Somewhere famous: The BRIT School If fame costs, then SE25 is where you start paying. In Selhurst to be precise, in the UK's first state school for the performing arts. The BRIT School arrived here in 1991, and since then it's pumped scores of famous names into the musical mainstream. Leona Lewis for one, and Kate Nash, and Katie Melua and Adele, and even that Dane Bowers bloke who had a hit with Victoria Beckham. Plus Amy Winehouse, which just goes to show that not every school discipline policy works long term. Various record companies sponsor the place, not surprisingly given the royalties they recoup as a result. This is the type of educational establishment that ITV had in mind when they developed Britannia High, only rather more successful and with a far better long-term future. The school's on two sites, both along The Crescent and separated by a car park. One's a typical redbrick Edwardian building with high windows, nabbed from a former girls' school. And the other's much more modern, like a white-legged glass caterpillar squatting beside the road, and considerably lighter and brighter within. On a Saturday morning there's not much going on. I spotted a few extra-curricular students carrying instruments across the playground and heard the sound of animated performance somewhere within, but it was a pale reflection of the seething creating cauldron this must be on a weekday. I wonder which well-rounded alumnus wannabe we'll all be discovering this year. by train: Selhurst by bus: 50, 75, 157, 468
Somewhere sporting: Selhurst Park To the slopes below Upper Norwood, to the home of mid-Championship Crystal Palace Football Club. SelhurstPark is a 1920s ground that's been slowly upgraded and expanded over the years and is now a hybrid architectural hotchpotch. Along Park Road the stadium looks fairly traditional, all gates and turnstiles and tiny ticket windows. From Whitehorse Lane the stadium looks suspiciously like a boxy out-of-town trading estate, with a none-too-inviting staircase leading up from Sainsbury's front entrance towards the executive boxes. Meanwhile the Holmesdale Road grandstand resembles a very tall block of boring redbrick offices with a curved black roof on top and stacks of seating behind. I took the opportunity of a home match against Ipswich to explore more closely within the gated perimeter. Three hours before kick off the stewards were all in place, even if there was nobody to steward, and the programme sellers were similarly poised but premature. A cheery bloke in a red and blue scarf trundled by in his wheelchair, while a few bullet-headed stalwarts arrived early because Saturday is football day and it'd be wrong to stay away. Low winter sun glinted on the inscribed bricks in the Centenary Wall("Palace 4 life", "Till I die", "Come on Eagles" "Glad All Over!"). Busy inside their solitary trailer, the executive chefs of the British Burgers Company readied their deep fat fryers for an expected onslaught of hot dog guzzlers. And in the official shop by the ticket office, twitchy retail staff watched an early trickle of punters buying not much, not even the 20%-off babywear. Oh yes, there was definitely a whiff of pre-match optimism in the air when I headed off to the bus stop. Alas, when I passed by later in the afternoon the floodlights were beating down on a 4-1 home defeat. Palace's intermittent glory years remain little more than memories amongst these suburban avenues. by train: Selhurst by bus: 468
Somewhere random: Purley Way It's a three mile section of the A23. It was opened in 1925 as the Croydon by-pass. It was the first road in the UK to be lit with sodium lights. Today it's a grim arterial bottleneck. Let me take you on a journey.
Purley: Welcome to Purley, a pleasant but rather ordinary suburb that looks like it'd much prefer to still be in Surrey. Purley Way starts at Purley Cross, once a focal crossroads but now a joyless concrete gyratory in need of urgent upgrade. No such luck, not until the Tesco supermarket alongside has its plans for expansion approved. Maybe they'll also give the Rotary Clock a kickstart, because it definitely wasn't half past six when I shuffled past into the underpass. No sign anywhere of a cemetery, alas, because I really wanted to take a photograph entitled Purley Gates. So onward up the hill, past Lucinda's handbag & blouse emporium, and very carefully across the treacherous one-way system. It's no fun for pedestrians round here, nor indeed up much of the rest of the road.
