offices inside, at other times artist's studios, but here the containers form an unlikely new collective facility. It's planned to be a "community café" (despite the fact there's not really any community nearby) (unless the target market is Olympic site workers wandering by, of which there are plenty). It's planned to provide "inclusive cycle hire" facilities (for anyone who fancies a bike ride along the Greenway) (I can think of much nicer spots, and several more worthwhile journeys). It's planned to provide an "education facility for key stages 1-5" (so that'll be lots of worksheets about ecology and engineering for local schools, no doubt). And it's planned to put on various "new art installations" (because a near-Olympic gallery is obviously what East London's been crying out for) (I don't know how I've survived for so long without). All the place needs now is a manager.
A job ad was posted this week for the role of View Tube Manager. The successful candidate will be expected to "establish the View Tube as a major resource for local communities, social enterprises and visitors to the Greenway", to "co-ordinate staff and services within the View Tube to maximum effect" and also to manage the site's day to day operation. Obviously the facility has to be "customer focused" and "sustainable" long-term, with the postholder required to ensure that "additional programmes in and around the View Tube are fully exploited". In other words, for a salary of £28K, they're looking for someone to turn a pile of metal boxes in the middle of nowhere into somewhere welcoming, prosperous and special.
I just wondered whether any of you might possibly be interested in the job. It's a four year fixed-term contract, with the opportunity to work on a windswept sewertop in the middle of a construction site, Should the View Tube ever evolve into a stakeholder-attracting success story then it'd be wholly your doing. More to the point, you'd be the custodian of the only remaining decentview of the Olympic Stadium along the entire Greenway, and therefore somebody well worth knowing. If I'm going kick off another series of decent 2012 site photographs then I'll need to be trotting up these part-time stairs on a regular basis, so being on speaking terms with the site owner would be damned useful. Plus, you never know, you might even want to give me a freebie backhander hot chocolate in the café as thanks for me pointing out the job in the first place. Closing date's in a fortnight's time. Let me know how you get on. And hurry up and get the place open.
Yesterday the Evening Standard sold its final copy. 50p bought you the latest London news, a Sudoku to do on the train home and a copy of the nauseating, straight-into-the-recycling ES magazine. From Monday everything changes. The Standard's ditching its cover price and giving itself away for free, in the hope that increased circulation will bring a profitable advertising bonanza. They're printing hundreds of thousands more copies than usual, so surely it'll much easier to pick up a copy than ever before? Ah, actually, no. And a lot of regular Standard readers are about to become seriously disenfranchised.
When newspapers are sold, there's a recognised distribution network to shift the product from the printers to the consumer. Vans rushing around the capital with the latest edition on board, delivered to street vendors, shops and newsagents, from which the eager reader could easily purchase a copy. Be it Romford, Ruislip or Purley, a copy of the Evening Standard used to be simplicity itself to locate.
When newspapers are given away free, the method of distribution changes. You need an army of low-paid hander-outers in brightly coloured jackets thrusting copies of your paper into the hands of as many passers-by as possible. Most of these locations need to be in central London, where the homebound commuters are, especially close to major road junctions and station entrances. But you no longer whisk copies of the paper to newsagents, because they're not going to be keen on customers coming into their shops and walking off with an unpaid-for freebie. Shoplifter's charter, that. Not a runner.
Hence the problem. If you're in the centre of town it should be easy to grab a Standard, they'll be everywhere, just like the London Lite is and londonpaper was. There'll be vendors outside every single Zone 1 station, for example, so that's great. Just so long as your commute takes you near a station, that is. Whole swathes of the City have no nearby stations, and here the Standard will no longer be available to those travelling home by bus or bicycle. Work in Clerkenwell? Sorry, bloody long walk to Angel or Farringdon required. Want a copy on Fleet Street? Nah, ain't none here guv'nor. Most unbelievably of all, not one single distribution point has been designated in Chelsea. Given that the Standard still targets itself at the affluent nanny-hiring classes, this unavailability is surely economic madness.
Once outside central London, the nu-Standard's distribution gets even feebler. Take where I live in East Tower Hamlets, E3. There are at least five newsagents within a ten minute walk of my front door in Bow. None of these newsagents will have any Standards come Monday, neither will there be a bloke down by the flyover trying to flog the paper to queueing motorists. Meanwhile for anyone living in Mile End the nearest giveaway point will be well over a mile away, so who'd bother even trying? Indeed there's only one distribution point planned within the whole of my postcode area, and that's at the Tesco superstore in Bromley-by-Bow. It's off the beaten track for most, and I can't say it's somewhere I make a habit of visiting every evening. But if I'm at home and fancy a free Standard fix, that'll be my only option. My local Tesco will be the sole distributor node between Hackney and Docklands, and between Whitechapel and Stratford. My chunk of East London is about to become an Evening Standard desert.
And it's even worse further out. Swathes of outer London will have Evening Standards available only in certain superstores, which are to replace newsagents as the publisher's outlet of choice. In Romford your only options are two Sainsburys and an Asda, in Ruislip a single southern Sainsbury, and in Purley a lonely Tesco Extra. Devoted Standard readers in the suburbs, many of whom don't commute into central London, are suddenly going to find themselves paperless unless they hop into their car and drive for miles to an out-of-town supermarket. They won't like that. They might even write a letter to the editor, although they'll only be able to read the response on the internet.
From Monday the Evening Standard may cost nothing, but that's no good if you can't find a copy. It seems that the newspaper is launching free before its distribution network is really ready, with an emphasis on suburban supermarkets that's a massive comedown on last week's newsagent network. The Standard's about to become an inner London commuter freebie, not a capital-wide voice. Never mind, there'll still be somewhere in Zone 6 to find a Standard, and that'll be littering the floor of a passing train carriage. Only time will tell if that's where the relaunched paper belongs.
» To check the Evening Standard news desert near where you live, click or search on this map. And then zoom out to view the problem on a wider scale.
One of the great things about art can be its ability to open doors. A few years ago, for example, Battersea Power Station was opened to the public ostensibly for an art exhibition, but in reality it gave curious Londoners the chance to swarm around inside a derelict old building they thought they'd never be able to explore. For the next month there's a similar opportunity to take a look inside a long-locked echo of London past - the Kingsway Tram Tunnel. And this time the excuse is knitting.
Between 1908 and 1952, any London commuter could have ventured beneath the streets of Holborn for the price of a tram ticket. Steps led down from Kingsway to an elegant subterranean station with a central island platform, from which trams departed regularly towards Aldwych to the south and Angel to the north. Initially designed for single-decker vehicles only, the tunnel was later deepened to allow the passage of double deckers. But even these couldn't remain profitable when faced with competition by car, bus and tube, and eventually the ramps down to this lamplit underworld interchange were firmly sealed. If this all sounds impossibly romantic, rest assured that the modern reality is rather gloomier. All you need is a booking for the exhibition and you can find out for yourself.
The arty installation is called Chord, and it's free, and it runs hourly from the junction of Southampton Row and Theobald's Road. Make yourself known to the guide with a clipboard and he or she will unlock the very obvious gates at the top of theramp and lead your group down into the rarely-seen depths. So many times I've walked past and looked through the railings and wondered what it might be like down there. And now I know.
The Kingsway tunnel is dark (as you might expect) and damp (probably thanks to Wednesday's downpour) and also unexpectedly long. This is no brief underpass, this is a proper underground carriageway with double tracks and a ribbed metal roof. Various building materials are stashed away in adjacent alcoves as the tunnel dips and rises towards a cavernous pillared space that was once Holborn Tramway Station. The retro feel here isn't entirely genuine - the tunnel's been used several times for filming so the fading posters and roundels on the walls are mere set dressing. Daylight creeps in down two steep confined staircases, while the sound of snarling traffic is ever audible from the roadway above. Rest assured, your guide will leave you free to explore this section of the tunnel (ooh, click, ooh, flash, click) while they wander on ahead to switch on the machines.
