Sometimes, if I've made a mistake or got more to say, I go back and edit old posts. It's mostly pointless because people don't scroll down the page to re-read something they think they've already seen, and once a post ticks over onto page 2 it's essentially invisible. But people are always coming to the blog fresh, and search engines sometimes deliver people to the strangest places, so I do sometimes change stuff particularly if it's recent. Here are five posts I've tweaked since you last read them, the first of which is due to fall off the front page tomorrow.
Last Wednesday I reported on the ridiculous Superloop roundels that have been installed on top of shelters where hardly any express buses stop. I've since found multiple really stupid roundels in Croydon close to the southern terminus of the SL6, not quite as bad as the redundant one on Waterloo Bridge but worse than all the others I mentioned. They confirm my suspicion that half the roundels on route SL6 aren't meant to be useful, merely adverts for the existence of a brand, because they serve no practical purpose whatsoever. I've therefore gone back and inserted Hogarth Crescent into my original report, and this is the extra paragraph you haven't yet read.
Here's another one, this time southbound at Hogarth Crescent in Croydon.
This is twenty-seven stops after the evening hyperleap.
By this stage the SL6 is just an ordinary bus, and has been for the last half hour.
You can't catch an express bus here, only a bus that's no longer an express.
And it's only going two more stops because the end of the route is 500m away.
Nobody is going to make a special effort to board a Superloop bus here, nobody at all.
But that's enough to get a roundel.
Two days earlier I brought you news of what I'd been up to in rural Norfolk. I didn't include any photos because that would have eaten into valuable family time, but I did go back and add three after I got home. Here they are to save you clicking back, but I didn't bother to change the text so you 'll never know how the car boot sale went.
The day before I'd claimed that Whalebone Lane, Whalebone Grove and Whalebone Avenue in Chadwell Heath were "the only Whalebone-related streets anywhere in Greater London". This turned out to be untrue because there's also a Whalebone Lane in Stratford, as an astute reader politely pointed out. I therefore edited the phrase to "the only Whalebone-related residential streets" and kept my fingers crossed this was actually the case. Yesterday I nipped down to E15 and checked. Phew, no houses.
Stratford's Whalebone Lane is an oddity, an age-old pedestrian connection that survives. It runs crookedly for quarter of a mile between West Ham Lane and Vicarage Lane, all three of which are throwbacks to when Stratford was vaguely rural and not a prime multicultural Olympic hub. These days it's broad and paved and mainly the route that students at Newham College of Further Education take to reach the shops. They're also warned not to follow it late in the evening because Whalebone Lane is more alleyway than brightly-lit safe space. The northern side of the lane is mostly the backs of terraced houses, for which read scrappy wooden fences, or else the backs of mundane flats. The southern side has the aforementioned educational establishment but also Stratford Park, formerly West Ham Recreation Ground, which is hardly the most exciting municipal greenspace you'll ever stumble into. It does boast a cavernous toilet block with ornate Ladies and Gents ironwork, but that's long since closed to save money and is now rotting away.
The only genuinely old leftover is a bollard at the Vicarage Lane end, ribbed and pointy like a drill bit from your grandpa's toolbox, imprinted with West Ham's coat of arms and the words Local Board. As for the derivation of the streetname alas the cetacean connection has eluded me, so maybe it's just as well I never mentioned Stratford's Whalebone Lane last time.
I've also been back and updated my list of places 'The furthest I've been from home' because additional evidence has come to light. My dad reminded me that in 1975 my reference to Guernsey should have been the airport, not a museum he didn't think we'd been to. After re-reading my 1998 diary I realised that a trip to Euro Disney just edged out a trip to St Michael's Mount, so my apologies to Cornwall. And in 2008 I got my Norwich supermarkets wrong because a Christmas Eve dash to Tesco was a tad further than Thorpe End Sainsbury's. I've also added links to my exploits at these far-flung places if I'd blogged about them. I reserve the right to go back and change some more if my memory evolves.
On Sunday I visited the centre of Acton, as calculated by averaging out the locations of its seven stations. But I left you hanging on the precise locations of the similar centres of Ruislip, Clapham and Harrow because I hadn't calculated those to five decimal places, plus it's not exactly essential information. But I have since done the sums and gone back and linked to maps at all three locations should you be genuinely interested. Ruislip's middle is at the corner of Torrington Road and Cornwall Road, while Harrow's heart is on the path from West Street down into Church Fields. And this is where Clapham lies.
This is the north side of Clapham Common, the separate small chunk closest to the smart shops, not the giant triangle where most of the recreational stuff happens. It's just west of the Temperance Fountain, just south of Holy Trinity church and just north of a road which turns out to be the A3. Tree cover is sufficient to cower under if the weather proves inclement. Throwing stuff away isn't a problem because there's a big skip as well as a litter bin. And the precise spot is a mere three minute walk from Clapham Common station, confirming that Clapham Common is indeed the most central of the Clapham stations, as irrevocably proven.
Please note that I don't go back and change posts deep in the archive, so if you leave a comment saying that "the fourth bulleted link is broken" on a post from 2005 I'll be neither surprised nor interested. But I do sometimes go back and alter recently-published posts, so if something doesn't quite look how you remember it that may occasionally be the case.
