Ah, you can't beat an organisation slagging itself off for being tired and outdated. It's arguable whether being vibrant, simplistic and versatile is necessarily better.
I fear Merton is over-reaching itself on the 'borough of sport' front. Yes it has Wimbledon for the tennis, but otherwise it peaks with AFC Wimbledon, the world’s oldest continuously used cricket pitch and free swimming for under-16s.
These are also suspiciously similar colours to the All England Lawn Tennis Championships, but I'm not going to suggest that the branding team took the easy way out.
Resorting to a capital letter is the laziest of all rebranding concepts (although to be fair Merton is the only London borough to start with an M... this would never have worked in Hackney, Harrow, Havering, Hillingdon or Hounslow).
I doubt that many people, if shown this logo, would correctly identify it as having Art Nouveau/Deco vibes. It's also brave to try to appropriate William Morris for Merton when Waltham Forest, Bexley and Hammersmith and Fulham also have a valid claim.
As logos go it's neither great nor memorable, it's just two quadrilaterals with some words next to them.
"How much did this rubbish cost?" is the kind of thing I can imagine some predictably boring moaners saying.
Whoever this branding team is they need to calm down a bit. Merton is not London’s best kept secret, it's covered 15 square miles of the capital since 1965.
These are great times for going up very tall buildings. Last month 8 Bishopsgate opened its rooftop viewing platform to the public, free of charge, and on Wednesday 22 Bishopsgate followed suit. Its viewing platform is called Horizon 22, and at 254m above ground level it's two double decker buses loftier than the upper platform at the Shard. Why pay £32 south of the river when you can stand even higher above the City for nothing?
Tickets are being made available in monthly bursts and were first launched two weeks ago. It only took two minutes for opening day to sell out, and within five minutes all the weekend slots had been snapped up too. I plumped for a visit on Day Two, i.e. yesterday, and kept my fingers crossed that the weather would play ball. It sort of did.
The entrances to 8 Bishopsgate and 22 Bishopsgate are immediately adjacent, because City towers have much larger footprints than the addresses they ultimately replaced. Horizon 22 has the flashier way in, indeed everythingabout it is a bit snazzier than The Lookout nextdoor, perhaps because it'll also serve customers to a rooftop restaurant. There are far more staff, they're far more cheerful and they also have a few more passageways to direct you along to reach the lift, which is far larger and whooshes upwards much quicker. Indeed it only takes 42 seconds to whisk you from the first floor to the 58th floor mezzanine, and the ascent is almost imperceptible apart from your ears going pop partway up.
Not only is this the pinnacle of the City's skyscraper cluster it's also a surprisingly large space split over two levels. The initial landing is set back slightly from the main windows, which might seem disappointing, but all the main action is on the floor below in a giant glass-walled gallery. It does feel slightly ridiculous to have ascended all this way and then to have to walk down the loftiest staircase in London, 34 steps in total, but the needs of restaurant-goers have been prioritised (and yes there is a separate lift).
It's very wow. An extraordinary panorama is laid out beneath you, including the tops of buildings you might previously have thought were tall. Shakespeare Tower at the Barbican - peanuts. The Skygarden at the Walkie Talkie - plainly second best. One of the closest is Tower 42, for many years the City's highest building but only from up here is its bank-logo cross-section self-evident. I had a bit of a moment when I realised what I was looking at was the top of the Cheesegrater, the narrow tip of the wedge, at an almost-jumpable distance just beneath me.
The tower's location means that what you'll see most clearly is the western half of the City of London, which is generally quite lowrise, or feels like it from up here. Enjoy the geometrical burst of roads that radiates out from Bank Junction, plus a perfectly unobscured view of St Paul's Cathedral, plus all the little boats sailing on the grey ribbon of the Thames (whose meandering path is somehow visible all the way from Westminster to Barking). It's so high that people on the ground don't really register, nor the vehicles, while the trains threading through London Bridge station form what looks like a charming micro model railway.
You don't get a 360° view, only 300°, with the east of London almost entirely obscured. You can just about see Whitechapel out of one window and the Lea Valley out of another but not the sector inbetween (which annoyingly is where I live). But everything else is up for grabs, dependent on the weather and the angle of the sun. I went up on an overcast day with low grey cloud so the promised horizon was more of a dissolved blur, but it was still perfectly possible to see Hampstead Heath, the tower at North Acton and the upthrust of Croydon. I also played a quick game of 'Spot the football stadium' (Arsenal yes, Tottenham yes, Wembley yes, West Ham no), indeed if you don't spend most of your visit standing by the window trying to identify stuff you're probably doing this wrong.
Your chief enemy is glare, so I reckon I got a better view of grey South London than when I went up neighbouring 8 Bishopsgate in bright sunshine. Your panoramic photos are also likely to be thwarted by reflections, particularly of the people walking behind you or standing at the next window along, although visitors repeatedly taking selfies are unlikely to be bothered by this. My top tip is that there's a separate small mezzanine up the steps on the way out which is often people-free, plus it's also several metres higher than the main gallery. It's also the best place to look down on the paying punters in the Shard - they won't see you but you can feel smug about it all the same.
The attendant told me they're only releasing 60 tickets for each half-hour session, increasing later to 80 once things have bedded in, so it should never get too busy to have a really good view without jostling. Also if you want to hang around you can, nobody's going to chuck you out until closing time (which is 6pm weekdays, 5pm Saturday and 4pm Sunday). Refreshments are available, although nothing more than a counter with a bogstandard frothy coffee machine and a very small selection of snacks (KitKats and popcorn yes, cakes pastries no). There are also toilets, and if you use the ones upstairs you can shut yourself away and enjoy the highest wee in London.
At time of writing Horizon 22's second tranche of tickets is now up for grabs, with availability on most of the weekdays in November. It's entirely free and all you have to do is wave the QR code in the confirmation email to gain access. By contrast the 50th floor Lookout nextdoor is fully booked until January and it isn't even as good an experience. If you're interested in seeing London from above then I urge you to apply now, and if you don't manage to pick a time that's rain-free, fog-free and glare-free then you can always go up again later.