Ah yes, the artwork. In the far reaches of the tunnel are two giant (what can I possibly call them, erm...) swirly yarn turbines, probably located somewhere underneath the traffic lights at the end of Great Queen Street. Each has three arms each with another three arms, a bit like a whirling fairground ride, and positioned on each are six reels of brightly coloured string. These very slowly rotate and move apart, twisting a technicolour rope between them that grows at a rate of 20cm per hour. Yesterday the rope was about 20 metres long, which suggests that artist Conrad Shawcross had been playing with his machine for quite some time before the public arrived. I didn't notice anything growing while I was there, but over the month of the exhibition the cable should extend to fill most of the tunnel below ground. It creates, of course, a "strong structural metaphor" as "a clear linear entity made up and formed by a cyclical process". Because that's art. And we wouldn't be down here without the art.
30 minutes below ground, for free, in a long-lost London Transport tunnel, photos permitted, with a mechanical Heath Robinson rope-weaver - what's not to love? Book now, or else you may forever wonder what lies beneath.
Have you been experimented on lately? If you were walking around the capital earlier in the year, you might have been. TfL have been experimenting on Londoners to see what would happen if traffic lights were rephased to give pedestrians crossing the road less time and vehicles more. If you live or work in Wandsworth, Lambeth or the City, you might unwittingly have been part of it.
Boris wants to improve traffic flow in London, and one way to do this would be to increase the proportion of time that traffic lights are on green. It seems that many of London's traffic lights have been over-generous to pedestrians by allowing them too long to start crossing. At many road junctions the green man symbol is illuminated for up to 10 seconds, whereas Government guidelines require only 6. Cut the green man period and, hey presto, four seconds extra for cars. These extra few seconds soon add up, and so traffic flow is improved.
Before you start worrying about safety, it's not crossing times that are being cut, it's starting-to-cross times. The gap between the green man disappearing and the red man lighting up, which is supposed to give anyone on the crossing sufficient time to get to the other side, remains exactly the same.
Here's how the new proposals might work for a typical crossing where one complete traffic light cycle lasts 80 seconds.
Normal phasing
10 sec (13%)
10 sec (13%)
60 sec (75%)
Experimental phasing
6 sec (8%)
10 sec (13%)
64 sec (80%)
Under the new proposals, traffic would be moving for 80% of the time, not just 75%. Hurrah! For pedestrians, however, green-man-time would be almost halved. Turn up at a normal crossing on foot now and there's 1 in 8 chance that the green man is lit. Rephase the lights, and that falls to a miserable 1 in 13. Boo!
TfL has commissioned research (which you can read in full here, or in summary here) to explore what the implications of greater vehicle friendliness might be. Their experiments were carried out by tweaking timings at nine sets of traffic lights around London. Thousands of pedestrians were then filmed, and observed, and categorised, even interviewed. And some rather obvious conclusions were drawn...
There was a significant increase in vehicle throughput after the signal re-timing. According to the experiment, vehicle throughput increased by 6.5%. In other words, for every 15 vehicles that passed the lights before, one more slipped through during the extended green-light period. But that's exactly what you'd expect to happen when 'green time' is increased by about 6.5%. It's not rocket science.
More people crossed in the red man phase after the signals were re-timed. Again, that's obvious. If the red man phase is longer, more pedestrians will cross during it. In the survey, more than half of the pedestrians observed crossed on red, and less than 40% on green. Londoners are already dreadful at waiting for the green man before they start to cross, preferring to nip across when it looks safe or just to rush headlong in the hope that oncoming traffic will stop. Rephase the lights, and even more of us will choose to cross dangerously.
There was no significant effect on safety from the re-timing of the signals. Recorded observations of traffic flow suggested a statistically significant increase in the number of times road users needed to manoeuvre out of each other's way. Pedestrians deviating from their original route as they crossed, or vehicles undertaking controlled braking, both of these increased. But more serious traffic incidents didn't vary much. Nobody died. Nothing to worry about, then.
Pedestrians with limited mobility felt rushed at crossings, and uneasy crossing the road when the blackout period started. Most of us can cross four feet of road in one second, which is the baseline standard on which pelican crossing timings are based. But less mobile folk can't necessarily make it across before the red man appears, and a reduced green phase would only make them less willing to try. If anything stops this proposed change from being implemented, it'll be the needs of the elderly and the disabled.
When asked 'What do you think this blackout period means?' 60% of pedestrians either answered incorrectly or didn't know. It's amazing how many people don't know why the green man disappears. He used to flash, and this blackout means exactly the same thing - "you have plenty of time to continue to cross, but don't start out now". Indeed, so baffled are London's walkers by the 'dark phase' that Boris is considering introducing Countdown timers, like they have in certain American cities, to indicate how long it is until the red man appears. 10, 9 (plenty of time), 8, 7, 6 (if you run, you might get across), 5, 4, 3 (hurry up now!), 2 (hurry!), 1 (hurry!!), 0 (oh bugger here comes the traffic). Expensive to install, especially in these times of TfL austerity, but the additional information might be a real boon for street-crossing risk-takers.
Pedestrians did not notice a change in the junction operation and most felt safe before and after the signal timing changes. After the green man was cut there was a small drop in the number of pedestrians feeling unsafe, but nothing statistically significant. It seems most people never spotted they were being experimented on at all. So if Boris ever decides to increase car-time and decrease crossing-time, London's pedestrians probably wouldn't notice the additional inconvenience. I bet he does.
As requested, here are a few ideas for cutting costs in the capital. I agree, let's not slash services any more than we have to, let's seek alternative means of raising funds. Sell off a bit of the family silver, something valuable yet non-essential, something that nobody'll complain about. But as Mayor you don't actually own much, just a creaking transport network and some local development plans, so we'll have to exploit those. Let's flog some names.
Selling off 300 tube stations to the highest corporate bidder would raise a tidy sum for London's coffers. The idea's been around for ages, I know, but its time is now. IBMbankment and Elephant.co.uk & Castle are sure fire winners, financially at least, and we have lots more well known brand names lined up too. Make the change in December and, in a stroke of Johnson genius, you could completely rebrand the tube map under cover of "restoring the Thames". Surely nobody'll complain about Heinz Park Corner or Burger King's Cross St Pancras, not when the alternative is public service cuts. Just blame Ken for spending too much and leaving you with a budgetary black hole, like you normally do.
Let's go one stage further. Let's sell off the line names too. They're all high profile assets whose intrinsic value has clearly been underexploited. Let's rebrand those too. I've already got Mohamed interested in renaming the Piccadilly line after his department store. Selfridges want to buy both the lines that go through Bond Street, but I think we have to give the Jubilee to O2 because they pioneered the noble art of brand kidnap in London. Rupert's really keen to rename the Circle as the SkyDish line, asap, and how about Smirnoff for the Bakerloo? I know the latter goes against all your anti-alcohol public disorder legislation, but the sponsorship fee will fund your Congestion Charge black hole for several years. We had Lehmans lined up for the DLR, but obviously the economic climate in Docklands is proving more difficult these days. And we're having a lot more trouble flogging off the new East London line because I'm afraid nobody wants to be associated with Dalston, full stop. You might have a few more ideas yourself.
And let's not stop there. Why do we still insist on giving buses numbers? IKEA are really keen to rename the entire London bus network after their individual products. Why take a 237 to the shops when you could hop on a JANSJÖ, and I know commuters would love riding a BILLY to the office. One thing, though. The Swedes are insistent that this stupid "Routemaster" name must go. Your new rear platform bus has got to be called a FÄRGRIK HÖGST, apparently, because they've got a lot of crockery in the warehouse needs shifting. Shouldn't be a problem Boris dear, you can sell anything to the proles.
So far so good, but my next plan should actually allow you to slash London's council tax at a stroke. There are 33 London boroughs, many of which have a silly invented name that no resident is genuinely attached to. So they can all go. We've got superbrands queueing up to buy these and stamp their ideals and mission statements on a quarter of a million local consumers. Waitrose would like Barnet, obviously, while Porsche will pay millions for Richmond. Who wants to live in Hammersmith & Fulham when you could live in Ben & Jerry's, and you can imagine what a good match Lewisham would be for Lidl. There are still three champagne brands in the running for Westminster, while the Telegraph want to combine Bromley, Bexley and Croydon into one broadsheet-reading super-borough. Damned Olympic restrictions are forcing us to use official 2012 sponsors in East London, but I think "the London Borough of Coca Cola" has a nice ring to it, don't you?
