Today after 54 years of publication the last copy of Time Out magazine hits the streets.
It's unfortunate timing, given today sees the worst rail/tube strike in decades so there'll only be a fraction of the usual audience to pick up a copy. Fortunately it's possible to download the magazine for free these days, should you know where to look, so you can grab yourself a complete souvenir pdf wherever you may be and keep all 88 pages for posterity.
It's a hefty magazine for a freebie and they haven't skimped on content for the final issue, nor let it get too downbeat. The theme of the features near the front of the magazine is the future of London, with an emphasis on people rather than predictions, and after that come all the usual listy bits. If you'd actually seen a copy recently you might have some idea what those usual listy bits are.
The first edition of Time Out (12th Aug - 2nd Sep 1968) was a lo-fi A5 pamphlet with a cover price of one shilling. It kicked off with three buildings worth visiting (The Royal College of Physicians, St Pancras station and the Monument) and very brief lists of book and record shops. It included subject headings that would linger through the years (Jazz, Ballet, Theatre, Cinemas, Exhibitions) but also some wonderfully niche topics that didn't (Lectures, Puppets, Marches, BLUEish films). The first restaurant in the Food category was The Stockpot in Hogarth Place which was offering kidneys in red wine for 4/6d. Groups to see at London gigs included Fleetwood Mac, Jethro Tull, Marmalade and Free. The London Museum at Kensington Palace was hosting an exhibition called 100 Years Of Jigsaw Puzzles. The Classic cinema in Stockwell intended to screen three days of Ronald Reagan B Movies. Issue One is a wonderful snapshot of its time, well deserving of nostalgic scrutiny, and you can see the whole thing on the Time Out website.
But times change, so not only does Time Out no longer need to list late night chemists in Bayswater, it no longer needs to exist at all.
The first big stutter came in 2012 when Time Out switched from a paid-for magazine to a skimpier freesheet. People simply weren't stumping up the £3.25 cover price for information they could find online, however good the articles at the front, so it became a handout with a much wider circulation paid for mainly by advertising. A lot of sections were lost or slimmed down in the changeover, and the writing style became chattier with an emphasis on small easy-to-read gobbets rather than full-on listings. The pandemic twice put the magazine on hiatus, lockdown having destroyed its raison d'être, and most recently publication has slipped to fortnightly with the penultimate edition dated June 7-20. Issue Number 2631 is simply labelled 23 June 2022.
They've got the Mayor to be the last guest columnist, which is a smart move because you can actually imagine Sadiq buying a weekly copy back in the day. The final street to be placed under focus is Kingsland Road E8, confirming that Dalston stayed hip and trendy to the end. The big feature on "a fresh generation of activists, artists and partystarters" is fundamentally diverse. A spread on beavers, water voles and rewilding is interleaved with a pair of adverts for Sainsbury's. In the centre, in what might once have been deemed a pull-out section, is a 16 page Summer Ideas special sponsored by a taxi app. The word count remains high enough to fill a journey. And the very final review on the very last page is a thumbs up for a Peruvian-Japanese fusion restaurant in Leyton, which seems an entirely appropriate way to bow out.
Because I've analysed several copies of Time Out I can bring you this table showing how the magazine's content has evolved over the last 15 years. It includes a 2007 edition I wrote anarticle for, the two editions either side of the paid for/freebie divide and also the final issue out today.
