I wondered if there was any mileage in further 'Random' blog series.
Random grid reference: TQ269722 Springfield Park Wandsworth SW17
Technically the precise spot is a block of flats just over the wall, but I was in Springfield Park just last week and blogged all about it so there's no point in going back again.
Random Haringey Park Wood Green Common N22
After generating my random number I headed straight there, just down the road from Alexandra Palace station, but it was closed. This was annoying because according to Haringey's website "Works to improve Wood Green Common were completed in June 2025", but they very much aren't. The new Multi Use Games Area and outdoor gym remain sealed off behind metal barriers while workmen tweak poles and paving, and a lot of grass people could be using for recreation is out of commission for parking white vans.
Admittedly the small children's play area is open but best not wander in there unaccompanied, also Barratt Gardens is unaffected but the wisteria on the pergola has already done its thing. Works were supposed to take 22 weeks which seems very precise, but they're very much not over yet and might not even be ready before schools go back. Bad timing.
Random London bus route 169 Claybury - Barking
The first number the generator threw up was 347 which hasn't been a London bus route for the last six months, then 446 but that hasn't run since 1996. Third time lucky I got the 169 because that actually exists, but I wasn't convinced anyone wanted to read a road trip across Redbridge whose commentary would mostly have been "and then more shops".
Random diamond geezer comment number 51857, 5th December 2011
There are now over 180,000 diamond geezer comments, which is damned impressive thanks, and to trawl back to the 51857th I had to scroll down to 5th December 2011. This was on a post about Ben Pedroche's book Do Not Alight Here in which I followed his route to disused stations round Bow, Stepney and Limehouse. Mid-afternoon one of you commented...
Shame the old Bow Station was demolished. What a magnificent building! CornishCockney 5 Dec 2011 - 4:15 p.m
...and how exciting that Cornish Cockney also left the 184817th comment only yesterday!
My random number generator picked a very high number this time, and photo 18637 turns out to be from the very start of this year when I went to Lancing to walk the road of the year. This is the roundabout at the northern end of the A2025, and excitingly it's never appeared on the blog before.
If a list exists, a random item can be identified. In this case the 71212th postbox in the database can be found in the Norfolk village of Southrepps, not far from Cromer. It's an E2R lamp box, probably the 1970s design, with a 9am collection time. It used to sit proudly outside the Post Office but that closed in January 2024 due to the resignation of the postmaster and is now a private home. I could schlepp up to Southrepps to take a photo but why bother when Google StreetView exists, other than perhaps enjoying a beer at the VernonArms afterwards.
Random London pub Little Windsor Sutton SM1
There is no official list of London's pubs but there was once courtesy of CAMRA, back in 2019, so I used that and hoped that pub number 2598 hadn't closed post-pandemic. It hadn't, but I had no idea where it was because I've never been to Greyhound Road in Sutton before. The Little Windsor looks like a decent local with a teensy front patio, formerly Fullers but they've recently withdrawn. Alas their website no longer exists but on Facebook they claim to be "a traditional cosey pub providing excellent real ales and food", plus they host occasional gigs by solo singers. I reckon Random London Pub might actually work as a feature on someone beer-friendly's blog, but I would very much run out of stuff to say after admiring the green wainscotting and noting the availability of Mini Cheddars.
I was hoping to delve back into my early years but instead we go back just three years to a rare Bank Holiday Thursday. It was the first day of the Queen's Platinum Jubilee, and after a breakfast of porridge and a nice walk round Hampstead Heath I headed to the Olympic Park to watch the flypast. Wow!
I headed home to eat bacon sandwiches while fast-forwarding through Trooping The Colour, then stuck a turkey joint in the oven. Charles and Camilla appeared on EastEnders, almost acting properly, and my most successful tweet of all time passed three quarters of a million views, which would never happen nowadays.
I went multiply random here. First I picked a random year during the lifespan of the UK Singles chart (1982), then a random month (June), then a random week and got the Top 40 announced by Paul Burnett on 8th June 1982. It was the day Adam Ant toppled Madness from the chart summit if you remember. Finally I picked a random position in that Top 40 chart and got number 5 which was Tight Fit's follow up to The Lion Sleeps Tonight, the much superior Fantasy Island. A bit cheesy perhaps, but you can see where Steps got a lot of their ideas from. Retro Charts Radio is the perfect place to hear random Top 40 hits these days.
Random London station Bexley (zone 6)
By the time I'd been to Wood Green there wasn't time to go to Bexley, plus Bexley's a dull station in an interesting place so I'd have spent more time writing about the village instead. You can always read the Wikipedia page where you'll discover the station car park has 259 spaces, or perhaps wait for someone to add their own thrilling anecdote to the comments.
n.b. I reserve the right to come back and do Random Station: Bexley at some point in the future, should it ever come up again.
Random grid reference: TQ414890
North Circular Redbridge IG4
This is mid-dual-carriageway on the A406 just north of the Redbridge roundabout, so you can only really get to it with a car. There is a footpath alongside by the river Roding, and if only it had been TQ415890 that'd have been Roding Well Pumping Station, but TQ414890 is alas off-limits Ballardian beltway. Some ideas only work once, and the magic rarely works a second or even third time, sorry.