One final moneyspinner to sell off, and that's the name of the capital itself. We should leave this until later, to give the public an opportunity to adapt to the other changes, but rebranding "London" would bring in an absolute fortune. It'd take a very special global sponsor to quintessentially refocus our city's international identity, but we've brainstormed a few obvious candidates. Virgin's a distinct possibility, obviously, or maybe Golden Arches, or possibly Windows7. Personally I'm a fan of Disney-on-Thames (assuming, that is, that we haven't sold off the Thames to Nescafé by then). Or we just find a very rich local entrepreneur and offer to name the city after them. I was thinking Sugar, or Abramovich, or even Cameron. Or, well, you've got an inherited fortune and bottomless pockets yourself, haven't you? Throw a wad of money into the pot and we'll let you run the city of "Boris". Works for me.
Not the fruit, you understand, but the mobile handheld device. The thin shiny thing with the qwerty keyboard and the big display. The pocket communicator with a pulsing red light and push email capabilities. That sort of BlackBerry. I've never had one, nor used one, nor wanted one, nor been offered one. What's wrong with me?
If I were more important I'd have one. Everybody on the rung above me at work was given one last year, but I have to make do with ordinary 20th century PC-based email. They have a permanent freebie connection to the outside world, and I don't. They're always on, and I'm always off. They sit in meetings tapping away under the table, responding promptly to some urgent incoming missive, and I'm forced to sit there listening to some tedious bloke droning on because I don't have a sanctioned excuse to look away. For all I know they're not really responding to anything at all. Maybe they've just set up their Blackberry to vibrate at ten minute intervals so that they can look important. Maybe they're flicking through their calendar to arrange a liaison with that girl from accounts. Maybe they're checking the latest tennis score, or buying shares, or sharing a rude joke with the manager sitting on the opposite side of the table. Whatever, I sit in meetings all alone with my pen and paper, and they've got the entire world at their fingertips.
I still live in a sub-BlackBerry world. If I need to check my calendar while I'm out of the office, I need a paper-based diary that might not even be up-to-date. If an important email comes round last thing in the afternoon after I've gone home, the first I know is 15 hours later when I log onto my PC the following morning. If I need to trawl through an important series of decision-heavy emails with essential attachments, I can only do that whilst sat at a single desk in a single building in a single city. And if I'm on leave when my boss has an urgent problem, he can't contact me wherever I am in the country and expect a response within minutes. Oh hang on a second, maybe not having a BlackBerry is actually a very good thing.
I often see BlackBerry owners lost in their own inner world, eyes glazed over, absorbed in unseen stimulation. I see seemingly independent people giving up control to a powerful external force that's surreptitiously taken over their waking hours. I see distracted folk repeatedly checking to see if their next hit has arrived, because that next hit is all important. I see twitching hands, and a faraway look, and the telltale under-eye signs of disrupted sleep. These users say they could quit any time, but I wonder how they'd cope if their lifeline were suddenly snatched away. Addictive? Surely not.
I have a life outside work. If it's eight o'clock in the evening, I'm off limits. If I'm at lunch when something needs doing, I'm not expected to drop everything to do it. I spend my journeys to and from work reading the paper, not clearing my inbox. I don't jump every time my BlackBerry pings only to discover that I have junk mail. If I'm working away from my desk I'm not tempted to distract myself from the task in hand when I should be concentrating on what actually needs doing now. I still work out of professionalism, not out of duty. OK, so I might be the last person in the office to know about tomorrow's meeting, or to read the funny email about what two colleagues got up to last night, but that's a small price to pay for relative freedom. Hell, who'd be 'important' at work? Give me BlackBerryLessNess any day.
LONDON A-Z An alphabetical journey through the capital's museums Sikorski Museum
Location: 20 Princes Gate, SW7 1PT [map] Open: weekdays 2pm-4pm (1st Saturday of the month 10am-4pm) Admission: free Brief summary: exiled Polish wartime archive Website:www.sikorskimuseum.co.uk Time to set aside: about an hour
The people of Poland haven't had it easy over the last millennium, regularly overrun and overtaken by their more belligerent neighbours. When the country was finally 'liberated' from the clutches of Adolf Hitler, and communist Russia took over instead, exiled Poles sought somewhere abroad to preserve their country's wartime records and treasures. Thus was the Sikorski Institute founded, safely within Allied territory, on the southern fringe of Hyde Park just along from the Royal Albert Hall. Today it's both an archive and a museum, hidden away in a row of villas mainly reserved for foreign embassies, and usually with a policeman pacing up and down nearby. Ring the bell at number 20 and a very grateful country will welcome you inside.
Within is a spacious terraced house with a central spiral stairwell and large airy rooms to front and back. The walls are decorated with Polish art, mostly military in theme, and each of the visitable rooms houses a different selection of Eastern European keepsakes. Room 1 is devoted to the military leader after whom the museum is named - Władysław Sikorski. His desk, his bust, that sort of thing - while all his very many medals are displayed in another room upstairs. Room 2 has a few historic pieces and some rather lovely Polish porcelain, but other than that it's pretty much militaria all the way. Don't panic - that's slightly more interesting than it sounds.
At the foot of the stairs is a bronze sculpture of Wojtek the bear, adopted as a cub by serving WW2 soldiers, then enlisted into the army when he grew into a lumbering (yet helpful) beast. Wojtek saw action at the battle ofMonteCassino, an Italian bloodbath in which Polish troops were eventually victorious seizing a heavily defended hilltop town. Monte Cassino gets a lot of mentions around the museum, being a victory of which the Polish Government in Exile were extremely proud, although it wasn't a battle I'd previously been familiar with. Indeed, I think it surprised my tour guide that I was neither Polish myself nor one of the UK's 1 million or so Polish descendant citizens. Everybody else on the tour was, all four of them.
Upstairs, a rare treat. Secured beneath a plastic cover is one of only two Enigma coding machines still on display in this country (the other, not surprisingly, is at Bletchley Park). This was acquired, and its code first cracked, by a bunch of Polish mathematicians before WW2 even started. They worked out how to decipher the millions of combinations of rotors and leads in this evil typewriter, allowing the Allies to know what over-confident German generals were up to. Machine complexity was later greatly increased, but Alan Turing and his pioneering 'Bombe' computer eventually unravelled that too, thereby helping to end the war two years earlier than might otherwise have been the case. It's hard to believe that such a lowly black contraption, all keys and cables in a small wooden box, had so great an effect on our global future.
And yes, more Polish military stuff to follow. The cap Władysław Sikorski was wearing during his suspicious fatal plane crash. Some swords. Lots of banners and military colours (including a liberator's red and white flag hastily made out of a bedsheet). Various leaflets, posters and booklets (in Polish, obviously). And all brought to life by a guide who himself saw action as a Polish post-war soldier, and without whom it all might have been rather dry.
And ssh, don't mention this bit to the staff, but one of the best bits about the tour was the opportunity to see inside a proper Kensington embassy-type building. The Iranian Embassy, location of an infamoussnooker-interruptingsiege in 1980, is only four doors up the road and must look pretty much identical inside. I imagined hostages holed up in the echoing rooms, and abseiling SAS men breaking in through the front windows, and gas from stun grenades swirling down the precipitous central staircase. And then I pulled myself together and thanked my guide and saw myself back out onto Princes Gate. A unique, and entirely eye-opening experience. by tube: South Kensington, Knightsbridge
You may have watched some pretty bad films in your time, but you may never have seen one as bad as The Room. Cult-inducingly bad, it is. Which is why, last night, hundreds of people turned up at the Prince Charles Cinema to watch it. And to gawp open-mouthed at the crassness of it all. And to shout back at the screen. And to throw spoons.
The Room has only been shown a handful of times in the UK, even though it was first released in America in 2003. It was made for $6m by a previously unknown director called Tommy Wiseau - who also had the audacity to write the script and star in the leading role. Alas there was nobody to tell him that his love-triangle movie was absolutely awful, so it flopped, and would have stayed buried had it not gradually earned a place in the pantheon of so-bad-it's-good cult movies. With monthly London screenings now underway over here, you may end up throwing a spoon at a screen sooner then you think.