Section
TIME OUT
12 Sep 2007 196pp, £2.80
TIME OUT
20 Sep 2012 124pp, £3.25
TIME OUT
25 Sep 2012 80pp, free
TIME OUT
23 Jun 2022 88pp, free
Intro stuff
19 pages
15 pages
8 pages
15 pages
Things To Do
9½ pages
5½ pages
4 pages
5 pages
Film
17 pages
12½ pages
4 pages
3 pages
Food & Drink
8 pages
3½ pages
2½ pages
3 pages
Art
5 pages
4½ pages
3 pages
3 pages
Theatre/Dance
12 pages
10½ pages
3 pages
3 pages
Music
11 pages
9 pages
4½ pages
nil
Classical
3 pages
3 pages
½ page
nil
Clubs/Cabaret
7½ pages
5½ pages
3 pages
nil
Comedy
3 pages
4½ pages
2 pages
nil
LGBT
2 pages
1 page
1 page
nil
Shopping
9½ pages
5 pages
2½ pages
nil
Time In/TV
18 pages
8 pages
2 pages
nil
Books
2½ pages
1½ pages
nil
nil
Classified
9 pages
2 pages
nil
nil
Sport/Health
5 pages
nil
nil
nil
Travel
nil
nil
nil
4 pages
Adverts
55pp (28%)
38pp (31%)
29pp (36%)
32pp (36%)
The ongoing theme here is of decreasing breadth and general thinning out. This was always a likely outcome when the number of pages halved, but the number of separate sections has also imploded over the years. Classified ads and book reviews didn't survive the change to freesheet and neither did TV listings, a cause for which Time Out fought so defiantly in the 1980s. The need for theatre and film listings faded away once we could all find out what was on where without printed assistance, and concerts, clubs and comedy nights have gone much the same way since.
Meanwhile 'Travel' is the one category that's gone in entirely the opposite direction as Time Out has increasingly encouraged us to leave London, often to another city or country they now have a base in. Urging readers to take a sleeper train or fly to Costa Rica brings in a bigger slice of advertising revenue than directing folk to a comedy night in Ealing. I should add that not all of the 'nil' categories are entirely absent, for example this week's Things To Do section includes a full page of Pride events and the summer pullout has two pages on music festivals. But Time Out hasn't been attempting to be definitive for years, merely 'curating' a few things in a few categories in the hope they tickle your fancy.
The writing style's changed too, and not for the better.
Time Out London will continue to generate content after its physical presence expires but you'll need to consume it in different ways. This week sees the launch of a daily Time Out email newsletter which they hope you'll sign up for, allowing them to fire leisure nuggets and sponsored content into your inbox on a regular basis. There's also a full page advert in the final magazine inviting you to look out for 'Time Out's first digital cover' on Instagram next week, although this sounds like a limp excuse to get you to click through onto their website, where of course the dripfeed of events-based news will continue. I note that a lot of the content on Time Out's Instagram account appears to be either froth or clickbait, sometimes both, and I fear this may be the ongoing direction of travel.
As Londoners' time out has changed over the decades, so Time Out has changed too. The latest generation to be out on the town no longer wants a pint, a film and a gig, it wants food, an experience and something shareable, and is perfectly happy to get its stream of leisure ideas onscreen. So as the printed magazine vanishes into a cloud of digital content, best remember how good it used to be and give thanks for all the marvellous things Time Out directed us to over past decades which otherwise we'd have totally missed.
The cluster of gasholders on Twelvetrees Crescent, E3, is one of the industrial treasures of the Lower Lea Valley.
Originally there were nine, then eight, now seven, and all easily seen from the District line between West Ham and Bromley-by-Bow. They were built by the Imperial Gas Light and Coke Company between 1872 and 1878 and formed part of a huge 170 acre gasworks beside Bow Creek. Altogether they saw a century of service before natural gas replaced town gas and they were last used for storage in 1984. Since then they've been left to decay somewhat, to the extent that in 2018 the Victorian Society placed them on a list of 'Top 10 buildings crying out to be saved'.
Over the last week as part of Newham Heritage Month there's been an incredibly rare opportunity to get past the security fence and walk amongst them, so I absolutely did. It turned out there was an ulterior motive, but we'll get to that.
