a) The R10 is one of eleven R-prefixed buses that operate out of Orpington, the last town heading out of southeast London. What's peculiar is that this corner of the capital extends far beyond the edge of the built-up area into open countryside, so TfL has a duty to run services along narrow lanes to connect remote communities. In this case that's the hamlets of Cudham and Pratt's Bottom, as well as the Kentish villages of Knockholt and Halstead, all linked around a ten mile rural loop. This might just be as pastoral as London's bus routes ever get.
b) Normally buses run in both directions, but the R10 runs only anti-clockwise. All journeys in a clockwise direction are numbered R5, this to prevent residents of certain villages accidentally riding the wrong way round the loop and taking an extra half hour to get home. The distinction was introduced in 2008, prior to which all journeys were designated R5.
c) Only one vehicle is assigned to the R5/R10 combo. It runs the R5 from Orpington back to Orpington, changes its driver, flips its blind and then runs the other way as the R10. And this means that intervals between buses are the longest of any buses on the TfL network. The gap used to be two hours until a consultation last year extended it to two and a half, this because individual buses weren't managing to get back to the start in the scheduled hour and the service was becoming wholly unreliable. Local people aren't happy, and said so, but TfL told them a more reliable service is better than a more regular service, so 150 minute gaps it is. If you ever try heading out this way, make sure you check the timetable carefully first.
An A-Z of LONDON BUSES
Route R10: Orpington - Orpington (via Knockholt)
Length of journey: 17 miles, 65 minutes
I checked the timetable carefully before I left home, which was fortunate because there isn't one at Orpington bus station. The R1, R4, R8 and clockwise R5 each have a timetable at the stop, but nobody's been bothered to make sure the anti-clockwise R10 is included too, which is a miserable state of affairs when it runs so infrequently. Thankfully I'd arrived just before my R10 was due to leave, revving up in the parking bay at the far end before driving across to my side. Another passenger was ready to board too, which seemed exciting until I realised he only wanted to go to the High Street and was simply nipping aboard the first bus that turned up.
There's more to Orpington, apparently, according to the sign on Station Road just before the War Memorial. There's certainly more Orpington on this route than you might expect, starting with a run up the High Street... and back again. I'm riding on a Saturday morning, too early for anyone to have finished shopping and be heading home, so we pick up nobody outside Londis on the way up, nobody outside the huge Sainsbury's where we turn round, and only one lady outside McDonalds on our return. Things'll no doubt be rather different in two and a half hours time. Within a few minutes we're passing the War Memorial again, this time straight on, and leaving the muted Christmas lights behind.
A mile of desirable semis lines the Sevenoaks Road on the journey south, broken by a splendid Metroland-style parade with 'Frigidaire Equipped' launderette. Our first destination is Green Street Green, a pleasant village-turned-suburb, somehow deemed important enough to have its own Waitrose. By now we're running slightly ahead of schedule so our driver finds a bus stop labelled "buses must not stand here" and does precisely that. Our other passenger wants the next stop, lugging her shopping off towards Old Hill, whereas we're taking a country lane with the warning sign IGNORE SATNAV AND RE-ROUTE. If I was surprised earlier to discover that the R10 isn't a minibus, I'm even more surprised when I see where we're going next.
Cudham Lane North is two miles of not-quite single track road with either front gardens, or high hedges, to either side. Two cars can pass OK but a bus is another matter, so there are several occasions where we pull in sharply to the side and a vehicle going the other way attempts to edge through. A Tivo van (they're still going, who knew?) finds the going too narrow and is forced to reverse a considerable distance, which slows us down somewhat. It's the obstructiveness of this stretch that baffled R10 users during last year's consultation. They wondered why the route couldn't be run with a smaller vehicle, keeping better to time and retaining a two hour service. TfL disagreed, citing worries that a minibus might fill with short-distance travellers in town, plus they were determined to change the timetable anyway... and so the larger bus squeezes on.
Detached houses and bungalows come and go, but the high hedges and fields beyond carry on. As Cudham approaches a deep green valley opens up on the right hand side, most unexpected for any bus user more used to crawling bumper to bumper down Oxford Street. The village has a lovely setting, if not a green wellies and labradors vibe, plus a plaque to Little Tich the music hall entertainer at the Blacksmith's Arms. Here too is the only bus stop on this long southbound leg - presumably the rest of the journey has been Hail and Ride, but the onboard electronic display has singularly failed to mention this. It fails again by then announcing the Three Horseshoes in Knockholt as the next stop, despite this being four further miles of Hail and Ride down the road.
Horns Green is the last hamlet in London, a string of homes heralded by a tiny village sign on a tree. And after a few more cautious corners and general woody remoteness, we finally turn left into Kent. So, this is Knockholt, is it? I've always meant to visit but never come, so I'm almost tempted to get off for a look, until I remember that the next bus in this direction is two and a half hours away. Plus Knockholt's really long, the same distance as from Marble Arch to St Paul's, so it doesn't pay to alight too early. At this far-western end the majority of buildings really are farms and stables, plus an attractive-looking pub, then the big-drived houses kick in. A road sign warns of toads for the next half-mile, which is mostly fields again, and I'm grinning that my Oyster card allows me on such an adventure.
When we finally reach a proper bus stop on the village green at Knockholt Pound, hurrah, another passenger is waiting. Technically it's here that the return half of the R10's journey begins, so it's no real surprise to have been the only person aboard on the outbound. More surprising is that TfL run a bus out this far at all, as it's the taxpayers of Kent who really benefit, and they fund the 402 which runs through Knockholt hourly. Ditto the village of Halstead, to which we're turning off next. A fairly standard residential estate feels quite out of place compared to where we've just been, but The Cock Inn (established 1718) quickly restores more rural credentials. The R10 uses Halstead's one non-cul-de-sac to loop back round and return the way it came, indeed this extended Halstead loop is one reason the bus can't quite keep to an hour's running time. But we get some elderly custom out of it, and then it's back to Knockholt again, now on the home run.
Our return to London comes at the top of Rushmore Hill, a relentlessly wooded gradient above, and then descending into, a narrow notched valley. At the bottom is a beautifully-positioned primary school, one of Bromley's most isolated, serving the populace of (snigger) Pratt's Bottom. It's well-named, geographically speaking, with rolling fields rising up on all sides, indeed the view from the R10 is briefly overwhelmingly pastoral. We've arrived during the brief window of the village's Christmas Fair, but again I daren't risk getting off to explore. Abruptly we hit a petrol station, a red route and the main A21, bringing our rustic safari to an end, although there's still one last expanse of farmland to savour before we return to Green Street Green.
And you already know this bit, because I rode it on the way down. What's different this time is that we have passengers, because thousands of people live nearby and we're now just another bus to the shops. At peak crowding there are ten of us, a handful from Pratt's Bottom and beyond, the rest, well, it wouldn't have hurt them to walk. Apparently the R5/R10 gets an average of 200 passengers a day, that's about fifteen people per bus, so today we've been running a fraction below par. Oh look it's the War Memorial again, and our third visit to Orpington High Street, this time emptying out and with a lot more queueing traffic. Thankfully this time we escape via a backstreet... and pass the War Memorial a fourth time... does any other London bus pass the same spot quite so often?
And look, I've actually ridden the whole 17 mile circuit back to Orpington station without the driver once eyeing me suspiciously and asking why I didn't get off. Presumably they're used to sightseers on this journey - it's the perfect route for it, should you ever be tempted to take a £1.45 coach trip to London's proper countryside. Blind flipped, the bus is almost ready to go back round again. Any takers?
"We're going to the Icebar", said BestMate. "You must come."
Don't say this blog doesn't get about a bit.
The Icebar is pretty much what it says, a bar made of ice. It's located on the ground floor of a well-hidden building up an alley in the middle of Regent Street, hence is aimed firmly at a West End clientele. They have an ordinary bar and a basement restaurant, much like any other, but also a room kept permanently at minus five degrees. [Note to American readers, that's Celsius, we're not talking midwinter Chicago]
Why not come for a Christmas drink, they say, and charge you sixteen quid for the privilege. You're invited to turn up 15 minutes before your allotted slot, but five will do, else you'll probably end up in the non-ice bar slipping down a non-trivially-priced cocktail. About fifty people are allowed inside the Icebar at a time, and all go in together, so first off there's a long queue for capes. You didn't think they'd let you freeze in there, did you? Everyone gets a thermal poncho in some sort of polyester, with a 'fur' trimmed hood to keep your ears warm. The overall effect resembles something you might wear while getting an x-ray at an Arctic dentist, but never mind because everyone's wearing the same thing so the fashion stakes are equal.