Watching The Room inspires audience participation similar to the Rocky Horror show, but without the dressing up. Every member of last night's 400-strong audience received a plastic spoon and a sheet of instructions, and was encouraged to join in with the now traditional list of catcalls and catchphrases or to chuck in a witty insult of their own. With an auditorium full of bold beer-drinking 20- and 30-somethings, the scene was set for a damning and hilarious riot.
A quick plot summary. Johnny loves Lisa, but Lisa prefers his best friend Mark. It takes Johnny 90 minutes to spot this ("You're tearing me apart, Lisa!"), by which time the main protagonists have had excruciating sex in soft focus at least four times. Johnny has the wobbly-arsed body of an ageing East European rock guitarist, in contrast to Mark's more traditional beardy ruggedness. Lisa is always "beautiful", as the script repeatedly reminds us, and suffers from a most disturbing post-coital neck twinge. Meanwhile Johnny has taken under his wing a young social inadequate called Denny, who would like to sleep with his wife and has an uxplained ball-throwing fixation. Loopy Lisa keeps confiding in her crotchety mum (who has a terminal disease that's only mentioned once) and also in her best friend Michelle (whose boyfriend appears to change actor part way through the film). Almost the entire plot is set in the same San Francisco apartment, into which occasional random non-introduced characters walk, and which is decorated with highly unimpressive modern art. Including framed illustrations of spoons. Hence the spoons.
Every time one of the spoon-filled artworks appeared on the Prince Charles screen, a volley of plastic cutlery filled the air to a loud cry of "Spoon!" from the assembled multitudes. Some major recycling then ensued, as folk collected up the spoons that had landed around them in readiness for chucking the next time the picture frame appeared. Other choreographed shouts included "Focus!" every time the camera blurred, "Hello Denny!" every time the misguided flopsy-haired youngster wandered into shot, and certain rather ruder chants. I know it sounds crass and barely hilarious at all, but the crowd was having a whale of a time laughing in disbelief at plot, dialogue and delivery, and wisecracking off-the cuff throughout.
Some stage plays should never be made into films, especially when they're clunkily scripted and appallingly acted. But The Room transcends awfulness (sheesh, the random drug dealer on the roof) (oh boy, the cringeworthy birthday party scene) (ouch, the award for the least convincing bugging of a telephone answering machine) to make for a wholly entertaining evening of cutlery-based audience participation. If I go again, I'll be sure to take a cheap catering pack of plastic spoons for added aerial bombardment throughout. And I suspect that most of last night's audience will be back, if only because there'll be several more gobsmacking moments they'll have missed the first time round. Did he just... I'm afraid so... omigod.
We do like getting stuff for free. Lovely stuff, lots of stuff, as much stuff as possible, and all for nothing.
Why buy one when you can buy one get one free? Want your news for nothing? It's everywhere, so why pay? No need to buy music when you can beg, steal or borrow. Like extra TV channels? Forget Sky, it's free to view. Need entertaining? The web has everything for nothing.
But just because we get something for free, doesn't mean it didn't cost.
Two for the price of one just means that one was overpriced. Journalists still need paying, and adverts don't always bring enough in. Who'd join the music business when there's no business to be had? When there are too many TV channels, the smallest become unsupportable. Somebody paid for that webpage you're reading, either in time or money.
So moving to a get-it-for-free economy has its downsides.
Much of the free food we accumulate ends up wasted in the bin. Why buy a once-a-day paper when it's all on the net constantly updated? When only the biggest bands have a career, who'll invest in unproven talent? If the licence fee is cut, we'll either get less BBC or a worse BBC. Stick up an online paywall and readers will simply get their fun elsewhere.
We're used to free now, and may never accept charges again. But other people won't do stuff for nothing for ever. Either they'll start charging, or they'll stop doing. So enjoy free, because surely it can't last.
Alternative (unused) scripts for Boris's Eastenders appearance
Scene 1:The Queen Vic (interior) Boris: Hail thee serving wench, a pint of your finest fermented barley please. Peggy: You what? Boris: Intoxicant from the Bacchanalian vine, the enchanted fruits of Dionysus, quod erat demonstrandum. Peggy: Don't you come swanning in off the street with your fancy language, young man. Boris: I'm sorry, am I not in leafy Richmond, home to the cultured and the highly educated? Peggy: Nah mate, this is bloody Walford innit. Boris: Dammit. OK, I'll just have a pint of Pimms and be off.
Scene 2:Beale's Plaice (exterior) Boris: (to a crowd of journalists) And right here is where one of my cycle docking stations will be located. Ian: Excuse me? You're putting what outside my chippy? I'll be reporting you to the council. Boris: I'm much more important than the council. I'm the Mayor. Ian: Crikey. Well I don't want tatty two-wheeled hippies disfiguring the street outside my small business! Boris: I have a sponsorship opportunity that might interest you - your restaurant's name here on this cycle rack. Ian: I love you. Would you like to come inside for a photo opportunity?
Scene 3:Albert Square (garden) Boris: Oh my word, this is perfect for the shooting. Dot: I say, we'll have no gun crime here (Proverbs chapter 12, verse 7) Boris: No, I mean this square would be ideal for an Olympic venue. We could put the targets over there by the car lot, and the grandstand could go outside the launderette. Dot: Mr Papadopolous would never agree to that. He may be Greek, but he thinks the Olympics is a complete waste of money. Boris: My point entirely. We'll install a cheap temporary venue here using existing infrastructure, and then we won't waste millions on an unwanted facility in Woolwich, and I can cut your council tax by 2p. Dot: Ooh Mr Johnson, your priorities may be insignificant, but I like them.
Scene 4:Round the back of the allotments Boris: Are you stalking me or something? Dirty Ken: I'm going to follow you everywhere until you let me have my manor back. Boris: Isn't it about time you came to terms with the fact that I got chosen over you? Dirty Ken: But I was so much more in tune with the people round here, and you're all ineffectual bluster. Boris: Come on bruv, this ridiculous feud must end. (choreographed fisticuffs ensue) (Dirty Ken is hit on the head by a well-aimed doorstop) Boris: Four more years! Four more years!
Scene 5:Walford East tube station Bianca: Oi, blondie, why can't I find Walford East on the new tube map? Boris: I can't believe it! It will be reinstated...
I did something unusual at the news-stand on the way home from work. I didn't buy a copy of Time Out magazine. I have done almost every week for the last umpteen months, but this week I thought I'd give it a miss. And am I missing it? Not yet.
Time Out's been evolving lately. They moved all the food and shopping chunks nearer the front, which is great if you like boutiques and burritos, but I don't. They started a sports section a while back, including a bike bit, but now they've cancelled it. They slimmed down the letters page to a Twitter-length parody of itself. They removed the splendid "Big Smoke" section altogether, the front bit that used to have all the quirky London stuff, and shoved it onto the internet as a web-only exclusive. And they cut the total number of pages in the magazine, down to about three quarters of what it used to be, which is a cunning way of raising profit without raising the cover price.
The magazine still provides a fine summary of arty openings, comedy nights, clubbing venues, film times, gigs (especially gigs) and theatre reviews. But I don't do a lot of that sort of thing, and £2.99 a week every week is a lot of money just to find out the details of stuff I don't really do. Plus it's all available online, innit, for free. Arty openings, comedy nights, clubbing venues, film times, gigs (especially gigs) and theatre reviews. OK, so the web doesn't provide the detail or convenience that the printed page affords, but I reckon that's a price worth paying for not paying a price.
One of the main reasons I carried on buying Time Out for so long was for page 36. There (or thereabouts) (in the About Town section) was a weekly list of London 'events', some of which I might otherwise have missed. If there was ever a "Barnet Kite Fair", or a "Covent Garden Sausage Challenge" or a "Mayor of London's 4×4 Festival", this is where it would have been listed. And I much prefer a printed list of events to an impenetrable online database, because I can scan for what interests me rather than having to delve in search of hidden treasures. But for £2.99 a week, nah, I'll take my chances with the free website...