One does not simply wander into a dangerous toxic environment, full PPE is required. We even received an email in advance asking if we were planning to bring any hi-vis of our own and what size shoes we took, making it sound like they didn't have much. So it was a surprise to turn up and discover, in amongst the usual helmets and plastic goggles, a shopsworth of shoeboxes piled up by size containing a full range of pristine safety boots. Such overstocking is a feat usually well beyond the capability of your average council heritage month. Also, as I was about to discover to my cost, iPhone cameras don't respond to touch if you're wearing safety gloves. I did my best. [7 photos]
Our 'tour' took us inside the hallowed perimeter and around most of the dead-end paths. It was fantastic to be standing amid the whirls of uplifted ironwork, but not too close, and don't touch anything, and whatever you do don't step off the path. The gasholders were plainly worse for wear if very much substantially intact, with peeling paint and ladders it probably wouldn't be advisable to climb. Closest to the entrance is gasholder number 2, still proudly numbered and bearing an 1872 construction date on some of the supports. The central telescopic drum membrane is slightly warped but no longer has any pressurised gas to support. Those peripheral wheels helped some of the structure to rotate.
Gasholder number 3 was hit by a bomb during the Blitz so had to be demolished. In its place today is a circular lake, considerably deeper than it looks, overflowing the original tank on which all the gas used to be supported. It's since become a haven for wildlife which most of the time gets to live here entirely undisturbed, which might be why the heron didn't immediately fly off when our hi-vis army approached. It's a shame number 3's vanished because it was one of only two gasholders to have been gifted an extra ring on top, which leaves number 1 as the only three-storey cross-braced structure remaining. Thankfully this is the closest gasholder to the street so the easiest to see when special tours are not on offer.
The space between the gasholders has become semi-overgrown, which at this time of year means a lot of shrubby trees and brambles. At the far end of the site there's even a dilapidated phonebox, 70s style, which staff in later years used when they needed to communicate with control... so obviously we spent some time looking at that as well. Our guide was excellent and well on top of his subject, often with a relevant archived image tucked away in his plastic folder. But there were still several moments when I ended up thinking "This is a unique site and we will only ever be standing here for 30 minutes, so what on earth are we doing huddled around a printout when we should be staring at the bloody marvellous stuff around us?"
Back in 2010 the proposed legacy use for these gasholders was as some kind of park. The plans for Lea River Park are still online based on the optimistic creation of a leisure corridor threaded down the river from the Olympic Park to the Thames. 'Twelvetrees Park' was envisioned as somewhere for adventurous climbing activities or perhaps as some kind of multi-habitat paradise for wider recreation - the artist's impression was impressively outrageous. But although the overall project got initial funding and outline planning permission, the remediation needed to turn these gasholders into "a London-scale destination" would have been astronomical and so sadly (but unsurprisingly) never happened.
Instead, it being 2022, the updated destiny for these gasholders is to be turned into flats. Of course it's flats, it's always flats, because the Lower Lea Valley has reached the stage where even the most toxic contaminated land can turn a profit if transformed into stacks of investor-friendly floggable boxes. The redevelopment of the gasholders at King's Cross into cylindrical blocks of luxury apartments showed what was possible and now the plan is to try that approach here at Bromley-by-Bow. The fact there are seven gasholders allows the developers to keep one substantially intact as a heritage feature and still have six left to make a pile out of. Throw in a pre-existing lake as a central feature and those premium 'penthouse chic' financial workers will be flocking in.
So the reason the Twelvetrees site miraculously opened its gates last week isn't because of Newham Heritage Month, it's because property developers St William took ownership of the site at the start of June. They're now embarked on a lengthy project to turn these Victorian leftovers into 2000 flats, the first stage of which will be the submission of initial planning documents next year, and don't expect anyone to be moving in for at least five years after that. Where we are currently is the Public Engagement stage where the developer tries to get the community onside to smooth the wheels for what's to come, and how better than to allow a few lucky souls inside for half an hour. Suddenly that pile of brand new shoeboxes makes sense, a piddly investment for St William in return for getting as many social influencers inside as possible.
