It's not yet the middle of October but you've already asked dozens of questions in the comments this month, most of which I haven't answered. Let me put that right.
Questions to which the answer is No
» No paragliders?
» Is it in Domesday?
» Did you see it, DG?
» Dark brown maybe?
» Is Pimlico the "worst" connected tube station?
» And did he do it within the 1 hour hopper fare?
» Did you just casually throw in the entry for 26 Apr 2013?
» Can you let us know your policies on Bus Stop M please?
» Did the gas cooker have an electric starter to light the gas?
» Is the spelling of Haringey a portmanteau of HARRINGay and HornsEY?
» Have you considered a cheap gym (or even multiple gym "trials") as a way of sourcing nice hot showers?!
Questions to which the answer is Yes
» ...all this in one day?!
» Am I misunderstanding something?
» With, or without a narrowboat underneath?
» Does the 236 even go to the end of Victoria Park Road?
» Is that the clip with Ms. Arcuri we keep seeing on the news?
» Was it luck or careful planning that meant that you never boarded a bus which would reach the end of the route before you had travelled the requisite number of stops to the terminus, and never ended up at a stop served only by the route you had just arrived on?
Proper questions
» How is luggage ambiguously dragged?
» What's specifically Atlantic about this?
» From which individual tube platform can you reach the greatest number of tube stations?
» I was just wondering, where would you say is the optimum place to sit on a single-decker bus to enjoy the journey the most?
But maybe stop to ask yourself... is that question mark really necessary?
Questions to which the answer is No, and you knew the answer was No when you asked
» Is this a guest post?
» Was it Road To Nowhere?
» Can we have a cross London tram too?
» Muggers lurking on every street corner?
» They didn't couldn't afford a night shift?
» Did the slice of Robin Hood Gardens smell of piss?
» A candidate for the forth plinth in Trafalgar Square?
» Anyone heard from Frank Dobson or Steven Norris lately?
» Is this the beginning of a series about punctuation marks?
» As distinct from what, exactly? Proceeding with eyes wide shut?
» Will you set up a Muggers Guild so they can be properly organised?
» Is that the sound of the bosses at TfL quaking in their boots, I hear?
» On the topic of buses, can you bring back Greenwich Waterfront Transit?
» Don't think the Northern line extension to Battersea will change anything for top 10 right?
Questions to which the answer is Yes, and you knew the answer was Yes when you asked
» Ego?
» Maybe it's changed?
» On the census it's both!?
» Did you read the question?
» So, New Year's Day the 11?
» Legend of seven Saxon kings?
» East Ham? West Ham? Newham?
» Are these guys engineers or technicians?
» A second mention of my home town, Leighton Buzzard, in as many days?
» Forgive me if I am being unusually dense, but if you can only use one train then doesn't that preclude changing lines anywhere?
» You say ' ... a FORMER Cumbria MP ...' presumably referring to Rory Stewart? Is he not still an MP, merely one that will stand down when the next General Election is held?
Yesterday I went to fifteen free art exhibitions. Here, very briefly, is what I thought.
Serpentine Gallery
☆☆☆ Albert Oehlen (until 2 February): Canvases of jumbled colour, plus several huge charcoals themed around a single 1940's surrealist painting, plus an almost inaudible soundtrack by Steamboat Switzerland. I haven't enjoyed an exhibition at the Serpentine since 2017.
★★☆ Luchita Hurtado: I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn (until 20 October): However, over at the Sackler there's some proper art for once. Luchita's first painting in 1938 was of a gas ring, after which she eschewed objects and struck out into pattern and self. Her favoured viewpoint appears to be looking down at her unclad body, so many of her works are perhaps best described as breastscapes.
National Portrait Gallery
★★☆ Redacted Oil Company Portrait Award 2019 (until 20 October): A roomful of contemporary portraits, as good as you'd expect, and far more diverse than would ever have been the case 20 years ago. If you're thinking of contributing next year, wrinkles add a lot of character.
White Cube (Bermondsey)
★☆☆ Mona Hartoum - Remains To Be Seen (until 3 November): Mona scores a point for her perspex mobile of the Earth's continents, which drew admiring glances, which her roomful of skeletal bunkbeds didn't.