A quick review of Time Out's Around Town online events database:
The front page has a useful selection of imminent highlights and weekend what's-ons, which is good. There's a list of "most viewed" events (which is surely rigged, because there's a More London event in the top 5 every single bloody week). Crucially, what happens if I use the search engine to find events happening this Saturday? Aha, there are a manageable 29 to look through (which is tons more useful than the bloated list that the Visit London website churns up). And Time Out's "ends on" date is a nice touch for winnowing out the special from the regular. But some of the "ends on" dates are completely spurious - for example the National Theatre Backstage Tours definitely don't end on "Sep 29 2010", it's just that the Time Out database insists on inventing an end date. Most importantly, are any of the 29 events on this list events that I'd never have spotted otherwise and would really like to attend? Er, no. Ah well.
Time Out's recent modifications are at the instigation of new editor Mark Frith, ex of Heat magazine, who wants to boost circulation by making the magazine more popular. He's keen to edge deeper into the more-profitable mainstream, and this means pepping up the listings with a few more bulky features, top columnists and celebrity-focused interviews. "I don't want people buying the magazine just because it tells them what's on at the cinema at the weekend," he says. "I want it to be their favourite magazine." For some Londoners, perhaps, nu-Time-Out might be exactly that. But I fear Mark's going to need to find a new reader to replace me, because I think I'm taking Time Off.
What's on this week? Christmas Past Geffrye Museum, until 3 Jan
Festively-decorated rooms. Museum of Docklands Free admission 27 Dec - 3 Jan
All the usual, for nothing.
Olympic update
• The Picketts Lock fiasco is long forgotten. Instead all eyes are on London's proposed bid for the 2012 Olympic Games. Seb Coe & Co plan to plonk an Olympic Stadium in the Lower Lea Valley, despite less-than-wild enthusiasm from the businesses on top of whom it would be plonked.
• We have a stadium. Its crown of white girders has been dominating the E15 skyline for a while now, reminding local residents that their communities are about to be transformed. The area around the stadium still looks a complete featureless mess, but the skeleton of several other Olympic venues is already ascending.
• The Olympics are long gone. But there's a nice new swimming pool for the people of Stratford to splash around in, and a shiny Velodrome precisely where the old cycling circuit used to be, and some nice ex-Village flats for rich bankers to spend their bonuses on. That's proper legacy for you.
Another month, another new London station. Don't get too used to this rapid infrastructure rollout, because the run of fresh stations won't last more than another year. But ooh, bright shiny DLR station alert. Have you been yet?
The new South Quay station opened yesterday with minimal fanfare. Certain local residents managed to get there during daylight hours and take several decent photos. By the time I arrived, however, it was very dark. Very dark, that is, except in the space immediately underneath the station where it was very bright indeed. Somebody's installed lighthouse-strength illumination below the platforms, shining out into the surrounding area like a glaring beacon. Office workers streaming home weren't going to miss their new departure point.
South Quay's main ground-level concourse feels rather unwelcoming, in that it's essentially a gaping chasm beneath a concrete railway track. Good luck working out where to go. I watched one lost commuter walking up to the far end only to discover a useless waterside terrace rather than any useful station access. And then I tried to find the up escalator for myself. I walked up to the obvious one, only to spot that it was barely moving, and downwards. They've installed intelligent energy-saving escalators here which only ramp up to normal speed when approached - and only when approached from the right end. It took me a while to spot the illuminated "no entry" sign on this particular escalator, so then had to wander off in search of the proper 'up' one. Minimal signage meant that it wasn't as obvious as it should have been.
Then a slow glide up to the platform to enjoy the elevated South Quay experience. I bet there's a fine watery view out across the dock during daylight hours, whereas yesterday's rush hour offered only overlookable twinkling lights. Instead I got to stare at the glassy metally walls, and the very bright lights, and the 'next train' indicator. I was pleased that it hadn't been installed by cretins and was therefore fully legible. I was less than impressed by the scrolling message along the bottom which read "Passengers are advised that the new South Quay station is now open". Well, yeah, duhhh, obviously.
This year the theme is darkness, with the appearance of an all-enveloping giant steel box on stilts. It doesn't look terribly exciting from the second level overbridge, more like an oversized freight container, but then it's not the exterior that's important here. The box's creator is Miroslaw Balka, a Polish architectural artist, and he's the first commissionee to create something the Tate audience can actually walk inside. To find the way in, walk up to the far end of the Turbine Hall and stand at the foot of the ramp rising back into the box. Dark, isn't it?
It is very dark indeed inside the box. Even if you've heard reports of how dark it is, the pitchblackness of the interior will still surprise you. That's so long as all the participants are playing by the rules and keeping their cameras in their pockets, as requested by a polite sign at the entrance to the artwork. While your eyes are attempting to adjust to the darkness, the last thing you want to see is the flash of a camera or the glow of a mobile screen. Needless to say, there are plenty. It's clearly not feasible to tell today's youth to put their mobiles away, because they'd be lost without them. That pinpoint of bright light you can see, that's some selfish twat taking a photo so that they can send dimly-lit facial images to their mates. Please resist the temptation to punch them in the face (even though in the darkness they'd never know who hit them).
1) Olafur Eliasson - The Weather Project: A giant radiating orange sun which Londoners took to their hearts [2003]
Twickenham Embankment is a very pleasant spot. It's located away from the High Street, down by the river, facing the midstream boathouses of white-gabled Eel Pie Island. This is a great place to feed the swans, or to watch the pleasure cruisers chug by, or to sit outside the Barmy Arms for an alfresco post-rugby ale. There's even a cascade dripping with sculpted naked ladies in the gardens of York House, which isn't something you see every day. As for Twickenham Museum, that's to be found in a Grade 2 listed townhouse up winding Church Lane, with proper Georgian windows and a pale green door. Occasionally a blue sign appears on the door, and another on the wall alongside, bearing a boldly welcoming "OPEN". Ten hours a week, the museum's volunteer curators await someone to chat to.
And there was only the one room upstairs. More history and more bygone photos - again rather more on the walls than in the cabinets. The whole northern-Thames-side stretch of Richmond borough was covered, including various elegant village-ettes I've never personally visited. Depressingly little on Eel Pie Island, I thought, given that it was a fascinating location and only 100 metres away. While I was investigating upstairs another couple of visitors nipped into the museum, and nipped round, and nipped back outside again. But I still had time to make one further discovery about the house itself, which is that 25 The Embankment had once been owned by Thomas Twining, the legendary 18th century leaf importer. My museum trip had come up trumps, as I bagged an unexpected two for T.
But what to cut? A few rush hour buses, so that we can all pack in more tightly together? That's likely, apparently. How about reducing bus frequencies, so that the gap between services is a bit longer than before. That's also likely, on certain routes, although (to give one very specific promise) nothing quite so drastic as doubling waiting times from 6 to 12 minutes. Or how about shortening routes, especially those bits near to the terminus where buses run almost empty. Curtailment might mean passengers have to change more often, and wait longer, and pay twice, but they'd still be able to reach their desired destination eventually. Not an option, obviously, is the cancellation of Boris's debendification plan, nor the derailing of his Routemaster replacement. Which leaves one final possibility - scrapping routes altogether.
The 425 is a new-ish bus, introduced last year as part of a major reorganisation of routes in the Bow area. Its route is almost entirely duplicated by other services. If you want to get from Stratford to Hackney you can catch a 276. If you want to get from Stratford to Mile End you can catch a 25. If you want to get from Bow to Clapton you can catch a 488. If you want to get from Mile End to Hackney you can catch a 277. And if you want to get from my house to Homerton Hospital (because bus routes always go to hospitals) you can catch either the 276 or the 488, there's no need for a 425 option as well. Indeed the hospital loop is a real diversionary blight on the 425's route, crawling round the backstreets of Homerton in a jam-snarling figure of eight, and putting a real dampener on anybody intending to ride the 425 as a rapid through service. Because it isn't.
Unlike the great majority of Londoners I've actually been to Boris Airport. Or at least I've taken a boat to the watery spot where it's most likely to possibly end up, five or so miles off the North Kent coast. The site's a long way out, nearly halfway to Essex in the middle of the major Thames-bound shipping lanes. I must say I wasn't thinking "airport" when I visited, I was thinking "oh my word blimey, look at these magnificent wartime Maunsell forts, aren't they bloody wonderful (if a bit rusty)". But if the Mayor gets his way then, sorry folks, the atmospheric wartime survivors at Shivering Sands will all have to be demolished. Typical - these iconic anti-aircraft platforms spent most of World War Two trying to shoot down swarms of German bombers, and now in the 21st century some foreigner called "Boris" wants to drop an entire bloody airport on top of them.
