xlviii)WalthamAbbey is a curious mix of old and new. The meridian arrives in town across the 20th century M25 (between junctions 25 and 26), crosses cobbled 16th century Sun Street (site of the Meridian coffee shop), then promptly hits the ruined remains of an 11th century abbey. The main Abbey building lies a few metres to the west, a spectacular example of Norman architecture. Or so I'm told, because it was closed to the public on the day I visited so that three consecutive Essex weddings could take place. The local men looked slightly uncomfortable squeezed into hired suits, while the local ladies oohed and aaahed at the horse and cart pulled up outside the church. Lovely gardens for the wedding photos though.
xlix)Waltham Abbey Gardens are so ancient that they may well be the burial site of King Harold (think '1066', think 'came second'). The meridian passes between the moat and the cloisters, straight through the Rose Garden where a steel arch forms a Meridian Gateway (complete with moon, stars and giant red sextant). The line continues across a pile of stones that used to be the old blacksmith's forge, then narrowly misses an arched medieval stone bridge (called, imaginatively, Stoney Bridge). It really is a lovely spot for a picnic, just so long as you can ignore the traffic on the Waltham Abbey bypass a few metres to the north.
l) Cross the bypass, turn right at the Dragonfly Sanctuary and you come to CornmillMeadows, possibly my favourite of all the sites along my meridian journey. This long thin peaceful woodland was once part of a Greater London Council arboretum which supplied many of the trees planted in London's parks. The meridian passes right up the centre, marked to north and south by two statues carved from granite blocks taken fom the old London Bridge. This unlikely pair are called Travel and Discovery, one (south) featuring a world map carved with 0° line of longitude and the other (north) blessed by some slightly strange human form. But my favourite bit wasn't the statues, it was the arrow-straight footpath that stretched between them. I followed this grassy track for a full 15 minutes through a multitude of trees, crossing a wooden footbridge over a tiny stream and tiptoeing through a couple of muddy meridian puddles. This green line had zero people but maximum charm. I was able to walk uninterrupted precisely along the meridian for nearly a mile, in a way that just hadn't been possible anywhere else on my journey. Having tracked as many as 50 meridian markers between here and Greenwich, this felt a perfect place to stop.
What are the chances of the meridian passing precisely through the summit of the tallest hill in northeast London? But it does.
This is the top of PoleHill, a wooded hillock in Norman Tebbitt's old stomping round of Chingford. It's quiet, it's gorgeous, and it's unique. This is the edge of London, the border with Essex lying less than half a mile away. This is where the green belt begins, the northern slopes rolling down to form the edge of EppingForest. And this is where the Greenwich Meridian passes, marked by not one but two stone pillars.
xlvi) The taller, western monument was built first. Unlike most of the other markers along the meridian it's not just ornamental but once served a real practical purpose. In the early 19th century the main telescope at Greenwich was James Bradley's transit telescope. This was used to observe the passage of stars across their highest point in the sky by timing them as they passed a fixed north line. Any transit telescope needs to be checked regularly to ensure that it really is pointing north and so a northern reference marker was required. It was an extremely fortunate coincidence that the Greenwich Meridian passed exactly through a hilltop 11 miles to the north - and that's why the Astronomer Royal of the day built an obelisk here on Pole Hill.
This pillar was erected in 1824 under the direction of the Reverend John Pond M.A. Astronomer Royal. It was placed on the Greenwich Meridian and its purpose was to indicate the direction of true North from the transit telescope of the Royal Observatory. The Greenwich Meridian, as changed in 1850 & adopted by international agreement in 1884 as the line of zero longitude, passes 19 feet to the East of this pillar.
xlvii) The shorter, eastern monument was built later when the Airy meridian was adopted at Greenwich. It's a stumpy concrete triangulation point, complete with Ordnance Survey benchmark (which is strange given that all OS maps are still constructed based on the Bradley meridian 6 metres to the west). Recently a few local yobs appear to have added some unnecessary streaks of red graffiti to this particular monument, but they're probably just aerosols.
Lawrence of Arabia adored this place so much that he purchased a plot of land on the hilltop and built himself a small timber hut and a tiny swimming pool. The hut no longer stands and I found no evidence of the pool, but there's still a great view from the top of Pole Hill. You can gaze down towards the City skyline, with the BT Tower and London Eye immediately recognisable in the distant Thames valley. Unfortunately the one place you can't see any more is Greenwich because the surrounding trees have grown up over the years and blocked the important line of sight from the great transit telescope. Maybe the view's better in the winter but I loved the place with leaves, long grass and and tiny spiders hanging from the trees. A place of true beauty on the meridian - what are the chances of that?
Three cheers for the London Borough of Waltham Forest, whose marking of the meridian is nothing short of superb. You can't see the meridian in Stratford but, once you cross the border into Leyton, it's everywhere. Back in the year 2000 the council decided to mark the millennium across their borough in a most original way. They ordered some menial operative to paint a big blue and yellow circle on the pavement of streets in Waltham Forest that crossed the meridian. And there are tons of them. As a result it's possible to walk all the way up the zero degree line to Walthamstow without the need for a map. So I gave it a try.
xxiv-xxx) I found my first meridian circle (pictured left) outside a house in Crownfield Road. I got my first funny look too as soon as I started taking photographs of the pavement. The next street north was Drapers Road and yes, another pavement, another circle, but then I spent five minutes wandering up and down Stewart Road looking in vain for a circle that turned out not to be there. Better luck in Downsell Road, except that the pavement had been re-tarmacked after the meridian householder had erected a new front wall so only a quarter of the original circle remained. Up and down these residential streets I went, locating a total of seven blue and yellow circles within one 500 metre corridor and no doubt alerting a number of Neighbourhood Watch schemes in the process.
xxxi) After Langthorne Road the meridian entered St Patrick's Roman Catholic Cemetery, the final resting place of Jack the Ripper's last victim. It passed through some nuns' graves (may the Sisters of Wanstead rest in peace), clipped the corner of the chapel and headed north through a sea of ornate marble monuments. A crowd of mourners had gathered beneath a tree for a burial dead on the meridian, so I beat a hasty retreat. On across the Central Line (just east of Leyton station), the new A12 relief road and the lounge bar of the Northcote Arms.
xxxii-xliv) More rows of houses followed, and more circles. I saw a woman having a screaming row sitting in the front seat of her car on the meridian, and a boy sitting on a front garden wall combing his afro on the meridian. On through Norlington Boys' School (cutting through cycle locker number 8 and the technology annexe) and precisely through the side entrance of Barclay Infant School. On through the top left corner of Whipps Cross hospital (where David Beckham was born) and through a parade of shops on the Lea Bridge Road (more accurately through the Roti Roti Restaurant, specialising in 'grilled and Karachi dishes'). All in all I saw more than 20 blue and yellow circles on the meridian before I got bored and went home.
xlv) ...but not before I'd visited the one pre-millennial meridian marker in Walthamstow. This grooved concrete slab (pictured above right) lies on the eastern side of Wood Street, just south of Wood Street station (one of those rare slap-bang-on-the-meridian stations). It was odd place to find such a marker, set into the pavement outside an obscure lock-up beside the 14th Walthamstow Scout Group HQ, but no more odd than my meridian pilgrimage had been I guess.
