It's time for the traditional diamond geezer post in which someone at TfL creates a poster and I attempt to show it's unhelpful/misleading/incorrect.
A snazzy floral roundel has appeared at Stratford bus station promoting the London Blossom Garden in the Olympic Park. The garden's been open for a month, commemorates lives lost during the pandemic and you might well appreciate a visit. If you do then a poster alongside provides a map and tells you it's "about a ten minute walk"... except it very much isn't.
The straight line distance between Bus Stop A at Stratford bus station and the London Blossom Garden is 1.1km, or just under three-quarters of a mile. At a normal walking speed of 3mph (5kmh) this distance should be walkable in 13 minutes. You'd need to up your pace to 4mph (6½kmh) to manage it in 10 minutes. So, doable?
The big problem is that it can't be walked in a straight line.
» Firstly Stratford station gets in the way, a massive chasm spanned by a single footbridge, so getting to it and then climbing lots of steps is going to slow you down.
» Secondly the Westfield shopping centre gets in the way, and this was never designed as a straight-forward cut-through. Either you walk through the interior (which is curved and full of obstructive people) or you have to walk round the edge (which is less direct).
» Thirdly Stratford International station gets in the way, another chasm spanned only in a handful of places, none of which are ideally placed.
The shortest possible walking distance is actually 1.33km, or five-sixths of a mile, and you'd need to be averaging 5mph (8kmh) to manage that in ten minutes. It's not a realistic prospect.
Admittedly what the poster really says is "about a ten minute walk from this station" which is a different claim altogether. Some additional smallprint at the foot of the text says "for display at Stratford station", which suggests whoever created the poster didn't have one specific starting point. Let's be charitable and assume the ten minute walking time is from the station's northern entrance which is as close to QEOP as you can get. Is ten minutes a realistic walking time to the London Blossom Garden? Spoiler - of course it isn't, as I shall proceed to demonstrate with a stopwatch.
0:00 I'm standing outside the northern entrance to Stratford station. It's tempting to enter the shopping centre at ground floor level because that looks to be in the right direction, but that'd deliver you to a suboptimal point at the other end of the mall. Instead it's quicker to head upstairs first, as the pink signpost over by the bus station suggests. I know this because I've spent five minutes drawing lines on Google Maps before I got here. The map on TfL's poster doesn't even have a suggested route, let alone an indication of the split-level terrain.
0:01 I'm upstairs approaching Marks & Spencer's main entrance. If I'd been walking from the bus station where the roundel is it would have taken three minutes to get to this point (so add two minutes to all the times that follow). Another pink signpost directs me along 'The Street', Westfield's outdoor mall, rather than into the seething maelstrom of the main shops.
0:03 I've reached the junction in The Street where the Olympic Park and Aquatic Centre come into view. A lot of inexperienced Stratford-goers would turn off here, and this is indeed the quickest way into the Park, but only to the southern half and we need the north. Anyone getting that wrong faces a 10 minute time penalty.
0:05 I'm outside John Lewis. Again it's tempting to think the quickest route is across the mall and down past Stratford International, but that would be an illusion because the smart route is to turn left towards Westfield Avenue instead. How any visitor who hasn't internalised a mental map over several years is supposed to know this I'm not sure.
0:08 I'm negotiating the one annoying road crossing, beneath the hideous block of student flats at the junction round the back of the multi-storey car park. Fast is not pretty.
0:10 My ten minutes are up but I haven't even got to the Park yet, I'm on the road bridge over the DLR over High Speed One.
0:13 I'm alongside the Waterglades next to the East Village, and this is the first time I've seen a pink sign directing me towards the London Blossom Garden. It's almost pointing in an unambiguous direction.
0:14 I'm very nearly there, at the Timber Lodge entrance to the Park. The problem is I only know I'm nearly there because I've been before. The last pink sign points across the bridge, and if you decide to go that way another pink sign eventually points back the way you came. It's no good checking the nearby Park map, the Blossom Garden isn't on it yet.
0:15 Here I am at the entrance to the Blossom Garden, a lovely spot. But you'd only know it was the entrance if you stopped to read the information board or noticed 'London Blossom Garden' written on a pink fingerpost, which when approaching from the southeast is completely hidden behind nine other destinations. From any kind of distance you could easily miss it.
So I managed to walk from Stratford station to the London Blossom Garden in fifteen minutes, but only because I knew where I was going and had researched the quickest way to go. A typical visitor is going to take more than fifteen minutes to get here, I'd venture more like twenty. This is not the "about a ten minute walk" the poster claimed.
It's unlikely to inconvenience anyone. Nobody gets off a bus in Stratford, sees a poster and thinks "ooh I've got half an hour spare, I could go and see that Blossom Garden", then misses their connection because they failed to get back in time.
But it's poor practice to write "about a ten minute walk" on a poster when in fact it's more like double that, especially when you're a transport organisation and timings are supposed to be your bread and butter. It would only have taken ten minutes to check, or in fact more like fifteen.
Perhaps more to the point, although the London Blossom Garden is a perfectly delightful corner of the Olympic Park it's not really worthy of a special roundel, let alone a special visit. I expect it to come into its own and be gorgeous next spring when the 33 young trees finally burst into flower, but that's not "about a ten minute walk", that's "about an eight month wait".