For today's post I selected a six-figure grid reference somewhere in London, entirely at random, and then visited the selected spot. That'll make a change from posting about railways, I thought. But I thought wrong.
Random grid reference: TQ402727 Grove Park Nature Reserve Lewisham SE12
The whole of London to choose from and I landed in a six acre nature reserve with full public access, just to the right of these railway tracks. What's at the appropriate gridreference is essentially a lot of trees but also a chalk meadow, a rare tiny wasp, a nature trail, a potential urban park, a monument to a famous local apartheid campaigner and the site of an abandoned motorway, also the inspiration for a much-loved children's story and knicker-waving film. I thus apologise for the fact I'm going to have to mention the word railway thirteen times in what follows.
The South Eastern Railway opened their Tunbridge line in 1865, here through open fields overseen by a handful of farms. Grove Park gained a station in 1871 and a few large houses appeared along Burntash Lane, while a single footpath continued across the cutting for the benefit of a few farm workers. Those villas spread without ever backing fully onto the railway, leaving a stripe of land that would eventually become allotments, then in 1984 a nature reserve. The footpath survives as a key local connection via a twisty footbridge, from which my earlier photo was taken, indeed you may know it from Capital Ring section 3. And from here it's all too easy to wander off into the delightful patch of woodland at TQ402727.
The southern half of Grove Park Nature Reserve, closest to the grid reference, is mostly deciduous woodland. The ground cover's quite thick but a path weaves round the perimeter, stepping up onto a wooden boardwalk at the top end to ensure less squidgy progress in winter months. A terribly brief stream feeds a small pond where dragonflies and irises proliferate, according to the information board, with adjacent platforms added to aid pond dipping. The wildlife I experienced included butterflies and a squirrel, plus half a dozen young children in wellies engaging in mudplay encouraged by jolly parents who'd brought buckets and towels. A six-post nature trail with QR codes linking to a Wordpress blog can help guide you round.
Keep going and you soon reach a clearing on an embankment overlooking the railway, and this it turns out is the most consequential spot. The meadow here has a chalk soil, this because navvies dumped spoil here during construction of the railway, hence this is one of the only alkaline habitats in the borough of Lewisham. "Best seen in July" says the information board, but after the parched weeks we've had I fear tufted vetch and bird's foot trefoil failed to gain a foothold this summer. The long grass is however ideal for the six-spot Burnet moth, and thus also for the parasitic chalcidid wasp, one species of which was unknown in Britain until it was discovered here at TQ401728.
That weird green leafy sculpture on the bank is the Peace Pole, endpoint of the uncelebrated Grove Park Peace Trail. This leads from Chinbrook Meadows and was inspired by the frankly astonishing fact that the future Archbishop Desmond Tutu spent three years as the curate for St Augustine's Church just down the road. He even came back for the unveiling in2009 when local schoolchildren sang him African songs and he told them how badly he'd been treated in apartheid South Africa. But the famous person who made Grove Park Nature Reserve her own was undoubtedly Edith Nesbit, the famous children's author, who once lived in a house by the top of the footpath, since renamed Railway Children Walk.
In 1894 E Nesbit used her early earnings as a writer to help fund a move to Three Gables, a desirable Queen Anne-style villa on Baring Road. She'd have had a good view of the railway from her back garden, the backdrop then just fields, and also been familiar with the path down the embankment which gave access to the tracks. She and her husband Hubert had a diverse and radical social circle, so for example George Bernard Shaw was known to drop by, and she also scandalised the neighbourhood by letting her children roam barefoot around Grove Park. The Nesbits had moved on to Eltham by the time The Railway Children was written, but it's often assumed the book was inspired by living beside the railway here, not least because Bobbie, Peter and Phyllis lived in a house called Three Chimneys.
The view out the back is far less sylvan now - four electrified railway tracks augmented by multiple approaches into Grove Park Sidings with its massive carriage shed. Also it was never as rural as you remember from the 1970 film because that was filmed on the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway in West Yorkshire instead. Alas Three Gables has long been demolished, the building on site today being a bogstandard three-storey block of flats called Stratfield House. I haven't been able to find out when and where it went, but I do know the two neighbouring semis were knocked down in 1969 to make way for a proposed orbital motorway called Ringway 2. This was a bold (some would say suicidal) plan by the GLC to replace the South Circular and would have wiped out 30,000 houses altogether. You can see how close it came to fruition.
Ringway 2 would have crossed the railway here, eradicating Cox's Wood and all the houses along Coopers Lane to make room for the multi-pronged Baring Road Interchange. Local residents were appalled when the GLC suddenly announced the route as a fait accompli, and joined a growing protest movement which eventually led to an electoral thrashing and the scrapping of the Ringways project. Here in Grove Park the new sense of activism found its voice with the opening of a community centre in the almost-demolished semi, and a cluster of prefabs slotted into the gap where the road would have gone. With a sense of ownership they called it The Ringway Centre, and on a Sunday morning I can confirm it thrives as The Redeemed Christian Church Of God Place Of His Presence.