Except, even if it is technically feasible, does anybody really want to build an airport in the middle of the sea? It'd be inconveniently located, and prone to closure when the weather's bad, and at risk from birds flying into jet engines, and a pain for shipping. Rather than being able to change flights at Heathrow, long-haul passengers would find themselves having to travel umpteen miles across the southeast for their onward connection. The people of north Kent and southeast Essex would have to sacrifice their Thames-edge landscape so that Londoners could breathe in a bit less pollution and sleep with their windows open. And the view from Southend or Whitstable would be permanently tarnished by offshore swooping jumbos and a giant duty-free shed on the horizon. Thank goodness this flight of fancy will surely never be built - and I'll only ever visit once, to some rusting forts, on an insignificant bobbing boat.
Another day, another museum beginning with F. This one's at Woolwich Arsenal, which I blogged about so comprehensively earlier in the year that I wasn't sure there was anything left to see. But there was still this repository of death and killing, so I went there. It's a favourite venue for young children, obviously, one of whom I ended up queueing behind for a ticket. "He's four", said Dad, nodding towards the admissions charge list to the side of the till. "Yes I'm definitely not five, I'm really only four, it's not my birthday for ages," added the small boy, protesting rather too much. But he got in scot-free anyway.
A lot of young men in uniform, mostly camos, were wandering around the museum. I think they had an office somewhere, and I guess they were volunteers from the nearby barracks helping out with stewarding and running activities and drinking coffee in the café. The museum seemed very keen to promote their in-house catering facility, which is open to folk off the street as well as to paying visitors and soldiers. But, not being much of a café-frequenter myself, I left the museum thinking I hadn't seen much. Partly my fault for being on a whistlestop schedule. If I'd hung around an extra half hour I could have looked inside the medals gallery upstairs, and if I'd hung around an extra hour I could have watched the 'introductory' film and the special audio-visual smoke-and fire presentation. But I'd have had to wait several months to explore the second half of the museum - the Cold War Gallery across the street, because it's currently closed for storage purposes. So I'd recommend that you save your money and come back in 2010... unless you can persuade the nice lady on the front desk that you're only four.
To get from Woolwich (above) to Thamesmead (below), you could take the bus. But I walked. It only took an hour, and meant that I got to walk a blissfully obscure section of the riverside Thames Path [map]. Blimey, do people actually choose to live on the eastern banks of Gallions Reach? Maybe it's more attractive when the sun's out. Onward past an expanse of bleak undeveloped wasteground where some future Mayor of London might one day build the Thames Gateway Bridge. To the remote extremity of Tripcock Ness, where a navigational light-tower keeps guard over a sharp kink in the Thames (highlight of the walk, in a flat grey way). And on east towards Thamesmead Clock Tower, which was much harder to reach than it first appeared. On the riverbank I discovered an extraordinarily over-optimistic example of urban planning - a raised concrete viewpoint (with a view of, erm, Barking Reach flood barrier, some incinerators and big piles of rusty containers) plus thirty-or-so landscaped benches (some with a view of the aforementioned Dagenham shoreline, others staring straight into a brick wall). And all for a usership of nil, because nobody ever got round to building flats on the strip of wasteland behind. Obviously I loved it. And I'll be back to do this walk properly, in its entirety, in sunshine, one day.
When you live on a reclaimed munitions testing site in the shadow of a sewage works, a trip to the shops could really brighten your day. But for the fifty thousand residents of Thamesmead, the local town centre leaves much to be desired. Forty years ago things seemed very different. A bold futuristic 'floodproof' town had been constructed on the Erith marshes to rehouse London residents displaced after slum clearance. It must have seemed ideal to locate the shopping centre non-centrally on a lakeside near the Thames, even though this meant that most residents would have to drive or catch a bus to get there. And it must have seemed ideal to build shops on either side of an artificial canal beneath a giant Clock Tower, all to add a bit of character. Alas, the place doesn't feel quite so ideal now.
The museum is based in a restored Georgian terraced house, which ought to have been hint enough to its diminuitive size. I walked into the first small room to pay my £4 to the girl behind the (rather elegant) desk, and accepted her offer of a guidebook consisting of photocopied sheets in a plastic wallet. It was only at this point I realised that the room in which I was standing formed half of the permanent exhibition. Eight or so exquisite fans hung from the walls, each beautifully painted or etched, although I'd have failed to appreciate them properly without the printed notes in front of me. Some were fans proper, while others were semicircular works of art not yet snipped, trimmed and folded. Once I'd grasped the concept that 18th century fans were merely handheld paintings for hot ladies, the rest of the collection made more sense.
Upstairs the museum puts on a thrice-yearly special exhibition, the theme of which (at the moment) is War & Peace. 18th century courtiers loved nothing better than to flap some noble battle scene in front of their face, especially if it featured pert soldiers in uniform or buff heroes from Greek myth. Commemorations of great victories were also de rigueur, even into the early 20th century, sometimes across broad pleated folds and sometimes in elaborate miniature. This was an impressive show of more than 200 fans, allegedly just the tip of the museums' in-storage iceberg, covering a broad perspective of eras and cultures. For greatest enjoyment it was crucial to read each accompanying label carefully, because somebody's gone to a heck of a lot of effort to write them.
Down to Eltham, not to the Palace (been there, blogged that) but to visit E Nesbit's house. She's the prolific turn-of-the-century author who wrote The Railway Children, amongst many other things, and wrote it here in an old house on Well Hall Road. Edith's home no longer stands, having been demolished after a fire in 1926, after which the council set about transforming the surrounding land into an attractive set of gardens. And didn't they do well? An astonishing number of garden types and habitats have been crammed into thirteen urban acres. Part is wooded and part parklike, but other areas include sloping rockeries, ornamental flowerbeds and a bowling green. There are also two formal gardens, one sunken Italian, the other rather larger and laid out around a central fountain. Three holes in the western wall once housed Tudor bee skeps, unique in London, and the rosebushes must look a spectacular sight in the summer.
But not in mid-October. The entire Pleasaunce was extremely quiet at the weekend (apart from the roar of passing Dover-bound traffic), attracting few visitors despite the allure of its assorted autumn colours. One woman pushing a well-wrapped toddler, two girls gossipping on a bench, one youth engaged in an important phone call, and me. Plus lots of squirrels, who know a good nut source when they see one. Rather busier was the moat-side Tudor Barn, a two-storey gabled outbuilding originally owned by Sir Thomas More's daughter. It's been many things in its time, notably a pub, but has relaunched this month as a cafe/brasserie/eventspace. I popped in to try it out (yes, welcoming, cosmopolitan, full) but didn't really have time to sit down for a bite. "Do you do take away?" I asked. That threw her. "Er, we can do," she replied, no doubt wondering why I'd want to take my hot chocolate outside with the squirrels when I could have stayed in with proper crockery. My drink was tepidly so-so, although another customer at the counter assured me that the late-opening Sunday roasts are great. The Tudor Barn's website is as yet unhelpfully information-light, but both Brockley Central and the Greenwich Phantom have eaten here recently and posted reviews. Me, I'd stick with the outdoor garden-wandering experience, which is absolutely more than pleasaunt.
Greenwich's fame spread around the world 125 years ago this week when a line of longitude through the Royal Observatory was selected as the starting point of space and...
It was never meant to be this way. Ten years ago a nation held its breath as Peter Mandelson struggled to build a big tent on the North Greenwich Peninsula before Big Ben struck 2000. The Millennium Dome wasn't quite the spectacle he'd hoped, and once 2001 came round the site faded away into mothballed desolation. Government didn't have a clue, but big business eventually spotted a major opportunity (knockdown price, tube station alongside, kerching) and transformed the DustbinLid into an entertainment supernode. Two years on and the rebranded Oxygenmolecule is a huge commercial success, luring in a succession of musical megastars to perform in a huge arena surrounded by tapas bars. In 2012, the Olympic gymnastics and wheelchair basketball competitions will be played out beneath the MobileNetwork's glass fibre ceiling. And this weekend they've been having a practice.