The Icebar's through a double door... and actually, that's not too cold is it? Minus five's a chilly winter's morning in England, and therefore perfectly survivable, especially in specialist clothing. The tipping point comes with the 'free' drink that's part of the admission ticket - your choice of about twenty cocktails poured behind the actual ice bar while you watch. But don't expect mixology magic, because these are very basic cocktails with one spirit and a lot of fruit juice, squirted simultaneously out of plastic containers with all the panache of a Sodastream. What's truly special is the glass, which is essentially a thick chunk of ice with a well in the middle for your drink. It's both pretty and pretty cold, hence now is the time to make sure you've donned your thermal gloves else your fingers are going to freeze.
So you're in a low ceilinged room with a chilled cocktail, what are you going to do for forty minutes? Well, admire the place for a start. Blocks of ice have been ferried over from the Torne River in NorthernSweden, and then treated and sculpted in a variety of ways. Some are simply ice-benches to sit on and ice-tables to rest your glass on, but others are free-standing ice-sculptures or designs cunningly embedded in the ice-walls. This year's theme at the Icebar is 'food' so all the sculptures have a vaguely nutritional theme, including a giant cherry-topped cupcake and a hollowed-out pineapple, plus a graphic showing which bits of a reindeer are best to eat. All the designers have names like Jens, Mats and Lars, so this is authentic Scandinavian artistry, and it shows.
So you're in a low ceilinged room with a half-swallowed cocktail, what are you going to do for thirty minutes? Well, take photos, obviously. No 21st century human can visit somewhere new without sharing selfies on social media, so a heck of a lot of that sort of thing goes on. Manipulating your phone in these conditions is tricky unless you take your gloves off, but the temperature's not that scary, indeed one member of the security staff kept popping briefly into the room in a t-shirt. Expect each of the groups and parties in attendance to spend several minutes taking photos of one another in front of the decorated wall, or peering through the gap in the ice-pineapple, or grinning with glasses raised, it doesn't matter what so long as the event is recorded.
So you're in a low ceilinged room with an empty glass, what are you going to do for twenty minutes? Well, buy another cocktail, that's what the bar owners hope. By now the photobombing frenzy will have died down, and there's nowhere else to go, so they've got themselves a captive audience. Ideally you should go sit in one of the ice-booth corners and pretend that this is a normal but very chilly bar, enjoying a chat with your mates about the ice or something. This isn't really somewhere to go alone, more an environment in which drinking is more exciting, and you'll need interaction with friends to lift you through the experience.
So you're in a low ceilinged room looking at the walls, what are you going to do for ten minutes? Well that was probably enough time in a cold room, thanks, so maybe it's time to leave early. You'll feel a lot warmer once your cape's off and you're back outside in normal winter temperatures, readjusting to reality. Time to check in on Facebook and upload those photos - look this is me in the pineapple, and here we all are with our hoods up, and where shall we go drinking next? The Icebar's an interesting if expensive distraction, probably best to tick off rather than repeat.
The market town of Epsom is world-famous for two things. Let's do them both. [20 photos]
Somewhere famous: Epsom Well First the bad news - Epsom Salts aren't made in Epsom. But they owe their name to the town, and were first found here almost 400 years ago, completely accidentally. The chance discovery was made on Epsom Common during the dry summer of 1618 by a man out herding cows. Villager Henry Wicker spotted that a hoofprint in the earth had filled slightly with water, so dug around it in an attempt to bring more to the surface. The following day his hole was running over, but the cattle refused to drink, so he took a sip himself and noticed a bitter metallic tang. It took twelve years before the clear spring water was found to have medicinal properties, but news of this discovery then spread with haste across the country. A small well house was built in the middle of the common, and Epsom became the first spa town in England, to which gentlemen and ladies would flock to take the waters.
"Some drink ten, twelve, even fifteen or sixteen pints in one journey, but everyone as much as he can take. And one must then go for a walk, works extraordinarily excellent, with various funny results. Gentlemen and ladies have their separate meeting places, putting down sentinels in the shrub in every direction. It has happened that the well is drunk empty three times in a morning, in hot and dry summers when the water has more strength. And the people who observe this come then in such crowds that the village which is fairly large and can spread at least 300 beds, is still too small and the people are forced to look for lodgings in the neighbourhood. Some stay there on doctor's orders for several weeks continuously in the middle of the summer, drinking daily from this water, and many people take after the drinking some hot meat broth or ale." (William Schellinks, 1662)
Two discoveries at the end of the 17th century changed things somewhat. A second well was detected much nearer to the town centre, off South Street, which rapidly took the lion's share of the spa trade. Many businesses grew up around the New Wells, including a bowling green, a new-fangled coffeehouse, and a gaming and dancing hub at the Assembly Rooms, so the old well fell quickly into decline and was closed down. Meanwhile a scientist called Nehemiah Grew had been experimenting with the well water to try to discover the formulation of the mysterious salts dissolved within. His evaporation techniques may have been cutting-edge at the time, these being the early days of proper chemistry, but he was able to identify the principal component as sulphate of magnesia. Some lucrative business deals followed, leading to the production of Epsom Salts on an industrial scale, eventually from seawater.
By the mid-18th century Epsom's must-see status had been lost, upstaged by spa towns like Tunbridge or Bath with a more plentiful supply of therapeutic waters. But its tourist-based kickstart had made the town a desirable place in the country for many a wealthy gent, and several generations of provincial respectability followed. Epsom's town centre still has a smattering of contemporary buildings, especially at the western endof the High Street, these shielding a more modern playhouse and a fairly standard shopping mall. The market place outside survives, not too down-at-heel, crammed into a thin strip in the shadow of the famous Victorianclocktower. And the restored Assembly Rooms are now a Wetherspoons, continuing a long tradition of refreshment, but of the spa waters themselves there's no trace.
To find the original Epsom Well you have to walk a mile out of town to the middle of Epsom Common, as the first visitors did, where today sits a most peculiar interwar housing estate. This is almost perfectly circular in shape, with a radius of precisely one furlong, as this was the extent of the commonland given over to farmland when the old well closed down. The Wells Estate therefore consists of two concentric rings of 1930s semis surrounded on almost all sides by heath and woodland, connected to reality by a single access road. In the very centre of this residential labyrinth, enclosed by a ring of bungalows at the top of Well Way, is the original Epsom Well. The decorative iron cover was added in 1989, and the exterior bricks far look too modern, indeed there's an element of garden ornament about the whole thing. But step up from the parking bay and peer through the grille, and you're at the very spot where the contents of a million bathroom cabinets once originated. by train: Epsom, Ashsteadby bus: 166, 293
Somewhere sporting: Epsom Downs And then there's the racecourse. Again this has its origins in the 17th century, with England's first recorded horse race meeting taking place on the Epsom Downs in the presence of King Charles II. The open grassland to the south of the town was perfect for riding and racing, and the rolling landscape provided an excellent vantage point from which to spectate. Race meetings organised by the local nobility were soon taking place twice a year, and it was at the May Meetings in 1778 and 1779 that the two most famous races were inaugurated. First off were The Oaks, named after after Lord Derby's house near Carshalton, joined the following year by The Derby, named on the toss of a coin and so nearly called The Bunbury instead. As Epsom's fame grew so the race meetings became larger and more frequent, necessitating the building of a small royal grandstand and much larger stands for the commoners. The whole thing today is run as a huge commercial enterprise, complete with hospitality concessions and a Holiday Inn Express alongside. But the most amazing thing, if you ever visit outside racetime, is the free public access to almost the entire site.