The meridian now follows the Lea Valley, which means a mile and a half of inaccessible industrial warehouse-y marshland kind of stuff. Including the following...
xix) The original Big Brother House: OK, if I'm honest the meridian doesn't quite pass through the site of Nasty Nick's series 1 downfall, but the zero degree line does pass through the Bow field in which they built the house and within 100 metres of the original Diary Room. I've written about this now-empty field before of course - try here. xx) Abbey Mills Pumping Station: It's probably inadvisable to cut straight through the middle of East London's Sewage Cathedral... unless you're an imaginary line of longitude, that is. I've written about this place before too - try here. xxi) See also: Cody Road Industrial Estate, the District Line (between Bromley-by-Bow and West Ham), Bow Back Rivers, the Northern Outfall Sewer (now the Greenway), the Gala Bingo Hall on Stratford High Street, the Jubilee Line (by the footbridge just south of Stratford station), the car park round the back of Bridge House (home to Newham Council's Housing Department) and Stratford Box (contract 230 of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link).
Stratford xxii) This is Time Spiral, a six metre high twisty-turny clock erected in the pedestrian forecourt of Stratford station to mark the meridian. According to the artist, Malcolm Robertson, this is a piece wherein "curved walls sweep in towards a central point from all directions and amalgamate to form a unified spiral structure that acts as a beacon to continuously draw the spectator's attention upwards and outwards. The beacons draw their energy from the surrounding area and combine forces to produce a strong visual landmark of dynamic unity." If this is indeed the case, and somehow I doubt it, then the people of Stratford don't seem to have noticed.
xxiii) The people of Stratford haven't noticed the meridian either, despite the local council naming the large public plaza outside the station Meridian Square. They don't realise when they're lurking around the public conveniences at the southern end of the bus station that the meridian passes immediately through the cubicles. They don't realise when they draw up beside the 108 bus stop in their Ford Focus to drop their mates off that they're parking precisely on the meridian as well as illegally on a red route. They don't realise when they use the pelican on the ring road to cross from the bus station to the nasty cheap shopping centre opposite that they're actually crossing from the western to the eastern hemisphere. And they don't realise when they're standing at the eastern end of platform 10 waiting to escape Stratford by train that there's one additional line here that's invisible to the naked eye. People of Stratford, your knowledge is less than zero.
xv) On leaving the Dome, the meridian takes a quick trip through the Blackwall tunnel (northbound southern tunnel opened 1897, southbound northern tunnel opened 1967).
xvi) The meridian hits the north bank of the Thames at a brand new Barratt housing development in Blackwall. They've been good and not built a stack of one-bedroom shoeboxes on the line itself, but have instead planted a cobbled avenue of trees with yet another brass line down the middle. By the river there's a circle of concentric cobbles with a compass at the centre, pointing north. This is Virginia Quay, and a memorial a few yards to the east commemorates the departure point of the first permanent settlers to sail from England to the New World. King James I came down to Blackwall Steps to wave the settlers off, unaware of the dangers they would face across the Atlantic from malnutrition, Indian chiefs and being turned into Disneycartooncharacters. The First Settlers' Monument, which was unveiled by the US Ambassador in 1928, reminds us just how successful their journey of colonisation turned out to be.
From near this spot 19 December 1606 sailed with 105 adventurers the 'Susan Constant', Capt Christopher Newport in supreme command. Landed at Cape Henry, Virginia, April 26 1607. Arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, May 13 1607 where the adventurers founded the first permanent English colony in America under the leadership of the intrepid Capt John Smith. (Erected by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities)
xvii) The meridian crosses the Docklands Light Railway at (or more precisely fractionally to the east of) EastIndia station. There used to be a red line on the track marking zero degrees but it's no longer visible. xviii) Next heading northwards: a security man sitting at a small barrier on Saffron Avenue, the A13, a downcast council estate at South Bromley (the last houses on the meridian for the next two miles), Poplar gasworks, Bow Creek.
xi) After nearly a mile adrift in the Thames, the meridian comes ashore to clip the western edge of the North Greenwich peninsula. This is a grim industrial wasteland, still scarred with the remains of wharves and old factories. Even when the rest of the peninsula is reborn as a modern yuppie playground, this western sliver will be left unloved and underdeveloped. Except for the top bit.
The Dome xii) When Michael Heseltine was looking for somewhere to dump his great Millennium attraction, it was the meridian that swung his decision in favour of Greenwich. This was otherwise a rotten location, an inaccessible brownfield site heavily contaminated by what had been the largest gasworks in Europe. Still, it was better than Birmingham. The chequered history of the resulting Dome is well documented. However, the Dome wasn't actually built on the meridian itself, which passes one radius away on the western side. And here it is...
The Prime Meridian of the world, from which all time is measured, cuts the north-western edge of the Dome site. Marked with red light, it slips into the River Thames and emerges to cross the wildlife jetty. The area around the Line is raised and separated by a strip of water from the rest of Meridian Quarter. This is a space from which to look out beyond the Dome and Greenwich to other places touched by the Line and to the perspectives, experiences and cultures of the people of the world.
A large mirror on the Living Wall takes the Meridian Line southward into infinity. This is a photograph opportunity as we catch ourselves standing either side of the Line and across time zones. On the mirror is a map showing the eight countries which the Line crosses: the UK, France, Spain, Algeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Togo and Ghana. Large granite disks on the ground either side of the Line are engraved with poems from each of the countries. (Official Guide to the Millennium Experience, 2000)
It doesn't feel quite so inspirational alongside the Dome today, four years after the Millennium. The Meridian Quarter has been barricaded behind a tall blue wire fence, the red light has long been turned off and the Living Wall is more of a dead pile of concrete blocks. The meridian line enters this deserted site through a grimy mirror (right of photo), then passes yellow Kodak photo point number 18 and a small pavillion full of old Dome exhibits. It's impossible to read any of the poems along the line from the perimeter footpath, not that you'd ever have been interested in the first place. There's no perspective, experience or culture here today, just a bleak, lonely and forsaken location. If any section of the meridian properly defines zero, this is it. (take a walk here)
xiii) The tall black totem pole you can see to the right of this photo is a Millennium Milepost, placed Dome-side on the Thames Path by Sustrans the transport charity. There are 1000 such mileposts on cycle routes across the country, each featuring a lettered metal disc which is a clue in a long-forgotten national treasure hunt. I could tell you what the letter is on this particular meridian-sited milepost but that might ruin the fun for all you cycle-clipped puzzlers out there. I can tell you that the sign has been placed two metres too far east.
xiv) Ordnance Jetty juts out into the Thames on the north-western side of the Dome, straddling the meridian. It's a T-shaped pier, once used for unloading ammunition but recently topped off with grass as a safe haven for plants and birdlife. A low metal gutter sticks out from the shoreline pointed towards two white posts on the jetty, along which that red light from the Dome's Meridian Quarter used to be channelled. No longer. The gutter now contains nothing but one uniquely positioned weed.
Greenwich Observatory i) A brass line stretches across the courtyard, marked with the names, latitudes and longitudes of various world cities. ii) There's a big silvery sculpture at the northern end of the brass line, consisting of a pole inclined at 23½ degrees to the vertical, an equatorial ring and two segmented sails (pictured above left). iii) A tall stone plaque (with a vertical black meridian line) is set into the wall immediately beneath the observatory courtyard. A short brass line continues across the higher of the two footpaths.