Outside the arena there were only a few nods to the presence of the world's best pommel-horsers and ring-hangers. Adidas had a stand near the entrance selling stripy lycra merchandise, and souvenir t-shirts were also available from stalls located in front of the void where the luxury casino isn't. Further round, near the bored-looking Herta hotdog sellers, security staff guarded a rare additional back-of-house exit. Outside the building, just out of view, taxis and coaches waited to whisk athletes and press back to wherever in not-Greenwich they were staying. But most excitingly, the barriers beyond the British Music Experience were down, allowing curious visitors a rare opportunity to wander into the Dome's undeveloped southwestern quadrant. No cafes here, nor overpriced exhibitions, just a curved pathway in a gaping void beneath the original tented ceiling. This route was open for access to media accreditation facilities, not that there was anybody around other than a cleaner, so I thoroughly enjoyed looking at the space as it used to be before the pizzerias invaded.
Somewhat unexpectedly, Greenwich boasts a surprisingly high number of sporty locations. The Royal Blackheath Golf Club is the oldest golf club in the world (caveats and qualifications apply) and Blackheath Rugby Club is similarly the oldest public rugby team (ditto). Arsenal FC were founded in deepest Woolwich (been there, blogged that). And competition for the 2012 Olympics will take place not just in "North Greenwich Arena 1" but also, controversially, in Greenwich Park and at Woolwich Barracks. So much choice. But on a mid-season footballing Saturday there was only one place to go, and that was the home ground of Charlton Athletic.
I turned up mid-morning, well before the earliest spectators arrived, but the ground (and street outside) were already a hotbed of crucial pre-match action. Several stocky black-suited blokes were massing by the East Stand turnstiles, preparing to do whatever men in black suits do at football clubs. Security, or stewarding, or selling Courage Best - something like that. Other lesser folk stood around in fluorescent orange tabards, waiting to direct a crowd that wouldn't be arriving for several hours, and waving in the Huddersfield Town team coach through the stadium gates. Charlton's official doughnut van had been wheeled into position beneath the giant club badge, while a gaggle of burger trolleys stood idling off-road waiting to have their spitting grills fired up. A girl in a white trailer looked nearly ready to serve up her first hotdog of the day, but there were no queues as yet for her one-quid cups of steaming Bovril. Over at the Charlton Athletic Superstore, a fresh delivery of krbs-sponsored kit arrived in the back of a UPS van. But this early in the day, apart from myself, the only unpaid passer-by was a black cat darting through the pedestrian arches beneath the nearby railway. It brought good luck for Charlton who, by five in the afternoon, were celebrating being back on the top of Division One. Ah, for a return to the golden days when CAFC being in the First Division really meant something.
Random borough (23): Time once more for me to take another random trip to one of London's 33 boroughs. As I write I have no idea which one of the 11 remaining borough names will be revealed when I unfold the slip of paper I'm about to pick from my legendary (but unseen) "special jamjar". I could pick any one of the other London boroughs - inner or outer, urban or suburban, small or large, fascinating or dull. I just know it won't be Merton, Islington, Enfield, Sutton, Lewisham, Southwark, Kensington & Chelsea, Hackney, Hillingdon, the City, Bromley, Lambeth, Tower Hamlets, Haringey, Hounslow, Brent, Redbridge, Ealing, Harrow, Croydon, Waltham Forest or Wandsworth, because they're the twenty-two (dark grey) boroughs I've picked out already.
xxiii) After crossing the Bromley South railway line just west of Shortlands station, the Greenwich Meridian gets proper suburban. Residential street after residential street, occasionally flats but more usually houses, and increasingly houses with more garden than house. I traipsed up and down hills, and wandered along winding avenues only to retrace my steps, all in an attempt to follow an invisible line through the neighbourhood. I kept hoping that some interesting feature might lie along the zero line of longitude but I was disappointed. Enid Blyton's house on Shortlands Road? Missed. The hilltop Celtic cross of the Shortlands War Memorial [photo]? Close, but not quite. Anything that wasn't a house, a road or a garden. Absolutely not.
xxvii) One final within-London meridian marker can be found at the Coney Hall Recreation Ground. It's likely that you'll never ever visit this recreational plateau, not unless you have a penchant for obscure 1930s suburbs, or ever choose to walk section 4 of the London Loop long distance footpath. The zero-degree post resembles a sort of OS triangulation point, except made from considerably cheaper materials, and with a lumpy hemisphere protruding from the top [photo]. Two sides are inscribed with not very much writing, and the whole thing looks like a couple of hefty kicks from some local youth would cause it considerable damage. Thankfully, when I visited at least, local youth were much more interested in kicking a football around instead. Alas they were deliberately ignoring the nearby goalposts and had chosen to play up close to the meridian post, which made photographing it slightly awkward. But I sort of managed [photo]. And then rapidly made my exit.
xviii) At the foot of Bromley Hill, close to yet another roadside pub converted into a McDonalds, there's a rather ordinary parade of shops [photo]. Off licence, pizzeria, minimarket, that sort of thing. But just beyond the Tandoori restaurant, outside the Cleartone Dry Cleaners, is one of the southern meridian's rare pavement markers [photo]. It's a labelled rectangular stone with a precisely aligned groove pointing directly towards the front door of this esteemed laundry establishment, now under new management. So new in fact that when I arrived the owner was on his hands and knees in front of the shop painting the woodwork in alarmingly bright shades of pink and purple. "Don't mind me," I said, "I'm only taking a photo of that slab". So he carried on painting, and I got my close-up photographs [photo], and his shop gets an unexpected plug on this blog today.
xxi) On Farnaby Road, at the precise point where the gardens make way for a golf course, a stumpy metal post lurks beside an overgrown fence. It was put there by the Ravensbourne Valley Preservation Society to mark both the millennium and the meridian, and still presents two mirrored faces to west and east [photo]. Few pedestrian visitors pass this way and the neighbouring bus stop offers only a token service six days a week. Be in no doubt, most local residents cross the meridian by car.
xii) Only a handful of railway stations lie precisely on the meridian, and Hither Green is the only one south of the Thames. Even better, you don't have to enter the station to see its meridian marker. A pedestrian subway leads beneath the tracks [photo], linking the shopping parade in Staplehurst Road to a bleak plaza on the opposite side of the tracks. Midway through, almost precisely where a ramp leads upward to the ticket office, a silver arch crosses the darkened roof of the tunnel [photo]. A red strip up and over the centre divides the western hemisphere from the east [photo]. Top marks to whoever thought up this idea, which beats the usual council-friendly scrawled mural depicting worthy services from the local community. Step beneath in awe and wonder, and let's be on our way.
xiv) Beyond the South Circular, at the heart of the Corbett Estate, the local parish church lies directly on the zero degree line [photo]. This Edwardian pile ought perhaps to be called St Andrew's-on-the-Meridian, but alas not. It has (reputedly) the widest Gothic nave in Britain, a whopping forty feet across, plus a newly restored organ. I didn't get to peek inside, however, because The Free Pentecostal Apostolic Church of the Lord Jesus Christ were in full flow within.
xvi) And then, oh blimey, I really wasn't expecting this. I knew that Catford had an enclave of surviving post-war prefabs, but I wasn't expecting to turn a corner on my Meridian journey and stumble upon them [photo]. Altogether there are 189 low-rise temporary chalets here, each set in its own fenced off patch of land, and each lovingly cared for [photo]. A few fluttering Union Jacks here, a few gnomes there, and all around the feeling of being amongst a defiantly proud and tightly knit community. Residents christened this the Excalibur estate, and the byways are all named after lesser known knights of the Round Table. Meliot Road (named after Sir Meliot de Logris) runs closely parallel to the meridian, with the line passing through one particularly fine example of a half-timbered prefab [photo] [photo]. Oh to discover that such a building even exists, let alone in such a significant location. In the 1950s a prefab-packed estate such as this might have been a common sight in many parts of South East England, but this Catford hideaway is a rare (and uncommonly large) survivor. Six chalets have recently been protected with Grade II listed status, but long-term residents won't be reassured until the council finally designate the whole of Excalibur an official conservation area. Long may this unique lifestyle continue, it's magic.