You can't get into the grandstand area, of course. But the downs are open for roaming so long as you avoid the cinder tracks during the morning gallops. I walked down the side of the Duchess's Stand, opened in 2009 by our next Queen, following a sign intriguingly labelled Public Footpath. It led to an underpass beneath the home straight, through which racegoers are funnelled on days when hooves are thundering overhead. And that's nothing, a little further up another public path crosses the very turf itself, as I discovered when I was out this way back in June the day after the Derby. They've long since tidied up the mounds of rubbish, leaving the slopes within the white-railed horseshoe pristine, and ideal for a wander. It was simplicity itself to walk right up to the rails by the finishing line and look up and down the course, and across at the three grandstands - giant, medium and tiny. The dinky one painted pure white is the Prince's Stand, built in 1879 for the Prince of Wales, now used by Owners and Trainers as and when the need arises.
The Downs are a marvellous recreational resource for Epsom's residents, their dogs and their horses. And there's also a fantastic view from the northern side, across the golf course, looking down across most of West London. I timed my visit so that the low winter sun cast its light across the entire panorama, first spotting Wembley's arch, then the City cluster and Shard through the trees. Epsom and Ewell may never quite be absorbed into London, but the capital is never very far away. by train: Epsom Downs, Tattenham Cornerby bus: 166
By rights, the Surrey district of Epsom and Ewell ought to be in London. It nearly was, indeed the Local Government Act of 1963 almost succeeded, but instead the border of Greater London was drawn around it, surrounding Epsom and Ewell on three sides. Its residents like things that way, in their Home Counties pocket of green that Kirsty and Phil once decreed the best place to live in the entire UK. Epsom and Ewell's relatively small, both in terms of area and population, but that was good because it meant I could walk around the whole place in a day. And it's very much a borough of two halves, all suburban avenues to the north, and rather more market town to the south. Let's head north first, to Ewell and thereabouts. [20 photos]
Somewhere to begin: Epsom & Ewell Museum
Ewell has a very villagey feel, so long as you don't stray very far from the narrow twisty High Street. Look out for plaques on several of the older buildings, which is generally a sign that they're included on The Ewell Trail (available here in leaflet form, or on glass panels as you wander around the town), for example the old brick lock-up/fire station combo. At present there's a Christmassy feel, the aftermath of Ewell Yule, which is the only thing you could possible call a festive celebration hereabouts. Mind the traffic, the pedestrian being very much an afterthought round here, and head up to the ostentatious Dog Gate (with, obviously, a great white dog on top). This was the main entrance to Garbrand Hall, an 18th century merchant's mansion which declined, decayed and finally burnt to the ground in 1962. Its municipal replacement is architecturallyastonishing, as if a flying saucer landed on the lawn above the lake. Twenty low-set concrete ribs meet at a central crown supporting a domed roof light, beneath which a vast central space houses shelves of books or, potentially, your wedding reception. Now called Bourne Hall the building opened in 1970 as a Library, Museum and Social Centre, and still plays that role in the community today.
A Christmas Extravaganza Craft Fair had just got underway when I turned up, not that the "extravaganza" part was immediately obvious to the handful of us present. Instead I headed up the spiral stairs to the mezzanine which, cunningly, is the location of the Epsom and Ewell Museum. This means the museum needs no additional staffing so can be open whenever the building is, which is forty hours a week. There's plenty up here too, grouped in a variety of glass cases, and without the usual endless parade of fossils and Roman earthenware. Horse racing takes up a fair chunk of space, as you'd expect when Epsom's part of your borough, including a model of the course and full details of the local Prime Minister's 1894 Derby winner. Lord Rosebery's hansom cab is nearby, along with a selection of 'old' children's games that seemed to have been donated by a family with exactly the same toy cupboard as me circa 1975. A lot of temporary WW1 displays fit in where they can, topping off a carefully curated exhibition that has yet to be yanked screaming into the 21st century. That honour falls to the Epsom and Ewell History Explorer, an unconnected local history website created by volunteers, and whose in-depth background information I can only describe as phenomenal. Not a bad tally for barely thirteen square miles. by train: Ewell Westby bus: 293, 406, 467
Somewhere pretty: The River Hogsmill
The lake I mentioned outside Bourne Hall is also the source of the River Hogsmill. This tributary of the Thames runs six miles from here to its mouth at Kingston, joining up with several (longer) feeder streams along the way. A placidchannel runs behind The Spring bus stop, close to Spring Street and the Spring Tavern, which spring-iness might just help to explain the duck sitting on a plume of bubbles in the pool nextdoor. From here the Hogsmill sets off beneath the ring road and along a thread of greenspace, holding back the residential avenues to either side for at least a couple of miles. Already a wide shallow stream, the muddy path and meadows alongside will be familiar to anyone who's walked London Loop Section 8. The valley's history is hinted at in the first building along, the Upper Mill, although this is a 1984 residential rebuild of the original flour producer. Further along the channel Ewell's dogwalkers were out in force, if there was anyone at all, and I saw no sign of any other original waterside buildings.
I'd turned up on a frosty morning, indeed on the coldest day of the year, so the valley was encrusted in white and unexpectedly picturesque. And that beauty has made this stretch of river famous, although you'd never have realised. Two of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had connections with Ewell and used the Hogsmill as inspiration for their most famous paintings. John Everett Millais came down in 1851 and picked a stretch of riverbank as the backdrop for Ophelia, painting daisies and forget-me-nots in the water beside her floating body. A modern version would probably include lager cans and less vegetation, much of the river having been deepened and culverted to prevent expensive flooding. That same year William Holman Hunt was more interested in the old gunpowder mills, for which the upper Hogsmill valley was once renowned. He found an abandoned hut overgrown with ivy upstream and came back after dark to check its illumination by moonlight. You'll know that door as the one on which Jesus is knocking in the revelatory painting The Light Of The World - the original at Keble College Oxford, a full size re-paint at St Paul's Cathedral. The hut's long gone, obviously, but memories of the Hogsmill are reproduced the world over. by train: Ewell Westby bus: 406, 418, 467
Somewhere historic: Nonsuch Palace
There's only one candidate for Epsom and Ewell's most historic spot, which is Henry VIII's mega-mansion at Nonsuch Palace. But a) it was sold off to pay for gambling debts in the 1630s b) not a stone is still standing c) I blogged about it in-depth back in 2009. So I didn't go again, because you can read that already, and instead headed somewhere rather lower in the historic league... by train: Ewell East, Stoneleighby bus: 293, 470
Somewhere else historic: Horton Country Park The northwest border of Epsom and Ewell, rubbing up against Chessington, is covered by 80 acres of country park. It's very pretty, I can confirm, because I walked the full two miles from top to bottom. Up top a golf course holds sway, including a jungle-themed crazy golf course complete with waterfall and plane crash. Further south there's intermittent woodland, and rolling pasture leading down into the valley of the Bonesgate Stream. But why is there a tall house-like water tower rising high above the trees, and how come the main paths look wide enough to have once carried train tracks? The answer's the Epsom Hospital Cluster, 100 years ago the largest complex of psychiatric hospitals in Europe, built from scratch by the London County Council to house ten thousand of the capital's mentally ill. Construction was a massive job and took years, aided and abetted by a freight railway laid from Ewell West to link, in a finger-like manner, to each of the hospitals in turn. Officially no passengers were carried, though unofficially many of the workers hitched a ride to avoid a lengthy walk each day. St Ebba's cared for epileptics and children, Manor Hospital for those with learning difficulties and the other three for "all stages of nervous and mental disorder". And these massive asylums survived for most of the 20th century, one infamous inmate being Ronnie Kray, before closing one by one and awaiting a new fate.
And that fate was housing. Epsom and Ewell council jumped at the opportunity to approve fresh residential estates in a borough landlocked by the Green Belt. Each hospital site was almost entirely demolished and its footprint used as the basis for a new community, with developers retaining a few buildings only where they could be converted with character. All that's left of Long Grove is a school outbuilding, converted to country park use as a bat roost, while the connecting railway has long been built over or downgraded to bridleway. The latest hospital to undergo transformation is West Park, in its decaying state a target for urbanexplorers, but now almost complete in its new life as the Noble Park estate. I wandered its pristine streets, past townhouses with "Sold" signs outside and the occasional more valuable heritage block with telltale sash windows. On wooded steps opposite the former admin block I came face to face with a passing deer, which is more than I expect most residents have ever seen. And at the focus of the échelon-plan complex, now populated only by pigeons, I found the water tower I'd seen over the trees from a mile away. The Horton Estate Light Railway once terminated alongside, supplying a hidden society of those excluded and forgotten - today only the house prices are mental. by bus: 465, 467, E10
Were you planning on riding the cablecar this Christmas? Well, take some earplugs, because somebody in the marketing department has had a humdinger of a commercial idea.