Greenwich Park iv) At the foot of Greenwich Park is a banana-shaped boating lake. The zero degree line cuts straight across the middle, making this your big chance to pedalo along the meridian. On the northern bank lies a raised circular platform supporting a big triangular sundial (shown in the photo above, at noon Greenwich Mean Time with the sun's shadow pointing due north). This is the Millennium Sundial and, like a certain other local millennial project I could mention, it's fatally flawed. The architect was given the wrong information and the sundial ended up being built 2 metres off the meridian, so it runs 8 minutes adrift. They should have built it dome-shaped.
Maritime Greenwich v) On the first road north of the park, a plaque built into the wall of The Chantry reads 'Prime Meridian, zero degrees longitude'. A downward-pointing arrow divides East from West. vi) North from the plaque there's a row of ten raised studs following the meridian across the road (pictured above right) before disappearing into the front room of number 2 Feathers Place. vii) Old Woolwich Road School lies bang on the line, and so has been renamed Meridian Primary. viii) The meridian crosses the grounds of Trinity Hospital, a retirement home for 21 local gentlemen and the oldest building in Greenwich. ix) The green meridian laser passes directly between the four tall brick chimneys of Greenwich Power Station. This coal-fired station was built by London County Council in 1906 to generate power for local trams. More recently it was used by London Underground as a peak-time back-up station, before finally being mothballed last year (just in time for a serious power cut). x) The meridian enters the Thames totally unmarked at Crowley's Wharf, a few metres west of the nasty modern development at Anchor Iron Wharf. Steps lead down to the beach (yes, the Thames has beaches) from which the meridian heads off north across the river, just missing the giant derelict coal jetty sticking out from the power station behind. Next stop, the Dome.
The Prime Meridian is 120 years old today. That's the imaginary north-south line through Greenwich which divides the world into western and eastern hemispheres, and from which longitude and universal time are measured. It passes less than a kilometre from my house. And we'd be lost without it.
Noon was once simply the time when the sun was directly overhead. The advent of rail travel in the 19th century forced many countries to standardise time based on a national meridian. The UK adopted Greenwich Mean Time in 1880, while the French preferred their own meridien through Paris instead. A global standard was clearly required, so in 1884 US President Chester Arthur invited delegates from around the world to Washington to attend the first (and last) International Meridian Conference.
There were an infinite number of possible meridians, each stretching from the North to the South Pole, and any one of these could have been chosen. However, the Greenwich Meridian was pre-eminent because it had already been adopted by the UK and USA and was therefore being used by 72% of the world's shipping. The French backed down, but only in return for the rest of the world agreeing to think about adopting their system of metric measures. The crucial conference vote was taken on 13 October, with France and Brazil abstaining and only San Domingo in opposition. And so time began at Greenwich (latitude 51°28'38"N, longitude 0°).
To celebrate today's anniversary I'm taking you on a week-long journey up the zero degree line of longitude from Greenwich to the M25, stopping off at all the places where the meridian has been marked in some way. There are plaques and monuments, sundials and statues, and an awful lot of random everyday objects that just happen to lie on this most special of lines. Plus it's a great excuse for a walk through East London. Do join me.
Marking the meridian: The Royal Greenwich Observatory
Millions of tourists have stood precisely here, in the courtyard at the Royal Greenwich Observatory astride the famous brass meridian line. Cameras at the ready, left leg in the western hemisphere, right leg in the eastern hemisphere, click. The meridian passes directly through the observatory, and is precisely defined by the centre of the crosshairs of George Airy's 1851 transit telescope. Above the telescope on the outside of the building there's a clock counting the days since the Millennium, a silver plaque and a tiny hole out of which a green laser shines along the meridian after dark, visible for many miles to the north. The red line down the face of the building marks the precise longitude at which time begins. But it's not the original Greenwich Meridian.
Flamsteed House was built in 1675 on the highest ground within Greenwich Park, the perfect location for an observatory with unobstructed views of the sky over London. Unfortunately the windows of Christopher Wren's magnificent Octagon Room were found to be pointing slightly off the north-south axis, and so the first Royal Astronomer John Flamsteed made all his observations from a shed at the bottom of the garden instead. It was the telescope in this shed that established the first of four Greenwich meridians, each defined by a different telescope and each now marked by a silver plaque on the observatory wall.
Meridian 1: based on John Flamsteed's telescope, 1685 Meridian 2: based on Edmund Halley's telescope, 1725 (185cm east of Flamsteed's meridian) Established when Flamsteed's original telescope began to subside into the ground. Meridian 3: based on James Bradley's telescope, 1750 (11m east of Halley's meridian). Still used by the Ordnance Survey for map-making purposes. Meridian 4: based on George Airy's telescope, 1851 (5.79m east of Bradley's meridian). Selected as the Prime Meridian of the world exactly 120 years ago today.
With the advent of global positioning technology in the 1990s, a new virtual meridian has been introduced. It lies 102½ metresfurther east than the official Greenwich meridian and is the line used for all air and sea navigation. That's why when you stand in the courtyard at Greenwich wielding a handheld GPS device it doesn't show a longitude of precisely 0°0'0". However, for the last 120 years it's been Airy's Prime Meridian that is more properly recognised here at Greenwich and, quite literally, all around the world.
Before desktop publishing, there was Letraset. I guess if you're much under 25 you may never have used these lettering transfers, but those of us growing up before the advent of the affordable printer originally knew no better.
I loved Letraset. I had sheets of the stuff in a variety of sizes, fonts and colours. Whenever there was some writing that needed to look semi-official then I'd pick the style that I liked the most, grab myself a bluntish pencil and prepare for a good rub down. Letraset offered a choice that my typewriter couldn't, and also the flexibility to write on almost any surface. Some of the fonts (as I would later learn to call them) were really quiteadventurous, and if I didn't have the one that I wanted then I could pop down to the corner shop and buy another set for 49p. With a bit of practice I could produce a page layout which looked sort of professional. Almost, but not quite.
One of the biggest problems with Letraset was trying to line the sheet up properly so that the selected letters would appear on the page underneath in an approximately horizontal line. I also had to be sure that I rubbed over the whole of the letter and didn't leave a tiny limb flapping in the air when I lifted the sheet away. And, most importantly of all, I had to count the different letters in the phrase I was trying to write to ensure that there were still enough letters remaining on the sheet to be able to complete it. Far too often I'd start on a particularly lengthy sentence only to find that the 'e's or 'o's ran out halfway through and so the whole typesetting exercise would have to be abandoned.
Letraset was revolutionary when it was invented back in 1959, its stylish versatility bringing affordable graphic design to the masses. Many's the 60s revolutionary tract, 70s school project or 80s village show programme that was produced by pressing down really hard on a thin sheet of opaque paper. A whole swathe of public signage also owes its existence to this giant transfer lettering. The end for Letraset came with the rise of the home computer, the Apple Mac in particular, and now most of us can dash off a jumble sale poster in less than the time it used to take to line up a lower case 'u' next to a capital 'J'.
My Letraset stash was my introduction to the world of desktop publishing, and I owe it a lot. But I don't miss it, especially that annoying habit the letters used to have of peeling off at the crucial moment.