London's next dead bus 168: Old Kent Road Tesco to Hampstead Heath Location: inner London Length of journey: 7 miles, 65 minutes
The 168 has been chugging up to Hampstead Heath since 1986, initially from Waterloo, then from Elephant & Castle and most recently from the Old Kent Road. But it's been deemed superfluous in an era when central London has too much capacity and so tomorrow it runs for the final time. For a lot of its length it's tracked precisely by route 1, so from Saturday the plan is to create a hybrid of the two routes and assign it the lower number. The first three stops on route 168 are covered by loads of other routes, and the last two stops on route 1 are to be covered by switching the end of route 188, so technically nobody should be inconvenienced. The consultation took place two years ago, should you be interested in the background or want to see a map. I've been for a final ride.
The 168 starts its journey outside the giant Tesco on the Old Kent Road, at what was to be the site of the first stop on the Bakerloo line extension, very close to Burgess Park. Don't worry, six other routes connect this rail-remote location to Elephant & Castle so even next week you won't be waiting long. Nevertheless my 168 is busy almost as soon as it arrives, mainly with passengers who have no interest going upstairs because they're not going far. The Old Kent Road is blessed by world food outlets, affordable salons and flats with rents that, despite being well over £2, remain at the bottom of the Monopoly ladder. We don't soar over the Bricklayers Arms flyover because that only operates in the opposite direction, plus we'd miss out on a couple of bus stops if we did, one of which is where route 1 joins us.
Route 1 left Canada Water bus station 2½ miles ago whereas we've been going less than a mile, so there are some who worry the new 1/168 hybrid will be too long to be reliable. Never fear, said TfL in their consultation report, this has been accounted for and "extra time has been added to recovery time to help mitigate this risk." It's also the case that no passenger from this point onwards should have to worry about breaking their journey, they just need to board a 1 and it'll take them everywhere the current 168 would.
The New Kent Road is next, bordered by sprawling plane trees we repeatedly bash into. The first flats are older and intermingled with lowlier businesses, then abruptly the gentrified shoeboxes of Elephant Park rear up, perched atop bike hubs, subscription gyms and artisan dim sum restaurants. The whole of Elephant and Castle is in flux, as it has been for years, with the former shopping centre rapidly going the same way as the Heygate and arising as something blandly profitable. The scaffolding by the main bus stop is already much higher than a double decker. Then it's time to weave round what remains of the double-gyratory, look down on its infestation of pigeons and thankfully escape into something a tad older.
Unusually The Men Who Change Tiles haven't been out removing the 168s yet, or they hadn't yesterday, but all affected bus stops do now have a yellow information poster. There are two types, one explaining how routes 1, 168 and 188 are being reformulated and the other headlined "Route 168 will not stop here". Unfortunately the latter has been posted up outside the Bakerloo line station, pointlessly explaining how to catch a bus back the other way, whereas all that's needed northbound is "just get on the 1 instead". Best keep it simple.
A contraflow bus lane speeds us onwards to St George's Circus, past the Golden Sun takeaway, a hidden tube depot and a group of lecturers protesting outside London South Bank University. By the obelisk there are faffy filter lanes and cycleways to negotiate, then we're on more solidly traditional ground up Waterloo Road. The local BID has hung backslapping banners from the lampposts, including the godawful slogan "where fringe meets falafel" and the obligatory ABBA reference. You can't miss Masters Superfish, an old-school chippie which claims to be home to "Britain's finest fish and chips", but despite numerous positive online reviews I doubt their over-reaching claim holds water.
We sidle up the eastern side of Waterloo station, pausing awhile at the busy zebra crossing, before pulling up at the cluster of stops where thousands of commuters still pour onto onward buses every morning. A ridiculous number of routes still connect to the streets around Holborn, so ridiculous that TfL culled one last year and are culling another tomorrow, safe in the knowledge that the remaining six will still support the post-pandemic rush hour. The view from Waterloo Bridge remains magnificent, all bobbing boats and historic skyline, although progress remains hindered by the amateur conversion of one lane of traffic into a cycleway. And that was our 20 minutes in south London... now for 45 minutes in the north.
Holborn is where the 1/168 overlap currently ends with the 1 turning left to terminate at Tottenham Court Road. Tomorrow that 30-year association ends and it'll head onwards to Hampstead Heath, a significant extension more worthy of London's primary route number. Route 188 will simultaneously be diverted to Centre Point instead of Russell Square, and again hardly anyone will be inconvenienced because the 188 has also been tracking us since the Bricklayers Arms roundabout. Admittedly it'll be a longer average wait with the 168 gone, but TfL rarely worry about making your wait longer.
The top of Kingsway is where our speedy progress starts to falter, with more time spent queueing in traffic than moving forward. Around us London's office workers are scurrying back to their desks with tubs of protein, and somewhere behind me a quartet from Kent are discussing their favourite pub lunches (the chilli prawns at The Oak Tree are out of this world, apparently). The road ahead is lined by a phenomenal number of hotels, most of them very large. The oldest are imposing edifices in brick, the newest are glass boxes with burrito bars underneath and a few are postwar concrete bulwarks which look like they were designed by Gerry Anderson. This paragraph has taken 15 minutes, that's how slow we're going.
At Euston we follow the non-HS2 side of the station, although currently that's both of them. Only one other route goes this way, serving a Royal Mail depot, long Georgian terraces and some drab flats. Residents of Eversholt Street are going to have to get used to a new number come Saturday. One of the chatty foursome behind me is now regaling his friends with tales of how he used to love driving round central London back in the days when you had to use an A-Z but it's too expensive now, not to mention too slow, not to mention too hard to park, and I think "ha, in your case all those nudges to get motorists onto public transport have certainly worked".
Normally when TfL intends to significantly tweak a bus route, or indeed kill it off, onboard announcements are made at regular intervals alerting passengers to upcoming changes. But on the 168 there's nothing, not even a scrolling message, despite the upheaval being only a couple of days away. There's nothing like consistency and this is nothing like.
Mornington Crescent station heralds the start of our passage up the full length of Camden High Street, which is not a privilege afforded to buses heading south. The shops start off a bit bogstandard (Top Cuts is genuinely still offering a £6 haircut), then increasingly include familiar stalwarts like Argos and M&S Food. Eventually the retail rulebook is ripped up and things go all-out tourist, with cluttered shops offering purple DMs, anime t-shirts and nasal jewellery, not to mention spicy wraps and noodly trays. It's fun to observe from the top deck, but the swirling throng obviously aren't interested in leaving by bus and so on we plod.