Remember The Snowman, the adorable 1982 cartoon that lit up Channel 4's first Christmas? Well this isn't that, it's the not-quite-so-classic 30th anniversary sequel with a dog, and featuring incidental music by Razorlight's drummer. And when you ride the cablecar between next Saturday and the first Sunday in January, that's what'll be blaring out of the audio-visual display in your cabin.
And not even the full animation. For a start there isn't time during a ten minute crossing, but more importantly the Dangleway crew have commissioned some special cablecar-related visuals instead.
In the clip, our hero Billy flies over a snowy London to reach the cablecar, and then swoops around the dockside, car parks and post-industrial riverside of East London with a big grin on his face. Somebody in a meeting actually signed off on this, possibly even with money from your fares.
The original Snowdog cartoon used over 200,000 hand drawn images created by 77 animators and cost over £2million to produce. Alas the newly-added segment has noticeably lesser production values. The cablecar backdrop is fairly obviously film, tweaked and softened to look like a snowy night, and clashing somewhat with the proper animation. Indeed on its first appearance the cablecar looks particularly amateurly embedded, and the cables stop halfway across the river, which can't be ideal.
I'll gloss over the fact that in the C4 cartoon the Snowman's flight takes place at midnight, four hours after the cablecar stops running for the evening. I'll not query whether blizzard conditions would in fact have caused cross-river service to be suspended. Much more realistic is the observation that no passengers are visible aboard... although with this special Yuletide offer TfL are obviously hoping otherwise.
The first 15000 children to turn up will get a free goodie bag containing a chocolate, in-flight binoculars, an I-spy challenge and a character mask. There'll also be a life-size Snowman model for children to have their photo taken in front of before the flight, presumably with the name of the sponsor featuring prominently in the background. And adults will have to grit their teeth and endure the flight, prevented from enjoying the view by the terribly-distracting in-flight movie.
Two and a half years ago the cablecar was introduced as a serious commuter option, and a key part of London's transport network. Last year it became a tourist attraction, with the emphasis on the flight rather than getting to the other side. This Christmas it's an aerial cinema showing cartoons for kids. I used to have to try quite hard to ridicule the Dangleway, but now it satirises itself.
The P4 started life in 1973 as an experimental flat fare minibus, one of three routes that brought "Hail and Ride" to the capital for the first time. Initially it ran from Brixton to Brockley Rise, via Dulwich Village, but was extended in 1983 to Lewisham. At no time has the P4 ever gone anywhere near Peckham, after which it was named. And I hoped I'd enjoy the ride more.
An A-Z of LONDON BUSES
Route P4: Brixton - Lewisham Length of journey: 7 miles, 45 minutes
The centre of Brixton, on a Saturday afternoon, is awash with people and buses. The traffic is a curse for shoppers, much of it double decker, though I'm waiting for something humbler to arrive. And I've been waiting a long time, thanks to a hideous jam that's brought everything to an effective standstill. I can see the next P4 in the queue, but it won't be here for some time, and so the crowds amass. Across the road a steel band are playing on the pavement outside Iceland, which keeps us entertained, as does the patter of the salesman attempting to flog phone credit from the doorway behind. And here it is at last, and damn it's only going to Brockley Rise, and I want all the way.
I stand back to let the hordes on, it's quite a stampede, and then go back to people-watching as the bus departs. Just as I reckon the traffic's clearing a blue light approaches, and an ambulance duly parks up in the inside lane immediately behind the bus stop. That's half the carriageway blocked, hence the next P4 is going to be considerably more than the timetabled twelve minutes away, and the slow drip of other buses continues. Thankfully most of the other waiting passengers want the other buses, so they're averaging a three minute wait, whereas I've already racked up longer than the entire journey's about to take.
Eventually P4 number two arrives. This bus has Lewisham on the front, and isn't so packed, which is a relief because my visibility would have been heavily curtailed on the previous steamy service. Instead my close-up view consists of a woolly hat and headphones combo, from which the sound of tinny hiphop is already leaking. Our first stop invites us to "alight here for the Brixton Academy", which in 2014 sounds like it ought to be a school, but thankfully isn't. And then we're off round the backroads to reach Coldharbour Lane, the market end of Brixton being awkwardly impenetrable, by which point all the seats aboard have gone. Loughborough Junction is essentially a collection of railway bridges, of which we negotiate three, and then at last the P4-only section of the route begins.
Herne Hill Road boasts some rather tasteful Victorian terraces and a splendid Carnegie Library, on our gradual climb past one end of Ruskin Park. It's here that Bus Stereotype Number 15 gets up from his seat and moves to close the window, because it's all about what he wants and stuff the rest of us. We break the rise at the top of Denmark Hill, and then continue into the Sunray Estate and the marvellously-monikered bus stop at Casino Avenue. The name commemorates Casino House, a Palladian mansion designed by John Nash at the turn of the 19th century. Today only the ornamental lake survives, the remainder having been turned into the Sunray Estate after the Great War. I doubt that the two residents who nip off here know any of this, but you never know.
Things turn fractionally more rural around North Dulwich station, which is appropriate because Dulwich Village lies ahead. This is the poshest spot in inner south London, by far, and the P4 was its first bus - the residents wouldn't have appreciated anything bigger. It's like hitting Surrey, all cottagey and Georgian with chain fences and even a village signpost. You can see why Margaret Thatcher moved out here after her time at Number 10, admittedly to a Barratt home in a gated enclave... and blimey, she only paid £400,000 at the time. We pass all things Dulwich - the Park, the College, the Common, the Art Gallery - with a film crew busy doing their thing outside the latter. And the exclusivity goes on for minutes longer than expected, so much green, and so much money.
And bam, it's back to normality on Lordship Lane. A council estate, a boarded-up pub with sealed-off car park, and Lewisham's finest museum, the Horniman. Most of those on board disembark here, which is either good news for the capital's cultural future or because they don't want to ride into the hills beyond. Right on cue we veer off up Honor Oak Road onto the ridge, somewhere no larger bus would venture. Houses block most of the view, but there is a brief glorious panorama down Dunoon Road towards distant southeast hills. Honor Oak's shops turn out to be much like any other quite nice shops but with the words 'Honor Oak' shoehorned in front of their name. Change here for the Overground, which several do, or stay on until the bottom and Brockley Rise.
Hurrah, this P4's going further. To the Brockley Jack, which is a vibrant pub/theatre combination, and onto Brockley Grove, which is a road. Aspirationally parallel Victorian streets lead off, seven of these named after the offspring and relatives of the estate's developer, consecutively Elsiemaud, Henryson, Amyruth, Gordonbrock, Arthurdon, Francemary and Phoebeth. I worry for any dyslexic children brought up within. We've now entered Ladywell, a pleasant suburb with rough edges, as can be detected from the local combination of patisserie and nail salon. Those still aboard are restless, and our new companions looking as if they'll not be settling in for long, as we cross the Ravensbourne and enter Lewisham proper.
Many alight at the Fire Station, this because there are shops here and not for want of smoke alarm advice. I'm surprised because the main shopping centre is further on, but maybe they're trying to get off before the jams start. We've finally hit somewhere as buzzing as Brixton, a hub with all the delights of a Primark, Iceland and proper outdoor market. Our penultimate stop is behind a dustcart stickered 'Justice For Lewisham Hospital', close to The Sausage Man, before the Clock Tower. And then I was expecting the station, but we're summarily chucked off before that thanks to the all-transforming Lewisham Gateway project. This has dropped a massive building site between the shopping mall and the station, which'll one day be new roads and bland flats, but is currently a miserable wasteland of pedestrian diversions that makes me want to escape from Lewisham as soon as possible. And not by bus.
