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.
My last Annual Travelcard just expired, and I shall miss it.
I bought my first Annual Travelcard in 2001 when I moved to London. This is the easiest and cheapest way to commute without faffing at ticket machines every day, I thought, and I was right. That first Annual Travelcard cost me £896, i.e. the equivalent of £2.45 a day, and these days even an off-peak single journey into zone 1 costs more than that.
I decided to buy a z1-3 Travelcard even though technically I only needed z1-2. I live right on the edge of zone 2, I reasoned, and it would be stupid to have to pay extra every time I went to Stratford. I've stuck with a z1-3 Travelcard ever since because it gave me free rein around virtually all of inner London, and any excursions to the suburbs were cheap occasional add-ons.
My Annual Travelcard was a significant investment, paying a lump sum up front for travel I hadn't yet made. Not everyone can afford to do this, indeed it's another example of long-term savings made by well-off people while less flush folk pay more often and end up paying more overall.
I checked how much I've spent on Annual Travelcards since 2001 and it's a lot of money.
Cost of my annual z1-3 Travelcard
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
£896
£912
£924
£952
£1000
£1040
£1096
£1136
£1208
£1208
£1288
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2022
2023
2024
£1368
£1424
£1472
£1508
£1520
£1548
£1600
£1648
£1740
£1808
£1916
It really is a lot of money, it's £29,000. But for that I've been able to swan around London for the best part of quarter of a century so it's been well worth it.
I know it's been well worth it because I checked. When I was commuting five days a week all I had to do was make a couple of extra journeys in the evening or at the weekend and it had paid for itself. More recently I've not been commuting daily so I could have been losing money hand over fist, but I used a spreadsheet one year to see how much PAYG would have cost and my Annual Travelcard was still better value. However this is only because I am a serial user of London transport and travel all over the place on a ridiculously regular basis. Your average non-gadabout would indeed be out of pocket.
My Annual Travelcard has allowed me one-price travel across zones 1-3, which is effectively what a daily cap does. But a daily z1-3 cap costs £10 and I was paying a lot lot less than that to do exactly the same, indeed about half the price. This is why using PAYG gives me the heebeegeebees.
My last Annual Travelcard cost me £1916 which works out as £5.50 a day. That's a big sunk cost, so for example any day I stayed at home or spent in Norfolk was essentially £5.50 down the drain. But on most days that £5.50 was an utter bargain, merely the same as a return trip from zone 1 into zone 2, so every journey I made on top of that was effectively free.
My Annual Travelcard marked me out as one of a dwindling number of year-long ticket holders. According to a recent FoI request the number of Annual Travelcards issued in the last financial year was just 15,192, a pitiful total in a capital of nine million people, and down a massive 80% since 2018/19. Most Londoners have deduced that PAYG better suits their needs, especially anyone who sometimes works from home, so expect Annual Travelcard sales number to dwindle even further very soon.
My Annual Travelcard allowed me to pay last year's fares for this year's travel. This was brilliant, especially in any year after a significant fare rise. I really made the most of this by buying my last Annual Travelcard at the end of February just before fares rose at the start of March. That meant the Travelcard I was still using last week cost £1916 whereas a new one would have cost £2008, and today that price jumps again to £2100. PAYG users, by contrast, get shafted straight away.
Annual Travelcards give a saving of 13% compared with continuing use of Monthly Travelcards, i.e. you get 12 months travel for the price of 10½. Alternatively they give a 23% saving compared with continuing use of 7 Day Travelcards, meaning you get 52 weeks for the price of 40. That's a lot of extra free weeks, although if you have a full time job and take six weeks annual leave plus bank holidays and the occasional sickie it might not actually add up to a saving.
My Annual Travelcard came with a Gold Card for additional discount on National Rail fares. It was like having a Network Railcard but without paying for it, i.e. I got a third off all off-peak fares across southeast England. Even better a Network card only allowed cheaper fares after 10am whereas in 2015 Gold Cards became valid from 9.30am and I caught loads of earlier trains to Norfolk thanks to that.
My Gold Card, once applied to my Oyster, let me pay less on journeys in zones 4-6 too. All I had to pay was the extension fare from the edge of zone 3, and then I got one third off that off-peak too. Bow to West Drayton is normally £3.60, for example, but I only needed to pay the extra £1.90 from Hanwell and then they deducted 33% so the actual fare was only £1.25. Nobody on PAYG goes anywhere for as little as that.
My Annual Travelcard also allowed me to catch buses for free - that's all the TfL buses everywhere including the severely peripheral ones. It was technically possible for me to get to Dorking and back by bus for nothing, indeed I tried it once, and that's several miles outside London... as were Redhill, Bluewater, Watford and Slough.
The joy of buses being free is that I never needed to get the train to a zone 4 station and pay extra, I could get off at the edge of zone 3 and get the bus. I got seriously well practised at this eventually, using stations like Hendon, Leytonstone, Crystal Palace and Wimbledon as a jumping off point. With a bit of patience I could catch free buses even further, all the way to Uxbridge and Upminster if necessary, and because I have lots of free time that's generally what I did.