Croydon Airport: In the week that the Government planned to turn open fields into London's main airport, here's a location where things went the other way. Croydon Aerodrome was the departure point for airbound bright young things of the thirties, saw fighter service during World War 2 and limped to a commercial close 50 years ago. Hey presto, a runway replaced by open space - it can be achieved. I would tell you more, but I've visited this airport previously as part of my random borough trip to neighbouring Sutton. Rest assured that the Art Deco terminal building still stands, that the De Havilland Heron perched on the grass outside has seen better days, and that one day I will come back on the first Sunday of the month when the VisitorCentre is actually open.
Waddon Ponds: Off-road, surrounded by housing estate, is a thin strip of municipal parkland with a secret. That curvaceous lake surrounded by trees is all that's left of the River Wandle in Croydon. It's an impressive remnant, not just for the amount of water visible but also for the many colonies of waterfowl that make their home here. Maybe it's because it was mid-January but there were birdseverywhere, including up on the grass and footpaths (Important notice: Please do not chase the wildfowl). I'm not very good at identifying any bird more complicated than a duck, but I think there were coots aplenty and some geese-y creatures plus some red crested small things, erm, sorry, dunno. And, other than a lone couple walking an agitated dog, I had the flocking lot of them to myself.
Big shops: Ah, so that explains the traffic jams. The northern end of Purley Way is a series of massive out-of-town shopping centres with giant warehouses fronted by expansive car parks. This is where South London comes to buy stuff, be it plasma TVs, cheap carpets or a month's worth of groceries. Start at one end and you could spend all day traipsing from one megastore to the next, and probably visit several big chains more than once. But only car drivers seemed welcome. There was no expectation that any pedestrian might dare walk this way, and at the top end they're banned from the flyover altogether. Instead I had to divert via a bleak alley past two foul-mouthed cherubs sitting on a wall (don't look at them, they'll lose interest if you don't look at them). For the first time in my life I was glad to reach IKEA, although I didn't risk my life further by popping in beneath the landmark power station chimneys for a 93p cooked breakfast. by train: Purley by tram: Waddon Marsh by bus: 289
Somewhere historic: Addington Palace There's not much that's proper old in the Croydon area. Creeping suburbia wiped out most of the ancient hamlets, and manors, and kings and queens of old generally gave the place a wide berth. But the market town has one long-standing connection, to the Archbishops of Canterbury, who had their summer residence in Croydon Palace from the 12th century onwards. Some of this building still stands, now part of an independent girls school, and guided tours are available on a handful of days throughout the year. But not in January, so I didn't go there. Instead I followed in the archbishops' 200-year-old footsteps, fleeing Croydon town centre for a place in the hills.
Addington Palace, formerly Addington Manor, is a Palladian mansion a few miles southeast of Croydon. It was bought by the government in 1808, paid for by the sale of the old palace, and as many as six consecutive Archbishops of Canterbury spent their summers here. No, I hadn't heard of any of them either. When the seventh moved back to Canterbury instead, the palace was sold on to a diamond merchant, then to the Red Cross who used it as an isolation hospital. In 1953 the lease was taken over by the Royal School of Church Music, an august body charged with maintaining ecclesiastical choral tradition. And it was they who once invited me to visit the palace, back when I was a cherubic youngster with soaring vocal cords. I don't remember much of the occasion, alas, apart from a few vague wood-panelled flashbacks.
I didn't feel quite so welcome on this visit. Addington Palace has moved down the spiritual ladder and is now a wedding, conference and banqueting venue. For a small fortune (plus deposit) you can hire the chapel for a bit of knot-tying, then dispatch your guests to the permanent marquee dumped in the back garden. Smart guests were arriving when I turned up, so I kept my distance behind the hired limos and tried extra carefully not to tread on the grass. The surrounding greenspace is owned by the Addington Palace Golf Club, a rather exclusive bunch ("shirts must have collars and sleeves") serving a very exclusive neighbourhood, and I didn't think they'd appreciate former choristers stepping out onto their fairway for a better photo opportunity.
Down the hill is Addington Village and tiny St Mary's Church. This is the borough's oldest building, complete with part-Saxon chancel, a medieval belfry and an unusual pyramid-capped tower. It's also, unexpectedly, the burial place of five of the six Archbishops who lived up at the Palace. You'd expect their bones to be stashed in Canterbury, or at least Lambeth, but instead their ties as Lord of Addington Manor drew them to rest here instead. The church offers occasional tours in the summer, but again not in mid-January, so instead I made do with a stroll around the compact churchyard trying to spot mitred memorials.