Though not officially lettered bus routes, London has almost more Ns than all the other A to Xs put together. Approximately fifty of the capital's nightbuses need an N prefix because they don't run the same route as a daytime bus, in general running rather further. I had to pick one of these Ns to ride, which wasn't a simple choice. I decided I wanted a night bus running out of central London at the weekend, ideally Trafalgar Square, to get the most genuine after-dark experience. I decided I wanted a bus running east, because none of my other lettered journeys are taking me beyond Newham. And I also wanted to be able to get home at 2am without getting straight back onto the bus I'd just got off. Which meant, oh boy, the N15... Night bus to Romford.
An A-Z of LONDON BUSES
Route N15: Trafalgar Square - Romford Length of journey: 18 miles, 95 minutes
I check the list with some incredulity. Yes, the N15 has 85 stops on its way from central to outer London, and I'm going all the way. Sooner me than you. I'm in Trafalgar Square on a Saturday night, technically Sunday morning, as the first nightbuses start to swirl out from sideroads to start their intrepid journeys. The square is both busier and bussier than I was expecting, as the evening's drinkers continue their partying or choose to head home. Ground zero appears to be the 24 hour Co-Op food store at the end of the Strand, from which a steady stream of 20-somethings emerge clutching nibbles, fags, bottles, whatever. And the N15's journey begins immediately outside, which is convenient, or more likely the recipe for a blocked pavement.
Normally I rush for the top deck but when the bus arrives I settle in downstairs, behind the doors, to better get a feel for all the interior action that lies ahead. The bus takes a couple of minutes to fill up, and with mostly non-drunken folk, indeed it's the first hint that this might not be a journey characterised by jostling banter. Someone asks the driver how to get to Moorgate - it seems there are many options - and eventually we pull off. We're heading through the heart of the West End, but only for the next few minutes, so this is our best opportunity to fill up before heading to the suburbs. On Aldwych an ambulance has pulled up beside a girl leaning over and nodding semi-consciously into her hands, which is what passes for a Saturday night out for many in these parts. Within a couple of stops every seat downstairs has been taken. The tally includes a pair of tourists clutching yellow M&M's Store bags, more fool them, and a bloke in a leather jacket perusing Ferraris on his phone, but the bus is by no means packed yet.
The City isn't Party Central, but a few quieter couples swell our number. St Paul's is beautifully illuminated after dark, as are various building sites along the way, and umpteen office receptions where a security guard is attempting not to fall asleep. Every minute or so an electronic voice announces where we're stopping next, plus "Alight here for..." some station or attraction that isn't open and won't be for hours. It takes until Monument until the first 'ding' signals someone wants to get off, because normal loading patterns don't apply at one in the morning. The last train to Romford is leaving Liverpool Street around now, so any residents with any sense would surely be on that, or more likely have stayed out drinking rather closer to home.
It's Aldgate and Aldgate East that turn out to be the most heaving, as the East End piles aboard. Some are wearing highly ill-advised thin dresses, while others do that thing where they go upstairs and poke their head above the rail, note there are no seats and come back down. I thought it might never happen, but the driver finally has cause to push the "No standing on the upper deck or stairs" button, thereby legitimising the night bus experience. This means there are several stops between Stepney and Limehouse that our driver sails past, resulting in frustrated rapping on the window and a collective need to wait for the next bus. On the N15 that's not too far away, but on less frequent night services the "bloody hell, he didn't stop" moment causes genuine inconvenience.
My latest neighbour is a rather posh young lady, at least by Tower Hamlets standards, attempting to maintain a conversation at crotch level with her bow-tied other half. Another upmarket pair are clutching theatre programmes - they alight at Westferry into a less civilised crowd of chicken eaters and cola swillers. After too long a wait at the Blackwall traffic lights we rise up and over the Lea on the only elevated section of the journey, for a glimpse of the increasingly upstanding lights of downtown Stratford. An older couple seem agitated when we turn off at the roundabout, but it's so we can stop off at Canning Town bus station for a profitable haul of passengers. It's now half past one and I'm extremely surprised to see a non-night-bus setting out on a backstreets journey to Mile End... but then London's bus network is often bloody marvellous like this even if you're not awake to see it.
We're now into the less glamorous half of the journey and about to hit Plaistow. At stop number 42 Emma Highnett's electronic voice announces "Balham Leisure Centre", and at least two locals can be heard to yell out "BAY-LAM!", because the poor girl never gets this right. I note it's still possible to buy fruit and veg on the Barking Road even at this time of the morning, or indeed a round of McShakes, which an entire posse of girls are clutching as they board. They get off fairly soon afterwards in Upton Park and dash straight into Papa's Fried Chicken, as their evidently classy night continues. It's here that the worst behaviour of the evening occurs - a slightly surly bloke sticks his head in through the middle doors and stops us heading off for, ooh, at least ten seconds. It's no riot, the Saturday night bus to Barking, or at least it definitely isn't on this occasion.
We pass a seemingly endless run of greasy food joints and metal shuttered shopfronts, broken by the occasional cluster of minicab drivers awaiting the opportunity of a swift fare. The glow ends suddenly at the Barking Flyover, where I'm surprised to see a large electronic clock reading 1219... until I realise that's the price of diesel. The people of Barking appear to have had a good night, with several spilling out of the King's Lounge onto the pavement. And it's at the bus stop outside the station that most of the passengers aboard suddenly pile off, dispersing swiftly into the night. Indeed it looks like the remainder of the ride, a mere five miles now, could be a relative anti-climax. Five more miles, sheesh.
Once out of the town centre we pass the bus garage where a fleet of red cuboids is packed tightly into the depot and forecourt. Our windows are no longer steaming up, which is good, except there's far less to see out here in the proper suburbs. We're running a lot faster too, and stopping far less frequently, but then it's almost two o'clock and nowhere much is open. In Becontree three giggling gents bundle down the stairs, Red Bull in hand, one suspects with the intention of continuing their evening indoors. My onboard entertainment now involves little more than watching the security camera action on-screen, intermittently cutting from the the silent few downstairs to the six sleepyheads on the upper deck. And then, to my narrative delight, one wobbles up to the driver and asks where Faircross is, only to be told that we passed it a while back and he'll have to get out and catch a bus back the other way. Bad luck mate.
"You are now entering Romford." Hang on a cotton-picking minute, when did buses start announcing generalities like that? But here we are, on the outskirts of town at first, where a t-shirted lad with a bandaged fist bounds aboard, smelling of a skinful. There can only be a dozen of us left, our glowing box parading past groups of twenty-somethings in Essex-style evening dress awaiting their minicab home. The police are out in force in South Street, it now being Saturday night chucking-out time in Romford's premier nightclub zone. Cigarettes are being smoked and taxis are being tipped into, but there's no sign of the brouhaha I might have been expecting, and indeed you might have been hoping for, sorry.
I'm the only passenger to linger to the very last stop round the back of the market. It's remarkably quiet on the ring road, which suits me because I feared I might have a long wait for my next bus and didn't fancy being in the thick of post-clubbing shenanigans. I'm still shivering in the bus shelter fifteen minutes later when the next N15 turns up and a young lad with a big bag steps out. I watch as he crosses the carriageway and goes and waits on the other side of the road for exactly the same bus to turn up for its return journey. If he gets his head down on the top deck he could get an hour and a half's uninterrupted sleep, and still have time to get back to Romford before the N15 gives up for the night. My own bed may still be an hour away, but I feel incredibly fortunate to have one that doesn't shift eighteen miles a night.
Back in October the Queen nipped down to the Science Museum to send her first tweet. More precisely she was there to open a new gallery - The Information Age - which tells the story of communication technology over the last couple of centuries. I thought I'd wait a bit for the fuss to die down and then take a look. And the good news? The fuss has very much died down.