In the woods out back they've recently set up an outdoor classroom area called Camp Nesbit where schoolchildren come for science lessons, writing workshops and sometimes the chance to walk down to Grove Park Nature Reserve and wave at trains. There are also much wider plans to create a three mile long 'Urban National Park' alongside the railway from here to Elmstead Woods, plainly overoptimistic in these cash-squeezed times but sometimes it pays to dream big. Edith's embankment amid Grove Park Nature Reserve could one day be part of something much larger, ideal for letting off steam, although inspiring The Railway Children will always be TQ402727's first class achievement.
Railways are 200 years old this year, and one of the highlights of the anniversary celebrations is the Inspiration Train.
It's a four-carriage exhibition on wheels, knocked together in conjunction with the National Railway Museum, and is spending twelve months rocking up to 60 locations on a nationwide tour. Everyone's invited to come aboard for free, walk through various themed zones and hopefully leave more inspired about the railways. Officially you're supposed to pre-book but I chanced my luck at Waterloo station yesterday while the rest of the station was in total signalling meltdown, smiled sweetly and got lucky.
No that's fine, we're not that busy at the moment.
Sorry I need to ask you to enter some personal details on this tablet.
The Inspiration Train was tucked away on platform 19, the station's favoured hideaway for exclusive events. A proper steam train occupied the buffer end and was drawing an appreciative crowd - we'd get a chance to see that on the way out. The exhibition train is freight-hauled so remained unmobbed, although the exterior has been beautifullydecorated by the graphic geniuses who design loco liveries so was also well worthy of admiration. Alas the access point for the exhibition was down a long section of platform fully open to an ongoing deluge, so I was duly whisked past most of the exterior art by a kind gentleman with a large brolly.
You're welcome.
Yes the train was here yesterday and at Euston earlier in the week.
Margate tomorrow but it's all sold out.
Up you step.
A train is ideal as an exhibition space, and not just because it's mobile. It has a large amount of wall space for display purposes, a flat surface amenable to step-free access and an obvious path of travel from one end to the other. What it's lacking is a large amount of circulation space so it's all too easy for an engrossed family at one particular exhibit to create a temporary bottleneck mid-carriage. It's also ideal for train-themed gimmicks, in this case a lovely thick souvenir ticket you're supposed to punch in every carriage to show you've been. Alas I must have inserted mine in the machine wrong because in carriage 1 it punched out '4' instead, and not all the way through either, then machine 2 didn't work so I stopped trying after that.
This way please.
Carriage 1: Railway Firsts
I imagine a lot of brainstorming went on at Railway 200 HQ to try to work out how best to fill four railway carriages. They got carriage 1 right, a series of firsts to echo the fact that public railways first emerged 200 years ago. Here then we find the first railway photo (Linlithgow station 1845), the first Real Time Passenger Information (Dina St Johnston 1974) and the first use of Hi Vis in Britain (Glasgow 1964). Some firsts are truly world-changing (Railway Time leading to Greenwich Mean Time in 1880) or rightly thought-provoking (the first fish and chip shop was enabled by rail connections in 1860), but others are quite frankly a bit contrived (the First Use of Railway Language, the First FA Cup Final At Wembley Stadium). A tad sparse in places but a good start.
Carriage 2: Wonderlab in Motion
Ooh a hands-on science exhibit. First that age-old favourite where you try to use blocks to build a safe span across a valley. Second that fun one where you try to create an axled thing that'll roll down a curved slope. And third a sandpit with roads and railways projected onto it which chop and change as you run your hand through the sand or try to build up an embankment. I still have no idea what that last one was trying to prove but it was fun, and I couldn't get near the other two because they were being used by children. As content it's clearly perfect for an Inspiration train because the next tranche of rail engineers has to come from the younger generation. But really all that's here are three interactives lifted from the Wonderlab gallery at the NRM in York, and perhaps its true purpose is as inspiration that you might like to take your offspring there instead (day tickets from £9.90).
Carriage 3: Your Railway Future
This is where the target audience for the Inspiration train becomes obvious, it's attempting to encourage rail-obsessed youngsters to consider a career in the industry. Ten different career paths are suggested, none of them driver, guard or gateline jockey, more science-based and professionally focused. Have you ever thought of being a Weather Analyst, a Freight Manager or an IT Apprentice, maybe even a drone pilot or ecologist? A complex set-up with a railway layout mid-carriage was totally absorbing one young lad who might one day become a coder, although the other displays weren't so grabby. I walked off with a card suggesting that if I liked planning parties I might want to become a timetable planner for Network Rail, intrigued but not inspired because my career path lies way behind me.
Carriage 4: The Partner Zone
And this is where the Railway 200 brainstorming failed, or maybe someone on the Marketing Manager career path put their foot down and insisted on space for a synergistic brand collab. Essentially it's an empty carriage populated by whoever's turned up to promote themselves, which is fair enough but very much not inspiring. I dodged the lady who wanted to talk about Alzheimers and was instead invited to try my hand at SWR Guard Training by working through several screens on a tablet. As I tried hard to press all the circles that appeared on the screen, each highlighting an increasingly unlikely customer interaction, my determined focus meant I learned absolutely bugger all about the role of the guard. I did however score over 30000 points so have been entered into a prize draw for something, hopefully not a fortnight's course in Basingstoke, and what was the dinosaur all about anyway?
We hope you enjoyed your time on the Inspiration Train.