That's old Addington. NewAddington is a completely different matter, and a completely different world. This huge local authority housing estate, originally planned as a 'garden village', now sprawls unchecked across 1000 acres of former farmland. Sadly New Addington never achieved its aim as an aspirational community, not by a long chalk, and lack of facilities and isolation from the outside world led to the place being nicknamed Little Siberia. Today more than 20000 people live on its downmarket slopes, and few are the sort who play golf. The main shopping parade is awash with charity shops, bakeries and bookies, and the only supermarket options are the Co-Op or Iceland. This is a land of mobility scooters, sneering dogs and hoodied youth, and a million miles from the wealthy suburbs across the valley.
But one thing's rescued New Addington from abject misery, and that was the arrival of CroydonTramlink in 2000. Line 3 terminates at the top of town, with regular services down the hill towards central Croydon and civilisation. It's an enjoyable journey - through switchback woodland and through a couple of old railway tunnels - and much quicker than the old crawl by bus used to be. Another great example of improving social cohesion through investment in public transport infrastructure, and one of Croydon's most useful resources. You may never use it, because it's hard to think of a good reason for coming out this far, but the residents of New Addington can only be grateful that Tramlink reached them pre-Boris. by tram: Gravel Hill by bus: 130, 466
Somewhere pretty: Addington Hills Croydon boasts some stunningly pretty countryside, at least by normal London standards. The rolling hills and verdant valleys of the North DownsGreen Belt are rather gorgeous, and the perfect "somewhere pretty" for me to visit. Except I've already been, a couple of summers back, for a walk along section 5 of the London Loop. I strongly recommend this undulating hike around the southern rim of the capital, especially the views from Farthing Downs, but probably not in January. So I left that old favourite alone and explored a different council-recommended viewpoint instead. Just south of Shirley.
The easiest way to get to Addington Hills is by tram. Alight at Coombe Lane, which looks like a forgotten halt in the middle of rural England, and then take the path into the undergrowth. No really, don't be afraid, this muddy track is another stretch of the London Loop, and the woodland doesn't stay dense for long. You emerge beside what must be London's most remote Chinese restaurant, and then the path turns left away from the car park towards an elevated stone podium. Oh my word, look at that. The land drops away beneath you, across the capital's largest expanse of heathery heathland, and there's a great (and unusual) view across most of London. To the left that's the metropolis of Croydon, its skyscraper office blocks clearly evident. A bit further round, surely that white arch can't be Wembley 17 miles away, but yes it is. There are the two south London TV masts and, across to the right, a prominent cluster of pointy topped buildings that can only be Canary Wharf. Hang on, back a bit, rather fainter than expected, there's the Gherkin and the towers of the City. A series of metal plaques around the edge of the platform confirm what you're seeing - even on a clear day, apparently, Amersham. Splendid stuff. Just be careful which route you take back to the tram stop, because some of the couples lurking in the car park looked like they might have a completely different view on offer. by tram: Coombe Lane by bus: 130, 466
Croydon props up the capital from beneath, and it's also the London borough with the largest population. So big, indeed, that the council have their sights set on reinventing Croydon as London's Third City. Much of the northern part of the borough is suburban sprawl, but down south the land gets hillier, and greener, and (in places) considerably more exclusive. I spent yesterday attempting to explore some of the borough's more interesting locations, which wasn't easy because no matter where I went the transport network kept dragging me back to the centre of town. Definitely town, Croydon's no city yet.