Before cut and paste, there was the typewriter. I guess if you're much under 30 you may never have used one, but those of us growing up before the advent of the word processor originally knew no better.
I loved our family's typewriter when I was a child. It was grey, it was made by Brother and it lived in a brown carry case in the cupboard under the stairs. I'd set it up on the desk in my bedroom and feed a couple of sheets of paper down behind the platen roller. Tap thwack tap thwack tap thwack - it was a noisy business trying to write in those days, and a messy one too if you managed to get the ink off the ribbon onto your fingers. But with a bit of practice you could produce a printed page which looked sort of professional. Almost. But not quite. Our 'i' key was very slightly out of alignment and so used to print a bit left of centre, whereas capital letters used to appear about half a millimetre higher than their lower case counterparts. It looked good enough to me, but then I also thought nothing of the fact that my typewriter had only one font, nor that it produced writing in only one font size.
The biggest problem with my typewriter was that I had to hit everything exactly right first time. Make even one mistake and there was no easy way to erase it, just an obvious scar left by a giant rubber or some of that new-fangled Tippex stuff. No, if I was seeking typed perfection and made a mistake then my best bet was to curse, rip the paper out and start again. And then, almost as bad, I had to know exactly what I was going to write before I started typing because there was no way to rearrange the sentences on the page afterwards. Backspace, delete, undo and cut and paste make life so much easier these days, as do bold, italic and underline, to say nothing of the massively time-saving "print multiple copies" command.
And yet the computer keyboard owes a great deal to the typewriter. The modern return key is just a replacement for the satisyfying swish of the carriage return lever. The shift button used to physically lift the roller to allow you to select between the two characters on each key. And that nightmarish QWERTY arrangement of letters on the keyboard really was designed to slow typists down so that the metal keys didn't collide and interlock when used too fast.
My grey typewriter was my introduction to the world of word-processing, and I owe it a lot. But I don't miss it, especially that annoying habit the ribbon used to have of running out of ink at the crucial momen
X-75 Seen in local supermarket: Advent calendars (does anyone ever buy one of these and use it in November?) and peanuts in expensive packaging (hmmm, where have the peanuts in non-expensive packaging gone?).
(Bet you've seen worse...)
I spent my Saturday evening in A&E. It wasn't me that needed mending, before you worry, but it was me they asked to come along for the ride in the ambulance. And this was definitely not how I was expecting my Saturday night to turn out, although it was an awful lot cheaper and I still got to roll home at the same time in the early hours as if I'd gone out properly.
I've only ever had to call 999 once before (and that was to tell the fire brigade that the phone box I was making the call from was on fire). On this occasion it probably took me about five minutes too long to realise that now was the time for my second 999 call, but thankfully that didn't matter in the end. The 'incident' involved unconsciousness, a flight of stairs and a lot of shivering, but with the added bonus that the patient had also managed to lock themselves out of their flat without any keys. A paramedic was on the scene within minutes, and soon I was sitting in the back of a laboratory on wheels heading towards University College Hospital. There were no sirens and there were no bleeps, just a couple of really professional paramedics with a great sense of humour who really helped our journey along. Three cheers for our wonderful ambulance workers.
A&E wasn't like you see on the television. There were no photogenic actors recuperating whilst reaching some crucial life decision all nicely wrapped up within 50 minutes. Instead there was a ragbag of patients from all strata of society being wheeled around looking rather folorn. A slow dripfeed of casualties was stretchered into the building ready to be processed. I only saw one person suffering from Saturday night excess, the remainder were merely dazed, grazed or crazed. One particularly mad old woman swore repeatedly at the staff, then insisted that she had to be listened to because her father ran the hospital, and so was promptly thrown out.
We were shunted into a cubicle immediately opposite the main admin desk, which at least meant that we could watch the workings of the department inbetween waiting for the nurses and doctors to come back and do yet another test. Bits of apparatus were wheeled in and out, none of the gleaming 21st century gizmos that you might have expected but utilitarian beige equipment that was merely adequately functional. Hot sweet tea was available (as was a large plastic bottle for getting rid of it again). Again the staff's bedside manner was impeccable, and helped us through a long evening of hanging around waiting to feel better. Three cheers for our wonderful hospital staff.
We resisted buying a souvenir t-shirt or bookmark on the way out. Of more importance was solving the problem of keylessness, which eventually meant persuading the night security bloke at a central London office block to permit the extraction of a spare set of front door keys from a desk on an upper floor. In this case there was a happy ending and everybody did live happily ever after. I'm not at all convinced that everyone who was admitted into that A&E department this evening will have been so lucky. But I am glad to know that the NHS is always there for us when we need it most, because we never do quite know just when that might be.
BowRoadupdate: At last, after eight months of stifling inactivity, some real renovation work is actually happening at Bow Road station. Right now, today. About time too. It appears that closing the station early at 10pm every night since March has been wholly ineffective, and so an alternative way of inconveniencing the travelling public has been introduced. The powers that be have decided to introduce a series of weekend closures in the hope that the station's inert workforce might actually manage to get something done if they have a full 56 hours in which to do it. Bow Road station is therefore to remain closed all this weekend, all next weekend and on three other weekends before the end of January. I wonder what they're going to get up to. This weekend my money's on them renovating the two staircases down to the platforms (because all the adverts down those staircases were suddenly removed overnight on Thursday). I shall be trotting wide-eyed into the station on Monday morning eager to see exactly what magic transformation has occurred during my enforced absence. I'm expecting to be disappointed.
For further discussion on cinema names, and off-topic (but fascinating) discussion on old cinemas and how lovely they were, please read the comments box for the post below. Thank you.
Cinema names The name Vue must be the crappiest name ever to be conceived for a cinema chain by a board of marketing tossers. The name Odeon, on the other hand, retains an air of tradition, elegance and style. If we assume that Vue scores 0 and Odeon scores 10, where would you put some other cinema chains on the same scale? (Let's concentrate on brand names here, not customer service, interior facilities or website accessibility)
VUE 0 –– 1 –– 2 –– 3 –– 4 –– 5 –– 6 –– 7 –– 8 –– 9 –– 10 ODEON
How to spend £17 on a film
a) buy one ticket at the Vue Cinema, Leicester Square (£10.50), plus a regular soft drink and popcorn combo (£6.20) b) wait three months, buy the film on DVD (£17), then raid the kitchen for free drinks and nibbles
c) wait six months, then attempt to subscribe to Sky Movie World for a fortnight (£17.50) d) wait three years for the film to appear late at night on Channel 4 (£0, with £17 change)
Screen 6: Saw (18) Nobody ever made a feature length version of TheCrystalMaze, neither has there ever been a Hollywood remake of TheAdventureGame. Shame, I'd have paid good money to see those at the cinema. Instead I went to see Saw, which is how The Crystal Maze might have turned out had Richard O'Brien been a devious homicidal psychopath. Two men wake to find themselves chained at opposite ends of a deserted washroom somewhere in the Industrial Zone. Various clues and artefacts are hidden around the room waiting to be discovered, although the aim of this particular game is not to escape and win a few drogna but instead to kill or be killed. It's not teatime television this, it's end-to-end gruesome. Many of the shocks are unexpectedly original (you'd never normally do that with a bear trap) and considerably more bloodthirsty than being wobbled at by a giant aspidistra. Unfortunately there are also unintentional laughs due to some particularly hammy overacting from the main players, and it's probably best not to delve too deeply into how likely the whole "lunatic with unexplained unlimited financial resources" scenario really is. But the plot's quite clever (it twists and turns like a twisty-turny thing), the end is satisfyingly unexpected and the whole thing kept me firmly entertained for a good hour and a half. You'll either love it or hate it. I just wouldn't recommend taking your Mumsie.
