The government is attempting to redrawourconstituencies again, and this time will succeed. They tried in 2013 but Nick Clegg killed the plans off. They tried again in 2017 but Brexit proved constitutionally more important. This time the government has a large enough majority to sail it through, plus it was in their manifesto, plus it's about time for a reshuffle because populations change.
UK constituencies were last rejigged in time for the 2010 election, before that 1997, before that 1983, before that 1974 and before that 1950. What's different this time is the government's specification that constituencies must all be of roughly equal size. Ignoring islands, the UK's smallest electorate is currently 55,419 in Stoke-On-Trent and the largest is 99,253 in Bristol West. This time the range has to be a lot smaller, with each constituency no more than 5% different from the average, and this enforced constraint necessitates all kinds of changes.
David Cameron's original plan was to cut the overall number of MPs from 650 to 600, back when the expenses row was at its height and everyone thought 'the fewer MPs the better'. One reason the plans stalled is because no MP wanted to be one of the 50 losing out, so Boris has backtracked and is keeping the full 650. This means an average constituency size of 73,392, and the 5% range means electorates must now lie between 69,724 and 77,062.
It all sounds terribly fair, because why should voters in Stoke have considerably more power than those in Bristol? But the limit of 5% is a subjective choice which restricts flexibility for those charged with redrawing boundaries, so they've been forced to make some poor geographical choices which could have been avoided had the range been 6% or greater. It's also a political decision to base constituency sizes on the electorate rather than overall population, which disadvantages areas with more than the average number of children.
A consequence of constitutional significance is that some regions of the UK are about to lose representation in Parliament and others are going to gain. It's fair to say that Labour, Plaid Cymru and the SNP would never have pushed these changes through and the Conservatives are more than happy.
Region
MPs
change
South West
55 → 58
+3
South East
84 → 91
+7
London
73 → 75
+2
East Anglia
58 → 61
+3
East Midlands
46 → 47
+1
Yorks & Humber
54 → 54
-
West Midlands
59 → 57
-2
North East
29 → 27
-2
North West
75 → 73
-2
Scotland
59 → 57
-2
Wales
40 → 32
-8
Northern Ireland
18 → 18
-
It's particularly bad for Wales which'll lose 20% of its MPs and particularly good for the South East region which'll gain seven. The political centre of the United Kingdom is being nudged south and east, because that's where the population is, at the expense of less well-off parts of the country. It's unintentionally the government's "levelling up" agenda in reverse.
Ten years ago a boost in southeastern seats would have been a slamdunk for the Tories but recent elections confirm that's no longer necessarily the case. Similarly a reduction of seats in the north would have been bad news for Labour, but the rise of Conservatism in these parts means a number of 'red wall' seats will now disappear. Overall however this still delivers an electoral boost for the incumbent government, especially the loss of ten seats in Wales and Scotland.
London's constituencies are due to get a significant rejig, and not just because two more are being squeezed in. The requirement to keep electorates within a specific range will cause significant boundary turbulence, as indeed it will across the country. Many of the capital's existing 73 constituencies are already of an appropriate size but only two will be left unchanged, because you can't unpick one bit of the map without a domino effect rippling off elsewhere.
For example Romford's boundary could have stayed the same but the three adjacent constituencies are all too big, so Emerson Park is being brought in and part of Hylands ward is being hived off. The Boundary Commission tried not to split existing council wards but this was sometimes forced because mathematics is now king, not administrative cohesion. You can check your own constituency here, wherever you are in the country, and read a rationale for any proposed change if you dig deeper into the local and national reports.
One of London's extra seats is being added where I live. The 'Newham and Tower Hamlets sub-region' now has a combined electorate of 368,155, entitling it to 5.02 constituencies rather than the four we have now. Currently Tower Hamlets has two and Newham has two, but an extra constituency is being squeezed in to accommodate the extra population delivered by years of newbuild housing. It'll have to span the River Lea, which the Boundary Commission would rather not have had to do, but needs must. And it's going to be called Stratford & Bow, which means I'm going to live in it.
Stratford & Bow will stretch from Victoria Park to the fringes of Wanstead Flats, taking in the Olympic Park, Forest Gate and Upton Park. It lumps in Bow with a swathe of Newham, which feels odd. Only one road crosses from the Tower Hamlets part to the Newham part, such is the severance inflicted by the river Lea, which is less than ideal. But it'll still be a safe Labour seat, much as I live in now, so where I place my cross still won't technically make any difference.
To quell my concern I've looked back at the history of constituency allocation hereabouts and confirmed that the only constant is change. In 1950 Bow was lumped in with Poplar and the Isle of Dogs as part of the Poplar constituency. In 1974 Bow was lumped in with Bethnal Green instead forming Bethnal Green & Bow. In 1983 Bow was switched back to Poplar, forming Bow & Poplar, then returned to Bethnal Green & Bow in 1997. Also Poplar was coupled with Canning Town between 1997 and 2010, creating a precedent for a constituency across the Lea, which makes the upcoming Stratford & Bow less of an anomaly.
The total number of constituencies in Tower Hamlets and Newham has changed several times in line with the size of the local population, so this latest uptick isn't really anything unusual.
1950
1974
1983
1997
2010
2023
Tower Hamlets
3
2
2
1½
2
2½
Newham
4
3
3
2½
2
2½
Total no. of MPs
7
5
5
4
4
5
At present the Boundary Commission's plans are just proposals subject to further review, so a two month window has opened for the return of feedback. Expect potentially significant changes before a second round of consultation takes place early next year, followed by further tweaks and a third consultation before the whole thing becomes law in late 2023. If Boris waits until May 2024 to hold the next General Election then the new constituencies will apply, but if he manoeuvres to go early then the current ones will still hold sway.
