LONDON A-Z An alphabetical journey through the capital's museums Twickenham Museum
Location: 25 The Embankment, Twickenham TW1 3DU [map] Open: Tue, Sat 11am-3pm (& Sun, 2pm-4pm) Admission: free Brief summary: historical riverside Richmond Website:www.twickenham-museum.org.uk Time to set aside: less than half an hour
There are several small local museums sprinkled around the London suburbs, each telling the story of their neighbourhood to anyone who cares to pop in. Southwest London has a fair few, including historical hideaways in Richmond and Kingston-upon-Thames. But I went to Twickenham, purely because it started with the letter T. It was either there or to the tiny Twinings Museum in the Strand. I might have misjudged.
Twickenham Embankment is a very pleasant spot. It's located away from the High Street, down by the river, facing the midstream boathouses of white-gabled EelPieIsland. This is a great place to feed the swans, or to watch the pleasure cruisers chug by, or to sit outside the BarmyArms for an alfresco post-rugby ale. There's even a cascade dripping with sculptednaked ladies in the gardens of York House, which isn't something you see every day. As for Twickenham Museum, that's to be found in a Grade 2 listed townhouse up winding Church Lane, with proper Georgian windows and a pale green door. Occasionally a blue sign appears on the door, and another on the wall alongside, bearing a boldly welcoming "OPEN". Ten hours a week, the museum's volunteer curators await someone to chat to.
I earned a cheery hello from the jolly retired lady behind the desk, then walked into the alcove behind her desk to take a look at some photos of old Twickenham. There were a lot of photos of old Twickenham in the museum, and of Whitton, Teddington and the Hamptons. Each panel showed some buildings how they used to look, then how they look now, with some meaningful words inbetween. They're no doubt fascinating if you live hereabouts, but I don't, so I nipped round the alcove a little briefly. A grey-haired bloke walked in through the front door who I thought looked suspiciously like very-local inventor Trevor Baylis. Alas not, I was assured, just another volunteer popping in to say hello. Official visitor numbers for the day remained in single figures.
There was only the one room downstairs, bedecked with more old/new photos and a cabinet of TW1 curiosities. Programmes for Twickenham's Charter Day, old bits of printed paper, that sort of thing. Beneath the stairs a diving costume tableau provided a reminder of underwater stuntman 'Professor Cockles', who entertained riverside crowds here from the 30s to the 70s. Museumfolk reconstructed one of his dives a few years back, managing to retrieve a bunch of keys and an eel from the murky depths of the neighbouring Thames, because they're inventive like that.
And there was only the one room upstairs. More history and more bygone photos - again rather more on the walls than in the cabinets. The whole northern-Thames-side stretch of Richmond borough was covered, including various elegant village-ettes I've never personally visited. Depressingly little on EelPieIsland, I thought, given that it was a fascinating location and only 100 metres away. While I was investigating upstairs another couple of visitors nipped into the museum, and nipped round, and nipped back outside again. But I still had time to make one further discovery about the house itself, which is that 25 The Embankment had once been owned by Thomas Twining, the legendary 18th century leaf importer. My museum trip had come up trumps, as I bagged an unexpected two for T. by train: Twickenham
OK, I confess, I was wholly underwhelmed by the Twickenham Museum. I couldn't fault the enthusiasm of the volunteers, and the old house had a bit of character, but the former hadn't really filled the latter with much interesting "stuff". Words and pictures yes, but you don't need to walk through the door to see those, they're just as easily absorbed on the museum's website. And the website's detailed, and fact-packed, and excellent. So go there instead.
Every time my laptop powers up successfully, I breath a small sigh of relief. I've had it nearly four years now, ever since its predecessor failed to fire up properly one Saturday morning and presented me with the notorious Windows blue screen of death. An expensive failure, as it turned out, but my laptop has more than paid its way by providing thousands of hours of uptime service. I use it rather more than your average laptop user, which helps explain why it now runs rather slower than before and why its memory banks are almost full. A replacement laptop is, I suspect, long overdue.
My switch-on sigh of relief has been louder this week. That's because my laptop is old enough to still run on Windows XP, so I've been holding my breath through every week of Windows Vista rollout in the hope that I could leapfrog its innate rubbishness. Had my laptop died prematurely, I'd have been forced to upgrade to some crappy memory-hungry operating system that nobody likes much. But now we've reached the end of October 2009, Windows 7 is finally an alternative option. I need never sully my mouse fingers with Vista, I can buy into a better-thought-out future. Phew.