My mother owns a copy of this very same book, probably passed down from her mother and from her mother before that. I too enjoyed poring over this book as a child, devouring its seemingly haphazard collection of information, etiquette and advice from a bygone age. Now a comprehensive selection from the 1884 edition of Enquire Within Upon Everything is available to read online (hosted on the same website that brought us the fabulous South London Tube Map). It's a fascinating glimpse into Victorian society which allows us to see much (or how little) has changed over the last 120 years. Enquire within. And here are a few choice snippets:
29. Relative Economy of the Joints. The Veiny Piece is sold at a moderate price per pound; but, if hung for a day or two, it is very good and very profitable. Where there are a number of servants and children to have an early dinner, this part of beef will be found desirable.
208. The Apostrophe is used to indicate the combining of two words in one,-- as John's book, instead of John, his book; or to show the omission of parts of words, as Glo'ster, for Gloucester--tho' for though. These abbreviations should be avoided as much as possible. Cobbett says the apostrophe "ought to be called the mark of laziness and vulgarity."
329. Beds for the Poor. Beech-tree leaves are recommended for filling the beds of poor persons. They should be gathered on a dry day in the autumn, and perfectly dried. It is said that the smell of them is pleasant and that they will not harbour vermin. They are also very springy.
339. To Ascertain whether a Bed be Aired. Introduce a drinking glass between the sheets for a minute or two, just when the warming-pan is taken out; if the bed be dry, there will only be a slight cloudy appearance on the glass, but if not, the damp of the bed will collect in and on the glass and assume the form of drops--a warning of danger.
470. Allowing Children to Talk incessantly is a mistake. We do not mean to say that they should be restricted from talking in proper seasons, but they should be taught to know when it is proper for them to cease.
842. Leeches and their Application. When Leeches are Applied to a part, it should be thoroughly freed from down or hair by shaving, and all liniments, &c., carefully and effectually cleaned away by washing. If the leech is hungry it will soon bite, but sometimes great difficulty is experienced in getting them to fasten. When this is the case, roll the leech into a little porter, or moisten the surface with a little blood, or milk, or sugar and water. If a Leech be accidentally swallowed, or by any means should get into the body, employ an emetic, or enema of salt and water.
X-80 • You've just missed the last posting date for surface mail to Australia.
• Apparently Woolworths have decided to start their Christmas season three weeks earlier this year because "customer focus groups have shown that people want a longer time for Christmas shopping". I agree, but I'd be quite willing to make do with late night opening on December 21st instead.
(Bet you've seen worse...)
work • Geoff's department was outsourced to a private company last week (a month after the same thing happened to me). Read his story here. I couldn't possibly comment. (lucky bastard)
• Ask Tube is a new service where you can find the answers to frequently asked questions about the Underground (Can I take my surfboard on the Tube? What's the track voltage? I’ve lost money in a chocolate vending machine, what should I do?)
• Blogs by company employees number 437: Morrisons
rest • Farewell to MichaelFish, Britain's longest serving weather broadcaster, who retires tonight after a storming career (final forecast after the 10 o'clock news).
• BBC3's Flashmob-The Opera was supposed to be taking place at 8pm tonight (at, shhh, Paddington station), except I received an email cancelling the flashmob part of it last week. Frustrated mobbers might prefer to attend Pillow Fight Club (bring your own pillow to the 'pedestrain area' outside St Paul's Cathedral) tonight at 17:40pm precisely. (Thursday update: Harriet went to Paddington, she has a flashmob report with photos. Meanwhile Jon has a review.) • If you live in the posher bits of London then this week is Chocolate Week. Enjoy such events as Chocolate Pudding Making, a Private Chocolate Tutorial, and As much Chocolate Mousse as you can Eat at Harvey Nichols.
play • Great news for any football fan who wants to fly from London to Manchester via Dubai - Arsenal's new ground at Ashburton Grove is to be called the Emirates Stadium. £100 million is the estimated air sum. Me is traumatised. I'm not convinced by the Saudi team's merit. Arse imitates mud. Amateurism dies. (apologies - one of those isn't an anagram)
Search engines are great, usually. You can look up anything and find the information you require, usually. But they're getting harder to use, regularly, due to a proliferation of search engine spam. Try searching for a placename and you'll end up with a selection of fake gazetteers and hotel-booking sites. Try searching for a film and you'll be plagued by sites trying to sell you a copy on DVD. Nothing new there. But now try searching for almost anything in a search engine and you'll be served up a long list of Wikipedia clones. These carbon copies all contain exactly the same information as Wikipedia, the original collaborative online encyclopaedia, but Wikipedia they are not. They trick you into thinking you've found a useful source of information whereas all you've really found is an ad-funded parasite. This is information spam, and it's getting worse.
1) Straight clones: artpolitic.org, creativevoyager.com, fixedreference.org, freepedia.org, musicvoyager.com, voyagenow.com
2) Clones, but with added adverts: campusprogram.com, encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com, encyclozine.com, england.asinah.net (and 20 similar sites named after different countries), explanation-guide.info, fact-index.com, fastload.org, finance.pixelmetric.com, freeglossary.com, infovoyager.com, knowledgerush.com, mcfly.org, nationmaster.com, nebulasearch.com, pedia.newsfilter.co.uk, searchlinx.com, therfcc.org, vagabondpoet.com, web-dictionary.org, wikiverse.org, wordiq.com, yourencyclopedia.net
3) Clones with spyware ads and nasty pop-ups: 4reference.net, brainyencyclopedia.com, informationblast.com, informationgenius.com, wikisearch.net
They're quite devious, these clones. All of them have names that sound like they're official knowledge-based sites. One hides its adverts amongst the normal links at the bottom of each page. Another describes itself, somewhat deceitfully, as an "up-to-date high speed static mirror". Another slyly suggests that "you might want to link to this article from your website". And the most underhand of all amends its web address each time to sound more relevant to your search (e.g. london-borough-of-enfield.wikiverse.org). I'm pleased to see that Google still hides most of this scum out of sight when you carry out a search, but alas they also seem to hide the original Wikipedia article too.
And all this cloning is quite legal. You can copy as much of the Wikipedia as you like, just so long as you include the relevant link ("This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License"). It's called copyleft, not copyright, and presumably the originators of this concept thought it was a great way to promote freedom of information. Unfortunately it also seems to offer freeloaders free information in return for no effort whatsoever. So it looks like we may be stuck with a proliferation of Wiki parasites clogging up search engines for the foreseeable future. You'd never find blogs doing anything like that, would you?