For part of the climb up Haverstock Hill we are the sole bus route, just as our immediate surroundings finally go upmarket. Steeles Village is the kind of neighbourhood Time Out used to go nuts for, although the name's barely 10 years old and only took off when TfL agreed to rename the bus stop. Further up the hill, heralded by subdivided villas and mansion blocks, we pierce the super-middle-class bubble of Belsize Park. Here the cinema is boutique, the petrol station has its own florist, the Budgens supermarket has gone premium and a haircut will cost you sixty quid not six. We're nearly there.
Our final destination is close to the Royal Free so many of our passengers are heading there, not to a local patisserie, including the man in the shabby jacket with a repeating cough. Outside the hospital's side entrance the ward staff are enjoying a cheeky fag in the early autumn sunshine. But round the corner on South End Green it's pavement culture a-go-go as Hampstead's idler residents enjoy coffee at small tables while perfectly-groomed dogs lie at their feet. Having reached the terminus our driver nips across the road to the mess room by the underground public conveniences and prepares for the 168's return to the Old Kent Road. It'll be an even longer ride to Canada Water on Saturday, but remember you'll only get ahead if you're looking out for number 1.
The future of High Speed 2 is seemingly forever under threat, the latest proposal being that it should run only between not-quite-central Birmingham and not-quite-central London. But would it really be so terrible to terminate the line at Old Oak Common rather than Euston, saving billions, especially when there's a perfectly adequate walking route between the two? Let me show you how simple a connection it would be. Long-term decisions for a brighter future!
Old Oak Common is the perfect terminus for a high speed rail link, especially if you live in Harlesden. It's a vast obsolete rail depot ripe with development potential and also crisscrossed by numerous other railway lines, none of which yet have a station here. But that lack of connectivity won't be a problem when HS2 arrives because taxpayers will be better off and car drivers won't be inconvenienced, plus it's only a short walk from Euston. All you have to do is follow an approximate straight line eastwards on foot, as any business traveller would, taking just two more hours to reach your ultimate destination and maintaining all the timely benefits of the high speed line.
We start on Old Oak Common Lane, a name which still evokes a peaceful rural ambience rather than clustered hardhats and lorries stuck in contraflow. We could choose to cross the outer wastes of Wormwood Scrubs in sight of its Victorian prison but by far the most efficient route is to follow the towpath of the Grand Union Canal instead. This speedy pedestrian-friendly walkway could almost have been purpose-built, avoiding as it does all major roads and built-up areas. At present the verge is alive with Michaelmas daisies, brambles and dandelions, and the water of the canal is adorned with empty lager cans bobbing in vibrant green pondweed. Look, you can already see the BT Tower in the distance so Euston can't be that far away.
Just over the wall is the main Crossrail depot where all the out-of-service trains go to recuperate. It would be dead easy to add a platform to shuttle passengers into central London, but also much too expensive in these austere times so best watch them sail past empty as they head off to form the next train to Shenfield. Landmarks to enjoy along the towpath include used car empires, the backside of a cemetery and an electricity substation which marginally resembles the Snowdon Aviary. The path is entirely unlit, so perhaps not ideal after dark, and also includes several long stretches lacking any escape route should ne'erdowells intrude. But anyone who arrives on HS2 from Birmingham will no doubt be familiar with desolate canals through semi-derelict hinterlands so should thoroughly enjoy the vibe.
The towpath gets quite steep near Kensal Green Sainsbury's as it crosses a couple of former wharves, but remains step-free so anyone lugging suitcases ought to be able to cope. Things get a little more built-up as we enter Kensington & Chelsea so expect a greater chance of sniffing weed or stepping in dogmess. The Lucky Bean cafe offers canalside passers-by a special 'breakfast bun and filter coffee' deal for just £5.50, but best not rest yet. It'll have taken you about 42 minutes to walk this far which by coincidence is also how long the HS2 journey from Birmingham to Old Oak Common is scheduled to take, so we really are zipping along here.
You could continue along the canal and the Euston Road but that's merely the most straight-forward route, not the most direct, so instead we'll be bearing off here via the spiral footbridge. This delivers you to a bus stop served by route 18, a double decker providing a direct connection to Euston station. You could take that all the way to your destination but won't you look at the queue to board, and the traffic looks to be seriously backed up ahead, and given we've started out on foot it would be an abdication of responsibility to bow out now. Harrow Road is also the liveliest shopping street on our walk, the ideal place to buy a hookah, vinyl flooring, wet fish, a bowl of pomegranates or a fridge, so certainly shouldn't be missed.
The direct route east requires diverting up Elgin Avenue, a broad thoroughfare with easy-to manage pavements. Its villas are all divided into somewhat faded flats, although they get less faded the more we pass from Maida Hill to Maida Vale. At the walk's halfway point we bear right onto Lauderdale Road, a smarter proposition lined by mansion blocks, each of which boasts its own Porter's Flat on the ground floor. Sir Alec Guinness was born in one of these, as a blue plaque attests, and you'd never have seen this miraculous spot had the government wimped out and constructed a direct train connection. Sir Alec's local shopping parade is rightly quite posh and is anchored by a florist offering a £25 weekly subscription service because people round here have disposable income, we're not in Balsall Heath any more.
It's time to mosey down to St John's Wood Road, either past the Esso garage or the Tesco Express, it doesn't matter so long as you end up by Lord's Cricket ground. You won't see much of it from the outside, only the Lord's Tavern, a lot of railings and a snatch of the pitch through the slats of a fire escape. But it remains a global icon so expect to encounter groups of grinning tourists posing in front of the gates just to say they've been here, and now so have you, solely because nobody could be bothered to complete a high speed link. As an HS2 user embracing the walking option, that Chiltern train passing under the Nursery Pavilion likely left central Birmingham half an hour after you did.
Welcome to the splendours of Regent's Park, entering via the Hanover Gate and heading quickly over to the boating lake. This looks lovely and inviting but is in fact really annoying because we'd be able to follow a much more direct walking route if the water wasn't there. Instead we trace the northern edge past a gushing fountain and the boat house before dodging a game of women's football on an outer pitch. It'd be nice to pass through the rose garden, which hasn't quite tipped over into autumn yet, but the optimum route is to follow the Inner Circle and turn left at the allotments. In good news if you came down from the West Midlands to enjoy the Frieze Art Fair you're already here without ever needing to go to Euston.