The far side of the gasworks site, immediately alongside West Ham station, has already opened a sales office to offload the first of 3800 homes. Poplar Gasworks on the other side of the Lea is further down the line with the first of two dozen blocks substantially complete alongside Leven Road. That's another St William project and so is Bow CommonGasworks, nearer Mile End, whose 10 acres have recently been cleared in preparation to become a forest of predictable brick-coated towers. At least the Twelvetrees development should be architecturally more interesting given its cast iron circular constraints, but how much nicer it would have been not to have had to disfigure this world-beating cluster of gasholders in the first place.
We could have had a park, but instead we're getting insufficiently-affordable flats because that's what East London gasworks invariably become in the 2020s. If you get the chance to see this extraordinary industrial landscape before the highflyers and the coffee carts move in, grab it with both hands.
I've tried to make a list of all the bands/artistes I've ever seen live.
By my calculations I've seen 91.
I'm only including bands that had at least one hit record, so nights spent in sweaty Camden bars generally haven't contributed.
The list includes proper concerts I paid good money to see, events I got a freebie for and festivals where anyone could walk in off the street. It includes billtoppers and support acts, plus bands who only appeared on stage to perform one song as part of a larger event.
The list's not as hip as I'd like, mainly because Stephen once dragged me along to Party In The Park and the lineup for that read like a Heart FM playlist. It sounds more impressive than it should because I once blagged a seat at a charity event Charles and Camilla attended. But it also contains some absolute monsters of pop and rock and I am well pleased with it.
ABC, Adeva, Alison Moyet, Arab Strap, Art of Noise, Ash, Audio Bullys
Pretty good start, that.
Backstreet Boys, Bananarama, Belle & Sebastian, Bellestars, The Beloved, Beverley Knight, Bjorn Again, Bon Jovi, Bow Wow Wow, Boy George, Buggles
If you're not impressed by at least one of those, you know nothing.
Ce Ce Peniston, Chaka Khan, Coldplay, The Corrs, Craig David
Little did I know when I bought tickets for the Paralympic Closing Ceremony that it would essentially be a Coldplay concert.
Dannii Minogue, Daphne & Celeste, The Darkness, Dead or Alive, Depeche Mode, Deuce, Dizzee Rascal, Dollar, D-Ream, Dub Syndicate
The Ds aren't anywhere near as hard-hitting as the Bs, with one godlike exception.
East 17, Elton John, Erasure
Pop royalty, basically.
5ive, Frankie Goes To Hollywood
I am only proud of one of those.
Gina G, Grace Jones
Eurofroth and archcamp.
Heather Small
She came on stage in Trafalgar Square minutes after London won its Olympic bid. You can guess what she sang.
Jam & Spoon, Jay-Z, Jimmy Somerville, Jocelyn Brown, JX
I had to look two of those up to remind me who they were.
Kelly Osbourne, Kula Shaker, Kylie Minogue, Kym Mazelle
I think it would have been remiss of me not to have seen Kylie at some point in the last 34 years.
With one glaring exception, the Ms are quite a cool list.
North & South
I'm hoping you don't even remember who they were.
Orbital
Hell yes.
Pet Shop Boys, Polyphonic Spree, Propaganda
You're probably nodding at the first of those, but the really impressive band to have seen is the last one.
Rachel Stevens, Rihanna, Robbie Williams
It doesn't get much more mainstream than that.
Saint Etienne, Seal, The Shamen, Shirley Bassey, Sisters of Mercy, Sister Sledge, Sparks, The Spinners, Spiritualized, Stiltskin, The Streets, Suggs, Sybil
Now that's more like it. I am happy for you to judge me on my 'S' line-up.
t.a.T.u., Thompson Twins, Travis, Tom Jones, Toyah
One of those is the first concert I ever went to and another is the last concert I went to.
Ultra Nate
The 90s were a different planet.
Viola Wills
Took me ages to remember her, sorry.
Westlife
Please believe me when I say I went to the beer tent while they were on.
Years and Years, Yes, Yoko Ono
Bang up to date plus a pair of total throwbacks to finish off the list.
That's my 91.