Somewhere sporty: Picketts Lock If all had gone to plan the world's athletes would be gathering to compete in Enfield next summer. But things didn't go to plan, they went 100% completely and utterly wrong. A local sports centre was built at Picketts Lock in 1977, a brownfield site by the River Lea with plenty of room for expansion. In 2001 the place was earmarked for Britain's proposed National Athletics Centre, and the IAAF were impressed enough to award the 2005 World Athletics Championships to London. Mistake. Costs spiralled, transport links were poor and the whole project fellapart in a public display of high-level backbiting. The government pleaded with the IAAF to move the games to Sheffield, but the IAAF were having none of it and moved the whole prestige project to Helsinki instead. Dead embarrassing.
Picketts Lock limped on as a local sports centre, but "came to the end of its sustainable lifecycle" a couple of years ago and was closed down. I found a very sorry site, with the entrance to the building locked and its glass windows smashed. The famous 1997 General Election count where MichaelPortillo lost his Enfield Southgate seat was held here, but I saw no signs of a blue (or even red) plaque on my visit. All that remains outside the centre is a multiscreen cinema and an under-frequented pizza restaurant. And a golf club, which is still doing very well thankyou (not that golf counts as a proper sport anyway). To the south, on the exact spot where the new stadium would have been built, all that remains is a disused driving range, a few buddleia-covered tennis courts and some empty car parks. By next August, while you're watching the world's best runners competing in Finland, the Picketts Lock leftovers should finally have been demolished. They're hoping to replace them with either a new National Athletics Centre or a small bowling green. I wouldn't bet money against the latter. by train: Ponders End (¾mile), by bus: W8
Somewhere retail: Enfield town centre The place to be, even on a wet Saturday afternoon, is Enfield town centre. The shops are packed with people out bargain-hunting, or just standing around bitching and trying to look cool. I don't think I've ever seen quite so many spotty teenagers in baseball caps, hoodies, white trainers and nylon trackies in one place before. One carelessly discarded match and the whole town's youth would probably go up in flames. Enfield boasts a proper town centre, far enough from any large out-of-town shopping mall to have maintained its own retail identity. There's a traditional high street and a small market, as well as a decent 80s shopping centre carefully tucked out of sight behind the existing façades. You can sample the delights of Pearsons, a department store which has somehow survived since 1931 (although it looked to me to be stuck somewhere in the 1960s). But Enfield's biggest retail claim to fame is that the world's first cashpoint machine was installed here, at Barclays in Church Street in 1967. On The Buses actor Reg Varney was invited to officially open the new ATM, and he obliged by withdrawing £10. Nobody I saw in the queue on Saturday looked old enough for their parents to even have been born at the time. by train: Enfield Town, Enfield Chase
Somewhere random: Crews Hill This is a photograph of north London. In fact it's the northernmost point in London - a muddy track beneath the M25 between junctions 24 and 25. You can get slightly further north than this if you park along the clockwise hard shoulder of the motorway ¼mile to the west, but this concrete bridge is as far north as anyone can walk. The cyclist in the foreground of the photograph is a few yards into Hertfordshire, whereas the bridge, tunnel, cattle grid and green fields beyond are all part of Greater London. The driving rain during my visit provided a physical manifestation of the boundary, which lies exactly where the light grey track in the photo turns to damp dark grey. I got absolutely drenched walking the half mile up this unmade private lane which leads north from Crews Hill towards Goffs Oak (most famous residents, Posh Spice's parents). At the bottom of the lane stands the Glasgow Stud, and also a lockable gate labelled "Trespassers will be prosecuted" painted in Union Jack colours. The village of Crews Hill itself is nothing but the largest collection of garden centres I have ever seen in my life. You can't move for shrubs, sheds, greenhouses and gnomes, and families in 4x4s driving 20 yards from a car park on one side of the road to a car park on the other. Verily this is the end of the world. by train: Crews Hill, by bus: W10
So, yesterday I ended up in north London in the randomly selected borough of Enfield. Not London's most interesting borough perhaps, but still better than some I could mention. I gave myself an hour to research Enfield on the internet, then spent the rest of the day wandering around. And yes, I did get very wet in the process. There was so much to see that I'm splitting my report in half - first part today, the rest tomorrow.
Somewhere famous: Cockfosters I really struggled to find somewhere famous in Enfield. Even the leaflet 'Great days out in Enfield' struggles to find somewhere famous in Enfield. So, my apologies, but I decided to visit London's most famous knob gag instead. Cockfosters (snigger) lies right at the northern tip of the Piccadilly Line and opened for service in 1933. It's a four-platform terminus with a shed-like concrete roof and a large circular ticket hall. All the other Enfield tube stations (Oakwood, Southgate and Arnos Grove) are architecturally renowned, but I didn't consider Cockfosters to be quite in the same league. It still has much of its original signage, however, including a giant illuminated platform indicator hanging beneath a central yellow clock.
The station lies right on the edge of London suburbia, with the Green Belt beginning just a few yards to the north. A parade of shops stretches half a mile to the south, a rather splendid selection of traditional English retailers with not one well-known chainstore in sight. It's all fishmongers rather than supermarkets, chips rather than kebabs, teas rather than coffees and functional rather than fashionable. I was sorry to see one independent menswear shop that provides for sizes 32"-64" holding a closing down sale - what a waist that is. At the bottom of the Cockfosters Road I also found both the Chicken Shed Theatre (for socially aware young starlets) and the intriguing Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture (alas closed at the time of my visit). End of the line maybe, but not the back of beyond. by tube: Cockfosters
Somewhere historic: Royal Small Arms Factory If you were shot by the British Army during the 19th or 20th centuries, chances are that the gun that shot you came from Enfield. The RoyalSmallArmsFactory was established beside the River Lee at Enfield Lock during the 1820s, ending the army's previous reliance on private gunmakers. The factory was built just too late for the Napoleonic wars but provided most of the firepower for the Crimean and Boer Wars, as well as World Wars One and Two. It was one of the first factories to develop mass production, as early as 1857, and later produced large numbers of the famous Lee Enfield rifle. The factory survived, even through long periods of peacetime, until 1987 at which point it was sold to British Aerospace who promptly closed it down. Now the island site has been redeveloped as a large housing estate, with a number of the old buildings left standing uneasily amidst a sea of bland townhouses. My photo shows the front of the main factory building, and very impressive it looks too, but what you can't see is that the rest of the structure behind has been replaced by a collection of modern retail and workshop units. There's a gym, a Greek restaurant, a new Tesco Express and a by-appointment-only museum that reflects on the much stronger community that once used to thrive here. Gun, but not forgotten. by train: Enfield Lock, by bus: 121
Somewhere pretty: Forty Hall Forty Hall is a Grade 1 listed Jacobean house, built in 1632, surrounded by beautiful grounds which include a lake and a 300 year-old cedar tree. And entrance is free. It's the sort of place which one day, when you're retired, you'll come for the afternoon for a nice sit down in the lovely gardens followed by a cup of tea and another nice sit down in the café afterwards. The grounds contain the remains of Elsynge Hall, one of Henry VIII's many hunting lodges and a favourite childhood residence of the young princess Elizabeth. Forty Hall is now home to the Enfield Museum, a surprisingly interesting collection of local artefacts including an ancient sword, a number of old maps of Middlesex and even a selection of OXO tins. I was pleasantly surprised by the whole place, and I'm hoping to come back in 2030 for a nice sit down and a Rich Tea biscuit. by bus: 191
Tomorrow: a sporting fiasco, the world's very first cashpoint and 'north' London
Random borough: It's about time I took another random trip to one of London's 33 boroughs (this is shorthand for "I have nothing else to do today"). My specially converted jamjar still contains 31 folded slips of paper, but will soon contain only 30. I could pick any of the boroughs - north, south, east or west, or maybe somewhere in the middle - who knows? I just know it won't be Merton or Islington because they're the two boroughs I've picked out already. I shall then go out and visit some of my randomly-chosen borough's most interesting places, assuming it has any. I hope to visit somewhere famous, somewhere historic, somewhere pretty, somewhere retail, somewhere sporty and somewhere random. And then I'll come back tomorrow and tell you all about it. Let's see where I'm going this time...