☆☆☆ Harmony Hammond (until 3 November): Minimalist, abstract and monochrome. Rarely do I walk out of a gallery less than 15 seconds after walking in, but I felt like I'd seen it all.
☆☆☆ Dóra Maurer (until 3 November): That said, I spent less than 10 seconds with Dóra's overlapping planes of colour. Technically splendid, emotionally meh.
White Cube (Masons Yard)
★★☆ Damien Hirst: Mandalas (until 2 November): Welcome back to the sheepslicer, who on this occasion has appropriated thousands and thousands of butterflies and arranged their wings in colour-coordinated concentric circles. The suite of works is undeniably gorgeous, both individually and collectively, because nature's splendour is unmatched and their assembly has been impeccable. But it did feel somewhat distasteful to be admiring death on such a scale.
Newport Street Gallery
★☆☆ Reason Gives No Answers (until 10 November): Meanwhile, over at Damien's actual gallery, 50 of his acquired works have come out of storage for a rare showing. Three bins and six kettles. A tyre in a box. Two massively oversized biros. Several canvases of varying interest. I did love the Francis Bacon, but overall more miss than hit.
☆☆☆ John Squire : Disinformation (until 10 November): Two of the six galleries instead feature big glitchy portraits. I would have preferred more bins and kettles.
Whitechapel Gallery
★★☆ ”la Caixa” Collection of Contemporary Art (until 5 January): It's quite bitty, this Spanish curation, but the absolute winner was Eve Sussman’s random video of an unnamed central Asian oil town. A separate screen to one side shows how each scene is being algorithmically selected from a database of short clips, linked by keyword, hence any perceived sense of meaning is entirely unintentional.
★★☆ Eileen Simpson and Ben White: Once Heard Before (until 5 January): Scratchy records, 1950s vinyl and contemporary sampling, all transferred from Salford. Was being enjoyed by the youngest, hippest crowd I've ever seen here.
★★★ Sense Sound/Sound Sense (until 2 February): A small exhibition celebrating Fluxus, a 60s movement with an avant garde view of musical composition. Water dripped into a bucket. Notes held for a very long time. Building a fire. Music derived from the numbers in train timetables. 4’33” of silence. It's all nuts, but the sheer density of creativity exhibited is inspirational.
Victoria & Albert Museum
★★★ Robin Hood Gardens (until tomorrow): Poplar's iconic concrete tenements are being demolished, but before they went the V&A commissioned this monumental half hour fly-through tribute. We rise through floors, snoop in kitchens, glide along walkways and admire the gridded homeliness. At one point a large yellow claw is seen through the window smashing apart the building opposite. If we must lose this icon, Do Ho Suh's mesmerising video is a worthy memento.
★★☆ Beatrix Potter's Art: 'drawn with design' (until 17 November): Childhood sketches of ducks, pigs and rabbits, proving that Beatrix was a better artist at the age of eight than we will ever be.
★★★ Into the Blue (until 19 April): The Architecture gallery's sideroom houses yet another winning exhibition, concerning "the origin and revival of pools, swimming baths and lidos". Skip around the country from spa towns to coastal dips, admiring Victorian design and Art Deco features through photographs, plans and contemporary film clips. Can't go wrong with that.
Royal Academy
★★☆ Antony Gormley (until 3 December): This one's not free (it's twenty quiddish) and I went today (not yesterday). Expect a full retrospective, from waxed sliced bread to dangling metal fruit, plus a heck of a lot of trademark humanoids in multiplicitous forms. The most interesting rooms are exuberant assault courses (picking through spiralled cable or negotiating a gloomy hardboard cave), the dullest is crossed by three wires at right angles. Nobody's here for the small paintings. Four decades of sketchy notebooks intrigue. The penultimate gallery is flooded with seawater, so visitors can only stare. If nothing else, varied enough to be a memorable experience.
Also on my 7 mile perambulation, I observed the following...
Kensington Gardens
★☆☆ Junya Ishigami: Serpentine Pavilion 2019 (closed 6 October): After celebrating a social summer in a shady slate cave, the time has come to disassemble the annual pavilion's roof. I watched three workmen removing the last slates from a wire mesh, less carefully than the artist had slotted them together, and piling them onto a suspended pallet.