And all this matters because a 'fairer' system could deliver a different balance of power and change the future of the country. Had earlier revamps succeeded then David Cameron would have won a bigger majority in 2015 and maybe not risked Brexit, and Theresa May wouldn't have had to rely on the DUP to prop her up in 2017. It wouldn't have altered Boris's landslide in 2019, only boosted the scale, but it could lock in an electoral advantage from 2024 and perpetuate the Tories' years in power. If you don't like the shape of your constituency feel free to complain, but the 5% limit is coming whatever, giving the opposition an even higher electoral mountain to climb.
If they were naming my 18th random ward today they'd probably call it Moorgate, but parallel Coleman Street came first by several centuries so gets the accolade. It slots into the gap between the Barbican and Liverpool Street, is mostly low key commercial and doesn't offer many great reasons to visit. [pdf map]
This is Coleman Street today, a much sanitised version of the medieval thoroughfare which linked Lothbury to the City wall. It is indeed named after incineratory practices, in this case the charcoal burners who plied their trade on open ground by the river Walbrook. These days it's one-way and somewhat of a backwater, the sort of place you'd only come if you worked here, but retains a smidgeon of character at its northern end. Its chief building used to be St Stephen's church, a Wren rebuild with two stone pineapples on the roof and a weathervane commemorating 'La Cokke on the hoop', a local 15th century brewery. Alas the church was never rebuilt after the Blitz and its site is currently occupied by a coffee shop and a Japanese restaurant, but the cockerel lives on as the ward's Nando-esque logo.
A number of short alleys lead off Coleman Street with evocative names like Great Swan Alley, Great Bell Alley and King's Arms Yard. The only one with any character is Mason's Avenue, a narrow curved cut-through with Tudor-style frontages and a selection of hospitality options. Best known of these is The Old Dr Butlers Head, identifiable by the barrels out front, which was established by a quack in 1610 to sell a liquid cure-all that had allegedly eased King James I of his back pain. On weekdays City workers with pints spill out to fill the alleyway, but on Sundays everything's closed so it's the ideal time for a chat with the homeless guy who sleeps outside the opticians.
Great Swan Alley continues across Moorgate where we find Chartered Accountants' Hall, the numbercrunchers HQ. Its lengthy neo-Baroque facade conceals a similarly ornate interior, subsequently mashed together with a Brutalist concrete extension facing Copthall Avenue. A lot of the buildings around here are, or look, Victorian, and are presently occupied by an entirely different institution to that which built them. The home of Zurich's Habib Bank, for example, boasts a fine 3m-high lighthouse carved into one corner because it used to be the offices of the Ocean Accident & Guarantee Corporation. The lantern alas no longer illuminates.
The crossroads where Moorgate crosses London Wall, you won't be surprised to hear, is the location of the former Moorgate entrance to the City of London. It's the only one of the big seven gateways to be added after the Romans left because back then the land on the other side of the wall was marshy fenland fed by the upper reaches of the Walbrook. The gate spanned the road by the Globe pub, a listed hostelry that stands on the site of the Swan and Hoop Inn and Livery Stables. It was here in 1795 that the poet John Keats was born, or is believed to have been given that his grandfather owned the inn and his father was an ostler paid to look after travellers' horses.
Moorfields, beyond the wall, wasn't drained until the 16th century. It became a large open space for recreation, grazing, markets, fairs and the like, and was where most of the City's displaced residents camped out following the Great Fire. The second Bethlem Royal Hospital was built here in 1676, backing onto the Roman wall, and remained until the asylum moved on to what's now the Imperial War Museum in 1815. Around this time Lower Moorfields was transformed into Finsbury Circus, an elliptical greenspace surrounded by two ornate crescents, and which is still the City's largest public park. It used to boast the City's only bowling green but that hasn't been replaced since Crossrail's construction site moved on, and the temporary lawn by the bandstand has yet to be transformed into the promised 'haven for people and wildlife'.
The platforms of Liverpool Street Crossrail station run directly underneath Finsbury Circus, and one day next year you'll be able to descend at the Moorgate end to speed off to Heathrow. The new entrance remains interminably sealed beneath a cliff face of sheathed scaffolding, which will ultimately be Deutsche Bank's new London bolthole, while the emptygash out front has been leased by Aviva for an eight-storey block. The only way curvaceous Moor House was able to avoid the development maelstrom is because Foster & Partners had the nous to build extra deep foundations and a ventilation shaft in the early 2000s, several years before the purple railway officially got the go-ahead.
Many of the streets at the northern end of the ward are flanked by anodyne offices and small lockdown-susceptible shops. Anything a desk jockey might need to nip out for at lunchtime is catered for, from dentists and opticians to sushi and stationery, not to mention greetings cards, paracetamol and tailor-made shirts. Not all of these outlets have survived a year without footfall, and it's notable that several bars and restaurants which'd be thriving in the suburbs still have signs in the window apologising for not reopening yet. Even £4.20 luxury pasta isn't shifting while patrons of Spagbowl continue to work from home.
The tallest building in the ward is Citypoint, a glass tower resembling a hardback book. When it opened in 1967 it was called Britannic House, the new home for British Petroleum, and became infamous as the first City structure to rise higher than St Paul's Cathedral. The British Red Cross have their HQ in a much less glam concrete block on the opposite side of the piazza. A disjoint scrap of Coleman Street ward extends along Silk Street to embrace the last offices before the Barbican kicks in. The chief point of interest here is the former Whitbread Brewery, operational 1750-1976, home to many a barrel and a vault of porter. Today it's part hotel and part conference/events venue, so you probably won't be getting inside unless your company hosts a corporate awayday.