Somewhere to begin: Museum of Croydon Beneath the Town Hall clocktower, in the very centre of Croydon, is the borough's main cultural centre. It's not particularly obvious from outside quite how many different arts-y facilities are crammed within. It's not that obvious inside either, and I got a bit lost trying to work out where to go. Ah, hang on, past the main library, up the stairs and through the door marked 'Then'. 'Then' turned out to be an empty-ish black room with some maps on the wall and a model of the Crystal Palace atmospheric railway on a table and some motley objects shut away in separate illuminated containers. And that's all I saw, because within two minutes of my arrival the building's manager walked in and closed the museum down for the day. Staff absence problems, apparently, so the young bloke supervising the museum had to be relocated to the more-important cafe-bar instead, sorry. And with that I was locked out and never got to explore the place properly. I suspect I didn't miss much. The museum's exhibits aren't labelled in the conventional sense, no printed text alongside, but instead you have to interact by touching a video screen to discover background and emotional statements attached to each. Too much effort for too little reward, I thought. Plus it really didn't help that one of the screens was displaying a Windows Outlook Express error message instead. Plus you can interrogate the entire collection online from home, so why bother turning up? I shan't be rushing back. by train: East Croydon by tram: 1, 2, 3
Somewhere retail: Whitgift Centre / Allders One thing Croydon's great for, and that's shopping. The centre of town is one big shopping island, hemmed in by a ring of dual carriageways and circling trams. Take your pick of the high street stores, they'll have a branch in here somewhere. And at the heart of things are two Croydon classics - Allders department store and the Whitgift Centre. Until recently the Whitgift was London's largest shopping mall, at least before that upstart Westfield came along. It's a revamped 60s complex, unusually airy, with labyrinthine passageways on two levels connecting three individual atria. They've seen better days, to be sure, but they still have more character than any recent artificial hellhole. The main action is downstairs, while the upper floor has slightly more of a backwater feeling. Solid, safe, comfortable, and a bit of a middle-aged family hangout. On a Saturday morning the place to be seen is Cafe Giardino (of which there are three) - the ideal spot to squeeze behind a plastic table and enjoy a frothing beverage with optional pastry while you flick slowly through your mid-market tabloid. Or ride the escalator to buy a personalised pen, somewhere halfway between the tropical fish cavern and the independent sewing shop. Probably nothing more special than where you live, just bigger.
Exit through Allders Square to Croydon's biggest department store. Allders may have retreated from the rest of the southeast, but here it's still trading as a bought-out independent behemoth. Oh my word, the ladies shoe department is enormous. Rack after rack after rack of pointy heeled must-haves, which seemed to have attracted several excitable Croydon footwear devotees. I moved on, slightly more tempted by the basement offering of Vacuum Cleaners, Domestic Appliances, Fitted Kitchens and 'Gift Food'. They do things slightly differently in department stores. In particular here, where there's a thin crescent mall curving within the store, with small concessions devoted to key-cutting, hair-dressing and cake-icing. You can easily imagine that Terry and June might walk down here at any minute. Alas, Allders's future still looks rocky, and the store may not survive repeated attempts by the council to redevelop this prime central site.
And on the corner of George Street, back to Whitgift again. This time it's the Whitgift Almshouses, a row of Elizabethan properties that have somehow survived to the present day, despite sticking out into a major crossroads. They're a rare exception round here, they're not shops. Neither are they under threat, because not even the local council would dare build a skyscraper here. You can see the projected plans in a plastic scale model just up the road in the brand new Croydon Visitor Centre. Shiny towers ahoy, that's the proposed future for the metropolis of 2020 Croydon. Personally I reckon the current handful of classic old 1960s and 1970s designs just outside the town centre are uplifting enough. by train: West Croydon by tram: 1, 2, 3 by bus: tons of them
Random borough (20): Time once more for me to take another random trip to one of London's 33boroughs. As I write I have no idea which one of the 14 remaining borough names will be revealed when I unfold the slip of paper I'm about to pick from my legendary (and as-yet unseen) "special jamjar". I could pick any one of the other London boroughs - inner or outer, urban or suburban, small or large, fascinating or dull. I just know it won't be Merton, Islington, Enfield, Sutton, Lewisham, Southwark, Kensington & Chelsea, Hackney, Hillingdon, the City, Bromley, Lambeth, Tower Hamlets, Haringey, Hounslow, Brent, Redbridge, Ealing or Harrow because they're the nineteen (dark grey) boroughs I've picked out already.