And that was it, I was off the train. I'd been aboard 25 minutes so it hadn't been a wasted walkthrough, although after the first carriage the engagement level dropped off somewhat. Don't travel a long distance to see the Inspiration Train I think is what I'm saying, although given it's likely travelling to you there's every reason to drop in. Take a look at Geoff's video if you'd like to see what you're missing, or could perhaps enjoy.
Further along the platform the departing crowd were being wowed by 35028 Clan Line, a perfectly preserved Pullman-puller operated by the Merchant Navy Locomotive Preservation Society and normally based in Battersea. There was even the opportunity to clamber up onto the footplate for a closer look at the gauges, injectors and cock levers, all beautifully buffed, three visitors at a time. I didn't wait, I've seen coal-shovelling at first hand before, and here they weren't even allowed to blow the whistle. But as a smiling 10-year old took his place beside the gleaming engine for a beaming selfie I overheard his parents talking to the staff.
No we're not interested in trains at all but he is, and he's loved it.
If you're target audience, prepare to be Inspired at a station near you soon.
Another Saturday, another significant station birthday. This time it's a 50th birthday and it's on the Underground, the anniversary station being Hatton Cross.
Saturday 19th July 1975 was ALSO the day a brand newrollingstock was introduced on the Piccadilly line, freshly fitted out with additional luggage space. The first such train made the inaugural public journey into Hatton Cross around 10am, and may well roll in again today 50 years later because TfL still haven't managed to introduce a replacement. I don't think any significant celebrations are planned.
Before 1975 the Piccadilly line terminated at Hounslow West but a drive to serve Heathrow Airport saw a sequential extension introduced, initially just to Hatton Cross and then in 1977 to Heathrow Central. Here's a poster from the time and here's the customerleaflet, both sides. Hatton Cross station was to serve "the maintenance areas on the south side of the airport and the large housing districts of North Feltham and Bedfont". Meanwhile "passengers for airlines and spectators" were urged to continue to alight at a remodelled Hounslow West and take the A1 Express bus from the station forecourt.
Being of mid-70s vintage, Hatton Cross has a certain brutalist aesthetic, or if you're feeling less polite looks like a concrete bunker. Its flat roof is because it was once meant to have a car park on top until the airport decided that might be a distraction to incoming planes, which do admittedly come into land incrediblyclose by. Look more closely and the ripples on the slabs round the perimeter of the roof are actually art, a concrete frieze by William Mitchell, although the artworks most people are aware of are the gorgeous mosaics down on the island platform.
Several of the tiled columns feature three stylised birds in flight, the 'Speedbird' motif of Imperial Airways/BOAC, gloriously picked out in blue against an orange background. If waiting for a train, perhaps changing for a looper to Terminal 4, they always brighten the soul. Meanwhile the roof is made from corrugated metal, the floor comprises panels of multicoloured terrazzo and the larger wall tiles are in shades of off-grey and subdued green. Note also the illuminated roundels, these now found only here and at Pimlico which had opened three years earlier. As a time capsule of mid-Seventies design the tube has no finer example.
Climb thestairs - Hatton Cross being the youngest tube station not to have lifts - and you reach a broad funnelling concourse. Beyond is a covered waiting area brightened by a glass lantern and several hanging baskets, where global travellers mingle with airport staff and perhaps take the opportunity for a nap. The shop unit still trades, although the name Newscafe is plainly out of date and they probably now sell more bottles and cans than anything else. The doors to the booking hall were originally operated by treadpads and opened automatically, which was proper cutting edge, but those to the bus station are more annoying as they all need pushing and one alas is full-on defective.
Hatton Cross got a spruce-up last year including the addition of vinyl artworks across many of the ground floor windows. The upper frieze features the Speedbird motif amidst a burst of colour, echoing back to designs downstairs, while below are Himalayan blue poppies and Shirui lilies, two species discovered by Frank Kingdon-Ward who once had a nursery close by. At the same time a so-called Energy Garden was added in the flowerbeds round the back and a few tubs out front. It looked dazzling in Ian Visits' initial report but the current reality is scrappy green plants in need of watering, so at best that means I missed their spring flowering but more likely suggests it's no longer getting the attention it deserves.
The station sits amid an oppressive urban environment with a major dual carriageway on one side and Britain's largest airport on the other. But look more carefully amid the sheds and hotels and the remnants of something older linger, because all of this has been built right on top of what was once a small quiet Middlesex village. Hatton was once a cluster offarms and cottages around a loop of country lanes, large enough for a pub and chapel but not a church or shop, surrounded by many acres of market gardening. Its misfortune is that in 1925 the Great South West Road was aligned straight through the middle, then brutallywidened ten years later, and where the village got lucky is that when London Airport expanded it got no further than the A30, thus a few scraps of Hatton remain to the south of the main road.
If it helps you to orientate, the centre of Hatton is now occupied by the screamingly blue Atrium hotel, where you should never book an overnight room if it's Runway Alternation Week One. The older house across the road with all the vans round the back was originally called The Orchard while the feeder road outside, now Dick Turpin Way, follows the alignment of a brief back lane. A tad more of Steam Farm Lane survives, now somewhere taxis and coaches park up during pauses between airport transfers. The boarded-off hall here was originally Hatton Mission Chapel, an outpost of St Mary's East Bedfont whose vicar travelled by horse and cart to hold a service on Sunday afternoons, and which finally closed in 1992 for fear of fallen roof tiles.
