Are repairs underway at Bow Road's gentlemen's conveniences?
Immediately beneath the Gladstone statue in the middle of Bow Road is a pair of Victorian public conveniences, long mothballed and alas long fallen into decay. The Gents is the most prominent, surrounded at street level by a crescent of decorativeiron railings and formerly accessed down two curved stairwells behind further ornate gates. These toilets were built in 1899 by Poplar Board of Works and Grade II listed by English Heritage in 2008 for being "attractively designed", "relatively intact" and of "group value as part of a significant historic townscape". I doubt they're so intact now after years of rainwater leached down, plus the railings got partly smashed recently and a damaged bollard was shoved precariously into the gap, indeed the whole thing has been in urgent existential need of repair for some time. Looks like it may finally be happening.
Yesterday morning workmen turned up in the sunshine and started sealing off the structure behind a wooden screen. The railings vanished within hours, followed by a completely separate structure for the skylight, both now safely ensconced behind the bluest of blue walls. It looks like an unlikely roadside artwork at the moment, all squat and vibrant, but I doubt it'll be long before our local taggers and flyposters get to work. It also looks serious, like someone might be about to spend money on this subterranean treasure at last, but it's not clear whether that'd be for a proper overhaul, a light repair job or merely protective quarantine.
These Gents conveniences have only been open for six hours so far this century, back in June 2012 when an arts company took them over for a quirky installation called Listed Loo. They spent many collective hours scrubbing it out, clearing the litter from the stairwells, removing the graffiti and then adding their own quirky touches including hundreds of apples piled up in one cubicle and a tree in soil in another. It was quite frankly baffling but also wonderful, mostly for the opportunity to finally step inside this historic municipal amenity where so many gentlemen have found relief over the years.
It was seriously evocative to discover a spacious skylit triangular chamber whose roof I'd walked over on multiple occasions and to admire the veneer cubicle doors, the russet marble urinals and the central green pillar supporting the roof. Oh to have such facilities available anywhere in Tower Hamlets today. I fear it looks far far worse down there now and that the public may never see inside again, but I'm delighted that someone's finally turned up to make sure Bow Road's listed loo doesn't get even worse.
Are bakeries the new church?
Once pretty much all you could do on a Sunday morning was go to church, then heading out on recreational day trips was added to the list and eventually John Major allowed people to go shopping. But more recently Sunday mornings have become more about communal nibbling, especially amongst younger folk, especially if it's somewhere that's been recommended but they've never been. You could call it brunch, although that tends to conjure up visions of eggs or avocado as part of a proper plateful and it doesn't have to be that substantial. It could just be pastries and coffee, especially if they're artisan pastries, especially if you saw them on TikTok, which might help explain this ridiculous queue moving at glacial speed I saw on a backstreet in Islington.
This is Pophams on Prebend Street, an innovative viennoiserie that opened in a derelict chemist's shop in October 2017. In the mornings they specialise in crisp flaky pastries, be that a Honey & Smoked Salt bun, a Seasonal Custard Danish or a Marmite, Schlossberger & Spring Onion swirl, not forgetting their signature Bacon & Maple. I'm sure they're damned good but I'm not sure they're worth making a pilgrimage across town to join the back of a line of millennials 40 strong, edging forwards towards an understaffed counter to order a few carbs and a locally-sourced coffee before grabbing a bench seat and snapping an appreciativevideo to share on social media. As a one-off why not, but there are many folk whose Sunday morning mantra is always where can we meet up and eat - anywhere on trend will do - and who probably end up having most of their conversation in the queue.
There are tons of things you could be doing on a Sunday morning, and how fascinating that for so many people bakeries are the new church.
Is this London's newest boundary stone?
This is a boundary stone on Leytonstone Road, a few minutes walk north from Maryland station. It's plonked in the pavement roughly opposite the end of Borthwick Road although it's been here a lot longer than that particular residential sidestreet. The letters on it say WHP because this was once the edge of West Ham Parish, an ancient subdivision that stretched four miles south from here to the Thames, and the earliest year inscribed here is 1775 suggesting it was installed exactly 250 years ago. 1850 and 1864 also get a mention.
I know this because a council plaque on the wall confirms it as a West Ham boundary stone, and also that the 1864 marking is to confirm this was boundary point number 31. The intriguing phrase is that it "no longer marks any boundary", when a quick look at a map will confirm it still sits on the dividing line between the boroughs of Newham and Waltham Forest. Maybe they mean it's been shifted slightly since so it's no longer in precisely the right place, but if not it's incredibly close so this feels like an over-pedantic niggle. Anyway, you'll have deduced by now that a 250-year old boundary stone can't possibly be London's newest so I draw your attention instead to a nearby paving slab which has the words "borough boundary" chiselled into the kerb.
I had to stand in the road behind a bus to get that shot, so I hope you appreciate the mild peril that went into obtaining it. This special slab was laid here in 2019 when Waltham Forest was the London Borough of Culture, and sits alongside a black totem topped with a saw-toothed factory-shaped sign containing the name of the borough and the local postcode. This was one of four sites chosen for the 'Welcome Sign' project, each marking a main gateway into the borough. The others can be found on Lea Bridge Road by the Ice Centre, on Forest Road approaching Woodford and outside the Ferry Boat Inn at Tottenham Hale.
As far as I can tell the Leytonstone Road totem is the only one of the four with a modern boundary stone in the kerb alongside, so my claim is that this is London's newest boundary stone until someone tells us otherwise.