I was only able to compile this list because I've kept a diary for over 40 years. It took a while to make sure it was a fully comprehensive list because I had to track down all the gigs I'd ever been to somewhere within its thousands of pages. I was occasionally amazed to see who'd been in the line-up at certain concerts because one's musical memory can be very fickle (hence the importance of doing proper research). I don't think I'd have guessed it would be as many as 90 different acts before I started looking.
If you think you know how many bands/artists you've seen, here's a comments box for that. comments
If all you can do is list some bands you've seen or tell us about a concert you once went to, don't bother because that's not what today's post is about.
If you feel the need to tell us you've never seen any bands, nobody cares.
I've made a list of all the bands/artistes I've ever seen live.
By my calculations I've seen 91.
Her two number 1s are separated by a gap of 44 years, a new chart record.
And they're also separated by six miles across southeast London...
Kate Bush grew up in East Wickham, which lies just to the north of Welling in Bexley. The family home was one of the oldest buildings in the area, a former farmhouse called East Wickham Farm, now perched on the brink between open land and plain suburbia. It must have been quite the place to live, a medieval-hearted two-storey house surrounded by barns and stables but still only a minute's walk from the postbox and the corner shop. Kate's parents were in medicine - he a GP, she a nurse - with two elder brothers John and Paddy completing the family line-up. It's a little easier to become a competent musician when your dad keeps an organ in the barn and there are no near neighbours to disturb during violin practice. This is the best photo I was able to take of the farmhouse, in that you can see one of the two chimneystacks peeping above the trees.
The rest of this end of Wickham Street looks like a run of very ordinary postwar housing - several mundane semis, a few flats, some maisonettes. What's astonishing is how little the Bush family home stands out, despite its proximity to the street, having been sequentially surrounded by a cloud of protective tree cover. What would have been the front gate has become another panel in the slatted fence, now with no evidence of any path beyond, and the entrance for vehicles is sealed by two featureless black gates. Alongside is a house name written on a wooden sign but it's incredibly faded, and beyond that a row of outbuildings for motley storage, a few vehicles and a skip.
Whichever owner attempted to conceal the house has done an extraordinarily successful job, ensuring it's really not somewhere to bother to make a pilgrimage to. But you can get beyond the front gate if you have a particular interest in the sharp side of metalwork because the current inhabitant of East Wickham Farm is Kate's nephew Owen Bush, a self-described 'bladesmith'. He runs a wide variety of courses at his forge devoted to the making of patternwelded swords, kitchen knives and axes - not cheap, but if you'e already stroking your long straggly beard they may be for you.
This was a good walk away in West Heath on the Woolwich Road, just up the hill from Abbey Wood if you're looking for an excuse to do some purple sightseeing. It was run by nuns - thankfully the more forward-thinking kind - with teaching spread across a Victorian building and a modern annexe. Kate was a successful student who performed in school plays, wrote poetry for the school magazine and left with 10 'O' Levels including obviously Music. A few years later it became a technology college and it is of course now flats, with the Victorian building still intact so someone may well be living in the room where Kate first read Emily Brontë or learned the first few digits of pi.
Kate's parents weren't short of money and helped their children by buying a big house for them to live in, six miles to the west in Brockley. Kate took the middle flat and her brothers settled in above and below. I'm fascinated by the similarity in the street names - the family home being in Wickham Street and this being Wickham Road - and wonder whether it was a coincidence or a deliberate move. Kate was only 18 when she wrote Wuthering Heights in this very flat, apparently in a few hours on the evening on 5th March 1977, and a year later it became the UK's first ever number 1 by a female artist with a self-penned song.
Number 44 now comprises six flats, one of which is apparently up for sale at present although I haven't been able to find details. The front path is a broad line of bright red tiles leading to a not inconsequential set of steps, and Kate's former windowsill has gained two very colourful flowerboxes. What particularly struck me was the house immediately across the street, a Gothic pile with a belfry-like tower which would have formed the majority of the view from Kate's window. I'm not saying that it informed her output but it certainly wouldn't have been a hindrance.