My Annual Travelcard also allowed me to catch trams for free, a perk you get with any Travelcard with z3, 4, 5 or 6 validity. That made a lot of south London readily accessible, or at least not quite as inaccessible it would have been, bringing even Coulsdon and Biggin Hill into practical reach. Indeed I've made so much use of buses and trams over the last year that I only gave TfL £12 on top of my initial £1916 outlay, that's how exceptional value my Annual Travelcard has been.
My Annual Travelcard encouraged short journeys in a way PAYG never does. I could hop on a train for one stop or a bus for two stops without affecting my daily fare, which was especially useful if I was trying to make a connection in a hurry. PAYG is particularly brutal if you keep switching between trains and buses, never quite getting the full benefit of either, whereas a Travelcard enables efficient multi-modal journeys and indeed allows you to take the lazy option without penalty.
Essentially my Annual Travelcard allowed me to swan around London to my heart's content without worrying about how much it'd cost. This is not to be underestimated. Sure it was a huge price up front but after that I knew where I could go and how much it'd cost me, i.e. nothing extra, and that really encouraged me to travel and travel like a mad thing.
My Annual Travelcard also allowed me to pass in and out of ticket barriers to my heart's content without worrying if I was going to be slapped with an enormous penalty fare. I cannot begin to tell those of you with PAYG how good that feels. I wasn't forever thinking "should I have tapped out there?" or "oh god I hope I tapped in" or "have I been down here too long?" or "is it off-peak yet?" or "will they bankrupt me if I enter the station for 60 seconds and then tap back out again?". I didn't need to know the minutiae of all the stupid penalising rules because with an Annual Travelcard there weren't any.
And my Annual Travelcard allowed me to travel at any time of the day, be it the height of the rush hour or the middle of the night. Peak times meant nothing to me so long as I stayed in zones 1-3, and peak travel was even better value. I shall miss that freedom.
My last Annual Travelcard just expired and I already miss it. I'm struggling to get used to paying for travel and indeed paying what feels over the odds, so have been travelling a lot less as a result. I really struggled with my last evening out at BestMate's, a two-stop journey to Plaistow and back, which suddenly cost me £3.60 rather than the zero I've been paying since 2001. Worse still today is fare rise day so when I go back this week it'll be £4, and no way is eight minutes on the District line worth that.
I've taken my final Gold Card out of my Oyster wallet where one's been a fixture for over twenty years. I've also removed the photocard because I won't need that again, and doing that made me really sad. The photo is of me in September 2001 when I was a chipper 36 year-old with a big grin, flawless skin, unfaded hair and thousands of London adventures ahead of me. Amazingly that frozen snapshot has been acceptable to ticket inspectors for 24 decaying years, but I now have to retire that idealised angel and face up to being a near-pensioner instead.
The reason I've bought my last Annual Travelcard is that I'm about to switch over to a 60+ Oyster instead, the Mayoral treat that gifts free travel to sexagenarians to the annoyance of everyone younger. It hasn't arrived yet, indeed expect to read a post about how blindingly incompetent the onboarding process is at a later date. But when it does I'll suddenly be able to go everywhere in zones 1-6 for free which'll be game-changingly better, but also nowhere before 9am which'll be annoyingly worse.
My last Annual Travelcard just expired, and I shall miss it.