I may have made Coleman Street sound interesting. Don't let that tempt you into making a special trip.
Santander are closing a lot of branches over the next three months, 111 in total, as they trim their network to match future usage. This cull removes 20% of their existing branches and comes on top of a similar 20% cut in 2019.
Oh, I was hoping for a post about something else today. I'm not really interested in Santander, I don't bank with them.
Like many other banks Santander are out to make savings as customers increasingly move online. They claim branch transactions fell by 33% over the two years before the pandemic and declined by a further 50% in 2020, and also that two thirds of overall transactions are now digital.
I can't remember the last time I went into a bank. There was that time I had to make a physical transaction, and that time I needed face-to-face authorisation, but mostly I just juggle everything online.
The branches being closed are all within three miles of another branch, which Santander have decided is a reasonable travelling distance, plus they've checked there'll always be an ATM and Post Office nearby.
We used to think nothing of queueing for our money, but you'd never get away with that these days. I remember I once went into my local bank with a large bag of halfpennies, it was Williams & Glyn's, anyone remember them?
If you live somewhere like Shrewsbury or Yeovil where there are no other nearby towns, no worries. Elsewhere Margate is closing in favour of Ramsgate, Runcorn's been usurped by Widnes and Bletchley's losing out to Milton Keynes. But the axe is mostly falling within large conurbations... and especially in London where 40 of the 111 closures will take place.
You've also reminded me of cheques! They were amazing, I can't believe we used to rely on small pieces of paper sent through the post, my so-called signature was virtually unintelligible, and we always got the year wrong in January!
I spotted the significance of London's Santander slimdown while on a visit to the City. The branch in Bishopsgate and the branch in Moorgate are both closing, with posters outside advising existing customers to switch to branches in Cheapside or Islington instead. It turns out the unprepossessing branch on Cheapside will in future be Santander's sole outpost in the City of London, which seems extraordinary in what's supposed to be London's financial centre.
Moorgate to Upper Street is easy enough, you take the Northern line there and back, it sounds like a fun adventure. I wouldn't like to do it regularly but like I said I don't go into banks any more so that's fine.
The recommendation to go to Islington surprised me because it's a fair distance away, over two miles. The High Holborn branch is currently closer but that's closing on 8th July. The London Bridge branch is closer but that's closing on 15th July. Even the Bethnal Green branch is closer, but that's also closing on 15th July. Islington's somehow the next nearest left.
There were banks on every street once, there were banks everywhere, you couldn't move for banks. But as someone who's never lived or worked in the City of London these changes all seem perfectly reasonable.
When I was in Barking last week I noticed their branch is closing too. This time the two recommended alternatives are Ilford and East Ham, both within three miles but still not entirely convenient. I see the branch in Dagenham is closing too which'll leave the borough of Barking and Dagenham (population 212,000) in the extraordinary position of having no Santander branches at all.
Other banks exist. Residents of B&D could always switch to Barclays or the Halifax, which I assume will still have branches left, or at least they do now. If Santander want to lose customers who insist on turning up in person I suspect that'll only boost their profits.
This map shows branches staying open (red) and branches closing (black) across north and east London. It's fascinating to see a visual representation of the thinning out of the network... or extremely annoying if you happen to be a customer about to lose their closest branch. Many such people exist, as evidenced by the long queues outside banks and building societies during lockdown. [branch locator map]
It's just some coloured dots scattered across an area I have no interest in. At first glance it looks like there are more red dots than black dots anyway, so surely nobody will be disadvantaged? Santander's accountants know what they're doing.
No other London boroughs will end up with no Santanders, but Harrow, Hounslow, Kingston, Richmond, Hammersmith & Fulham, Kensington & Chelsea, Hackney, Waltham Forest, Tower Hamlets and Lewisham will now only have one, and Merton only had one anyway. If you think of each of these boroughs as having a population far larger than most provincial towns and cities, it's a significant inconvenience.
What you've forgotten to mention are all the employees who'll be made redundant by these closures. Hire a few more phone monkeys and these awkward salaried pensioned staff are easily dispensed with. Still, at least it keeps my bank charges down.
I suspect this confirms that Santander (and other banks) would love to close a lot more branches, but it's only within densely populated places like London that they can proceed with impunity. Our suburbs are close together by national standards, so we increasingly get to waste our time and money travelling for face-to-face services so that shareholders can prosper.
I don't use banks any more, not unless I absolutely have to, so I genuinely don't see what the problem is. Business has to move with the times.
Anyway, think of Santander's latest closures as a snapshot of the journey to debankification and as an example of the wider digitalisation of society. Most of us have already proved we don't need to go out to get on with our lives. Before long the others may not have much of a choice.
If you're a Monopoly player, UK version, I thought you might appreciate seeing what the Old Kent Road actually looks like. The whole thing's almost two miles long so I'm giving you a very atypical stretch, especially the dual carriageway vibe, but the street does have two Lidls so at least that's properly representative. Old Kent Road is well known as the cheapest property in Monopoly but prices have moved on since the game was published and £2 would now barely pay for an hour's rent in a typical flat. As for hotels I can only find a drab block with 53 rooms called the Eurotraveller Hotel Premier (Tower Bridge), whose displaced branding confirms that the brown end of the board still lacks prestige.
Monday (IG11)
This is the Charlton Crescent Subway beneath the A13, one of the pedestrian escape routes from the Thames View Estate in Barking. It was given this colourful makeover in 2005 as part of the council's Artscape project (which is also responsible for the landing lights at Lodge Avenue and the witch'snipples at the Goresbrook interchange). The interior's painted cyan at this end, blue in the middle and purple at the far end, interspersed with contrasting concentric rings. The bands of LED lights used to flash like you were stepping into some futuristic launch tube but I fear that effect has been switched off.