They say London thrives on rich and poor living side by side and it doesn't get much clearer than on the far side of the park. Chester Terrace is a stunning neo-classical terrace bookended by Corinthian arches, whose 42 luxurious residences were shaped by John Nash and Decimus Burton. The average property price here is 12 million pounds. But immediately behind this cream edifice is the Regent's Park estate, a complex complex of 2000 postwar council homes, the odd tower block and some windblown grass. Weaving your way through this social labyrinth will lower your aspirations considerably. But oh my word, what's that devastation ahead?... a huge swathe of land on either side of Hampstead Road demolished and laid bare.
It's like an inner city void that's been erased and abandoned, an empty depression where construction work has halted leaving the future of an entire neighbourhood in limbo. And so this walking route from Old Oak Common is forced to funnel between gaudy hoardings across a mothballed abyss, dodging hi-vis security and uniformed staff nipping out for a smoke, before entering the backside of Euston station through a grim door labelled Fire Escape. Whatever they're building here they should hurry up and finish because it really lowers the tone, plus it totally slows down the end of the journey, plus the whole thing's just ridiculous with this part missing. Perhaps HS2 with a six mile walk at the end is a really dumb idea after all.
They also left comments, the first of which was "It's hard not to think Londoners are entitled and ungrateful", so the conversation immediately spun off into a tangential debate about regional entitlement. But some people said relevant things, timings-wise, including...
» The percentage alone doesn't tell much, without knowing what's the value for regular routes.
» Travelling by scooter in London, about half the time is spent waiting for traffic lights.
» Although the tube sounds really fast, even with the lengthy dwell times, a bicycle is a far better option.
Which got me thinking, what percentage of a journey is spent not moving when using other travel modes?
Thankfully Whitechapel to Paddington is a good route to test this out.
I took my stopwatch on the Hammersmith and City line on a journey from Paddington to Whitechapel. I timed the overall journey and also how much time the train spent waiting at each station. I then compared this to my previous Crossrail data.
Hammersmith & City
Crossrail
Length of journey
26m 13s
13m 10s
Number of intermediate stations
10
4
Time spent at intermediate stations
25s 55s 21s 26s 27s 20s 20s 20s 23s 54s
56s 54s 57s 45s
Time spent waiting outside Aldgate East
1m 30s
-
Total time spent not moving
6m 21s
3m 32s
% of time spent not moving
24%
26%
These are incredibly similar percentages overall. Even though a tube journey takes twice as long, the time spent not moving is still about 25%. But a typical dwell time at a tube station is 20-30 seconds whereas on Crossrail it's 50-60 seconds, twice as much, which is why Crossrail feels so dawdly.
And then I took my stopwatch on the bus. Route 205 goes from Whitechapel to Paddington so I rode that all the way and timed every wait at a bus stop, every wait at traffic lights and every wait at a pedestrian crossing. And my word, buses stop a lot.
Traffic was fairly light, except around King's Cross, so these shouldn't be extreme figures. Altogether the bus stopped 62 times! That said we also passed through 40 sets of lights on green, so maybe we got lucky.
This time about 50% of the journey was spent not moving, hugely higher than travelling by train. It's kind of amazing that buses in central London get anywhere at all but they do, just not very fast.
I'd also timed the 205 bus on its speedier journey from Bow to Whitechapel - a more typical inner suburban bus journey - and that spent 26% of its time not moving. Roughly 25% again... it's a popular percentage.
I don't have a bike so I didn't try cycling from Whitechapel to Paddington, plus it's a really bad idea to use a stopwatch repeatedly while negotiating a red route. But I can now do you a quick summary of rail, tube and bus, roughly speaking.
Whitechapel to Paddington Crossrail: 25% of the 13 minute journey is spent not moving H&C tube: 25% of the 26 minute journey is spent not moving 205 bus: 50% of the 64 minute journey is spent not moving
Perhaps focus on how long your journey takes, not how much it dawdles on the way.
After I boarded my train home from Surrey on Sunday I noticed that a beetle had hitched a ride on my rucksack. It could have jumped from a bush I'd brushed against, it could have worked its way up from my boots or it could have crawled on when I put my rucksack down on the platform - I suspect the latter. But my intervention meant it was now on a train heading into London, moving rapidly away from its familiar habitat and setting its future on an entirely new course.
It was a fine-looking beetle, all flat and angular and about a couple of centimetres long. I had no beef with it so I set my rucksack down on the empty seat opposite and let it roam, although initially it was only interested in exploring the outside of my bag. It followed the rim around the front and up the side and over the top and down and round without ever trying to leave the black fabric. "I'm not carrying you home," I thought, "you need to consider exploring elsewhere".
Eventually it tried venturing off onto the seat so I whisked my rucksack away and let it explore the red moquette instead. Again it focused on the rims and edges, never the centre, attempting to determine the boundaries of its new environment. After about five minutes it got bold and risked traversing the metal connector to the adjacent seat which it explored in a remarkably similar way... round, back, up, along and down. Nobody interrupted it because nobody else had yet boarded the carriage, until a single female passenger claimed the seat on the other side.
I wondered what the beetle's new destiny would be. Would it make it all the way to London and alight there, would it escape at some intermediate station or would it shuttle back and forth forever in its new artificial environment? Alternatively, given it was a beetle on a train, would a single passenger take offence and end its life with a single squish? I had, simply by taking a day trip to Surrey, changed its life irrevocably.
The beetle clambered repeatedly to the top of the seat, clever thing, until a particularly jolty section of track caused it to lose grip and disappear over the back. I tried looking under the seat but I couldn't see it anywhere. I also watched my fellow passengers, whose numbers were now increasing, but none of them made any beetle-related grimaces or flicks. It was only a four carriage train - it had been longer on the way out - and as we crossed the zone 6 boundary all the seats inexorably filled up. By the time we hit Raynes Park it was standing room only, which isn't something I thought a roaming beetle would appreciate, so I hoped it had fallen into that first lady's open handbag and she'd carried it off to a new life in Wimbledon.