Last time I visited the Science Museum, the entrance was primed for security checks. "Can I see your bag, sir? Thank you." Now the security guards hover unobtrusively near the main door, and a different kind of barrier greets visitors. To gain access to the museum you have to aim for one of four-or-so staffed desks, each a mini-chicane, potentially with queues at busy times. "It is still free to get in, isn't it?" I asked, surprised that entry required direct human interaction. The lady at the desk assured me that entry was still free, and that the desks had been installed "just in case you wanted to make a donation." That'd be a suggested donation of £5, according to the adjacent sign, plus of course I had the opportunity to purchase tickets for any of the special exhibitions or attractions within. I bet this approach shames a fair proportion of visitors into coughing up, especially those who don't speak the language very well, but as a London taxpayer I felt perfectly entitled to walk straight through. Security Theatre has been replaced by Commercial Theatre, it's the new paradigm.
To find The Information Age you'll need to walk along the building a bit. Try that on the ground floor and you get to walk past lots of incredible exhibits, but take the lift to the second straight away and you'll enter one of the museum's quieter backwater galleries. It's the Mathematics and Computing gallery, home to E.R.N.I.E. and Babbage's Difference Engine, both pioneering devices in their own way. There's an archaic feel to the displays, which include slide rules, Klein bottles and Spirograph drawings, as well as several cabinets of very colourful cardboard polyhedra. A lot of the displays concentrate on curves and surfaces, and hence calculus, explained with a clarity that's unexpectedly good at bringing complex concepts to life. But come quickly, because plans are afoot to transform the gallery into a shiny £5m space with a Zaha Hadid roof based on patterns of aerodynamic turbulence, with a 1929 aircraft as the star exhibit. The end result could be fantastic, or it could be a lot of screens telling stories - a deliberate shift in emphasis from pure to applied. Whatever, the Maths gallery revamp starts next year, so if you want to see what came before, come soon.
Which brings us The Information Age. This fills a mighty big gallery, or rather it fills the space around the edge because there's a lot of circulation space through the middle. The enormous object in the centre which looks like a clothes drier is an Aerial Tuning Inductor, a hexagonal low-frequency coil rescued from the wireless station at Rugby in 2003. The remainder of the gallery is divided into six clusters, each devoted to a different type of communication technology from Cable to the Web. The oldest inventions are the telegraph systems of the early Victorian era and examples of the undersea cables that transformed international communications - it's refreshing to see such artefacts still celebrated. The Radio section includes heritage BBC microphones and transmitters, as you'd expect, but also intriguing audio visuals explaining how the sinking of the Titanic and traders on the New York Stock Exchange drove the technology forward.
Are there buttons to press? Hell yes, and screens to touch, and graphics to watch, if that helps you linger longer. It helped me. I even stayed to watch a five minute video about digital switchover, that's how up-to-date this place is, while one of the gallery's cleaners stood entranced in front of a cabinet recollecting TV's breakthrough at the Coronation. The curators have chosen well, using footage from an international 1967 simulcast to represent satellite broadcasting, and a phone shack from Cameroon to show how mobiles have brought a new kind of African independence. They've even got Sir Tim Berners Lee to explain how the internet works, and have on display the computer on which he invented the World Wide Web at CERN two decades ago. You'd not be reading this sentence right now without it.
I'm not quite sure why the gallery's designers went to all the effort of creating an upstairs. An elliptical mezzanine passes through all six sections but adds very little, other than a good view, and yet the museum's gone to considerable expense in providing two special lifts to make this upper level accessible. I completely missed the 40 interactive light beacons placed around the gallery by an artist, because that requires an app on your phone, and I never download apps in public unless very firmly directly to so. And then there was the punched card reader exhibit.
Several forms of communication are represented in the exhibition by a moulded interactive panel. Tap a morse key, tune a crystal set, route a telephone conversation, that kind of thing. The punched card reader exhibit invites you to punch some virtual holes in a virtual card which is then sorted in a variety of virtual ways before your very eyes. And it was while this program was completing that I realised I'd seen an older punched card reader exhibit in the maths and computing gallery nextdoor. This had featured a complete 1930s workroom, a large-scale mechanical reader and some Babbage-era punched card prototypes, amongst other related ephemera. There was even a complete history of the punched card and its role in driving forward 20th century business profitability, this hand-assembled along one complete wall panel using photos, diagrams, graph paper and inkjet-printed labels. And it struck me that this labour of love isn't going to survive the gallery's transformation, and that instead the humble card reader may be represented in perpetuity by a simulation and a few detail-light paragraphs.
The modern way with exhibitions seems to be not to overload, which means fewer concrete objects and more virtual descriptions. And in that respect The Information Age is a perfect exemplification of itself, which is both precisely how it should be, and a damned shame.
Winterville is a city of 1000 souls in west Georgia, USA, best known as home to the Butthole Surfers and an annual Marigold Festival. It's also the name of a new festive village in Victoria Park, open throughout December, with the express aim of keeping you entertained.
Londoners have gone a bit mad for this kind of thing of late, first 'continental' markets, then the funfair behemoth that is Winter Wonderland. When that tackfest began in 2007 it was little more than a patch of rides beside a few Bavarian cottages, but it's grown and grown over the years to cover an increasingly unhealthy acreage. And blimey, it's popular. I went on Sunday, joining a heaving throng denser and more slow-moving than I'd ever believed possible. Families and groups of mates shuffled around, swilling glühwein out of plastic cups and stuffing their faces with £7.50 pork baps. Some queued for the mega-observation wheel with Santa hanging off it, while others simply walked round and round the perimeter, watching out for pickpockets and maybe having some more churros. This is December in the capital, folks, and the masses love it.
So Winterville would seem to be a sound business proposition. Seal off a central portion of an East End park, then stick a funfair up one end of the enclosure and a few other rides elsewhere. Line the aisles with bars and food, and freeze over an ice rink for good measure. Add some tents of boutique shopping and proper entertainment, this to ensure the place has a unique selling point. Stick security guards on the gate, and invite the Metropolitan police too in case anything kicks off. Open it up from December 2nd to January 1st to catch the solstice crowds. And make getting inside free, in the hope that visitors will sign up for tickets to the attractions once they've tired of food and drink and stalls. Available now in London E3.
I went yesterday evening, which was Day One and a Tuesday so unlikely to be busy. It was also dark and cold and damp, but that's Winter for you, hence these were surely perfect market conditions. A map was thrust into my hand as I entered, which I should have read but it was a bit dark, and some of the combinations of text and background colour weren't particularly easy to read. Nobody was queueing up at the ticket office, partly because they hadn't read the map either but mostly because any crowds had yet to arrive. A few local families had turned up to see what all the fuss was about, increasing in number as the early evening went on. But I also noticed a considerable number of smart twenty-something media types with scarves and big cameras, because it turned out Tuesday was press night, and this made the place look rather more presentable that it might otherwise have done.
All the special guests were being schmoozed in the cabaret tent, so I couldn't look inside 'The Spiegeltent', but a wide range of shows will be taking place here over the next month. Some are free, some cost £20, so check wisely, but the expensive ones do at least look like they might be special. There's also a daytime pantomime, and a series of paid-for children's shows in The House Of Fairy Tales, but these take place only at or near weekends. A sprinkling of arts and crafts tents were open yesterday and keeping the Columbia-Road demographic happy, but I suspect they were only staffed and active because it was press night. Indeed most of the signature stuff at Winterville appears to be weekends only, so come at any other time and you'll have to make do with food and drink and much more ordinary amusements.
The fairground will be a big draw I'm sure, indeed it usually is whenever one turns up in Victoria Park. Various swirly twisty beasts had been erected over the weekend, each glistening with lights, as well as a few of those giant house-type things you walk inside for a thrill and several of those stalls where you throw things. And yet this corner of Winterville was perfectly dead. Indeed I've never walked alone through a fairground before, past a collection of vacant-looking stallholders waiting for someone, anyone, to stop by and kickstart the evening. Ditto the showmen at the Wall of Death, revving their motorbikes and pleading with the handful of passers-by to pay to step inside and see the show. But they're patient, they know things always kick off later, and Winterville's open til ten.