(Mac users, please, stop right there. I know you're going to tell me to abandon Microsoft's global empire and get myself a Mac instead. Save your breath, it ain't going to happen. See Charlie Brooker for details)
So, er, right, new laptop. I need one that's got Windows 7 already installed, rather than some week-old Vista machine which requires an upgrade. Are they out yet, or will I get a better choice if I wait a bit? I've pretty much filled my old laptop with stuff (mostly photos), so I suspect "amount of available memory" is going to be very important. But I don't use my laptop to play games, or to fire laser guns at lifelike vector graphics of American soldiers, so multi-media processor power isn't top of my shopping list. I don't take my laptop out and about much, although it might be useful if I could, so maybe increased portability is an important option. But I need a decent sized screen - nothing titchy and squinty - so a netbook probably isn't the answer. I also have an old 20th century printer/scanner/copier I'm very fond of, which I suspect is no longer supported by modern printer drivers. Do I need to fork out for the XP emulator in Windows 7 Professional, or can I keep on printing another way?
I've decided that price doesn't need to be too great a restriction. My current laptop may have cost a fair bit up front, but it's had a heck of a lot of use for the equivalent of well under a pound a day. I'm hoping that this next one will last me past the Olympics, so value for money should be assured. Which just leaves me trying to decide which model to get. There's far too much choice out there, and I'd hate to end up regretting buying a substandard inappropriate machine. I must go hunting now that Windows 7 is here, and pick, and choose, and buy. And fast, because sooner or later my current laptop is bound to give up the ghost and die, and I'd hate not to have jumped ship by then.
So look, I've had this idea to save the Royal Mail. And it's brilliant, and no taxpayers money is wasted.
One of the most annoying things about Royal Mail is that they refuse to deliver your post if it has inadequate postage. Some idiot has sent you a letter with insufficient stamps on the front, perhaps, or else been baffled by complex new pricing instructions involving weight and thickness. Sorry, a few pence under, delivery refused. The postie then slips a card through your letterbox, detailing excess charges required, and your intended mailshot is kept hostage back at the sorting office until you agree to pay up.
And it's not cheap is it? Not only do you have to pay back every penny the sender omitted, this is also dwarfed by a whacking great "handling fee". An extra pound or so on top of the surcharge, notionally to cover the cost of the postman scribbling a few illegible details on a card, and a missed delivery can suddenly become very expensive indeed. But you've got to pay up otherwise you'll never find out what your mystery package is, let alone ever get to open it. It's daylight robbery, obviously. But it could also save the business.
Here's my plan.
Get yourself an envelope, stick a folded sheet of waste paper inside, and make sure you definitely don't stick a stamp on the front. Then write down an address of your choice (and here's the cunning bit), preferably of somebody you know but don't like. Pop the envelope into a postbox, and that's your job well done.
Some days later your selected nemesis will receive an "undelivered" card through their letterbox. It'll tell them they've been sent a letter with insufficient postage, but not what that mystery package might be. Imagine their consternation. It might be a bill, but there again it might be a cheque. It might be junkmail, but there again it might be a premium bond win. It might be a letter from a long-lost auntie, except she's stuck it in too big an envelope and fallen foul of complicated breadth and depth regulations. However much they might want to ignore this unexpected missive, they daren't. So they'll head down to the sorting office and pay their one pound thirty something, just in case. You can probably imagine their anger on discovering that the contents of their expensive envelope really weren't worth the money. But by then your financial good deed is done. Outlay (to you) nil, profit (to the Royal Mail) £1. Kerching.
To truly succeed, my plan needs to be multiplied through the collective efforts of the entire population. If we all chip in and we all send an unstamped envelope to somebody we don't like, the Royal Mail will suddenly be tens of millions of pounds better off. And we don't need to stop at doing this only once. Let's all send another unstamped envelope a few weeks later, to somebody different this time. They might be a bit suspicious, but they'll still not resist paying because it might just be a really important letter they daren't miss. Keep this up over several months and the Royal Mail could soon have collected enough £1 surcharges to yank their business back into the black. Result!