Copywrong: You've probably seen the marvellous South London tube map, the one that turns the underground map upsidedown. Unfortunately the lawyers at Transport for London have also seen it and have demanded that the map be removed.
"I am afraid we do not allow any changes to be made to the Underground Map - the Great Bear was an exception as Simon Patterson asked for permission before he began his work and we have not allowed another piece of work like this to be done. If you have produced a piece of work which is clearly based on the Underground Map then you have infringed our intellectual property and we would usually inform our lawyers to contact you."
Shame. At least the site does still link to a pdf of this great map, so there is still a chance to see (and save a copy of) this masterpiece before the lawyers wipe it out for good. And hmm, I wonder if copying a section from that letter about copyright constitutes breach of copyright...
As for Simon Patterson, the artist who famously did manage to make a lot of money out of relabelling the tube map, it turns out that he was in my brother's class at school and that his brother was in my class at school. Small world. As well as doing art A-level, I'm told that Mr 'Turner-nominated' Patterson also spent much of the sixth form smoking fags around the entrance to the nearby tube station, so maybe that's where he got his big idea.
Important new governmentlegislation concerning disability, accessibility and mobility comes into effect today. These new laws mean that everything everywhere now has to be accessible to absolutely everyone, or else. Woe betide any small business or public service that fails to meet the Government's exacting new standards. No matter that there is only one left-handed, colour-blind, Portuguese, wheelchair-bound, octogenarian lesbian in the UK - all transport networks, public signage, sporting arenas, retail outlets and kerbside access must now be adapted for her use. Britain's newsagents now live in fear that Professor Stephen Hawking will pop in one day for a packet of Rizla and get jammed between the crisps and the ice cream cabinet.
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xlviii) Waltham Abbey is a curious mix of old and new. The meridian arrives in town across the 20th century M25 (between junctions 25 and 26), crosses cobbled 16th century Sun Street (site of the Meridian coffee shop), then promptly hits the ruined remains of an 11th century abbey. The main Abbey building lies a few metres to the west, a spectacular example of Norman architecture. Or so I'm told, because it was closed to the public on the day I visited so that three consecutive Essex weddings could take place. The local men looked slightly uncomfortable squeezed into hired suits, while the local ladies oohed and aaahed at the horse and cart pulled up outside the church. Lovely gardens for the wedding photos though.
This is the top of Pole Hill, a wooded hillock in Norman Tebbitt's old stomping round of Chingford. It's quiet, it's gorgeous, and it's unique. This is the edge of London, the border with Essex lying less than half a mile away. This is where the green belt begins, the northern slopes rolling down to form the edge of Epping Forest. And this is where the Greenwich Meridian passes, marked by not one but two stone pillars.
This pillar was erected in 1824 under the direction of the Reverend John Pond M.A. Astronomer Royal. It was placed on the Greenwich Meridian and its purpose was to indicate the direction of true North from the transit telescope of the Royal Observatory. The Greenwich Meridian, as changed in 1850 & adopted by international agreement in 1884 as the line of zero longitude, passes 19 feet to the East of this pillar.
Stratford
xxiii) The people of Stratford haven't noticed the meridian either, despite the local council naming the large public plaza outside the station Meridian Square. They don't realise when they're lurking around the public conveniences at the southern end of the bus station that the meridian passes immediately through the cubicles. They don't realise when they draw up beside the 108 bus stop in their Ford Focus to drop their mates off that they're parking precisely on the meridian as well as illegally on a red route. They don't realise when they use the pelican on the ring road to cross from the bus station to the nasty cheap shopping centre opposite that they're actually crossing from the western to the eastern hemisphere. And they don't realise when they're standing at the eastern end of platform 10 waiting to escape Stratford by train that there's one additional line here that's invisible to the naked eye. People of Stratford, your knowledge is less than zero.
xiii) The tall black totem pole you can see to the right of this photo is a Millennium Milepost, placed Dome-side on the Thames Path by Sustrans the transport charity. There are 1000 such mileposts on cycle routes across the country, each featuring a lettered metal disc which is a clue in a long-forgotten national treasure hunt. I could tell you what the letter is on this particular meridian-sited milepost but that might ruin the fun for all you cycle-clipped puzzlers out there. I can tell you that the sign has been placed two metres too far east.
vii) Old Woolwich Road School lies bang on the line, and so has been renamed Meridian Primary.
Marking the meridian
There were an infinite number of possible meridians, each stretching from the North to the South Pole, and any one of these could have been chosen. However, the Greenwich Meridian was pre-eminent because it had already been adopted by the UK and USA and was therefore being used by 72% of the world's shipping. The French backed down, but only in return for the rest of the world agreeing to think about adopting their system of metric measures. The crucial conference vote was taken on 13 October, with France and Brazil abstaining and only San Domingo in opposition. And so time began at Greenwich (latitude 51°28'38"N, longitude 0°).
Millions of tourists have stood precisely here, in the courtyard at the Royal Greenwich Observatory astride the famous brass meridian line. Cameras at the ready, left leg in the western hemisphere, right leg in the eastern hemisphere, click. The meridian passes directly through the observatory, and is precisely defined by the centre of the crosshairs of George Airy's 1851 transit telescope. Above the telescope on the outside of the building there's a clock counting the days since the Millennium, a silver plaque and a tiny hole out of which a green laser shines along the meridian after dark, visible for many miles to the north. The red line down the face of the building marks the precise longitude at which time begins. But it's not the original Greenwich Meridian.
Meridian 1: based on John Flamsteed's telescope, 1685
Seen in local supermarket: Advent calendars (does anyone ever buy one of these and use it in November?) and peanuts in expensive packaging (hmmm, where have the peanuts in non-expensive packaging gone?).
Bow Road update: At last, after eight months of stifling inactivity, some real renovation work is actually happening at Bow Road station. Right now, today. About time too. It appears that closing the station early at 10pm every night since March has been wholly ineffective, and so an alternative way of inconveniencing the travelling public has been introduced. The powers that be have decided to introduce a series of weekend closures in the hope that the station's inert workforce might actually manage to get something done if they have a full 56 hours in which to do it. Bow Road station is therefore to remain closed all this weekend, all next weekend and on three other weekends before the end of January. I wonder what they're going to get up to. This weekend my money's on them renovating the two staircases down to the platforms (because all the adverts down those staircases were suddenly removed overnight on Thursday). I shall be trotting wide-eyed into the station on Monday morning eager to see exactly what magic transformation has occurred during my enforced absence. I'm expecting to be disappointed.