I made sure I was the last one out of the carriage at Waterloo and scanned the seats for signs of insect movement. Then I spotted an ominous looking splat in the centre of the floor, precisely where a succession of feet had been standing, and peered down at the brown mark in the laminate pattern. My companion the beetle had come to an irrefutable end, squashed by sole or heel, and would be returning to Surrey only as a flattened husk. I hadn't killed it directly but without my intervention it would be 20 miles away and still alive. This sat uncomfortably, but what can you do?
When I got home I inspected my photos of the beetle and tried to match it to a species, which isn't easy when beetles are the most diverse insect on the planet. But I reckon I've identified it and I think it's... oh, a brown marmorated stink bug, an undesirable invasive species from east Asia. They arrived in the US in the mid 1990s, most likely arriving on imported timber, and have since spread unwelcomely to 44 states. Here in the UK they were first spotted in 2020 and one of the first reports was from Wisley in Surrey, not far from where I caught my train.
It might just have been a more common shieldbug, but if it was a brown marmorated stink bug then I did the nation a service by luring one onto a train so it could be comprehensively slaughtered. Watch your gardens, watch your bags, and if you're travelling through Surrey watch your train seat too.
Yesterday I took the train to Surrey to tick off two more National Trust properties.
I was a bit late visiting the first one.
Cost of off-peak return from Waterloo to Clandon: £14.50 Cost of off-peak return from Wimbledon to Clandon: £8.00 (so maybe do that)
You alight the train a couple of stops before Guildford and walk a mile down the road past two pubs, the village hall and a lot of houses you can't afford. If you find West Clandon Village Pound you've gone the wrong way.
NATIONAL TRUST:Clandon Park Location: West Clandon, Guildford, Surrey, GU4 7RQ [map] Garden open: 11-4pm Wed (daily, Apr-Oct) Admission: free House open: not since 2015 Tours: not again until 2024 Website:nationaltrust.org.uk/surrey/clandon-park Four word summary: burned to a shell Time to allow: maybe half an hour
Clandon Park House was commissioned in the 1730s as the country seat of Thomas Onslow, a rich baron whose father was the longest-serving speaker of the House of Commons. Thomas had previously been MP for the whole of Surrey, back when that included Lambeth as well as Leatherhead, so had the means to commission a glitzy Palladian mansion bedecked with marble and Flemish sculpture. The National Trust acquired the building in 1956, though not the surrounding 500 acre park, and pledged to look after it. But on the afternoon of 29th April 2015 a fire broke out in the basement and spread so quickly that the entire building burnt to a shell, bar the Speakers Parlour which remains essentially intact. Staff tried rescuing as many of the contents as they could but most were lost, and Clandon is easily the National Trust's biggest disaster of the 21st century. So, come and see a cuboid shell under sheets of scaffolding surrounded by a bit of grass.
It's free to look. I stood beside the shuttered ticket office for fifteen minutes before I worked this out, then headed into what they call the Garden and wandered around the site. The house is massive but invisible, bar a couple of gaps in the sheeting where the doors used to be, and is being supported by a serious lattice of metal poles. It's an eerie sight and a tragic one, with colourful hoardings around the base offering some insight into what was lost. The tone is oddly upbeat, more 'look at the craftsmanship on this not-quite charred table leg' than 'oops, what an irreplaceable loss'). Across the lawn is a wharenui, a rare Maori meeting house shipped here from New Zealand by the 4th Earl of Onslow, although not much of it is original any more and the sacredcarvings are due to be shipped back. Up top is a short cypress avenue overshadowed by towering redwoods and at the far end of the lawn a formal Dutch Garden (alas currently closed for stonework conservation). And that's pretty much all the public has access to, or at least I assume it is because I didn't see a map of any kind anywhere and it looked like the surrounding woodland became rapidly out of bounds.
The National Trust's headache is what to do with what's left of the building. Their original plan after the fire was to restore the ground floor using the insurance money and to add a less showy first floor for events and exhibitions. But last year they changed their minds and the current intention is to leave the building as a shell, perhaps with walkways and a roof terrace, and to simply celebrate its form and structure. They claim this would be "a unique way to understand and enjoy a country house", but many more traditional members think this is a travesty and have put a forward a resolution at the upcoming AGM demanding the restoration and recreation of at least the Marble Hall. Expect smoke, if not fire. In the meantime pre-booked tours through the site and its basement are sometimes offered in the summer months, but they seem to have ended early this year and to be honest there's very little to draw you here.
The second National Trust property is only a mile and a half away but to get there, in the absence of a decent public footpath network, requires a walk along an unkempt tarmac ribbon beside a dual carriageway. I wouldn't risk it with children in tow and you'd never manage it in a wheelchair. Eventually you reach the village of East Clandon, which comes as sweet relief, and just beyond that is the entrance to the next car park. Pedestrian visitors are not anticipated.
NATIONAL TRUST:Hatchlands Park Location: East Clandon, Guildford, Surrey, GU4 7RT [map] Open: 10am-5pm House open: noon-4pm (Apr-Oct) Admission: £11.00 Website:nationaltrust.org.uk/surrey/hatchlands-park Four word summary: parkland and plentiful pianos Time to allow: a couple of hours
Fanny Boscawen used her husband's Admiralty salary to pay for her dream home in the Surrey countryside, only for him to die soon after its completion so she moved back to London and sold the place on. The Sumners stayed longer and later Lord Rendel bought it for his family until inevitably one of his descendants was forced to hand the place over to the National Trust. Along the way Hatchlands gained Robert Nash interiors, Humphry Repton re-landscaping and a Gertrude Jekyll parterre, all of which somehow survived a spell as a girls' finishing school. Today it's a bit of a mix but essentially a lot of lovely pastoral grounds, a choice of traditional cafes and a house that contains a quite frankly astonishing collection of art and music.
Only six ground floor rooms are open to the public and one of these is essentially the bottom of a staircase. Also no photography is allowed because this is still a family home, but that's fine because it just helps everyone to focus on the contents. The walls are covered with hundreds of old masters from the Cobbe Collection, originally purchased to decorate a grand villa in Dublin - yeah that's a Titian, that's a Gainsborough and that's thought to be the only surviving contemporary portrait of William Shakespeare. But it's the keyboard instruments that dazzle, with pianos, harpsichords and spinets squeezed into every last space, many of which had a really famous owner. "You're standing beside Chopin's grand piano", said the room guide, "and that one was Marie Antoinette's, and later you'll see Bizet's, Lizst's, Mahler's and Elgar's, and did you see Charles II's virginals?" I hope the fire policy is stronger here than at Clandon because this lot are truly irreplaceable.