Behind was Hatton Farm, largest of the local farmsteads, one of whose many barns survives as a timber ruin amid a scrappy paddock. Horses are still kept here and in other nearby fields, even those containing airport landing lights, because equine residents tend not to complain about aircraft noise. And a short distance down Hatton Road, a smidge beyond the car wash, are six old cottages still on their original footprint. It seems amiss to see an 1836 plaque on the front of the pebbledashed pair, unless perhaps they replaced something older, but the two teetering right on the edge of the flightpath look much more convincingly Victorian.
Hatton's oldest surviving building by far is The Green Man pub, allegedly Jacobean although its listing only reckons 18th century. It's a lovely higgledy building, formerly thatched, whose stables contain a highwayman's hide built into the open back of the chimney, now a feature in the Lounge Bar. If you're ever waiting a long time for a flight it looks a better place to enjoy chicken, chips and a pint than forking out for something fussier airside. For an even cheaper meal try Super Singh's, a no-frills cafe in a blue and white shed on Faggs Lane specialising in vegan pizza and eggless cakes. As for the business park across the road this replaced an extensive Catholic orphanage, the St Anthony's Home, which packed its dormitories tight but fled the area in 1962.
Close by is Hatton's only 20th century residential street, a cul-de-sac of houses and bungalows looped round a patch of parched grass called Hatton Green. In this brief enclave of neat hedged gardens and satellite dishes you could be anywhere in outer London, at least if you visit like I did during the half of the day when planes aren't thundering over. The penalties for living here are obvious but the benefits include a free parking space many visitors to Heathrow would kill for, plus the gift of a tube station a short walk away. It may have been built for the airport but it unintentionally best serves the village Heathrow half-destroyed, by the busy crossroads known as Hatton Cross.
In today's edition we investigate art, science, conspiracy and just what did the councillors know?
On the outskirts of Harrow a clump of empty-looking sheds lurks mysteriously beside the ring road. What is this and why is it here and how is it related to the future of the council?
It looks important, heavily signposted in gleaming red letters from both Greenhill Way and Station Road. A chain of blue and green lights beckons through an alleyway between a cake shop and a chicken shop, while a sign on a lamppost lures you in with promises of STREET FOOD ART AND MORE. But beyond the skips all we found was a silent cluster of lockable units, adapted containers and pseudo-greenhouses, all connected via a chain of timber ramps because this tumbleweed corner is nothing if not accessible. Who precisely is accountable for whatever hasn't happened here?
This is Harrow Art Park, supposedly a "vibrant destination for culture" opened just last month by Harrow Council as part of the £7m regeneration of Harrow town centre. It launched with a bang, or at least a week of special activities hitching onto the coattails of the London Festival of Architecture. Our bet is that the live music and local food was better appreciated than the panel on incremental urbanism, especially on a Thursday evening. And yet a month later nobody is here, not unless they're walking through from the adjacent street market, and the empty units echo with the sound of misplaced investment.
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A deep dive into Harrow's Art Park fiasco is below.
But first — a quick look at the big London stories this week:
🔎 The Mayor is in Africa on a trade tour this week, rather than staying behind to deal with the real problem of Lime bikes on pavements.
🔎 A new M&S Food Hall opened in Leytonstone yesterday because that's proper news isn't it?
🔎 Eastbourne is to get a new train connection from London Bridge, but only once a day and not at weekends and not in the off-peak so don't get your hopes up.
🔎 Something else we saw some other outlet mention is that floating bus stops are to be banned, or paused, or ripped out we're not sure we didn't read that far down.
🔎 Two mice have been seen at The Ivy, presumably without a reservation.
🔎 The Palm House at Kew Gardens is to close for five years as part of a major renovation project, and quite frankly if we're the first people to tell you then you're not paying nearly as much attention to London's news media as you ought to be.
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The Cultural Lens
Our science correspondent rocked down to the Wellcome Collection on the Euston Road this week, only a month after the opening of their new exhibition Thirst! It's all about water and the lack of it, because we love to bring you the exclusives.
The exhibition's in the usual gallery on the usual floor and you walk round in the usual direction after entering through the usual door. According to a warning out front you might see a desiccated animal on your way round but we must have missed it so we were very cross. There are several themed areas, all water based, focusing on matters of scarcity and excess both in Britain and abroad. Several arid countries feature, which is excellent if you love a good wadi or if Beirut's fluvial trauma is something you've never previously considered.
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You get more out of the exhibition if you stop and wave your phone at a QR code on 11 separate occasions, then listen to five minutes of audio at each waypoint, but quite frankly who has time for that? We didn't stop to read everything either, just walked through and looked at the pictures so were out fairly quickly all told. The theme felt a bit loose and the art wasn't as engaging as it sometimes is, but the good bits were good and if retreating glaciers don't give you the willies you're probably ice-hearted. Thirst! continues until February 2026 which is basically forever, so it'll be worth a visit on a glum winter Saturday when you've run out of interesting things to do.
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Meanwhile in Harrow the new Art Park continues unabated.