20 things we learnt from TfL FoI requests in February 2025
1) The oldest bus in service in London is the Uno 605, a vehicle introduced in 2007 and currently in use on route 383. However, this vehicle is due to be withdrawn from the fleet shortly. 2) On average TfL's income from ULEZ charges is about £375,000 per day. 3) As of 2024, 52% of all London’s roads have a 20mph speed limit. This can be further broken down as 52% of borough roads and 16% of the TfL Road Network. 4) The TfL Road Network comprises 4% of London's public roads but carries 29% of the traffic. The borough of Wandsworth has the most TfL-controlled roads (36km), Harrow has none. Barnet has the most major roads (109km) and Sutton the least (30km). Bromley has the most roads altogether (913km) but Hillingdon has the most traffic (followed by Havering and Enfield). 5) The noisy manhole cover on the northbound carriageway of Commercial Street at the junction with Fleur de Lis Street has had two utility notices issued, but as yet there is no date for a permanent repair. 6) There are 938 ticket machines at tube stations. These are of four different types. King's Cross St Pancras has the most (45) followed by Victoria (34), Liverpool Street (23), Paddington (22) and London Bridge/Heathrow T23 (18). Roding Valley is the only tube station with one ticket machine (the minimum otherwise is two). 7) Of all the Superloop routes, the SL7 has had the highest spend on vehicle vinyl wraps (£130,795.00) but also the lowest spend on stop/shelter branding (£16,861.43). 8) Customers who need to reset their multi-factor authentication are still unable to access their Contactless and Oyster accounts following the cyberattack in September. 9) A fox was seen on the Central line tracks at Oxford Circus on the evening of 19th January 2025. Traction current was turned off between 19.30 and 19.50 with train services suspended. The fox was unharmed and released in nearby Hanover Square Gardens. 10) Five existing electric vehicles from route 323 have been reassigned to the Silvertown Tunnel cycle shuttle service. Route 323 is currently being operated by Euro VI Diesel vehicles but will be back to using electric vehicles "as soon as is possible". 11) Toilets will be provided for bus drivers at both ends of the 129 and SL4 bus routes through the Silvertown Tunnel (but only at one end of the cycle shuttle because it's a short route). 12) During the last financial year 3,003,614 Oyster users and 13,087,477 Contactless users received an autofill refund payment after being charged for an incomplete journey. 13) Yes, heating is installed on buses on route 463, with the expectation that the saloon temperature be 17 degrees. 14) AI has not been used by TfL or their partners to develop the promotional materials seen around their network 15) If you'd like pdf copies of 38 tube maps issued between 1998 and 2009, this zip file has them all. 16) 295 penalty charges notices were issued on 25 December 2024 for vehicles being in a bus lane. Buses do not run on Christmas Day. No fines had been issued on any previous December 25th, even though the policy changed in 2020. 17) In 2021 TfL ran 14 advertising campaigns for cryptocurrencies, but last year just two. 18) There are now 794 Santander docking stations. The total was 330 when the bikes launched in 2010, 737 in 2015 and 784 in 2020. 19) At the end of 2024 a total of 10,364 customers had an active annual membership of Santander Cycles. That's 0.1% of London's population. 20) During 2024 TfL received 4207 FoI requests.
45 Squared 8) HALLIDAY SQUARE, UB2
Borough of Ealing, 70m×30m
I had high hopes for Halliday Square because it's surrounded by all sorts of intriguing historic stuff, specifically Ealing Hospital and the asylum that preceded it, many of whose Georgian buildings survive. Alas none of the good stuff is in Halliday Square itself, only nearby, nor was it built on the site of anything specifically interesting, not quite.
Halliday Square is a typically 1980s development, maybe 1990s, I haven't been able to determine which. It's a long thin quadrangle surrounded on all sides by three-storey townhouses, all terraced together so you can't walk round the back. The third storey is tucked away in the roof space which saved the original residents from having to fork out extra for a loft extension. Front doors open straight onto the street, are topped by an extremely slimline porch and are lit by a circular lamp. A couple of four-storey blocks of flats straddle the central alignment, also in two shades of brick, and when I said Halliday Square wasn't especially interesting I wasn't kidding.
Many London squares have a pleasant lawn in the centre but here it's all about car parking, one space each, overshadowed by a line of trees that've got pretty tall by now. Ball games are not permitted, the number of parked cars making this both impractical and unsafe. The most recent community notice on the board in the middle of the square advertises a bike event in 2021, while the "Missing Kitten" poster has had its centre ripped out so only the peripheral sellotape remains. It'd all be really quiet were it not for the footpath that runs across the middle, conveniently located for a bus stop on the Uxbridge Road so a relatively busy thoroughfare. The only vaguely interesting thing here on Halliday Square is a road sign with a spelling mistake, having been written with only one L instead of two.
But step through to the south and a decent flank of rather splendid institutional buildings appears. This is the former Middlesex County Asylum, the first purpose-built asylum built in England following the Madhouse Act of 1828, laid out on 74 rural acres between the Uxbridge Road and the Grand Union Canal in the vicinity of HanwellLocks. It was also pioneeringly progressive thanks to its first Medical Superintendent Dr William Ellis who believed in the 'therapy of employment' and tried to make the asylum self-sufficient. The west wing of the panopticon originally housed over 1000 female patients, and two centuries on is now a gated development called Osterley Views, although for many the view is actually of the access road to Halliday Square.
The rest of the asylum still caters to mental patients but as St Bernard's Hospital, accessed through a particularly fine arched gatehouse near the aforementioned bus stop. This is administratively separate from the better known Ealing Hospital whose stark concrete stack was built in 1979 on the site of the asylum's playing field and running track. Meanwhile the open space to the west of the old hospital was redeveloped as the Windmill Park Estate, a slice of modern suburbia running down to the canal, of which Halliday Square is an outlying part. Its stand-out feature is a curved wall of flats bored through by an access road, watched over by a knobby obelisk marooned on a roundabout, where a Spar supermarket is the last remaining shop.
What we have here is a fascinating pre-Victorian asylum whose sprawling buildings have been multiply repurposed and its grounds sequentially sold off for development. But what I was supposed to be writing about is Halliday Square, which as far as I can tell merely squats on the site of an ornamental garden just inside the main entrance, and maybe a tennis court in the hospital's later years. Best merely walked-through, or skipped altogether.