A few years ago all the food offerings would have been burgers and noodles, but this is a bit more Shoreditchy and hence there's a lot of streetfood. Cheesesteaks, brisket and pulled pork are present, as well as more vegetarian-friendly options, not that anyone was really biting at six in the evening. A row of bartenders awaited custom in several large marquees and cabins, I'd say with optimistic capacity (especially the pumps tucked out of the way beside the ice rink), but at weekends who knows? I chose to partake in the tiny Hot Cider Bar, just to say I'd tried something, plumping for the warm spiced cider option. I was a little unnerved when my server disappeared below the bar for thirty seconds, but she did eventually emerge with a none-too-vast cup of warm-ish red liquid. It tasted fine, but smelt of cows, and the last few gulps were tepid with dregs in, so perhaps don't follow my lead.
Further tips. Don't wear your very best shoes because, even though the grass has been covered over, the matting is damp and in places muddy. Bring money because there's basically bugger all to do if you don't. Make sure you get your banknotes before you turn up because the cash machines on site charge £2.95 for the privilege. Don't traipse all the way over to Victoria Park because you've heard good things in Time Out, because they're one of the sponsors so they're not going to say anything negative. Don't come expecting something similar to Winter Wonderland, because Winterville's smaller and rather less brash. And if the place manages to get some atmosphere, well, if you like this kind of thing you'll like this kind of thing.
• One thing that's popped up all around Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park are stand-alone posters promoting the Orbit. The twirly crimson mega-sculpture has now been open since Easter, and I've never seen it busy, so needs all the customers it can get. Part of the issue is the cost of a ticket - fifteen pounds, or two quid off if you're local and happen to have turned up clutching a utility bill. An increasing number of special 'events' are being tried to lure in the punters, for example this month they've opened a bar and drafted in Santa, though never simultaneously. Maybe one day the Orbit will take its place on the international tourist trail but, until then, views of Bromley-by-Bow and the City are going begging.
• Down below, remember those splendid fountains that gush in sequence which children love running through? Turned off until next year, sorry, but then it is December.
• West Ham's new Stadium roof is going in, a vast circular cantilever that'll improve the acoustics and prevent spectators below from getting wet. There's little specific visual evidence at roof level, bar some big cranes, but there's plenty going on around the perimeter. Diggers are churning up the soil above the City Mill River, speeding down the embankment and returning to dump the earth in an an unattractive heap overlooking Carpenter's Lock. Don't look now, look again in 2016.
• After Water Chariots went spectacularly bust during the Paralympics, several of its fleet of passenger boats ended up in the hands of the Lee and Stort Boat Co based up the river in Roydon. This year they're back in E20 running sightseeing tours up and down the Olympic Park, for considerably less than the extortionate 2012 fare. They're still running hourly for eight quid even in winter, at weekends only, weather depending, with a few bits of tinsel and fairy lights added for festive effect. But I'd still rather walk it.
• How's the pedestrian link to Warton Road going in the south of the Park? Awfully, since you ask. When the South Park opened in April someone had forgotten to add a path so visitors clambered up the embankment to gain entry. Then some temporary steps were added, but this was deemed unacceptably inaccessible, so the bank's been sealed off for months and months to allow minor civil engineering to take place. The new permanent steps are in, but aren't allowed to be de-barriered until a meandering ramp has been completed taking wheel- and pushchair users far out of their way. To reach Stratford High Street pedestrians then have to walk the long way round the roundabout via a newly-installed zebra crossing, because nobody planned ahead and added a pavement on this side under the railway bridge. The end result is a long-term infrastructure balls-up brought to life, minor in scale, but delivering a wholly inefficient legacy connection.
• If you came to the Games, or have been back since, you'll remember the big wide bridge in the northern half of the park that led across from the Copper Box to the Basketball Arena. It's currently being dismantled. More precisely the broad temporary span is being removed and the narrow footbridge alongside retained, as part of the Bridge F03 Transformation Project. It's a serious mess at the moment, with conveyor belts, cranes and gaping voids, but it'll all look lovely again (and much slimmer) by the spring.
• Whilst the southern half of the park is notionally open 24 hours a day, the northern half suffers no such privileges. During 2014 a low fence has been erected round the entire perimeter, with lockable gates installed at key access points, diminishing the openness of the legacy parkland. At the main entrance near the Copper Box there are four adjacent gates but on Sunday only one was open, forcing visitors and cyclists to take turns passing through. I'm sure the gates have been added for good reason, but the subliminal message is now "we don't really want you here" rather than "come on in and enjoy".
• The next public opening hereabouts will be the Canal Park, down the western edge alongside the River Lea Navigation. There's no evidence as yet that it'll be a thrilling recreational border, but it'll be a lot greener than the brownfield slope it replaces, and it'll add value to the adjacent flats once they start to be built. According to all the signposts, The Canal Park opens next month.
• Over on the Westfield borders, where the security tents frisked you down during the Games, the International Quarter is starting to emerge. A wall of tower blocks is planned over the next few years, the first to appear being the residential stump of Glasshouse Gardens. Only the first floor elevator core has arisen thus far, but it's a portent of the elitist barricade to come, here on the non-affordable side of E20.
• There were hundreds of people in the Park on Sunday, which was impressive for November. Two continued successes are the Timber Lodge cafe and the adjacent adventure playground - if they can draw in a busy audience even at this time of year, their future success is assured. Oh, and the sunset was gorgeous too. Come back soon.
A new tube map has been hitting the leaflet racks in stations over the weekend, ready for the start of December. You can always tell that a new tube map has been issued because social media briefly gets very excited by the design on the front cover. But much more important, I'd say, is the content within. So let's play...
Accordion fold
(Breaking news: the old tube map was folded differently to the new tube map)
Letter fold
(The old tube map is the odd one out, the previous four were all letter-folded)
Back cover
Station index: Abbey Road - Dagenham Heathway
Bright blue advert for credit card company, promoting contactless cards
(the first full-page advert in five years)
Station index
3 pages
2 pages
(same tiny font, much more tightly packed)
(thanks, credit card company)
On the map
No interchange:Bond Street
(but Bond Street is currently exit and interchange only, it doesn't go back to normal until mid-December, so the new map isn't yet true) No Bakerloo & Northern line: Embankment
No Central line:Tottenham Court Road
(but Tottenham Court Road's Central line platforms aren't closing until 3rd January 2015, so for the next month the map is unhelpfully inaccurate)
New step-free stations
Hampstead Heath
Queens Road Peckham
Step-free maintenance
Kilburn: no step-free access until June 2014
West Ham: no step-free access to District and Jubilee lines until late February 2015
Daggers
Cannon Street: limited opening hours and closed Sundays
Cannon Street: open full time from December 14th (during lengthy London Bridge redevelopment works) (so the map is incorrect this weekend)
Covent Garden: exit only until mid-November 2014
Covent Garden: exit only from late February until early November 2015
Gloucester Road: Piccadilly line trains not stopping until mid-December
(map shows incorrect information for the next couple of weeks)
Victoria: Reduced interchange during station improvement works, change trains elsewhere
Bank and Waterloo listed separately in dagger list
Waterloo & City line information listed only once
So why the new map?
The Bond Street / Embankment / Tottenham Court Road thing
(and the advert, obviously)
In summary, the message is "use the tube map with caution this month, because several things aren't yet true".
And if you're a tube map connoisseur, grab as many copies of the new map as you can, because the next one's likely to be a shocker. A big change to London's rail services takes place in precisely six months time (or as near to 'precisely six months' as you can be when November only has 30 days). On Sunday 31st May 2015 oversight of several different rail services passes from the existing franchisee to TfL, and TfL will no doubt want to show off their new acquisitions on the tube map. Expect to see...
You'll notice that Liverpool Street appears a lot in this list, indeed all five transferred lines lie to the northeast of London. And this means that the top right-hand quadrant of the tube map could be getting an awful lot more crowded, and considerably harder to untangle, even bafflingly hard to follow. Maybe something like this.
It's not a done deal. There's no reason why TfL's tube map designers should make any or all of the changes in the way I've depicted, and there definitely won't be as many step-free blobs as I've shown because some of those are long-term aspirational. But you might at least be more than a little nervous about what lies ahead for Harry Beck's 'design classic' in six months time. And for goodness sake stop getting quite so excited about the art on the front cover, because the really important thing is always the quality of the new map within.