Greenwich Observatory (south)
vi) The semicircular Rose Garden is an elegant and peaceful part of Greenwich Park [photo], in bloom even in October! If you fancy a nice sit down, some of the benches around the hedged perimeter are in the western hemisphere, and some are in the east.
Blackheath
Lee
Marking the meridian
Our prime meridian goes through Greenwich thanks to a 17th century astronomer's telescope. John Flamsteed was the first Astronomer Royal and made all his observations from a hilltop shed in the grounds of the newly established Royal Greenwich Observatory. An imaginary line drawn from north to south through this telescope became the marker from which celestial measurements of longitude were taken. But Flamsteed's was the only the first of four Greenwich meridians, each defined by a different successive telescope, and each now marked by a silver plaque on the observatory wall.
It's the last of these lines which draws thousands of tourists to the summit of Greenwich Park every year. Legs astride the meridian they scramble to take photos of one another in the front courtyard, one foot in the west and the other in the east. You've probably stood here yourself, although if you've not visited recently you may not yet be aware that the public face of the Observatory has had something of a presentational revamp. There's no longer direct admittance to the courtyard, so folk now have to venture inside through a turnstile in the main Equatorial Building. No charge, it's still free, but they've finally got rid of the ridiculous requirement to collect an unnecessary ticket on the way in. Turn left to visit the two-year-old Astronomy Centre and bold bronze conical planetarium [photo]. Both are excellent, but time instead requires us to turn right onto the "Meridian route".
And then visitors pass back inside, this time for a rapid chronological jog through Greenwich's zero degree telescopes. Flamsteed's first, then a room aligned for Halley, then the room in which James Bradley took his measurements. The final chamber is almost completely filled by Airy's Transit Circle, which points outward across the milling snappers in the courtyard towards the stars beyond. If the Greenwich meridian could have an epicentre this would be it, not that most of the passers by seem to recognise the instrument's true significance. A variety of Prime Meridian souvenirs are available nextdoor - perfect if you're ever short of a fridge magnet or two. And don't forget to take the detour up the stairs to the Time and Society Gallery (important, but underwhelming), because this leads on to the Onion Dome perched at the very top of the building. Housed inside is the largest refracting telescope in the UK, a pert 28-incher built in 1893, through which the public are still invited to take a look at least once a month. Had this monster have been in place a decade earlier, then the Greenwich Meridian would probably have passed through these giant crosshairs instead. But it's Airy's line of sight that's been immortalised here at Greenwich and, quite literally, all around the world.
But a new panoramic opportunity is taking shape a little further south, alongside the railway. A collection of bright lime-green containers, some for shelter, another upturned like a tower, now fill a previous Greenway dead end. There's no access for the public yet, and the opening's already running at least a month later than scheduled. But smile, because this is the View Tube, and it's here to give taxpayers their line of sight back.
A job ad was posted this week for the role of View Tube Manager. The successful candidate will be expected to "establish the View Tube as a major resource for local communities, social enterprises and visitors to the Greenway", to "co-ordinate staff and services within the View Tube to maximum effect" and also to manage the site's day to day operation. Obviously the facility has to be "customer focused" and "sustainable" long-term, with the postholder required to ensure that "additional programmes in and around the View Tube are fully exploited". In other words, for a salary of £28K, they're looking for someone to turn a pile of metal boxes in the middle of nowhere into somewhere welcoming, prosperous and special.
When newspapers are sold, there's a recognised distribution network to shift the product from the printers to the consumer. Vans rushing around the capital with the latest edition on board, delivered to street vendors, shops and newsagents, from which the eager reader could easily purchase a copy. Be it Romford, Ruislip or Purley, a copy of the Evening Standard used to be simplicity itself to locate.
Between 1908 and 1952, any London commuter could have ventured beneath the streets of Holborn for the price of a tram ticket. Steps led down from Kingsway to an elegant subterranean station with a central island platform, from which trams departed regularly towards Aldwych to the south and Angel to the north. Initially designed for single-decker vehicles only, the tunnel was later deepened to allow the passage of double deckers. But even these couldn't remain profitable when faced with competition by car, bus and tube, and eventually the ramps down to this lamplit underworld interchange were firmly sealed. If this all sounds impossibly romantic, rest assured that the modern reality is rather gloomier. All you need is a booking for the exhibition and you can find out for yourself.
The Kingsway tunnel is dark (as you might expect) and damp (probably thanks to Wednesday's downpour) and also unexpectedly long. This is no brief underpass, this is a proper underground carriageway with double tracks and a ribbed metal roof. Various building materials are stashed away in adjacent alcoves as the tunnel dips and rises towards a cavernous pillared space that was once Holborn Tramway Station. The retro feel here isn't entirely genuine - the tunnel's been used several times for filming so the fading posters and roundels on the walls are mere set dressing. Daylight creeps in down two steep confined staircases, while the sound of snarling traffic is ever audible from the roadway above. Rest assured, your guide will leave you free to explore this section of the tunnel (ooh, click, ooh, flash, click) while they wander on ahead to switch on the machines.
Ah yes, the artwork. In the far reaches of the tunnel are two giant (what can I possibly call them, erm...) swirly yarn turbines, probably located somewhere underneath the traffic lights at the end of Great Queen Street. Each has three arms each with another three arms, a bit like a whirling fairground ride, and positioned on each are six reels of brightly coloured string. These very slowly rotate and move apart, twisting a technicolour rope between them that grows at a rate of 20cm per hour. Yesterday the rope was about 20 metres long, which suggests that artist Conrad Shawcross had been playing with his machine for quite some time before the public arrived. I didn't notice anything growing while I was there, but over the month of the exhibition the cable should extend to fill most of the tunnel below ground. It creates, of course, a "strong structural metaphor" as "a clear linear entity made up and formed by a cyclical process". Because that's art. And we wouldn't be down here without the art.
Have you been experimented on lately? If you were walking around the capital earlier in the year, you might have been. TfL have been experimenting on Londoners to see what would happen if traffic lights were rephased to give pedestrians crossing the road less time and vehicles more. If you live or work in Wandsworth, Lambeth or the City, you might unwittingly have been part of it.
10 sec
10 sec
60 sec
More people crossed in the red man phase after the signals were re-timed.
The people of Poland haven't had it easy over the last millennium, regularly overrun and overtaken by their more belligerent neighbours. When the country was finally 'liberated' from the clutches of Adolf Hitler, and communist Russia took over instead, exiled Poles sought somewhere abroad to preserve their country's wartime records and treasures. Thus was the Sikorski Institute founded, safely within Allied territory, on the southern fringe of Hyde Park just along from the Royal Albert Hall. Today it's both an archive and a museum, hidden away in a row of villas mainly reserved for foreign embassies, and usually with a policeman pacing up and down nearby. Ring the bell at number 20 and a very grateful country will welcome you inside.
Upstairs, a rare treat. Secured beneath a plastic cover is one of only two Enigma coding machines still on display in this country (the other, not surprisingly, is at Bletchley Park). This was acquired, and its code first cracked, by a bunch of Polish mathematicians before WW2 even started. They worked out how to decipher the millions of combinations of rotors and leads in this evil typewriter, allowing the Allies to know what over-confident German generals were up to. Machine complexity was later greatly increased, but Alan Turing and his pioneering 'Bombe' computer eventually unravelled that too, thereby helping to end the war two years earlier than might otherwise have been the case. It's hard to believe that such a lowly black contraption, all keys and cables in a small wooden box, had so great an effect on our global future.
And ssh, don't mention this bit to the staff, but one of the best bits about the tour was the opportunity to see inside a proper Kensington embassy-type building. The Iranian Embassy, location of an infamous snooker-interrupting siege in 1980, is only four doors up the road and must look pretty much identical inside. I imagined hostages holed up in the echoing rooms, and abseiling SAS men breaking in through the front windows, and gas from stun grenades swirling down the precipitous central staircase. And then I pulled myself together and thanked my guide and saw myself back out onto Princes Gate. A unique, and entirely eye-opening experience.
Alternative (unused) scripts for Boris's Eastenders appearance