Other than the house what you're really getting for your entrance fee is the chance to roam a 400 acre estate. It has that look of manicured farmland, all rippling pasture and strategically located oak trees, with a few patches of woodland added later to provide diversity and to hide the adventure playground. A lot of well-scrubbed Surrey families were heading out along the waymarked trails yesterday, as far as their children or joints would permit, and don't forget you have to walk all the way back again. At one point a hilltop vista opened up towards Woking, so an ideal spot for watching a Martian invasion, but generally the trees screen everything, even the main house. There are many National Trust properties with more to see, but only one has Chopin's grand.
Getting home was another slog, Hatchlands being an hour's walk from either of the nearest stations. I plodded on to Horsley rather than returning to Clandon, following another narrow main-road-side path and then cutting through another commuter village. The bus service is pretty terrible too so all this is best done by car, sorry.
As you probably know, BBC local radio is currently engaged in rapid strategic contraction in an attempt to save money. Dozens of much-loved programmes are being withdrawn, especially those broadcast in the evenings and at weekends, in favour of syndicated regional content covering a much broader area. Why deliver locally-focused favourites to an ageing audience when that money could instead be used to create digital content hardly any young people will notice?
Now the same argument is coming to the blogosphere - reducing choice at off-peak times to focus effort where it's most needed. From this weekend all bloggers will take Sunday off and instead publish one national syndicated post designed to be engaging, bland and locally irrelevant. Rest assured that the weekday posts you know and love will remain unaffected and that Saturdays are not yet in danger. But on Sundays, thanks to top-down austerity, the nationwide debate will contract to a single point of interest of no material consequence. Make yourself a cuppa, make it a date and join us every Sunday for The Big Conversation.
The Big Conversation
Why aren't cheese and onion crisp packets green?
It's nuts isn't it?
Everybody knows that crisp packets are meant to be a particular colour according to what flavour they are. It's the way of things, it's how it's always been. And yet somehow a dark force has succeeded in infiltrating the packaging of Britain's favourite bagged snack and these long-established colour rules have been ripped up. Why are cheese and onion crisp packets no longer green?
They always used to be green. If you saw a green packet you knew the crisps inside would have that cheesy oniony tang you totally loved. Maybe green with a splash of yellow, because yellow obviously means cheese in the wider scheme of things. But green all the same, never red, never blue, always definitely green.
And yet if you head to your local supermarket today you won't find cheese and onion in the green packets, oh no, you'll find salt and vinegar. And you won't find salt and vinegar in the blue packets, heaven forfend, because that's what cheese and onion is now. This is definitely how it always is in shops these days, my individual experience confirms this. Because at some point in living history, unbidden and unwanted, the devil swapped the colours round.
If you ask the British public what colour packet cheese and onion crisps should be in, they know what the answer is. They also know what colour packet ready salted crisps should be in, which is red, which is what 72% of the public said the last time this important topic was surveyed. Red has been the colour of salty potato since time immemorial, or at least since the salt came in a blue bag and the packet was plainly white.
As for salt and vinegar far more of the populace think proper blue rather than upstart green, almost 50% of them, with second place green trailing far behind with 32%. You can't argue with a margin like that and you can't argue with YouGov, even if the survey's from 2016. Admittedly vinegar is usually brown but that would be a ghastly shade marketingwise, so it's just as well that when combined with salt the inevitable outcome is the colour blue.
YouGov's landmark survey also delivered a verdict on cheese and onion and confirmed the natural pre-eminence of the traditional green. The percentage was a little lower this time at just 44%, but blue trailed even further behind with 30% so that's blue trashed. In this case another colour cut through with 10% of the public vote and that was yellow, but yellow was never the important tint on the packet, the crucial hue was good old green.
It's all Gary Lineker's fault. His favourite Walkers crisps currently dominate the crisp market and they're the company who stupidly decided cheese and onion should be blue. Likewise they chose to make salt and vinegar green, essentially because there was nobody around in the East Midlands to stop them, and it's their regionally-blinkered quest for world domination which has foisted this unnatural colour shift on a gullible nation.
Let's talk history. Cheese and onion crisps were launched upon an unsuspecting British public by Golden Wonder in 1962. They were an immediate hit, a monster munch, and were obviously produced in green packets. When market leader Smith's fought back they did so with a new flavour of their own, namely salt and vinegar, which came in bright blue packets and proved almost as big a hit. So were the original colours originally set.
All those of us of a certain age remember Smith's and Golden Wonder crisps from our childhoods, likely as the very foundation of our snack-based memories. A few pence at the corner shop brought us crunchy heaven in a plastic wrapper, with some of us plumping for salt and vinegar - Team Blue - and some for cheese and onion - Team Green. Amid the relentless pressure cooker of youthful impressionism, these colours were indelibly imprinted.
But if Mrs Thatcher taught us anything it's that the free market always wins out, and so it proved. The much-loved Smith's brand was sold first to General Mills, then to Associated Biscuits and ultimately to Nabisco, bringing both Smith's and Walkers under the same umbrella. But it was only after a further sale to PepsiCo in 1989 that hard-nosed managers cruelly decided to phase out the Smith's name in favour of Walkers for all their mainstream crisp products.
Suddenly the upstart Midlands brand had the upper hand and all was lost, almost overnight, as one colour usurped another. It meant that salt and vinegar was now jarringly green and cheese and onion ridiculously blue, and all because some crisp factory in Leicester said so. Admittedly if your childhood took place in the Midlands you'll always have thought these were the colours, but these are the views of a backward minority and you'd be wrong.
It's also the case that young people won't remember Smith's making proper crisps, only selling fripperies like Frazzles, Chipsticks or Scampi Fries, so will always wrongly associate cheese and onion with blue. But young people don't read blogs, or indeed listen to local radio, so we can ignore their opinions and state categorically that ready salted should be red, salt and vinegar ought to be blue and cheese and onion must be green.
It is a national scandal that the colours of crisp packets have evolved so incorrectly over the years. But change is inevitable and nostalgia isn't what it used to be and why can't everything be the way it used to be when everything was better? Do share with us your memories and opinions of the colours crisp packets no longer are but should be, and join us again next Sunday for another Big Discussion on a crunch topic of national importance.