One of the greenhouse things appears to contain a cactus, another is festooned with photos of the Art Park so feels a bit meta and the other two are empty. As for the surrounding units one has a clothes rail in it, one has become an offshoot of the rug shop on the market and another is being used by a cake decorator which isn't truly art. The most telltale sign that bugger all is happening is the map of the Art Park framed on the wall whose key is entirely empty, all the way from Units 1-14 to Galleries E-G. And yet it all started with such high hopes.
Councillors decided to replace 20 car parking spaces with an Art Park as part of "a bold new project dedicated to creativity, community and collaboration". It's a five year project overseen by Meanwhile Space on behalf of the London Borough of Harrow, the aim to "establish itself as a creative and social catalyst for Harrow's future". Beancounters should have run a mile when they read that the Art Park was to be "a hub of curiosity" but instead they paid up and this deadzone is the end result.
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The area's Labour councillor told the London Lens that the project highlighted Harrow Council's inability to plan and co-ordinate effectively, also that "hundreds of pounds in taxpayers' money is likely being wasted on keeping the lights on all day every day” which we're pretty sure is a ridiculous exaggeration. In response the Conservative council leader admitted it would take a few months to reach full occupancy as you'd expect with any new venue, then blamed Labour councillors for being too downbeat. "The Council is learning and adapting as we go along," he added, which to be fair did sound like a confession it was a bit rubbish at the moment.
The London Lens doorstepped the heart of the Art Park yesterday, keen to get to the bottom of things. We approached the central meeting space, a community hall with a grey ridged roof, and observed two shady characters lurking deep within. What secrets might they hold, what astonishing revelations might they reveal, and who on earth was paying them to spend Thursday morning awaiting visitors who would never come? As we stepped through the door and saw precisely what was laid out on the table inside, little could have prepared us for the unexpected truth we would discover by doing the proper journalism nobody else is doing. And in the centre of Harrow of all places!
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I remember film for cameras. You couldn't just wander around with a smartphone snapping willynilly, you needed special film like Colourprint II designed for instant loading cameras. You bought a box of film from the shop, in this case Boots, and had to manoeuvre the cartridge into your camera without accidentally overexposing it on the way in. This particular film only had space for 12 pictures so you had to take photos really sparingly or you'd run out before the end of the holiday. There was always a best before date, in this case May 1980, and note the depressing news that PRICE DOES NOT INCLUDE PROCESSING. Every film had to be sent away after use, in this case dropped into Boots, and then you'd go back a few days later and excitedly flick through the blurry messes you'd taken. No 'dodgy' photos in those days, Mr Chemist was watching. If you're a certain age you probably remember film for cameras too, also I'm aware you can still get it for certain retro devices, but my word instant photography has moved on in the last fifty years.
I remember free gifts in cereal packets. They were the most exciting thing ever when I was a child, the opportunity to find a random piece of card or plastic figure lurking at the bottom of your packet of cereal. Sometimes they were outside the bag and sometimes inside, so sometimes you thought they'd forgotten to put one in only to find it later, perhaps by urgently shaking the Coco Pops at an angle until a gift appeared. These ones came with Weetabix in 1975, a set of 24 cards featuring Dr Who And His Enemies just as Tom Baker hit his peak. You got 4 characters at a time, each of which had to be pushed out of its card before you could play with them in front of the colourful alien scene on the back of the packet. I never got the full set, instead I ended up with two Yetis, also I was only 10 so didn't remember any Dr Who stories containing a Quark or White Robot. Gordon Archer did the artwork and they're now eminently collectable, not that I realised this at the time. I also remember Magic Roundabout pencil toppers in Ricicles and Klondike Pete comics in Golden Nuggets, as will you if you're a certain age, and wow breakfasts got a lot duller when they stopped putting random freebies in cereal packets.
I remember Viewmaster stereoscopes. They had a plastic viewer with two eyepieces and then you could buy all sorts of discs on all sorts of topics to slot into them. Each 'reel' had 14 transparencies, and by viewing them in pairs you got to see seven 3D images as the disc rotated. This set's Wombles-themed from 1973, with three discs each bringing to life one of the stories from the stop-motion TV series. Ideally someone else read the text from the booklet out loud while you were clicking through, or else you knew the story off by heart because you'd watched them over and over. In the absence of video recorders, this is how we filled our afternoons. If you're of a certain age you'll remember Viewmasters too, maybe any age because they're been around since 1939 and are still in production. Originally the main content was tourist-related, so for example I have another set of reels from Niagara Falls, but eventually storytelling for children took over and in 2008 they stopped making scenic panoramas altogether.
I remember transfer lettering. There was no desktop publishing in those days and sometimes a Dymo label wouldn't cut it, so sheets of transferrable letting sold like hot cakes. You'd remove the protective backing sheet, locate the letter of your choice over the appropriate surface and scribble with a pencil. If you pulled the plastic away before you'd scribbled enough you could be left with an incomplete mess so you always had to be careful. This sheet's unusual because all the letters are the same, whereas normally you got a full alphabet and had to hope none of them ran out before you'd finished. Two Zs or seven Es and you might be scuppered. One of the joys was that you could buy all sorts of typefaces - Letraset made some stunners - and pick a decorative style for a bedroom cupboard or something more sober for the front of a presentation. Of course you had to try to keep the line straight or the end result looked wonky, plus the letters had a tendency to eventually rub off, but if you're of a certain age you will very much remember dry-transfer lettering.