Blimey, I've finally reached the twenties. There's a fair chunk of East London still to visit, and a thin strip of boroughs across west London, plus Croydon, but that's all. Which of these leftovers will be my destination for the day? Will I have to filter through the bountiful cultural highlights of somewhere central and important, like Westminster or Camden? Or will I be dispatched somewhere rather more peripheral and attraction-lite, like Kingston or Havering? More to the point, can I possibly avoid the epidemic of engineering works on the tube this weekend. Fingers crossed.
Once I've researched my randomly-chosen borough online then I'll head off and visit some of its most interesting places (assuming it has any, and that they're open in the middle of January). As usual I hope to visit somewhere famous, somewhere historic, somewhere pretty, somewhere retail, somewhere sporty and somewhere random. I might even take lots of photographs while I'm at it, if the borough's photogenic enough. Then after I've made my grand tour I'll come back tomorrow and tell you all about it. Let's see where I'm going this time...
If fame costs, then SE25 is where you start paying. In Selhurst to be precise, in the UK's first state school for the performing arts. The BRIT School arrived here in 1991, and since then it's pumped scores of famous names into the musical mainstream. Leona Lewis for one, and Kate Nash, and Katie Melua and Adele, and even that Dane Bowers bloke who had a hit with Victoria Beckham. Plus Amy Winehouse, which just goes to show that not every school discipline policy works long term. Various record companies sponsor the place, not surprisingly given the royalties they recoup as a result. This is the type of educational establishment that ITV had in mind when they developed Britannia High, only rather more successful and with a far better long-term future. The school's on two sites, both along The Crescent and separated by a car park. One's a typical redbrick Edwardian building with high windows, nabbed from a former girls' school. And the other's much more modern, like a white-legged glass caterpillar squatting beside the road, and considerably lighter and brighter within. On a Saturday morning there's not much going on. I spotted a few extra-curricular students carrying instruments across the playground and heard the sound of animated performance somewhere within, but it was a pale reflection of the seething creating cauldron this must be on a weekday. I wonder which well-rounded alumnus wannabe we'll all be discovering this year.
To the slopes below Upper Norwood, to the home of mid-Championship Crystal Palace Football Club. Selhurst Park is a 1920s ground that's been slowly upgraded and expanded over the years and is now a hybrid architectural hotchpotch. Along Park Road the stadium looks fairly traditional, all gates and turnstiles and tiny ticket windows. From Whitehorse Lane the stadium looks suspiciously like a boxy out-of-town trading estate, with a none-too-inviting staircase leading up from Sainsbury's front entrance towards the executive boxes. Meanwhile the Holmesdale Road grandstand resembles a very tall block of boring redbrick offices with a curved black roof on top and stacks of seating behind. I took the opportunity of a home match against Ipswich to explore more closely within the gated perimeter. Three hours before kick off the stewards were all in place, even if there was nobody to steward, and the programme sellers were similarly poised but premature. A cheery bloke in a red and blue scarf trundled by in his wheelchair, while a few bullet-headed stalwarts arrived early because Saturday is football day and it'd be wrong to stay away. Low winter sun glinted on the inscribed bricks in the Centenary Wall ("Palace 4 life", "Till I die", "Come on Eagles" "Glad All Over!"). Busy inside their solitary trailer, the executive chefs of the British Burgers Company readied their deep fat fryers for an expected onslaught of hot dog guzzlers. And in the official shop by the ticket office, twitchy retail staff watched an early trickle of punters buying not much, not even the 20%-off babywear. Oh yes, there was definitely a whiff of pre-match optimism in the air when I headed off to the bus stop. Alas, when I passed by later in the afternoon the floodlights were beating down on a 4-1 home defeat. Palace's intermittent glory years remain little more than memories amongst these suburban avenues.
Purley: Welcome to Purley, a pleasant but rather ordinary suburb that looks like it'd much prefer to still be in Surrey. Purley Way starts at Purley Cross, once a focal crossroads but now a joyless concrete gyratory in need of urgent upgrade. No such luck, not until the Tesco supermarket alongside has its plans for expansion approved. Maybe they'll also give the Rotary Clock a kickstart, because it definitely wasn't half past six when I shuffled past into the underpass. No sign anywhere of a cemetery, alas, because I really wanted to take a photograph entitled Purley Gates. So onward up the hill, past Lucinda's handbag & blouse emporium, and very carefully across the treacherous one-way system. It's no fun for pedestrians round here, nor indeed up much of the rest of the road.