I have no idea if this'll work but let's give it a try.
20 questions hide and seek
This morning I'm going to go somewhere in London and I invite you to find me.
You have 20 questions to narrow me down.
I'll be there from 10am to 11am.
I've never been there before.
It's somewhere public, outdoors.
It's not in a street or station.
I shall have Squeezy Pig with me.
I haven't left the house yet.
Your questions go in this comments box. comments Just one Yes/No question each, thanks.
I'm ignoring all questions asked before 10am.
You'll either be collectively brilliant or collectively useless.
And if it goes well I'll do it again from 2pm to 3pm.
Yes: east of the A23, south of the A232, within 3 miles of Shirley windmill, within 2 miles of Lloyd Park tram stop, in a park, within a mile of a golf course No: north of the Thames, postcode begins with W, in Southwark or Lambeth, near a body of water, inside the South Circular, in a Labour-controlled borough, within 5 miles of Biggin Hill, near the sea
It's now 11am and you didn't find me.
I was at Purley Beeches.
• It's 18 acres of woodland and grassy lawn near Purley Oaks station.
• Technically it's in Sanderstead but it was once part of Purley Downs.
• The ratepayers of Sanderstead purchased it in 1907.
• The coat or arms for Coulsdon and Purley Urban District Council included two trees, an oak for the Purley Oaks and a beech for Purley Beeches.
• The wood was thinned out by the 1987 hurricane.
• It has a better website than your average woodland.
• It's very beechmasty underfoot at the moment (and very popular with dogs).
• This was created by Eric Wettern between 1918 and 1965, then given in trust to Croydon Council.
• It's a lovely hideaway with multiple arboreal specimens, 30 of which are labelled.
• Ever since Croydon council got into financial difficulties, the Friends of Wettern Tree Garden have taken on a lot more of the upkeep.
• I was particularly intrigued by the bobbly green fruit fallen under the Osage Orange, a very rare tree in the UK, grown from a seed Eric planted in 1925.
OK, let's go again.
I'll be somewhere else from 2pm to 3pm.
Again I've never been before.
Again it's somewhere public, outdoors.
It's not in a street or station.
Your questions go in this comments box. comments Just one Yes/No question each, thanks.
I'm ignoring any questions before 2pm.
Yes: north of the Thames, west of the River Lea, west of the A10, west of 0.1°W, west of the Watford Overground line, south of the A40, east of Hillingdon Hospital No: inside the North Circular, nearer a tube station than a rail station, in Harrow, in Barnet, within 3 miles of Heathrow, within 500m of a river or body of water, south of the A4
It's now past 3pm and again you didn't find me.
I was in Cuckoo Park.
• It's a park in Ealing between Greenford and Hanwell.
• It's on a slight hilltop east of the River Brent.
• It was the site of a battle between the Saxons and the Romano-British in the sixth century.
• In 1857 the Central London District Poor Law School was built here.
• Charlie Chaplin was a pupil at this school!
• The school closed in 1933 and a housing estate was built around it.
• The drive to the school survives as a long leafy strip up the centre of Cuckoo Avenue.
• The school buildings became Hanwell Community Centre (and are also occupied by the London Welsh School).
• The park surrounds the school and is well frequented by unaccompanied youth.
• If you need conkers, Cuckoo Park and Cuckoo Avenue are currently super-abundant.
I'm not convinced that was a great success.
But maybe some other time.
A lot has been added to the tube map in recent years. Accessibility blobs, walking connections, cablecars, trams, river piers and most recently Thameslink, all have been shoehorned into an increasingly cluttered diagram. But whatever ridiculous woke nonsense have they added now?
Snowflakes.
That's right, the latest incarnation of the tube map includes snowflake symbols and uses them to show lines with air-conditioned trains.
The Circle, District, Hammersmith & City and Metropolitan lines all have air-conditioned trains, indeed every train on these lines has been air-cooled since 2017. In hot weather these are the tube lines that'll offer you a more comfortable temperate journey, the other tube lines less so, mainly because they have older rolling stock and it's more difficult to apply aircon technology in narrow deep tube tunnels. Meanwhile the DLR doesn't yet offer aircon (but will start doing so next year when new trains arrive) and Crossrail's had it baked in since the start.
You may be thinking 'yes I know all this' but not everybody does, hence TfL's decision to add snowflakes to the tube map. Selecting the coolest trains is not necessarily a practical way to make decisions when route planning, but better to know than not know would be the designers' rationale. Also the snowflake symbol isn't littering the actual diagram, only the key, because aircon is a feature which applies only to lines not individual stations. In terms of clutter it has a minimal effect.
Things get a little sillier further down the key. Yes the Overground has aircon and so does Thameslink, that's great. But the need to be consistent means a snowflake also has to be used on the piddly Olympia branch with its intermittent weekend services and paltry half dozen weekday trains, and no sane traveller is ever going change their journey based on this information. Splitting the Overground into six separate lines will also require six separate snowflakes so steel yourself for that. Also note that the snowflake symbol has to be explained at the bottom of the list, indeed what we have here is a sub-key to explain the meaning of a symbol used only in the key.
You won't have seen these snowflakes if you've picked up a paper map or checked a poster in a tube station, because these were last produced in May 2023 and aircon wasn't a thing then. The change has only happened on the online map, as you can see if you visit the scrollable version or download the latest pdf. This is clever because it means TfL could add the snowflakes in summer and take them away again in winter, indeed by the time the next printed tube map comes out in December aircon won't be of any general interest whatsoever.
Technically this is the 'August 2023' tube map, it says so in the filename, so it must have appeared on the TfL website last month. What's odd is that nobody noticed, and even more odd that TfL didn't mention it themselves. Their press office is normally well on top of these kinds of things, or at the very least one of their social media channels would have tweeted it excitedly along with an avalanche of snowflake emojis. Instead there was absolutely zero fanfare, the updated map just slipped silently out.
The earliest evidence I can find that anybody noticed the snowflakes was an Instagram account called thetubemap which posted a cutaway of the frozen key on 6th September. This reached the attention of Geoff Marshall on 9th September, at which point online scavengers MyLondon wrote a so-called news article compiled from responses to his tweet and other circumstantial banter. As far as I can tell the only other news medium to have written about the snowflakes is LBC on 11th September, and since then there's been nothing. If TfL's press office hasn't spoonfed it, most transport news never happens.