I remember Pocketeers. They were a series of hand-held non-electronic games released by Palitoy in the late 1970s and my brother and I were totally target audience. Each came in a green sleeve and generally what you got was a plastic box with some kind of clever mechanical game inside. Time Up was a maze through which you had to try to roll a small silver ball, scoring up to 100 points according to how far you got before a mechanical timer halted your progress. I also owned Steeplechase which was a mini-obstacle course, The Derby which was a wheel-turning four horse race and Pinball which was self-explanatory and ideal for 10 year-olds who couldn't go into pubs yet. My brother had Cup Final and Golf, the latter with a teensy player you took out of the box and set up to hit teensy balls into a teensy hole. We never got the fullset of Pocketeers because they cost 99p at the Co-op and that was beyond our pocket money but they were a much-loved possession that filled many an afternoon and I remember them very fondly.
I remember Double Agents. These were a boiled sweet produced by Trebor, named because they had a hard flavour outside and a soft sherbet inside. My absolute favourites were strawberries and cream Double Agents, numbered 004, closely followed by lime and chocolate (as pictured, 003). All the sweet wrappers had coded messages on them which could be unravelled if you found the packet with the right Spy Information printed on the inside (a simple substitution code but with all the words written backwards). Trebor often ran special offers - they sent me a Fingerprint Kit in 1978 in return for four wrappers and a 10p coin. Double Agents would have been the perfect sweet to eat while reading the KnowHow Book of Spycraft, an Usborne publication which I read and reread and which may still be one of the best books of all time. You may remember none of this, or you may have taken everything to heart and learned to reveal absolutely nothing.
I remember collectable cards. These are from ice lollies and teabags, two of the quintessential places to find a small rectangle of card in the 1970s. The first pair are from a set of 25 cards made by Lyons Maid for a lime, vanilla and strawberry ice lolly called Space 1999. I must have got through a lot of lollies in the summer of 1976 because I've got a dozen of them, also they stopped hiding picture cards inside the wrappers the following year. The artwork wasn't great because the real Dr Helena Russell looked considerably more realistic than that. As for tea cards we weren't a great consumer at the time so my grandmothers funnelled all their Brooke Bond freebies my way, and between us we managed to fill the entire album of The Race Into Space (1971), History of Aviation (1972) and The Sea - Our Other World (1974). Cuppas have never been so exciting since.
I remember ink cartridges. This is a pack of 10 Parker ink cartridges for my Parker fountain pen, cursive script being an essential part of a 1970s education. You needed a stash of cartridges because at any minute your nib might go a bit scratchy as the ink ran out and that could be the end of the world if you were in the middle of a crucial essay. I always plumped for black ink rather than the usual Royal Blue, either because I thought black looked cooler or because in the early days we only had a bottle of black Quink ink in the house. Also I note that this particular pack of ink cartridges is unopened, this because there was once a threshold in my life when the need to use a fountain pen became redundant and my lovely Parkers now sit in a drawer. In a way it's a damned shame, but also a good thing because I'm not forever hunting a sheet of blotting paper and my fingers no longer look like they're decaying from frostbite, indeed hardly anything needs writing any more and when it does biros and fibre tips have totally won out.
I remember BT Phonecards. They seemed so modern when they arrived in 1982, a green plastic rectangle you could slot into a payphone and make a call without the need for coins. It meant you had to make a purchase in a shop before you could make a call, but BT smiled because their payphones were no longer full of cash and a target for theft. Instead a strip on the front of the card was heated and 'erased' so they knew how many units you'd used, and if you could read the bumps you knew how many you had left. I think mine's fully used up which is just as well because cardphone technology was phased out in 1996 and otherwise I'd have wasted some of my sunk cost. You may remember BT Phonecards if you're old enough, but mainly when people get nostalgic about payphones it's all about dropping coins in slots and what the minimum coin was and giving three rings and how you had to press Button A and Button B, and one day people who use smartphones will be just as retrospectively tedious.
I remember Tamagotchis. These were little digital pocket pets which you had to nurture so they grew up properly and didn't die. Feed them right and clear up their poop and they might grow from baby to child to adult, but neglect them for too long and they'd get into bad habits or waste away and go up to heaven like an angel. Eventually you learnt it was OK to go to sleep at night because they'd still be alive when you woke up, but like today's phones they were always burning a hole in your pocket begging for attention. I know they still make Tamagotchis but this is one of the first generation circa 1997, not that I was still a child but there's no age limit on novelty zeitgeist gadgets, and I'm hoping that a lot of you who didn't remember any of the earlier things will definitely remember this.
I remember being 30. I got given a birthday card with this badge on... '30 and red hot' ...and I wore it at work all day. I didn't think I was red hot at the time but I look back now and sigh, recognising I was far more red hot than I thought I was and considerably red hotter than I am now, relatively speaking, indeed they don't make '60 and red hot' badges and they wouldn't sell anyway. But it's all too easy to spend your time looking back and sighing about the past, and droning on about the past, and fixating about the past, indeed focusing all your thoughts on the past, whereas the present is all we've got and the future is all we can change. Remember that.