Tuesday (E16)
This is not what you expect to see walking along the Thames waterfront. It stopped a few of us in our tracks when we spotted it, a bobbly pink confection pacing along the promenade at Royal Wharf. I did later confirm that the feet belonged to a woman, not to the balloons themselves, but only when she turned the corner into the main body of the estate. I never worked out where she was delivering them, presumably to an apartment hosting a socially distanced party, but it did seem a somewhat extravagant helium flourish.
Wednesday (RM12)
When in Upminster I like to drop in and see how the Underground's largest swastika is getting on. On my first visit of the day a group of TfL staff were having a meeting standing on top of it, like you do, so I returned to Upminster Bridge station later in the day for a clear shot. Alas the tiled design is now despoiled by two socially distanced stickers saying Please Queue Here, on the off chance that passengers at this little used station simultaneously want to purchase tickets. It's worth pointing out that the design was added in 1934, post-Hitler but pre-war, and that the swastika has a much longer religious history.
Thursday (E3)
This empty painted rectangle has appeared outside Bow Road station, heralding the dawn of London's first e-scooter trials. Today it's illegal to ride one on the streets of London but tomorrow the law changes and a select few boroughs will permit hired speed-limited scooters on roads and cycleways. Four are in West London (Richmond, Ealing, Hammersmith & Fulham and Kensington & Chelsea), then out east there's the City of London and Canary Wharf. The rest of Tower Hamlets is taking part only as a "ride-through" borough so I'm baffled why Bow Road has a parking space. You shouldn't be able to start or end an e-scooter ride here, and we're hardly on the way from Docklands to the City, so I expect this space'll remain empty. Long may our pavements stay that way.
Friday (E15)
Blimey, it's a Wendy's... in the process of taking over the former Pizza Hut restaurant on Stratford Broadway. Wendy's are the world's third largest chain of burger restaurants, after the obvious two, but closed all their British branches in 2001 and are only now creeping back. Reading got the first this week, and Stratford and Oxford are vying to be second later in the year. I had my first Wendy's at their flagship in Oxford Street in the 1980s and remember being entirely underwhelmed, I suspect because I'd been allowed to select my own ingredients. The latest menu is bacon-obsessed and unlikely to set foodie tastebuds alight, but Stratford may well bolt it down.
Saturday (E14)
This is Sun Pavilion by Morag Myerscough, the latest art installation at Canary Wharf (in Montgomery Square, opposite the other entrance to the tube station). It features striking patterns in vibrant colours, which are very much Morag's thing, plus a few plants and a rack of seating. It certainly dazzled when I walked by, but only because the sun is high enough at this time of year not to be blocked by the surrounding skyscrapers. From one side it's symmetrically Insta-friendly, whereas from other angles it's just somewhere colourful to sit down with a locally-purchased drink. There's invariably an ulterior motive.
• hybrid variant detected in Vietnam
• UK could be in early stages of third wave
• ban on evictions comes to an end
• WHO allocates Greek letters to variants
(α Kent, β South Africa, γ Brazil, δ India)
• Peru trebles its official death toll
• zero deaths reported (but cases rising)
• 75% of UK adults now vaccinated
• 50% of UK adults now fully vaccinated
• school catch-up plans underwhelm
• Portugal moves from green to amber
• lockdown eases across much of Scotland
• infections rise by two-thirds in a week
North Ockendon is one of London's proper villages, i.e. with fields and a parish church, and is also the only place in the capital to lie outside the M25. Its administrative trajectory was set in 1935 when the parish was transferred to Hornchurch Urban District with the expectation that suburban sprawl was imminent. Instead the Green Belt preserved it, then in 1965 this outpost found itself absorbed into Greater London where it remains as a rural anomaly. The village is really two hamlets, one linear and trafficked, the other more characterfully clustered. The M25 despoils the western boundary.
St Mary Magdalene is fundamentally fourteenth century, although there's been a church here considerably longer than that. The exterior is flint and ragstone with dressings of Reigate stone, the tower has diagonal buttresses and the south doorway boasts an intricate Norman arch. Getting inside isn't an option at present, indeed all services are currently suspended, sorry. The noticeboard outside confirms that Choral Communion only takes place on the 5th Sunday of the month, i.e. no more than five times a year, which ought to give you some idea of the importance of the place.
St Mary's holds a special place in scientific history thanks to William Derham, rector of Upminster, who in 1709 made what's generally accepted to be the first successful calculation of the speed of sound. He took his 16 inch telescope up the tower of St Laurence in Upminster, observed the flash of a gunshot from the church tower in North Ockendon and timed the interval before the sound arrived using a half-second pendulum. His calculations suggested the speed of sound was 1072 Parisian feet per second, which equates to 348 metres, impressively close to the actual 343.
In one corner of the churchyard is a small gate leading down to St Cedd's Well, a genuine antiquity. Cedd was a 7th century Northumbrian monk sent to convert the East Saxon kingdom, for which read modern Essex. It's said that he baptised pilgrims in the spring here, but it's also said that the water arose in Kent and gushed forth in Essex so best not take this as gospel. The spring now feeds a well that helps fill the moat of North Ockendon's former manor house, so best step down and soak up the beauty of the spot.
Note that Visitors Who Use The Steps Do So At Their Own Risk, indeed the top couple of blocks are definitely on the wonk. Also note that Deep Water refers to the well itself, a four-foot long brick pool which would definitely be drownworthy, not the adjacent but inaccessible moat. Don't worry, the well house is securely covered by a pitched timber roof, this a bland replacement for a previous incarnation which depicted a cowled lady weeping and a bearded man with a white ruff.