What isn't clear is what happens next. Will the snowflakes disappear from the map once autumn settles in and the chance of a heatwave drops to zero or is this a permanent addition, clogging up the key all year round? Many's the extra symbol that looked temporary but is somehow still with us. I can see TfL keeping them as a marker of how up-to-date their trains are, although no additional lines will merit a symbol for 100% aircon any time soon. We'll have a much better idea of their permanence when the December tube map appears - are snowflakes just for summer or does some idiot think they're also for Christmas?
40 years ago this week I bought my first television.
We had a television in the house already, indeed we had two, so my brother and I could watch The Great Egg Race in one room while my Mum watched Angels in the other. But I didn't have a TV of my own until that special day I went into Watford and handed over £129 of my summer job money for a Philips 9TC 2100.
It was only black and white and only had a nine inch screen, hence the model name, but it showed all the same channels as a normal television and most importantly it was mine. Back in 1983 there were only four channels to watch, one of which wasn't yet a year old, but my 9TC 2100 was seriously forward-looking and had room for ten. You had to push the sliders on the top to change channels - remote controls weren't yet a thing - but that didn't matter because it was about to be positioned in pride of place on my bedside table. All I had to do was reach out and I could flick repeatedly between Butterflies and the Nine O'Clock News, something I wouldn't dare to try downstairs.
Not only was it inordinately convenient but it also meant I suddenly had control over what I watched, which when you're 18 can be both useful and important. It meant when The Omen popped up on ITV that Saturday night I could lie in bed and watch it all, whereas otherwise that classic film might have gone unwatched. Another advantage of my new TV is that it had a headphone socket so I could plug in my single plastic earphone and listen without anyone else hearing. That was great for everyone else in the house if the time ticked past midnight, and also great for me if I didn't want anyone to know precisely what I was watching, or even that I was watching anything at all.
And it wasn't just a TV, it was a multifunction cube, so as well as a screen it also had a radio. This could do medium wave, long wave and VHF, but mostly the former because Radio 1 didn't venture off 275/285 very often. Even better it had a cassette recorder down one side because cassettes were the height of recording technology in those days. It couldn't compete with my proper music centre but it did have the enormous bonus that I could record sound perfectly off the telly. Previously when I'd tried taping the Tomorrow's World theme I'd had to use a string of cables but now I could grab it direct. I didn't often trust my expensive pre-recorded cassettes in the side of the TV, though, because I worried what the magnets in the cathode ray tube might be doing.
My TV/radio/cassette also had a red LED clock on the front and this allowed my new gizmo to function as an alarm. I could set it for 7am and wake up to BBC Breakfast Time, indeed by the end of the first week I'd learned how to print stamps and how airline food was cooked, all before getting out of bed and heading off to work. I messed up on day two by setting the volume to zero but thankfully still woke up anyway, perhaps distracted by Selina Scott flickering in black and white. And that wasn't even the best bit. If you set the alarm and pushed down the play/record buttons on the cassette recorder, when the TV switched on it started recording and it was like having my own personal VCR. I only got the sound, not the picture, but many's the episode of Top of the Pops I'd have completely missed had it not been captured on C90.
The day I bought the TV I'd also bought lots of things I might need at university, including bath towels, tea towels, cutlery, salt and pepper pots and cereal bowls. I think they came from Clements, the big department store on the high street, or perhaps from Littlewoods or Timothy Whites. She also got me to buy a dark blue suit from M&S, rather than the regulation black, and insisted on taking a photo of me wearing it when I got home. But my 9TC 2100 was the most expensive purchase of the day, a true investment in the future, and would help to make me a centre of social interest in my freshers year.
I had to ask permission to have the set in my room, because this was 40 years ago and students didn't generally bring a TV with them when they came to university. The general expectation was that you'd watch programmes in the Common Room, whichever channel the majority of the masses preferred, which was total anathema to an independent viewer like me. But with my own set I could keep on top of the news (Cecil Parkinson did what?), laugh at Who Dares Wins and enjoy The Five Doctors without a running commentary. The two best requests from fellow students in that first year were "can I come round and watch Treasure Hunt fly over our farm?" and "can I come round and watch myself on Blockbusters?" I happily obliged.
One downside to the TV was that all the channels were set mechanically using a bank of swirly sliders under the lid. That was fine if you kept the set in one place but I was taking it to university and back every term so ended up doing a lot of awkward twiddling. It then accompanied me on my year living out (Roland Rat, The Tripods), then on my year living back in (Masterteam, Maradona's hand of god), then to Job 1 where I was lodging in someone's spare room (The Brittas Empire, Sticky Moments). Without my 9TC 2100 I could easily have missed out on eight years of shared national television culture but instead I kept on top of it all. There's not I think a single episode of Dallas that I didn't see.
By the set's 10th birthday I had my own home and a proper colour set, so my black and white cube retired to my bedside table. Here it allowed me to watch Newsnight before I nodded off to sleep and Grange Hill repeats before getting up on a Sunday morning. I was now renting a separate, somewhat clunky VCR so no longer needed to rely on sound-only tape recordings if I went out. But my 9TC 2100 was still an integral part of everyday life, even if only as a spare radio, and when I moved to London I packed it into its original box and brought it with me.
Alas reception in my flat proved so poor that the TV only served up pixels of fuzz, whichever direction I pointed the aerial, and then in 2012 analogue transmissions were switched off meaning it'd never work again. The cassette player has failed too, which seems to be a common problem with cassette players decades after they were manufactured, in this case because the eject button no longer opens the deck so you can't get a tape in. The radio still functions, so if I'm ever in the spare room and want Radio 4 it'd be great, but because it can't get digital-only 6 Music I hardly ever switch it on. It is essentially now redundant and I should take it down the tip for recycling.
But the clock still works and still gets used every day because I've set it up to be visible at the end of the hallway. The red LED is particularly good at showing up in gloom and darkness, which you just don't get with modern LCD displays, and I regularly use the clock to help me time my meals correctly. I love my futuristic lump of black plastic, which almost looks as if the 1980s are yet to come, and so it survives as a cool and chunky timepiece on my chest of drawers. I'll bin my 9TC 2100 one day, but given everything it's contributed to my cultural experience it remains one of the best £129s I've ever spent.