If all had gone to plan the world's athletes would be gathering to compete in Enfield next summer. But things didn't go to plan, they went 100% completely and utterly wrong. A local sports centre was built at Picketts Lock in 1977, a brownfield site by the River Lea with plenty of room for expansion. In 2001 the place was earmarked for Britain's proposed National Athletics Centre, and the IAAF were impressed enough to award the 2005 World Athletics Championships to London. Mistake. Costs spiralled, transport links were poor and the whole project fell apart in a public display of high-level backbiting. The government pleaded with the IAAF to move the games to Sheffield, but the IAAF were having none of it and moved the whole prestige project to Helsinki instead. Dead embarrassing.
Picketts Lock limped on as a local sports centre, but "came to the end of its sustainable lifecycle" a couple of years ago and was closed down. I found a very sorry site, with the entrance to the building locked and its glass windows smashed. The famous 1997 General Election count where Michael Portillo lost his Enfield Southgate seat was held here, but I saw no signs of a blue (or even red) plaque on my visit. All that remains outside the centre is a multiscreen cinema and an under-frequented pizza restaurant. And a golf club, which is still doing very well thankyou (not that golf counts as a proper sport anyway). To the south, on the exact spot where the new stadium would have been built, all that remains is a disused driving range, a few buddleia-covered tennis courts and some empty car parks. By next August, while you're watching the world's best runners competing in Finland, the Picketts Lock leftovers should finally have been demolished. They're hoping to replace them with either a new National Athletics Centre or a small bowling green. I wouldn't bet money against the latter.
The place to be, even on a wet Saturday afternoon, is Enfield town centre. The shops are packed with people out bargain-hunting, or just standing around bitching and trying to look cool. I don't think I've ever seen quite so many spotty teenagers in baseball caps, hoodies, white trainers and nylon trackies in one place before. One carelessly discarded match and the whole town's youth would probably go up in flames. Enfield boasts a proper town centre, far enough from any large out-of-town shopping mall to have maintained its own retail identity. There's a traditional high street and a small market, as well as a decent 80s shopping centre carefully tucked out of sight behind the existing façades. You can sample the delights of Pearsons, a department store which has somehow survived since 1931 (although it looked to me to be stuck somewhere in the 1960s). But Enfield's biggest retail claim to fame is that the world's first cashpoint machine was installed here, at Barclays in Church Street in 1967. On The Buses actor Reg Varney was invited to officially open the new ATM, and he obliged by withdrawing £10. Nobody I saw in the queue on Saturday looked old enough for their parents to even have been born at the time.
Somewhere random: Crews Hill
This is a photograph of north London. In fact it's the northernmost point in London - a muddy track beneath the M25 between junctions 24 and 25. You can get slightly further north than this if you park along the clockwise hard shoulder of the motorway ¼mile to the west, but this concrete bridge is as far north as anyone can walk. The cyclist in the foreground of the photograph is a few yards into Hertfordshire, whereas the bridge, tunnel, cattle grid and green fields beyond are all part of Greater London. The driving rain during my visit provided a physical manifestation of the boundary, which lies exactly where the light grey track in the photo turns to damp dark grey. I got absolutely drenched walking the half mile up this unmade private lane which leads north from Crews Hill towards Goffs Oak (most famous residents, Posh Spice's parents). At the bottom of the lane stands the Glasgow Stud, and also a lockable gate labelled "Trespassers will be prosecuted" painted in Union Jack colours. The village of Crews Hill itself is nothing but the largest collection of garden centres I have ever seen in my life. You can't move for shrubs, sheds, greenhouses and gnomes, and families in 4x4s driving 20 yards from a car park on one side of the road to a car park on the other. Verily this is the end of the world.
I really struggled to find somewhere famous in Enfield. Even the leaflet 'Great days out in Enfield' struggles to find somewhere famous in Enfield. So, my apologies, but I decided to visit London's most famous knob gag instead. Cockfosters (snigger) lies right at the northern tip of the Piccadilly Line and opened for service in 1933. It's a four-platform terminus with a shed-like concrete roof and a large circular ticket hall. All the other Enfield tube stations (Oakwood, Southgate and Arnos Grove) are architecturally renowned, but I didn't consider Cockfosters to be quite in the same league. It still has much of its original signage, however, including a giant illuminated platform indicator hanging beneath a central yellow clock.
The station lies right on the edge of London suburbia, with the Green Belt beginning just a few yards to the north. A parade of shops stretches half a mile to the south, a rather splendid selection of traditional English retailers with not one well-known chainstore in sight. It's all fishmongers rather than supermarkets, chips rather than kebabs, teas rather than coffees and functional rather than fashionable. I was sorry to see one independent menswear shop that provides for sizes 32"-64" holding a closing down sale - what a waist that is. At the bottom of the Cockfosters Road I also found both the Chicken Shed Theatre (for socially aware young starlets) and the intriguing Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture (alas closed at the time of my visit). End of the line maybe, but not the back of beyond.
If you were shot by the British Army during the 19th or 20th centuries, chances are that the gun that shot you came from Enfield. The Royal Small Arms Factory was established beside the River Lee at Enfield Lock during the 1820s, ending the army's previous reliance on private gunmakers. The factory was built just too late for the Napoleonic wars but provided most of the firepower for the Crimean and Boer Wars, as well as World Wars One and Two. It was one of the first factories to develop mass production, as early as 1857, and later produced large numbers of the famous Lee Enfield rifle. The factory survived, even through long periods of peacetime, until 1987 at which point it was sold to British Aerospace who promptly closed it down. Now the island site has been redeveloped as a large housing estate, with a number of the old buildings left standing uneasily amidst a sea of bland townhouses. My photo shows the front of the main factory building, and very impressive it looks too, but what you can't see is that the rest of the structure behind has been replaced by a collection of modern retail and workshop units. There's a gym, a Greek restaurant, a new Tesco Express and a by-appointment-only museum that reflects on the much stronger community that once used to thrive here. Gun, but not forgotten.
Forty Hall is a Grade 1 listed Jacobean house, built in 1632, surrounded by beautiful grounds which include a lake and a 300 year-old cedar tree. And entrance is free. It's the sort of place which one day, when you're retired, you'll come for the afternoon for a nice sit down in the lovely gardens followed by a cup of tea and another nice sit down in the café afterwards. The grounds contain the remains of Elsynge Hall, one of Henry VIII's many hunting lodges and a favourite childhood residence of the young princess Elizabeth. Forty Hall is now home to the Enfield Museum, a surprisingly interesting collection of local artefacts including an ancient sword, a number of old maps of Middlesex and even a selection of OXO tins. I was pleasantly surprised by the whole place, and I'm hoping to come back in 2030 for a nice sit down and a Rich Tea biscuit.
Random borough: It's about time I took another random trip to one of London's 33 boroughs (this is shorthand for "I have nothing else to do today"). My specially converted jamjar still contains 31 folded slips of paper, but will soon contain only 30. I could pick any of the boroughs - north, south, east or west, or maybe somewhere in the middle - who knows? I just know it won't be Merton or Islington because they're the two boroughs I've picked out already. I shall then go out and visit some of my randomly-chosen borough's most interesting places, assuming it has any. I hope to visit somewhere famous, somewhere historic, somewhere pretty, somewhere retail, somewhere sporty and somewhere random. And then I'll come back tomorrow and tell you all about it. Let's see where I'm going this time...