In front of the well is a long cobbled channel with a central gutter leading down towards the moat, plus a pump for drawing the water should you be so inclined. At the height of summer it's a verdant spot, a lovingly-maintained mini-garden with a memorial bench where you can rest awhile and soak in the Saxon vibe. I suspect the well-heeled inhabitants of the adjacent barn conversions enjoy coming down here most often, but anyone can drop in, so it's Cedd.
The first field to the south of the village has been overtaken by a hardhat army doing preliminary work for a major road-building project. The Lower Thames Crossing is coming, a tunnel downstream of Tilbury intended to relieve pressure on the Dartford Crossing. It's been confirmed that one end of the new dual carriageway will break off from the M25 in North Ockendon and this field is directly in the line of fire. I spotted two operatives inspecting a shallow preparatory trench, several piles of earth marking previous attempts and a big yellow digger intent on scraping more. It made me go online and check the plans when I got home.
The hedgerow I stood beside while taking photos of the level crossing will be obliterated by the first sweep of the southbound sliproad. The field on the other side of the level crossing will be bisected by the northbound sliproad just before it tunnels underneath the M25 embankment. That line of blue cones scattered amid the growing crops will one day be the site of hundreds of thousands of overtaking manoeuvres and potentially a fatal accident. And footpath 252, the ill-marked undertrodden right of way I'd struggled even to locate, is to be reborn as a thin bridge above a seething chasm of railway line and speeding vehicles. It's North Ockendon's bad luck to have been selected twice for a major road-building project, narrowly skirted and irretrievably scarred.
London has ten public footpath level crossings, just ten, and half of them are in the London Borough of Havering. If you have three hours spare you can walk them all...
Walking Havering's five Public Footpath Level Crossings
The first three are on the Romford to Upminster line, because minor foot crossings are most likely to survive on quiet single track backwaters with not many trains. The railway divides one group of leafy residential avenues from another, denying vehicle access for three quarters of a mile so this pedestrian cut-through is very welcome. To start the walk make your way to Osborne Road between Romford and Emerson Park stations (the 193 bus delivers) and look for the broad alleyway between the semis at 125 and 127. At the far end are a swing gate and a volley of notices, one reminding you to keep your dog on a lead and another saying No Trespassing in English, Polish, Romanian, French and Spanish. A decent line of sight down the straight track means it all feels open and safe, and crossing the line takes barely two seconds. I was surprised that Network Rail classify this as the most dangerous of Havering's quintet, this mainly due to the 'large number of users' which turns out to be about 120 a day. I spotted three other users and two dogs. On the far side is a brief stretch of whoppingly high fence to discourage shortcuts, then an alleyway leads off in both directions behind sheds and back gardens. It'd be easier to escape if the end of Courage Close wasn't bricked up. Reassuringly nobody's planning to close this crossing, which is more than can be said for the next two...
Fork right along the alleyway to join Hillview Avenue - a world of well-kept bungalows with Avon catalogues on doorsteps. At Godfrey's Bakery turn right past Emerson Park station and the Hop Inn micropub, then left into Burnway at the Oh My Cod! chippy.
This has a much narrower alleyway, as befits a more minor crossing. It may not bode well that the house on one side is up for sale and the other has already sold, but if you've always wanted a 3-bed semi backing onto a level crossing (and don't mind people using the stile to peer over into your back garden) now's your chance. Again there are signs aplenty on the approach, including the usual Stop Look Listen and a more modern exhortation to put your mobile phone away. Line of sight is again excellent, indeed you can plainly see the end of the platform at Emerson Park in case the half-hourly service is waiting there. Low green railings deter trespass trackside. The path on the far side is shady and doglegged, and emerges beside a massive detached house which appears to be mostly garage.
But the crossing's days are numbered because it's on Network Rail's longlist for closure. Over 100 crossings in the Anglia region were the subject of two rounds of public consultation in 2016, the aim being to improve safety and reduce risk. Results in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk were finally confirmed in 2020, but the orders for 'Essex and Others' await approval from the Secretary of State. The crossing attracts only 30 pedestrians a day and isn't fully accessible thanks to stiles on both sides so Network Rail are happy to divert users to a footbridge quarter of a mile down the road. But their main argument really boils down to "without the closure of the level crossing there is a risk of a future incident at this location", which is essentially a reason for shutting anything.
Footpath 170 emerges at the end of a cul-de-sac, then weaves through pines to a string of bungalows on Woodhall Crescent. Ignore the footbridge leading to St Andrew's Park, pleasant though that is, and keep your eyes peeled for Footpath 172 on the right.
This is the excellent one, the footpath that descends into Hornchurch Cutting where the Pleistocene ice sheets ground to a halt. The change in level means that a zigzag ramp is required on both sides, affording an excellent view on the way down that eventually opens up to reveal a pleasingly straight track. At the foot of the slope is a motley selection of deterrent infrastructure, including three steps, a funnel of wooden fencing and a trackbed of black plastic spikes. The whole thing has a whiff of adventure about it, not to mention the fact it's also a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest. Alas Network Rail want to close this one too. There are only two dozen users daily who could easily use the footbridge on nearby Wingletye Lane instead, indeed the crossing's been here since these were fields and increasingly looks like a bypassable anachronism. If you want to experience it for yourself, maybe come soon.
It's the best part of an hour's walk to the next crossing so don't undertake this expedition lightly. You'll pass Upminster Bridge and Upminster stations, probably via the windmill and the high street, before veering around the District line depot to reach the lower middle class suburb of Cranham. Keep going until the end of Nightingale Avenue, where the Green Belt starts, and enter the Brickfields nature reserve. The next crossing is unsignposted behind the row of trees on the right.