This really is something for nothing. It's a bit naughty, admittedly, but it's not illegal. And it manages to annoy somebody you hate without them ever being able to trace the evildoing back to you. Please, feel no guilt, because the benefits to the country as a whole are huge. Indeed this is, I'm sure you'll agree, the perfect solution for rescuing a beloved national organisation from collapse and eventual bankruptcy. My plan cannot fail to succeed, just so long as postmen continue to make regular daily deliveries.... (ah, bugger).
As anyone who lives outside the capital will have noticed, London's busservice is bloody marvellous. Buses go everywhere, often and cheaply, even late in the evening and on Sundays. And that's because London's bus service is planned and coordinated by a non-profit-making body which aims to serve the resident population, not far-distant shareholders. We're bloody lucky, we are.
The TfL bus network has four key performance targets, as follows: Comprehensive - routes should be designed to run within 5 minutes (or 400m) of most homes Frequent - as many routes as possible should run at least every 12 minutes (i.e. a "turn-up-and-go" service) Simple - the route should be as simple as possible, and operate at the same terminals at weekends Reliable - journey times along routes are regularly tested
In total, London's buses run more than 500 million kilometres each year. That may sound like a heck of a lot, but it's actually less than 200 metres per Londoner per day. If you travel further than that, then you're enjoying more than your fair share. But Boris's latest transport plans are about to cause the London bus network to contract, because a £150m cut to bus service subsidy will result in running 26 million fewer kilometres per year. That's a 5% cut, equivalent to one in every 20 buses scrapped or cancelled. Coming soon, to a bus stop near you.
But what to cut? A few rush hour buses, so that we can all pack in more tightly together? That's likely, apparently. How about reducing bus frequencies, so that the gap between services is a bit longer than before. That's also likely, on certain routes, although (to give one very specific promise) nothing quite so drastic as doubling waiting times from 6 to 12 minutes. Or how about shortening routes, especially those bits near to the terminus where buses run almost empty. Curtailment might mean passengers have to change more often, and wait longer, and pay twice, but they'd still be able to reach their desired destination eventually. Not an option, obviously, is the cancellation of Boris's debendification plan, nor the derailing of his Routemaster replacement. Which leaves one final possibility - scrapping routes altogether.
There are a number of buses in London which carry very few passengers. Take the U10 through Ickenham, for example, or the 464 to Biggin Hill, or the 375 to Passingford Bridge. Why not scrap those? Their loss would inconvenience only a tiny minority of Londoners, wouldn't they, and the money saved could then go on preserving services in Inner London instead. Except that such actions wouldn't ensure the running of a socially inclusive bus network. Increase the number of places unreachable by bus, or reachable only irregularly or infrequently, and many more of us will need to buy cars. Surely London doesn't need to move in that direction, sacrificing the welfare of many to the great god Austerity.
So look, I'd like to propose a bus local to me that I think ought to be cut, erased, eradicated. A bus that I believe is burning up taxpayers money with every journey, rumbling around nigh empty, going nowhere special, five times an hour. A bus whose loss nobody would mourn, and whose sacrifice might help to preserve more socially-necessary routes eleswhere. It's the 425. It runs from Stratford to Clapton, past my house, in a big indirect dog-leg via Mile End. Let's scrap it.
The 425 is a new-ish bus, introduced last year as part of a major reorganisation of routes in the Bow area. Its route is almost entirely duplicated by other services. If you want to get from Stratford to Hackney you can catch a 276. If you want to get from Stratford to Mile End you can catch a 25. If you want to get from Bow to Clapton you can catch a 488. If you want to get from Mile End to Hackney you can catch a 277. And if you want to get from my house to Homerton Hospital (because bus routes always go to hospitals) you can catch either the 276 or the 488, there's no need for a 425 option as well. Indeed the hospital loop is a real diversionary blight on the 425's route, crawling round the backstreets of Homerton in a jam-snarling figure of eight, and putting a real dampener on anybody intending to ride the 425 as a rapid through service. Because it isn't.
And all this explains why I rarely see a 425 bus even a quarter full. Believe me, I've looked, I've checked, and I know. Rumbling along Bow Road they go, these brightly lit double-decker boxes on wheels, with 60-odd vacant seats and only a handful occupied. And then again, 12 minutes later, another nigh-empty subsidy-gobbling vehicle rolls by. There's probably one whizzing past my front door even now, taking nobody in particular to nowhere much. At the very least the entire service should be downgraded from double decker to single decker, and soon, because in 15 months I've almost never seen a 425 so full that a single decker couldn't have coped. Utter waste, the top deck is.