★★☆ The Hay Wain (11 October): A horse and trap pulled up outside the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, then a man hopped off and started forking grass into the back of the trailer. Far more bucolic than one expects in W2.
Trafalgar Square
★★★ Extinction Rebellion (until 19 October): A tented village filled half the square on one side of the fountains. Flags waved. Banners had been draped. Some kind of plant-based meal was being doled out into reusable tubs. Fake flames lapped up the base of Nelson's Column. A pink octopus wobbled theatrically at the foot of the steps. A conga was launched ...and a line of police watched everything from the roadway.
If ever you have an hour to spare and find yourself in Uxbridge, not that you ever will, why not give the Uxbridge Trail of Discovery a go? This two mile circuit explores the historic market town's waterside environs, assuming you're still vaguely interested, and is branded as 'Walk One' on the Hillingdon council website. Residents might alternatively stumble upon it via an information board in the middle of Uxbridge High Street, which isn't actually on the trail, or spot some of the handful of path markers that haven't been lost to time.
What's never made clear is precisely what there is to discover on the Trail of Discovery, other than a mallard, so I went discovering to find out.
Let's start in Fassnidge Park, because that's where you start if you follow the sign from the High Street down the back of Tesco and across the Cedars roundabout. Fassnidge is an Edwardian recreation ground, and still delightfully recognisable as such, with a central bandstand, wrought iron gates and a rustic toilet hut. It was donated to the town by Kate Fassnidge, whose back garden this once was, and who rolled the first jack on the bowling green in 1927. The Rusty Bike cafe is operated by an upcycling cycle hub, its terrace used as an observation deck by the mothers of ambulant toddlers. The skatepark in the far corner is doing its job of keeping Uxbridge's hoodied youth occupied. A memorial stone amid the flower beds commemorates the 200th anniversary of the incorporation of Uxbridge Massachusetts. There has already been much to discover.
The park is shielded from what could be its finest feature by a lengthy fence. Frays River runs down the eastern flank, and is only revealed when you step out onto the green in the conservation area at Rockingham Parade. One bank is faced by two storey workers' terraces, the other has early Victorian cottages, confirming that tiny parts of Uxbridge are rather more characterful than you might expect. At one end is three-arched Rockingham Bridge, built 1809, widened 1895, whose plaque tells a wartime story I'll leave you to discover when you visit. But I'm sorry to report that the only cafe on the Uxbridge Trail of Discovery, Original Lahore, is currently closed due to an electrical fault in the kitchen so you won't be going there.
In the waters below the bridge are those mallards the information panel promised, along with a small brown mammal swimming towards the weeds on the opposite bank. Instinctively I hope it's a rare water vole, but common sense (and a slew of helpful internetpages) suggest it was obviously a rat. Rarely can a business have been so poorly named as the Harrods Car Wash, a scrappy warehouse unit with a heap of dumped electrical goods out front. Keep walking and you'll soon emerge into Rockingham Recreation Ground, where the UTD offers an important choice... walk round three sides for the full experience or make a beeline to the nearest exit via the "shorter route". I took one for the team and did the full whack.
Frays River continues down the edge of the rec, now with added swans. It may look placid but a line of concrete embedded in the grass is labelled Do Not Remove - Flood protection - Do Not Remove, all the way from the playground to the final tree. One day I will return and attempt to walk the whole thing from Denham to West Drayton, as far as accessibility allows, so consider this a brief taster. On this occasion I also passed a bloke in a Team Commando t-shirt doing ostentatious press-ups and a bench occupied by questionable lager drinkers. Further round the perimeter is a 1929-vintage water fountain gifted by the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association, whose cattle troughs are normally of greater prominence.
Hillingdon has a thing about streets called Waye, so it's no surprise to be following Frays Waye back towards Rockingham Road. The pub at the end is The Dolphin, the humpback bridge alongside is Dolphin Bridge and the newbuild flats can only be Dolphin Bridge House. Behind the pub's garden is the Grand Union Canal, here on its long journey up the heavily-threaded Colne Valley. Uxbridge has all these watery treasures but has hidden them behind a bypass and then a string of industrial units, so thank heavens for the Trail of Discovery for bringing them to light.