Now that we've nudged beyond the extreme of built-up London, this one's a proper footpath that happens to cross a railway. It's also a proper railway this time, the main line to Southend, which means several trains an hour rattling through at up to 75mph. And yet here we are, permitted to stroll across the line unchecked, protected only by a slew of signs and a two-step stile on either side. One of these stiles has a separate gate for dogs, but not the other, and the instruction Cyclists Dismount ignores the fact you couldn't have ridden straight through anyway. And yet despite the obvious risks there are currently no plans to close this crossing, I suspect because there's no nearby alternative, this being the only north-south connection between Cranham and the M25. Network Rail's census again suggests just two dozen users daily, perhaps because the only way out to the south is across a large buttercup meadow where horses graze, and the state of the mud suggests the path is an utter quagmire for much of the year.
It's the best part of an hour's walk to the next crossing, very little of it along roads, so only try this next part if you're superkeen. First follow a private path across Cranham Golf Course, where I watched pudgy Pringled youth mis-hitting tee shots, then enter the realm of the very excellent Thames Chase Forest Centre. Here a cafe and visitor centre cater to families who almost certainly drove here and might perhaps venture out into the surrounding community woodland. A public footpath exits the forest immediately alongside the M25, then you're aiming for the village of North Ockendon and another footpath which crosses the moat beyond the church. Good luck, this corner of London is defiantly and atypically rural.
Havering's fifth and final foot crossing can be found on the railway line between Upminster and Ockendon a few hundred metres inside the Greater London boundary. This used to be a remote spot, a brief interruption on a barely relevant footpath between North Ockendon and Pea Lane, but then in the 1980s the M25 arrived. It scythed across the landscape on an embankment, deftly dodging the railway beneath, but severed the route of Footpath 252 which was forced to divert alongside the motorway instead. I arrived by following a long hedgerow to a wire fence with a stile - single step this time - and waited for the train to Grays to zip by. This is the least substantial level crossing of the five, and the footpath beyond barely distinguishable along the edge of a dry sprouting field. When Network Rail did a nine-day survey in July 2016 no users were recorded, which I can well believe, so it's no surprise they plan to close this one too. It's probably for the best, another major road project is planned for the vicinity so Eve's crossing would inevitably have been snuffed out anyway.
Even when you reach the edge of the field, civilisation (aka Ockendon station) is still over a mile away. I was forced to dodge traffic along a country lane because the only shortcut across a field was blocked by a wall of shoulder-high nettles. But the walk was absolutely glorious, which I suspect I'm only saying because I haven't done anything similar for well over a year.
• Network Rail's level crossing database is here, including an interactive map and a downloadable spreadsheet.
• My map of London's ten public footpath crossings is here.
London's five other public footpath level crossings are:
» Angerstein(Greenwich) - alleyway across freight line, recently scheduled for closure.
» Trumpers(Ealing) - also across a freight line, see Geoff's video here.
» Golf Links(Enfield) - along a minor footpath up Crews Hill way.
» Lincoln Road(Enfield) - south of Enfield Town, closed to road traffic in 2012.
» Bourneview(Croydon) - almost in Surrey, between Kenley and Whyteleafe.
This is a post I'd been planning to write in March 2020, but circumstances conspired against.
Hornchurch is an impressively nondescript East London suburb, with little more to show historically than a medieval church and a former WW2 airfield. But geologically speaking it's extraordinary - the very furthest south that glaciers came in Britain - and we only know this because of the Overground's least used railway line.
The Romford to Upminster branch line, constructed in 1892, included a shortcutting across fields to the north of St Andrew's Church. Hornchurch Cutting was only eight metres deep but it exposed an unexpected seam of boulder clay overlaid by sand and gravel. Local geologist T.V. Holmes, then the vice-president of the Essex Field Club, undertook a field trip to the excavations and discovered several Jurassic fossils that could only have been carried from the Midlands by an ice sheet. No such glacial deposition has been found further south than Hornchurch, confirming this as the ultimate limit of ice penetration during the last two million years.
Every time you ride a train through Emerson Park, which admittedly isn't very often, you are in fact passing through a point of considerable geological significance. With TfL in increasing need of a moneyspinner to boost their finances, they could do worse than rebrand the Romford to Upminster line with an Ice Age theme, perhaps with Pixar characters on the rolling stock and cut-out dinosaurs lining the sides of the track, to encourage repeat journeys.
It's possible to go down into the historic cutting because this brief section of track is one of a handful of places in London with a pedestrian-only level crossing. Find your way to Maywin Drive or Woodhall Crescent, follow the alleyway and make your way down the zigzag ramp to track level. Plainly it's not somewhere you should hang around, nor is there any access to the trackside, plus most of the exposed pebbly soil is covered with green sheeting, but there is a geological frisson from descending into an artificial trench that changed the way we look at Ice Age Britain.
There's more. What excited Thomas Holmes wasn't so much the glacial deposits as the gravel on top of them, because normally that's found underneath. This was evidence that the Thames was younger than the fossils, confirming that the Thames was diverted to its present course after the arrival of the ice sheet. Hornchurch is the only place this layering of Thames gravel and boulder clay has been seen, hence the only location that confirms precisely when the big shift took place.
Half a million years ago the River Thames flowed across Hertfordshire via what's now the Colne valley and the Vale of St Albans, then eastward across Essex towards the coast at Clacton. 450,000 years ago the Anglian ice sheet intruded, blocking the route to the sea and creating a series of lakes which eventually overtopped and sent the Thames on a more familiar southerly course. The ice is known to have reached Bricket Wood and Finchley, with the lobe that pushed down towards Hornchurch one of the last obstructions. I've massively oversimplified this, sorry, so for more than three sentences you'llneedtoexplorefurther.