Croydon Airport: In the week that the Government planned to turn open fields into London's main airport, here's a location where things went the other way. Croydon Aerodrome was the departure point for airbound bright young things of the thirties, saw fighter service during World War 2 and limped to a commercial close 50 years ago. Hey presto, a runway replaced by open space - it can be achieved. I would tell you more, but I've visited this airport previously as part of my random borough trip to neighbouring Sutton. Rest assured that the Art Deco terminal building still stands, that the De Havilland Heron perched on the grass outside has seen better days, and that one day I will come back on the first Sunday of the month when the Visitor Centre is actually open.
Waddon Ponds: Off-road, surrounded by housing estate, is a thin strip of municipal parkland with a secret. That curvaceous lake surrounded by trees is all that's left of the River Wandle in Croydon. It's an impressive remnant, not just for the amount of water visible but also for the many colonies of waterfowl that make their home here. Maybe it's because it was mid-January but there were birds everywhere, including up on the grass and footpaths (Important notice: Please do not chase the wildfowl). I'm not very good at identifying any bird more complicated than a duck, but I think there were coots aplenty and some geese-y creatures plus some red crested small things, erm, sorry, dunno. And, other than a lone couple walking an agitated dog, I had the flocking lot of them to myself.
Big shops: Ah, so that explains the traffic jams. The northern end of Purley Way is a series of massive out-of-town shopping centres with giant warehouses fronted by expansive car parks. This is where South London comes to buy stuff, be it plasma TVs, cheap carpets or a month's worth of groceries. Start at one end and you could spend all day traipsing from one megastore to the next, and probably visit several big chains more than once. But only car drivers seemed welcome. There was no expectation that any pedestrian might dare walk this way, and at the top end they're banned from the flyover altogether. Instead I had to divert via a bleak alley past two foul-mouthed cherubs sitting on a wall (don't look at them, they'll lose interest if you don't look at them). For the first time in my life I was glad to reach IKEA, although I didn't risk my life further by popping in beneath the landmark power station chimneys for a 93p cooked breakfast.
Addington Palace, formerly Addington Manor, is a Palladian mansion a few miles southeast of Croydon. It was bought by the government in 1808, paid for by the sale of the old palace, and as many as six consecutive Archbishops of Canterbury spent their summers here. No, I hadn't heard of any of them either. When the seventh moved back to Canterbury instead, the palace was sold on to a diamond merchant, then to the Red Cross who used it as an isolation hospital. In 1953 the lease was taken over by the Royal School of Church Music, an august body charged with maintaining ecclesiastical choral tradition. And it was they who once invited me to visit the palace, back when I was a cherubic youngster with soaring vocal cords. I don't remember much of the occasion, alas, apart from a few vague wood-panelled flashbacks.
Down the hill is Addington Village and tiny St Mary's Church. This is the borough's oldest building, complete with part-Saxon chancel, a medieval belfry and an unusual pyramid-capped tower. It's also, unexpectedly, the burial place of five of the six Archbishops who lived up at the Palace. You'd expect their bones to be stashed in Canterbury, or at least Lambeth, but instead their ties as Lord of Addington Manor drew them to rest here instead. The church offers occasional tours in the summer, but again not in mid-January, so instead I made do with a stroll around the compact churchyard trying to spot mitred memorials.
That's old Addington. New Addington is a completely different matter, and a completely different world. This huge local authority housing estate, originally planned as a 'garden village', now sprawls unchecked across 1000 acres of former farmland. Sadly New Addington never achieved its aim as an aspirational community, not by a long chalk, and lack of facilities and isolation from the outside world led to the place being nicknamed Little Siberia. Today more than 20000 people live on its downmarket slopes, and few are the sort who play golf. The main shopping parade is awash with charity shops, bakeries and bookies, and the only supermarket options are the Co-Op or Iceland. This is a land of mobility scooters, sneering dogs and hoodied youth, and a million miles from the wealthy suburbs across the valley.