Almost all of the remainder of the walk is along canal towpath, so that's nice. Just keep looking towards the water, because the adjacent buildings are almost entirely industrial estate. Through the first gap are the remnants of what used to be the Bell Punch Factory, purveyors of hand-operated public transport ticket machines. They moved here from Finsbury Square in 1922, to 'The Island, Uxbridge', although I only discovered this when I got home and did some tangential Googling. This is a popular stretch of canal for long term moorings, as you can tell by the miniature gardens and occasional bird feeders dotted along the hedge. Narrowboats may have ornamental ducks on top, or small dogs peering out the front doors, or mohawked inhabitants sitting on the rear deck with a ciggie. At one point the Buckinghamshire boundary is barely 30 metres away along one braid of the River Colne. I have walked finer half-miles of canal.
All that remains is to return to the starting point, which means very busy roads, safety barriers and pedestrian crossings. The transfer to urban realism comes alongside the Swan & Bottle, which is probably your best bet for a beer along the entire walk. The campus of Bucks New University, which is not in Bucks and barely a university, was built on the site of Uxbridge High Street station. The Trail of Discovery signs are fairly prominent along Oxford Road, but you couldn't have relied on them elsewhere to get you round. After my circuit I've discovered a side to the town I'd only half-realised was there, and you will likely never see, so thankyou for reading to the end.
Today is 10/10, so I've been out riding ten bus routes.
Specifically a chain of ten bus routes, riding one more stop each time.
First route one stop, second route two stops... and so on up to ten stops.
Obviously I started here...
8: Bus Stop M → Roman Road Market(1 stop)
As one stop journeys go this is a long one, three-quarters of a mile no less, which is why I've picked it for my first trip. The 8 starts at Bow Church because it can't get under the railway bridge so has to go to central London via the Bow Roundabout and the A12. Lots of local people are therefore able to use it for a quick hop to the shops, and they do, flooding into the empty vehicle (front door only these days, of course). I am not the only person travelling just one stop, but I am the only person getting off to wait for another bus.
488: Roman Road Market → Waterside Close(2 stops)
This is twice as many stops, but less than half the distance. My brief trip passes a fire station that's now a college, some just-demolished retirement flats, the end of E3's most famous street market and a council estate they've attempted to brighten up using sculptures of giant wild flowers. Thankfully another passenger wants to alight at stop number two so I don't have to embarrass myself by dinging prematurely.
276: Waterside Close → Rothbury Road(3 stops)
First it's under the A12, where the graffiti starts, then up and over the Hertford Canal. A large area of recently-commercial land on Fish Island is in the early stages of rising as new flats. Hackney Wick has already succumbed. The Rothbury Road stop is immediately alongside a sparkling new development, its courtyard still fenced off, but with a gap to allow fitters and marketing folk to slip through pre-launch. They've named this jumped-up alleyway Meldola Yard, after the dye Meldola's Blue which was once manufactured in Hackney Wick (but not precisely here, indeed we're on the wrong side of the railway, so this is not quite the heritage win it first appears).
339: Rothbury Road → Stratford International Station('4 stops')
There's only one other bus route from Rothbury Road, so I'm taking that. The 339 is the bus through the as-yet unpopulated parts of the Olympic Park, veering off down White Post Lane near Hackney Wick station (where graffiti is at absolute maximum levels). As evidence that the Wick has changed, not necessarily for the better, a silver caravan branded Cauliwingz opened last weekend dispensing florets coated in cajun batter at £7 a tray. Since the start of the year the 339 has been diverted round the south side of the Olympic Stadium, passing two temporary stops that TfL's systems still refuse to acknowledge. The onboard display instead insists the next stop is the London Aquatics Centre, as does the 339's webpage, so I too am pretending they don't exist for the purposes of tallying my journey (because it'll make changing buses easier). Even though this area is local to me, I still spot one building site that was open ground the last time I passed by. Stratford City's bus station is officially stop three, where almost everyone else gets off, but I wait to alight round the back of the multi-storey car park behind the multi-storey car park.