There's more. In the 1970s the Electricity Board built a new substation in a former gravel pit round the back of St Andrew's Church, quarter of a mile south of the railway cutting. They found more boulder clay while they were digging the foundations, again unexpectedly, which encouraged more geologists to descend and check the soil. This time they failed to find further glacial deposits at the far end of the pit, confirming that the substation was actually the further south the ice sheet ever came.
In Hornchurch the old gravel pit is known as ‘The Dell’ and is thought to have been used as an amphitheatre for sporting events in the 18th century. These days it's securely fenced at one end and massively overgrown at the other, then surrounded by a cemetery, so not somewhere anyone could easily clamber down into. I eventually found a vantage point just off the main path and peered over the rim, with trees and vegetation erupting from below, and essentially saw absolutely nothing. But how brilliant to have uncovered the spot where the ice stopped 450,000 years ago, and to know that Hornchurch is by no means as impressively nondescript as it first appears.
Barking Riverside station is taking shape and on track to open in autumn next year.
It wasn't here when I last visited two years ago, this was merely levelled ground, but infrastructural progress is essential when there's a massive housing estate to be built.
A quick reminder. The area in question is the site of the defunct Barking Power Station, a huge expanse approximately two-thirds the size of the City of London, first snapped up by a housing developer twenty-seven years ago. Eleven thousand homes are planned but only twelve hundred can be built before transport links are improved and that's been a painfully slow process. An Overground extension from Barking got the nod in 2016, replacing a DLR pipedream scrapped in 2008, and only from next year can development surge ahead. In the meantime this is a fascinatingly outcast corner of the capital, still mostly openspace, albeit teetering on the edge of becoming Highrise-on-Thames.
The newstation is a two-platformed affair raised off the ground and encased in a glass box with timber cladding. The main entrance will be at the riverward end - that's the fully weatherproofed half - with ticket hall and retail opportunities tucked underneath. At present there's a good view across the building site past pipes and portakabins, but one day all the intermediate space will be densely developed because the premium spot for a district centre is right beside the station.
One of the things you can see outside at present is a pallet of roundels, securely wrapped and ready for installation. They're Overground orange with a blue bar across the centre, obviously, and it looks like they've been imprinted on glass panels rather than the usual white enamel. Considerably more abundant are the trackbed sections destined to connect the new station to civilisation. Hundreds of these white blocks are stacked within the grounds of the former Dagenham Sunday Market, a shopping experience permanently extinguished by the pandemic so currently a useful holding space.
At present only a short strip of housing has been built to the east of the station up a road called Fielders Crescent. You can see it in the distance from the station, just beyond the free school campus that arrived here first and just to the left of the cluster of cranes building phase 2. A bank of apartments curves round the crest of an artificial contour, intermittently punctured by short terraces of townhouses. Their balconies are all occupied and summer-ready, although residents will only have enjoyed one year looking out towards Thamesmead before their estuary view was blocked by the next line of rising flats.
The sales office is open at Fielders Quarter, although they're keen potential punters don't just drop in. The sign outside says Please Stay Inside Your Car Until Your Appointment Tim, partly due to lettering curtailment but also because they're not expecting anyone to come by bus. Apartments start at £249,495 which is damned good for zone 4, although parking spaces cost extra and don't expect to end up with a Thames view either.
The latest addition to the estate is a play area on Northgate Road, open less than a week, opposite a more extensive park whose gates should open later this year. Close by is The Wilds Ecology Centre, a brushed steel box that'll double up as a co-working space, because that's what you get instead of a community centre these days. This is also where they placed the bus stand for route EL1, currently the best means of escape... and if you look up you'll see why all these things are here. Three chains of pylons preclude the development of saleable flats underneath, so this peripheral area gets to have all the amenities instead.
This also is one of the best places to see the low-slung viaduct as it swoops over Choats Road and curves round to join the Tilbury line. This too has appeared in the last two years and will ultimately whisk local residents to Barking, from which they can change for wherever they really want to go. The slogan on the hoarding underneath claims that Barking Riverside will be "seamlessly connected to London, the countryside and beyond", and if you believe that kind of thing you totally deserve to come and live here to discover the inconvenient truth for yourself.
I'm pleased to say that Footpath 47 survives, the glorious half mile of entirely undeveloped waterfront where you can spot birds, walk through wild flowers, watch boats on the river and enjoy an extensive estuarine panorama. It'll be a few years before the advancing vanguard of flats gets this far and reimagines this wild space as a sanitised wetland strip with timber boardwalks and a 'coastal garden', but for now it's the only stretch of river that Barking Riverside residents can actually access. Come by train next year and you might still see the place at its best. [10 photos]
Sat 1: Picked up a copy of Time Out outside Stepney Green station. It's the first edition since September because people are finally going Out again, although it's only monthly to start with. May's edition has 48 pages - 14 pages of adverts, plenty of non-time-specific editorial and 6 pages of Things To Do. You can download Time Out for free these days, they need the circulation. Sun 2: I wasn't thrilled by the Line of Duty finale, but I wasn't as grumbly as some people (and at least it tied up all the appropriate loose ends). Mon 3: Dropped my TV remote control onto the carpet, which I've done several times before but now it sounds like something inside has broken loose. Thankfully everything still seems to work but now I have to live with it rattling like a kaleidoscope every time I use it. I must learn not to leave it balanced on top of an empty mug. Tue 4: A few minutes into today's walk I stumbled upon two men flytipping at the end of Wrexham Road. They looked redfaced and angry at being spotted, then drove off hurriedly in their white van. Annoyingly the photo I thought I'd taken of their numberplate didn't come out, but I'm reassured they probably think it did. Wed 5: It took four attempts to find a shop with a 200th anniversary copy of The Guardian (so my thanks to P&P News in Maryland). Thu 6: Went for a walk around the lake in Beckton Park. First spotted a heck of a lot of black plastic rat traps in the undergrowth. Then spotted several large black rats scampering everywhere, blimey, which simultaneously explained the number of traps and suggested they're not working. Fri 7: Having checked the use-by-date, decided it was finally time to open the emergency UHT milk I bought last spring. It properly wrecks a good cup of tea, that stuff.