Six years later Kate had moved back into the family farmhouse in Welling. Her fourth album hadn't shifted big numbers, being deemed too experimental, so she installed a 48-track studio in a barn and then set about writing a collection of songs that would eventually turn out to be the Hounds of Love. The first track to be penned was Running Up that Hill, sometime in the summer of 1983, although originally it was called A Deal With God and Kate had to be persuaded to give it a less controversial title before it was released. That took two years because this was the start of Kate prioritising perfection over speed, and the single eventually reached a peak of number 3 in September 1985.
I wondered if there was a better view of the farmhouse from East Wickham Open Space, the last swathe of former farmland that hadn't been suburbaned over. These days it's a lovely expanse of grass with plenty of contours, a snake of woodland down the centre and much unkempt meadow in the corners. I followed a tentative path through the high grass and nettles to the closest edge, only to find a sheer green fence blocking my way to some scrappy paddocks beyond. Alas this wasn't quite the farmhouse, this was George Mead Memorial Stables, a riding school for kids with a focus on community pleasure rather than snooty excellence. You can see it more clearly from Lodge Hill although you still can't see the old Bush place which remains entirely engulfed by trees.
And so it is that a song composed in a Bexley suburb just before I went to university is somehow the number 1 record four decades later. It is indeed the longest time taken for a single to reach number 1 on the Official UK Singles Chart as well as the longest ever gap between number 1 singles. What's more at 63 years 11 months Kate is now the oldest female artist ever to score a number 1 single, overturning Cher's previous record of a mere 52, and all because a Netflix drama set in the 1980s placed Running Up That Hill centre stage.
I like the fact I still haven't seen where it was written, it helps keep the magic alive somehow. It doesn't hurt me.
TfL are famously skint so the day may come when they need to start shutting bits of the network down. One way to do this would be to stop running trains on certain branches of certain lines because they're less well used than trains going the other way.
For example the Kensington Olympia branch of the District line has far fewer passengers than any other branch of any other line. According to latest figures, updated yesterday, just 28,000 passengers used Kensington Olympia last year, so TfL could save on staff and running costs while inconveniencing almost nobody if they shut the whole branch down. Unfortunately they have already pretty much done this, at least on weekdays, so there's no low-hanging fruit for major savings here.
I have therefore undertaken a considerable amount of research on behalf of the Transport Secretary, should he be reading, so that he can present TfL with a comprehensive portfolio of savage financial cuts that will inconvenience as few passengers as possible.
I've totalled the entry and exit figures for all the stations on certain branches and compared them so that it becomes patently obvious which branch has to go. Figures are for late 2021 so still somewhat pandemic-affected, but atypical data should not stop us from making vicious irreversible cuts.
Let's start at the far end of the Metropolitan line where there are several branches, and thus several potential cuts.
The simplest choice is between Amersham and Chesham. Amersham had 557,000 passengers last year whereas Chesham only had 297,000 - roughly half as many - so we should close the Chesham branch to save money. n.b. I'm ignoring the basic practical fact that Amersham also has a Chiltern railway service so it would make more sense to send all the tube trains to Chesham instead, because all my proposals are blinkered choices based solely on numbers.
If a greater financial sacrifice is needed we should nudge back to Moor Park. From here the Watford branch saw only 800,000 passengers whereas all the stations via Rickmansworth totalled 2,400,000. With only a third of the passenger numbers, the Watford branch absolutely has to go.
For maximum savings consider the situation at Harrow-on-the-Hill. If one entire branch has to be withdrawn, which should it be? It looks like a dead heat, with 5.9 million passengers at all the stations on the Uxbridge branch and 5.9 million passengers up the Amersham/Chesham/Watford branch as well. But by applying a spurious level of accuracy I can confirm that the Uxbridge total is really 5,905,986 and thus marginally outgunned by the 5,926,507 on the other branch, therefore it's the Uxbridge branch that needs to be scrapped.