Back in 2003 I saw a table on Jonathan's blog and thought "ooh, I wonder how he did that". I checked the source code and tried to unpick it, also consulted my Teach Yourself HTML4 book, and so sussed out how tables worked. Since then tables have been a regular feature on this blog, almost a defining feature, because I really enjoy arranging facts and data in a grid.
Most other blogs don't use tables, ever.
Most websites don't use tables either, not within the actual text.
Tables used to be more common, but not very common, perhaps for good reason.
Tables look fine on my laptop, and generally perfectly readable on my mobile, but I suspect they muck up all sorts of accessibility for all sorts of people.
Sorry if you can't read my tables easily.
But I still love tables and have no intention of retiring them.
They're all clickable, but given you've read them already there's no need to click.
Central Square got the most comments, with 18.
Balgores Square got the fewest comments, with three.
You'll notice I'm trying to do at least one square in every borough.
So far I have 11 boroughs left.
I still have 20 Squares to explore and would value your suggestions.
I asked you at the start of the year and got dozens.
So far I've visited 7 of the Squares you suggested, thanks.
n.b. I'm only visiting Squares that are listed in the National Street Gazetteer.
n.b. I need Squares in the 11 unvisited boroughs but also 9 more elsewhere.
n.b. Tower Hamlets has by far the most Squares, followed by Westminster and Southwark.
n.b. Harrow only has one public square so I know where I'm going, thanks.
Yesterday was St Swithin's Day.
And it rained, so it's going to rain for 40 days.
n.b. It may not have rained for you but it rained where I was and that's what counts. I had to hide in a hedge near Heathrow to avoid getting drenched, and I thought ah well, rain every day until August 24th.
n.b. Obviously the St Swithin's legend has been disproved as rubbish, obviously, because dead Saxonbishops don't affect our weather.
n.b. Also UK weather doesn't ever do 40 consecutive days of exactly the same thing. I investigated this in some depth back in 2022, so won't trawl over my four decades of personal data again.
n.b. As an example of how rubbish the folklore is, only 11 of the last 40 days have been wet in London but then July 15th went and bucked the trend with heavy showers.
Here then is my day by day record of the 40 days after St Swithin's Day 2025.
If a day is wet - even one drop - I'll turn the square blue.
If a day is dry - i.e. no rain - I'll turn the square yellow.
I'm calling it a SWITHINOMETER.
15
WET
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
n.b. This table will only be completed by the August bank holiday, before that it's just a work in progress.
n.b. I have a particular interest in St Swithin being wrong because my niece is getting married in the bottom right hand corner.
n.b. Expect to see this table on the blog again in late August, hopefully while I'm still nursing a mild hangover.
TfL sometimes struggle to get the media to notice a good press launch, but I got lucky yesterday and stumbled upon their latest project at Waterloo station while travelling home from riding a duff bus. I knew something was up when I noticed an art workshop at the top of the Jubilee line escalators and a stash of luxurious-looking leaflets in the rack by the ticket machines. And I confirmed my suspicions at the foot of the escalators when I walked straight into a full-on bash celebrating the launch of the latest Art on the Underground project. Imagine there are a couple of dozen leaflet-clutchers milling around to the left of this swirly songbird artwork, all looking important and admiring their handiwork, because there were and I've cropped them out.
This is Go Find Miracles by Rory Pilgrim, a new sound installation that'll be played out along the moving walkway at Waterloo station for the next couple of weeks. It was inspired by something unexpectedly tangential - the connections between London's architecture and the Isle of Portland - and combines choral music and spoken word in a looping ten minute presentation. Recording took place at two underground locations, one the disused Jubilee line platforms at Charing Cross and the other a Portland stone mine, with singers including alumni of the Prison Choir Project and following a creative workshop at a feminist library. There are so many surprising layers to this project that you'll only fully unpick them if you read the dense text on the Art On The Underground page or pick up a leaflet, which hardly anyone passing through will. It is a top-quality leaflet on posh paper in six-part gatefold which opens out to reveal a colourful songbird poster, this because Art on the Underground still has a proper budget.
I diverted off my planned journey to ride the travelator there and back to experience Go Find Miracles for myself. I would show you a photo but the passageway remains lined by dozens of distracting adverts for alibaba.com, not swirly songbirds, because marketing always trumps art. My passage was accompanied by forceful poetry with a musical soundscape, also a whole new crowd of arty guests who looked like they might have contributed to the project. But just as I was getting into the sequence of call and response a male voice interrupted with a long announcement about CCTV, looking after your belongings and ended with See It Say It Sorted, which is about as far from poetry as you can get. By the time the philistine intrusion ended we'd skipped 20 seconds of the sound installation, because health and safety always trumps art, and nobody's ever going to hear the full 10 minutes anyway.
The best way to experience Go Find Miracles may thus be to listen to the audio file on Soundcloud without fear of interruption, but Rory and TfL would rather you came and heard it for yourself this week and next, 10am to 5pm only, along an ad-strewn travelator. It's enchanting but if it causes one single traveller to go beneath the surface to imagine new structures of repair and possibility, or to muse on breaking cycles of harm to find space for miracles, it'll be a miracle.