308: Stratford International Station → Hackney Marshes(5 stops)
When I traced out today's route at home this is as far as I got, so everything beyond Stratford is unplanned. The 308 whisks me through the former 2012 Athletes Village, now a thriving community, indeed there are more people walking around its streets with shopping bags, sandwiches and pushchairs than I've ever seen here before. More flats are going up in all the available gaps, even on top of the community gardens the developers were waxing lyrical about five years ago. The bus garage at the top of Temple Mills Lane has facilities for refuelling not very many hydrogen-powered single deckers. A school PE lesson is taking place on a convenient set of steps alongside Hackney Marshes. Posters at bus stops warn of disruption during the Hackney Half marathon five months ago.
W15: Hackney Marshes → Homerton Hospital(6 stops)
I'm impressed by how many staging points on my semi-random journey are turning out to be places you've probably heard of. I'm less impressed when the onboard electronic display isn't working, so I have to count the stops manually like it's 2004 or something. This accidentally reveals that the TfL webpage is wrong again, missing two stops around Homerton Hospital where the W15 is definitely scheduled to stop, indeed the underlying data is so wrong that even Citymapper doesn't know they exist. The lady in the seat in front of me is crocheting something very small and very brown.
236: Homerton Hospital → Mare Street/Victoria Park Road(7 stops)
You have to be patient if you're a bus driver picking up outside a hospital. Our driver waits for a slow pensioner, then allows in a late double buggy, then waits again to allow an elderly couple to catch up. The twins in the buggy are asleep, hands touching. An ambulance worker is walking back to Homerton Ambulance station carrying 12 pints of milk. The luxury brand outlet along Morning Lane is as vacuously empty as it usually is. An old garage on Mare Street is being demolished so it can become yet more flats. Oh hang on, this bus is now on diversion because of long-term gas main works. The on-board display flashes up "Announcement in progress" but only after the announcement has finished, which for hard-of-hearing passengers is doubly useless.
48: Mare Street/Victoria Park Road → Commercial Street/Worthy Street(8 stops)
I have a wide choice of buses from this stop, but there's only one I'm ever going to choose - the route that's withdrawn on Saturday. The 48 has been deemed surplus to requirements, spending too long running alongside parallel routes and not enough time doing its own thing. I'm lucky to spot it stops here because the 48 tile has already been removed from the bus stop and replaced by a pure white square. Unfortunately this stop is also where the drivers change over and ours hasn't turned up, so we get to wait almost ten minutes while the departing driver awaits his relief. "They don't need it any more," he tells a passenger. "You might want to get off now and catch that 55, it'll be good practice." When we do finally head off, most of my eight stop-journey follows Hackney Road, an East End road in flux. One of the age-old handbag manufacturers - Boris Bags - is closing down and a clearance sale is underway. What was definitely Gala Bingo the last time I rode past is being replaced by 66 boutique apartments. The British Lion pub is now a wine bar. And when we do finally reach the edge of the City, sigh, most of Norton Folgate is in ruins apart from one wall they've preserved as an edgy facade. This being Shoreditch, the white tile where '48' used to be already has a pink marketing sticker on it. This bus terminates at the end of service tomorrow.
205: Commercial Street/Worthy Street → Stepney Green(9 stops)
A ridiculously high number of buses depart bus stop D, which could take me to the West End or deep into south London. But because I'm on my penultimate bus I select the one that heads for home, making the most of a fortuitous (and unplanned) overlap. We nip through the City, dodging suited jaywalkers and ambiguously-dragged luggage. We break out through the Aldgate non-gyratory, then cross back into Tower Hamlets for the long straight road ahead. The hordes board at Whitechapel, including a boisterous backseat posse. Counting to nine is harder than counting to one, but I'm fairly certain the Genesis cinema is the right place to alight.
25: Stepney Green → Bus Stop M(10 stops)
The 25 is a lot busier than the 205 because it goes all the way and runs less often than it used to. I squeeze into an upstairs seat along what's a very familiar road and observe our eastbound progress. A wheelchair user manages to board by the canal, then requests the ramp goes back down two stops later. Bow Church station is the site of another protracted driver changeover (the bane of my life, because it's invariably quicker to get out and walk). And sorry, I was lying when I said my journey ended at Bus Stop M, because that was truthfully only stop number nine. Real life never quite works out as perfectly as we'd like, dammit. Instead I had to stay on one extra stop to Marshgate Lane to complete my 1-10 challenge before walking home. 45 stops in total, distance travelled 12 miles, ultimate distance covered 450m.