Croydon boasts some stunningly pretty countryside, at least by normal London standards. The rolling hills and verdant valleys of the North Downs Green Belt are rather gorgeous, and the perfect "somewhere pretty" for me to visit. Except I've already been, a couple of summers back, for a walk along section 5 of the London Loop. I strongly recommend this undulating hike around the southern rim of the capital, especially the views from Farthing Downs, but probably not in January. So I left that old favourite alone and explored a different council-recommended viewpoint instead. Just south of Shirley.
Beneath the Town Hall clocktower, in the very centre of Croydon, is the borough's main cultural centre. It's not particularly obvious from outside quite how many different arts-y facilities are crammed within. It's not that obvious inside either, and I got a bit lost trying to work out where to go. Ah, hang on, past the main library, up the stairs and through the door marked 'Then'. 'Then' turned out to be an empty-ish black room with some maps on the wall and a model of the Crystal Palace atmospheric railway on a table and some motley objects shut away in separate illuminated containers. And that's all I saw, because within two minutes of my arrival the building's manager walked in and closed the museum down for the day. Staff absence problems, apparently, so the young bloke supervising the museum had to be relocated to the more-important cafe-bar instead, sorry. And with that I was locked out and never got to explore the place properly. I suspect I didn't miss much. The museum's exhibits aren't labelled in the conventional sense, no printed text alongside, but instead you have to interact by touching a video screen to discover background and emotional statements attached to each. Too much effort for too little reward, I thought. Plus it really didn't help that one of the screens was displaying a Windows Outlook Express error message instead. Plus you can interrogate the entire collection online from home, so why bother turning up? I shan't be rushing back.
One thing Croydon's great for, and that's shopping. The centre of town is one big shopping island, hemmed in by a ring of dual carriageways and circling trams. Take your pick of the high street stores, they'll have a branch in here somewhere. And at the heart of things are two Croydon classics - Allders department store and the Whitgift Centre. Until recently the Whitgift was London's largest shopping mall, at least before that upstart Westfield came along. It's a revamped 60s complex, unusually airy, with labyrinthine passageways on two levels connecting three individual atria. They've seen better days, to be sure, but they still have more character than any recent artificial hellhole. The main action is downstairs, while the upper floor has slightly more of a backwater feeling. Solid, safe, comfortable, and a bit of a middle-aged family hangout. On a Saturday morning the place to be seen is Cafe Giardino (of which there are three) - the ideal spot to squeeze behind a plastic table and enjoy a frothing beverage with optional pastry while you flick slowly through your mid-market tabloid. Or ride the escalator to buy a personalised pen, somewhere halfway between the tropical fish cavern and the independent sewing shop. Probably nothing more special than where you live, just bigger.
Exit through Allders Square to Croydon's biggest department store. Allders may have retreated from the rest of the southeast, but here it's still trading as a bought-out independent behemoth. Oh my word, the ladies shoe department is enormous. Rack after rack after rack of pointy heeled must-haves, which seemed to have attracted several excitable Croydon footwear devotees. I moved on, slightly more tempted by the basement offering of Vacuum Cleaners, Domestic Appliances, Fitted Kitchens and 'Gift Food'. They do things slightly differently in department stores. In particular here, where there's a thin crescent mall curving within the store, with small concessions devoted to key-cutting, hair-dressing and cake-icing. You can easily imagine that Terry and June might walk down here at any minute. Alas, Allders's future still looks rocky, and the store may not survive repeated attempts by the council to redevelop this prime central site.
Random borough (20): Time once more for me to take another random trip to one of London's 33 boroughs. As I write I have no idea which one of the 14 remaining borough names will be revealed when I unfold the slip of paper I'm about to pick from my legendary (and as-yet unseen) "special jamjar". I could pick any one of the other London boroughs - inner or outer, urban or suburban, small or large, fascinating or dull. I just know it won't be Merton, Islington, Enfield, Sutton, Lewisham, Southwark, Kensington & Chelsea, Hackney, Hillingdon, the City, Bromley, Lambeth, Tower Hamlets, Haringey, Hounslow, Brent, Redbridge, Ealing or Harrow because they're the nineteen (dark grey) boroughs I've picked out already.