Sat 8: Crossrail excitement! A sign has been pasted up beside the works entrance under the bridge at Pudding Mill Lane which says Trial Running - RFLI Rules beyond this point. Trial Running is the critical stage before Trial Operations which is the really critical stage before Passenger Service. Trial Running had been pencilled for the summer of 2018, then more realistically "at the earliest opportunity in 2020", then most recently "at the earliest opportunity in 2021", and here we finally are. The first pseudo-shuttling will begin on Monday. Sun 9: I keep going back to the Old Street Roundabout to watch it being sequentially de-roundabouted, and there still isn't an interesting blogpost in it. Mon 10: Bought Now That's What I Call Eurovision because it was only a tenner for three discs, and because last year's Icelandic entry is on it, but mostly because Tesco know a few of us still buy CDs so this is one of the tiny handful of titles they bother to stock.
Tue 11: prickly yellow gorse, flies plague the sand by the lake, some bluebells linger #WhippsCrossHaiku Wed 12: I was surprised to see a plane low overhead above the Greenway because it's not on the City Airport flightpath. It turned out to be a KLM plane that had aborted its landing and was going round for a second attempt. Thu 13: Following another of this month's blitzkrieg showers, the streets are full of bedraggled souls in their Eid finery dashing home from the mosque. Fri 14: I'm not sure if the empty tables outside City pubs and restaurants are because it's 12 degrees and a bit damp or because everyone's saving themselves to go indoors on Monday. Sat 15: Six weeks after the death of the Duke of Edinburgh, an all-black poster outside East India DLR continues to offer deepest sympathy to Her Majesty the Queen and members of the Royal Family. Sun 16: The downside of going back on a tube train for the first time in 8 months is hearing the See It Say It Sorted message for the first time in 14 months. I really hoped they'd given that up by now.
Mon 17: The red hot pokers in the Olympic Park are looking jolly splendid. Tue 18: London's Nightingale Hospital closed over a year ago, but two giant blue signs on Burt Road still mark the entrance to the Staff & Contractor car park and nobody's yet taken down the staff shuttle signs in the bus shelter outside. Wed 19: Normally the iris on my balcony throws up one bloom but this year it's four. I have no idea what I did right but it looks very pretty. Thu 20: I was baffled to see a table of merchandise outside lowly AFC Hornchurch's stadium, which is tucked away off a quiet Upminster sidestreet, but it turns out they're playing Hereford in the FA Trophy final at Wembley this Saturday. Go urchins! (and they won...)
Fri 21: In my attempt to spot all 420 personalised numberplate combinations from A1 to Y20, which I started three months ago at the start of March, I've now seen all of them except for F15, G16, H18, T17, W20, X16, Y13 and Y17. If any of you have a vehicle bearing one of these eight, I'd be much obliged if you could drive it round the Bow Roundabout a few times. Sat 22: I didn't think the UK's Eurovision song deserved nul points, indeed the new scoring system ought to have made that nigh impossible so we excelled there, but it was never a contender. As for the winning Italian song, that totally passed me by. Sun 23: Seven months after she died my aunt's house in Suffolk has gone on the market and swiftly sold. The estate agent described the property as having a 'Superb Kitchen' and 'Superb Mature Grounds and Gardens' which I suspect she'd have been jolly proud about. But it's eerie swiping through photos of the interior stripped of her belongings and realising I'll never go inside again. Mon 24: I've been living in this flat for almost 20 years, and today is the first time I have ever felt the need to go and knock on the door of the flat upstairs to tell the inhabitants how much noise they're making. Alas they didn't open the door (I suspect because they didn't hear me). Tue 25: The McDonalds by the Bow Roundabout is closed for a month-long upgrade, which this week includes digging up the drive-thru lane, realigning the pedestrian entrance and ripping the brick cladding off the walls. Wed 26: I spotted the second series of Bridgerton being filmed at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, which was all bright lights, top hats and bonnets. I also bumped into one of my regular drinking partners watching through the railings, which was a pleasant surprise. But I need to retrain my inner monologue not to say things out loud, because it appears I'm very much out of practice.
Thu 27: The Newham Trackside Wall, Crossrail's very-very-long artwork covering a blank barrier, has finally reached Silvertown. The last section includes one panel about pub quizzes at the Tate & Lyle factory and another about Stella Minge and her 1950s Molly House. Fri 28: Not only did I get my second jab today but I also used a cashpoint for the first time in 14 months, went inside BestMate's house for the first time in 7 months and ate a meal cooked by someone else for the first time since October, and it felt like a bit of a landmark day. Sat 29: It's been a kingfisher-free month in the Olympic Park, which is a shame after six consecutive blue-flash successes. Sun 30: It was odd seeing actual tourists on Tower Bridge again, and an actual queue waiting to go inside and up the towers, but I'd prefer to walk past thanks. Mon 31: My first bus journey for 63 weeks was aboard a rail replacement bus, partly because I hoped it'd be quiet but also because it's an excellent way to go five miles from home for free. I skipped the first bus with 14 passengers on the upper deck (because it looked like it was being driven by a timetable jobsworth) and was rewarded with a 'just two of us' instead (which got to the destination quicker).
