Robin Hood Gardens, Poplar's brutalist housing estate, is on its way out. Its west flank was demolished in 2017/2018 and has subsequently been replaced by vernacular flats, and the east flank is now undergoing the same fate. About half has been deconstructed so far, like slicing sequentially through a concrete gateau, leaving the streets in the sky severed and former living rooms open to the sky. Its replacement will be 50% affordable but also architecturaly forgettable, ensuring that nobody will ever write a wistful paragraph about Blackwall Reach. Come before May to see the last stumps of 60s optimism.
This plaque on the Victoria Embankment is unusual in that it commemorates the last time Queen Victoria visited the City of London. She was presented with the City sword by the Lord Mayor on some illegible day in March 1900, died less than a year later and the City erected this plaque on their western boundary in 1902. It's not clear whether the sword presentation took place precisely here, round the back of Middle Temple Garden, although it's perfectly possible because the monarch isn't allowed to enter the City without the permission of the Lord Mayor. I'm not aware of any other plaques deliberately commemorating the last of multiple visits.
It's annoying when engineering works close a stretch of railway line at the weekend, for example the Mildmay line's not operating today between Willesden Junction and Clapham Junction. It is thus reassuring to see that the promised National Rail maintenance is indeed underway, with a long flabby pipe snaking across the tracks at Kensington Olympia to duck beneath the southbound platform, umpteen hi-vis operatives fiddling trackside and a lengthy engineering train parked close by. There might even be some ballast-tamping going on.
If you use a Lime bike in Hammersmith & Fulham you have to park it in a specified parking bay, such as this one outside White City station. This is also the case in the boroughs of Camden, Ealing, Hackney, Hounslow, Lambeth, Lewisham, Kensington & Chelsea, Westminster and the City of London. But in other inner London boroughs you can leave them pretty much anywhere, for example Islington, Southwark and Tower Hamlets, which is why I'm tired of Lime-chuckers abandoning their clunky steeds outside my front door and maybe our Mayor could try a little harder to segregate things.
I spotted this road sign on Vauxhall Bridge Road near Vauxhall Bridge, and what I noticed is that the digits of its A roads all add up to the same number which is 4. What's more all three A roads are a different number of digits long, i.e. 4 = 4+0 = 2+0+2. It's not overly exciting in the grand scheme of things, more a numerical coincidence, but I'll stick my neck out and say that no British road sign has more A roads with an identical digit sum.