I'm reassured that Boris isn't thinking of cutting back London's bus services more severely, slashing the network root and branch in line with market forces. But if 5% has to go, I offer up my local 425 for sacrifice. It'd not be missed, and the savings made might help rescue an outer London lifeline that really matters. So come on TfL, how about a 425% cut?
Stuff climate change. What London needs, obviously, is a new carbon-guzzling airport. Otherwise international air travellers will go somewhere else and the UK will become less important and that would never do. If you accept this argument, then a new runway or two in the southeast appears inevitable. Heathrow wouldn't be popular, because that would involve bulldozingcommunities and blighting the lives of vociferous constituents. So Boris is looking east to somewhere where nobody lives and no Londoner votes. To an artificial island in the middle of the Thames Estuary. Yeah right.
Unlike the great majority of Londoners I've actually been to Boris Airport. Or at least I've taken a boat to the watery spot where it's most likely to possibly end up, five or so miles off the North Kent coast. The site's a long way out, nearly halfway to Essex in the middle of the majorThames-bound shipping lanes. I must say I wasn't thinking "airport" when I visited, I was thinking "oh my word blimey, look at these magnificent wartime Maunsell forts, aren't they bloody wonderful (if a bit rusty)". But if the Mayor gets his way then, sorry folks, the atmospheric wartime survivors at Shivering Sands will all have to be demolished. Typical - these iconic anti-aircraft platforms spent most of World War Two trying to shoot down swarms of German bombers, and now in the 21st century some foreigner called "Boris" wants to drop an entire bloody airport on top of them.
And then there's the adjacent wind farm. 30 massive turbines whirring in mid-channel, each towering more than 100 metres above the water, transmitting umpteen megawatts of eco-clean energy via a long cable to the coast. They're an important part of SE England's contribution to sustainable energy, but they'll have to be demolished too. That's according to a feasibility report published this week, which points out numerous impracticalities related to a proposed estuary airport but suggests that none are insurmountable. If politicians really want to plonk an airport at the mouth of the Thames, only insufficient money will stop them. And if they start planning soon, you might all be out here catching flights by 2029.
Obviously airport users wouldn't be catching an inflatable boat out from Herne Bay, they'd be arriving by train. Access would be via a five mile tunnel beneath the estuarine sands - a bit like the Channel Tunnel Rail link only not quite so deep. There'd actually be two tunnels, one per floating runway. Trains would whizz in underground from London, either north via Shoeburyness(ish), or south via Sheppey. The airport terminals would be a long way from the centre of town (the report says 96km), which would be quite a trek even on the high speed trains of the future. They're bound to be expensive trains too, adding a premium to any BorisDrome flight, and rather more costly than the Gatwick or Stansted Express or the Piccadilly line to Zone 6. If the airport ever happens, that is.
The latest feasibility report has been produced by "The Thames Estuary Research and Development Company", a company now well positioned to build on Boris's interest in this airport scheme. One of its founding members is a floating runway engineer who's the former Chairman of Crossrail... and he's come up with a scheme which relies on Crossrail-like railway connections to a floating runway. Funny that. The report also attempts to add credibility to Johnson's pipedream by suggesting how positive the entire project might be. An estuary barrage could help to protect London's World Heritage sites (and 16 hospitals) from North Sea flooding. Tidal lagoons could help to boost renewable energy targets in a post-peak-oil world. The economic centre of London could shift east, bringing prosperity to the Thames Gateway (and jobs, houses and industry to the marshes of Foulness and Sheppey). The airport could run 24 hours a day, because there'd be nobody local to complain about the noise. And if an evil terrorist decided to blow up a plane on takeoff, nobody in London would get killed. So that's alright then.
Except, even if it is technically feasible, does anybody really want to build an airport in the middle of the sea? It'd be inconveniently located, and prone to closure when the weather's bad, and at risk from birds flying into jet engines, and a pain for shipping. Rather than being able to change flights at Heathrow, long-haul passengers would find themselves having to travel umpteen miles across the southeast for their onward connection. The people of north Kent and southeast Essex would have to sacrifice their Thames-edge landscape so that Londoners could breathe in a bit less pollution and sleep with their windows open. And the view from Southend or Whitstable would be permanently tarnished by offshore swooping jumbos and a giant duty-free shed on the horizon. Thank goodness this flight of fancy will surely never be built - and I'll only ever visit once, to some rustingforts, on an insignificant bobbing boat.