An A-Z of LONDON BUSES
I checked the timetable carefully before I left home, which was fortunate because there isn't one at Orpington bus station. The R1, R4, R8 and clockwise R5 each have a timetable at the stop, but nobody's been bothered to make sure the anti-clockwise R10 is included too, which is a miserable state of affairs when it runs so infrequently. Thankfully I'd arrived just before my R10 was due to leave, revving up in the parking bay at the far end before driving across to my side. Another passenger was ready to board too, which seemed exciting until I realised he only wanted to go to the High Street and was simply nipping aboard the first bus that turned up.
First the bad news - Epsom Salts aren't made in Epsom. But they owe their name to the town, and were first found here almost 400 years ago, completely accidentally. The chance discovery was made on Epsom Common during the dry summer of 1618 by a man out herding cows. Villager Henry Wicker spotted that a hoofprint in the earth had filled slightly with water, so dug around it in an attempt to bring more to the surface. The following day his hole was running over, but the cattle refused to drink, so he took a sip himself and noticed a bitter metallic tang. It took twelve years before the clear spring water was found to have medicinal properties, but news of this discovery then spread with haste across the country. A small well house was built in the middle of the common, and Epsom became the first spa town in England, to which gentlemen and ladies would flock to take the waters.
By the mid-18th century Epsom's must-see status had been lost, upstaged by spa towns like Tunbridge or Bath with a more plentiful supply of therapeutic waters. But its tourist-based kickstart had made the town a desirable place in the country for many a wealthy gent, and several generations of provincial respectability followed. Epsom's town centre still has a smattering of contemporary buildings, especially at the western end of the High Street, these shielding a more modern playhouse and a fairly standard shopping mall. The market place outside survives, not too down-at-heel, crammed into a thin strip in the shadow of the famous Victorian clocktower. And the restored Assembly Rooms are now a Wetherspoons, continuing a long tradition of refreshment, but of the spa waters themselves there's no trace.
And then there's the racecourse. Again this has its origins in the 17th century, with England's first recorded horse race meeting taking place on the Epsom Downs in the presence of King Charles II. The open grassland to the south of the town was perfect for riding and racing, and the rolling landscape provided an excellent vantage point from which to spectate. Race meetings organised by the local nobility were soon taking place twice a year, and it was at the May Meetings in 1778 and 1779 that the two most famous races were inaugurated. First off were The Oaks, named after after Lord Derby's house near Carshalton, joined the following year by The Derby, named on the toss of a coin and so nearly called The Bunbury instead. As Epsom's fame grew so the race meetings became larger and more frequent, necessitating the building of a small royal grandstand and much larger stands for the commoners. The whole thing today is run as a huge commercial enterprise, complete with hospitality concessions and a Holiday Inn Express alongside. But the most amazing thing, if you ever visit outside racetime, is the free public access to almost the entire site.
Beyond London (5): Epsom and Ewell (part 1)
Somewhere to begin: Epsom & Ewell Museum
Somewhere pretty: The River Hogsmill
The northwest border of Epsom and Ewell, rubbing up against Chessington, is covered by 80 acres of country park. It's very pretty, I can confirm, because I walked the full two miles from top to bottom. Up top a golf course holds sway, including a jungle-themed crazy golf course complete with waterfall and plane crash. Further south there's intermittent woodland, and rolling pasture leading down into the valley of the Bonesgate Stream. But why is there a tall house-like water tower rising high above the trees, and how come the main paths look wide enough to have once carried train tracks? The answer's the Epsom Hospital Cluster, 100 years ago the largest complex of psychiatric hospitals in Europe, built from scratch by the London County Council to house ten thousand of the capital's mentally ill. Construction was a massive job and took years, aided and abetted by a freight railway laid from Ewell West to link, in a finger-like manner, to each of the hospitals in turn. Officially no passengers were carried, though unofficially many of the workers hitched a ride to avoid a lengthy walk each day. St Ebba's cared for epileptics and children, Manor Hospital for those with learning difficulties and the other three for "all stages of nervous and mental disorder". And these massive asylums survived for most of the 20th century, one infamous inmate being Ronnie Kray, before closing one by one and awaiting a new fate.
The centre of Brixton, on a Saturday afternoon, is awash with people and buses. The traffic is a curse for shoppers, much of it double decker, though I'm waiting for something humbler to arrive. And I've been waiting a long time, thanks to a hideous jam that's brought everything to an effective standstill. I can see the next P4 in the queue, but it won't be here for some time, and so the crowds amass. Across the road a steel band are playing on the pavement outside Iceland, which keeps us entertained, as does the patter of the salesman attempting to flog phone credit from the doorway behind. And here it is at last, and damn it's only going to Brockley Rise, and I want all the way.
I check the list with some incredulity. Yes, the N15 has 85 stops on its way from central to outer London, and I'm going all the way. Sooner me than you. I'm in Trafalgar Square on a Saturday night, technically Sunday morning, as the first nightbuses start to swirl out from sideroads to start their intrepid journeys. The square is both busier and bussier than I was expecting, as the evening's drinkers continue their partying or choose to head home. Ground zero appears to be the 24 hour Co-Op food store at the end of the Strand, from which a steady stream of 20-somethings emerge clutching nibbles, fags, bottles, whatever. And the N15's journey begins immediately outside, which is convenient, or more likely the recipe for a blocked pavement.
We pass a seemingly endless run of greasy food joints and metal shuttered shopfronts, broken by the occasional cluster of minicab drivers awaiting the opportunity of a swift fare. The glow ends suddenly at the Barking Flyover, where I'm surprised to see a large electronic clock reading 1219... until I realise that's the price of diesel. The people of Barking appear to have had a good night, with several spilling out of the King's Lounge onto the pavement. And it's at the bus stop outside the station that most of the passengers aboard suddenly pile off, dispersing swiftly into the night. Indeed it looks like the remainder of the ride, a mere five miles now, could be a relative anti-climax. Five more miles, sheesh.
To find The Information Age you'll need to walk along the building a bit. Try that on the ground floor and you get to walk past lots of incredible exhibits, but take the lift to the second straight away and you'll enter one of the museum's quieter backwater galleries. It's the Mathematics and Computing gallery, home to E.R.N.I.E. and Babbage's Difference Engine, both pioneering devices in their own way. There's an archaic feel to the displays, which include slide rules, Klein bottles and Spirograph drawings, as well as several cabinets of very colourful cardboard polyhedra. A lot of the displays concentrate on curves and surfaces, and hence calculus, explained with a clarity that's unexpectedly good at bringing complex concepts to life. But come quickly, because plans are afoot to transform the gallery into a shiny £5m space with a Zaha Hadid roof based on patterns of aerodynamic turbulence, with a 1929 aircraft as the star exhibit. The end result could be fantastic, or it could be a lot of screens telling stories - a deliberate shift in emphasis from pure to applied. Whatever, the Maths gallery revamp starts next year, so if you want to see what came before, come soon.
Several forms of communication are represented in the exhibition by a moulded interactive panel. Tap a morse key, tune a crystal set, route a telephone conversation, that kind of thing. The punched card reader exhibit invites you to punch some virtual holes in a virtual card which is then sorted in a variety of virtual ways before your very eyes. And it was while this program was completing that I realised I'd seen an older punched card reader exhibit in the maths and computing gallery nextdoor. This had featured a complete 1930s workroom, a large-scale mechanical reader and some Babbage-era punched card prototypes, amongst other related ephemera. There was even a complete history of the punched card and its role in driving forward 20th century business profitability, this hand-assembled along one complete wall panel using photos, diagrams, graph paper and inkjet-printed labels. And it struck me that this labour of love isn't going to survive the gallery's transformation, and that instead the humble card reader may be represented in perpetuity by a simulation and a few detail-light paragraphs.
So Winterville would seem to be a sound business proposition. Seal off a central portion of an East End park, then stick a funfair up one end of the enclosure and a few other rides elsewhere. Line the aisles with bars and food, and freeze over an ice rink for good measure. Add some tents of boutique shopping and proper entertainment, this to ensure the place has a unique selling point. Stick security guards on the gate, and invite the Metropolitan police too in case anything kicks off. Open it up from December 2nd to January 1st to catch the solstice crowds. And make getting inside free, in the hope that visitors will sign up for tickets to the attractions once they've tired of food and drink and stalls. Available now in London E3.