Metropolitan
• at Chalfont & Latimer: Amersham (0.6m) is busier than Chesham (0.3m)
• at Moor Park: Amersham/Chesham (2.4m) is busier than Watford (0.8m)
• at Harrow-on-the-Hill: Amersham/Chesham/Watford (5.93m) is busier than Uxbridge (5.91m)
I haven't drawn pictures for the rest, I've assumed the Transport Secretary just wants a simple list which makes it clear where the axe has to fall.
Piccadilly
• at Acton Town: Heathrow (9.64m) is busier than Uxbridge (9.56m)
The data for the western end of the Piccadilly line suggests a really tight choice. Both branches have 9.6m passengers, or at least they do according to my way of calculation which conveniently ignores the fact that several stations on the Uxbridge branch are shared with the Metropolitan line. I'm also using data from a time when Heathrow Airport was massively underused so my conclusions are fundamentally flawed, but that's fine because Grant Shapps won't be interested in facts, only how far TfL can be squeezed.
District
• at Turnham Green: Ealing Broadway (7.4m) is busier than Richmond (3.9m)
• at Earl's Court: Ealing Broadway/Richmond (24m) is busier than Wimbledon (16m)
• also at Earl's Court: scrap Kensington Olympia (0.03m), obviously
Stop looking at the impracticality of these cuts, just think of the savings to be made by pandering to the majority.
Central
• at North Acton: Ealing Broadway (4.6m) is busier than West Ruislip (4.2m)
• at Woodford: Epping (3.6m) is much busier than Hainault (0.3m)
• at Leytonstone: Epping (7.3m) is busier than Hainault (6.8m)
Common sense says the Ealing Broadway branch of the Central line could be scrapped with only minor impact but the figures say otherwise. At the other end of the line trains to Epping should (just) get the nod over trains to Hainault. The Woodford-Hainault shuttle is already scantily served and could be withdrawn altogether.
Northern
• at Kennington: Morden (27m) is hugely busier than Battersea Power Station (2m)
• at Finchley Central: High Barnet (3.3m) is much busier than Mill Hill East (0.4m)
• at Camden Town: High Barnet (14.6m) is busier than Edgware (13.1m)
The Battersea extension is plainly a total waste of money and should never have been built. Closing the Mill Hill East extension would be one of the least savage ways to save a lot of money. The two main northern branches of the Northern line see roughly the same number of passengers, but Edgware should be the loser here.
Other underground lines don't have branches so aren't susceptible to this kind of blunt analysis. However we can continue elsewhere...
Crossrail
• at Hayes and Harlington: Reading (6m) is much busier than Heathrow (0.7m)
DLR
• at Shadwell: Bank (7.4m) is busier than Tower Gateway (1.5m)
• at Canning Town: Woolwich (8.8m) is busier than Beckton (6.2m)
• at Westferry: Beckton/Woolwich (26m) is busier than Lewisham (20m)
• at West India Quay: Bank (14.9m) is busier than Stratford (11.3m)
Overground
• at Willesden Junction: Clapham Junction (12.7m) is busier than Richmond (3.9m)
• at Surrey Quays: Clapham Junction (12.3m) is busier than West Croydon/Crystal Palace (9.8m) is busier than New Cross (0.9m)
• at Sydenham: West Croydon (2.8m) is busier than Crystal Palace (1.0m)
• at Hackney Downs: Enfield/Cheshunt (11.3m) is busier than Chingford (6.0m)
• at Edmonton Green: Enfield Town (1.31m) is fractionally busier than Cheshunt (1.30m)
Trams
• at Sandilands: Beckenham/Elmers End (3.0m) is busier than New Addington (1.9m)
• at Arena: Beckenham Junction (1.0m) is busier than Elmers End (0.3m)
I know my data is flawed and that all sorts of additional factors should be taken into account before closing a line, but all I'm doing here is presenting numbers that could be used to make oversimplified top level decisions. In these brutal times let's not cut the services of the majority, let's just make the minority suffer.
And if you are the Transport Secretary and your eyes simply sped to the bottom of the post for a definitive conclusion, here's the list you need to really screw over Sadiq in your next meeting.