Twickenham Embankment is a very pleasant spot. It's located away from the High Street, down by the river, facing the midstream boathouses of white-gabled Eel Pie Island. This is a great place to feed the swans, or to watch the pleasure cruisers chug by, or to sit outside the Barmy Arms for an alfresco post-rugby ale. There's even a cascade dripping with sculpted naked ladies in the gardens of York House, which isn't something you see every day. As for Twickenham Museum, that's to be found in a Grade 2 listed townhouse up winding Church Lane, with proper Georgian windows and a pale green door. Occasionally a blue sign appears on the door, and another on the wall alongside, bearing a boldly welcoming "OPEN". Ten hours a week, the museum's volunteer curators await someone to chat to.
And there was only the one room upstairs. More history and more bygone photos - again rather more on the walls than in the cabinets. The whole northern-Thames-side stretch of Richmond borough was covered, including various elegant village-ettes I've never personally visited. Depressingly little on Eel Pie Island, I thought, given that it was a fascinating location and only 100 metres away. While I was investigating upstairs another couple of visitors nipped into the museum, and nipped round, and nipped back outside again. But I still had time to make one further discovery about the house itself, which is that 25 The Embankment had once been owned by Thomas Twining, the legendary 18th century leaf importer. My museum trip had come up trumps, as I bagged an unexpected two for T.
But what to cut? A few rush hour buses, so that we can all pack in more tightly together? That's likely, apparently. How about reducing bus frequencies, so that the gap between services is a bit longer than before. That's also likely, on certain routes, although (to give one very specific promise) nothing quite so drastic as doubling waiting times from 6 to 12 minutes. Or how about shortening routes, especially those bits near to the terminus where buses run almost empty. Curtailment might mean passengers have to change more often, and wait longer, and pay twice, but they'd still be able to reach their desired destination eventually. Not an option, obviously, is the cancellation of Boris's debendification plan, nor the derailing of his Routemaster replacement. Which leaves one final possibility - scrapping routes altogether.
The 425 is a new-ish bus, introduced last year as part of a major reorganisation of routes in the Bow area. Its route is almost entirely duplicated by other services. If you want to get from Stratford to Hackney you can catch a 276. If you want to get from Stratford to Mile End you can catch a 25. If you want to get from Bow to Clapton you can catch a 488. If you want to get from Mile End to Hackney you can catch a 277. And if you want to get from my house to Homerton Hospital (because bus routes always go to hospitals) you can catch either the 276 or the 488, there's no need for a 425 option as well. Indeed the hospital loop is a real diversionary blight on the 425's route, crawling round the backstreets of Homerton in a jam-snarling figure of eight, and putting a real dampener on anybody intending to ride the 425 as a rapid through service. Because it isn't.
Unlike the great majority of Londoners I've actually been to Boris Airport. Or at least I've taken a boat to the watery spot where it's most likely to possibly end up, five or so miles off the North Kent coast. The site's a long way out, nearly halfway to Essex in the middle of the major Thames-bound shipping lanes. I must say I wasn't thinking "airport" when I visited, I was thinking "oh my word blimey, look at these magnificent wartime Maunsell forts, aren't they bloody wonderful (if a bit rusty)". But if the Mayor gets his way then, sorry folks, the atmospheric wartime survivors at Shivering Sands will all have to be demolished. Typical - these iconic anti-aircraft platforms spent most of World War Two trying to shoot down swarms of German bombers, and now in the 21st century some foreigner called "Boris" wants to drop an entire bloody airport on top of them.
Except, even if it is technically feasible, does anybody really want to build an airport in the middle of the sea? It'd be inconveniently located, and prone to closure when the weather's bad, and at risk from birds flying into jet engines, and a pain for shipping. Rather than being able to change flights at Heathrow, long-haul passengers would find themselves having to travel umpteen miles across the southeast for their onward connection. The people of north Kent and southeast Essex would have to sacrifice their Thames-edge landscape so that Londoners could breathe in a bit less pollution and sleep with their windows open. And the view from Southend or Whitstable would be permanently tarnished by offshore swooping jumbos and a giant duty-free shed on the horizon. Thank goodness this flight of fancy will surely never be built - and I'll only ever visit once, to some rusting forts, on an insignificant bobbing boat.