The tube's least used branches 1) Kensington Olympia (28000) 2) Chesham (297000) 3) Mill Hill East (445000) 4) Amersham (557000) 5) Watford (833000) 6) Battersea Power Station (2046000)
UNVISITED LONDON TQ4471: north of Chislehurst(Bromley)
Some grid squares just don't want to be visited. If TQ4471 were fractionally further west it'd nudge the main road between Eltham and Chislehurst, and if it were fractionally further east it'd graze the Sidcup bypass, but it narrowly misses both and goes generally unnoticed. The vast majority of it is open space but not common land, and jealously guarded by a handful of wealthy inhabitants in gilded boltholes. It's much more rural than I was expecting, even given how green it looks on a map, and often felt like I'd stumbled into Surrey by mistake.
I reckon to make sense of the square it's best to start at this central junction where four long footpaths meet.
The path to the north is a medieval track called Kemnal Road, named after the local long-extinct manor house. Initially it's driveable in order to serve a handful of very big houses owned by very rich people. Brook House has ostentatious topiary, an actual belvedere and a duckhouse floating on a pond fed by the local stream. The Glass House is a modern confection with a greenhouse upstairs where you'd expect a roof terrace to be. The owner of Toppers Oak has plans to knock the whole place down (plus the stables nextdoor) to build something much more to his liking. He also owns a Rolls Royce and a Ferrari with numberplates 5 BW and BW 5 respectively because sometimes money is no object. The scaffolders doing up the last house in the row sounded a lot more common.
The further you walk the less roadworthy Kemnal Road becomes, more an isolated rutted path between paddocks and thick woodland. Proximity to the Wyncham Stream means it's partly waterlogged even in this weather so must be much more of a quagmire in winter. Kemnal Manor used to be somewhere in those woods to the right before it burnt to the ground in 1964. Eventually the back of a modern cemetery appears, notionally inaccessible but they've not been as zealous with their perimeter fencing as their horticulture so it'd be easy to slip through and drop down. I kept heading north and the path emerged on the wrong side of the A20, behind a gate, unsigned, far from a footbridge... and suddenly it was becoming obvious how easy this place was to miss.
To the south of that original fingerpost Kemnal Road is wider and properly tarmacked. It's also very much a private road, as multiple landowners are at pains to remind you, and has been fortified along one side with a seriously spiky fence and CCTV cameras on poles pointing every whichway. For added impact someone's bought a job lot of Beware of the Dogs! signs and spaced them out behind the railings along the full length of the drive. There are at least twenty signs in total, all with a green background except the last which is red just in case you hadn't got the message.
Beyond the top gate the road is no longer private and also more densely populated, but the security paranoia continues. I spotted several signs warning of unseen loose dogs, another on a back fence confirming the presence of anti-intruder devices and a painted notice on a tennis court warning 'Private Residents Only'. I made a special effort to take a photo of the Neighbourhood Watch sign in full view of three further cameras, and earned a hard stare from a lady emerging from the nearby alleyway. If you do all have a collective anxiety about burglary, I thought, perhaps go and live somewhere that's a bit better lit at night.
Head east from the fingerpost and it's a proper footpath this time. One side is thick woodland shielded by a fence you could probably get through and thick undergrowth you probably couldn't, so as depressingly inaccessible as all the other woods hereabouts. The other side is yet another fence, this time considerably sturdier and backed by a recently-planted line of conifers to act as extra screening. You might catch a few glimpses of magnificence through the needles as you climb but only at the very top of the slope is there a clearer view and blimey, won't you look at the roof on that.
This is Foxbury, a gothic hybrid built for investment banker Henry Tiarks in the 1870s and the finest private house in all of Chislehurst. You can read a lot more about the owner and his mansion here, indeed the whole Kemnal/Foxbury area is documented in fantastically impressive detail on that website. What it doesn't mention is that Foxbury has since become a top notch luxury hideaway for multi-millionaires, and that apparently Michael Jackson had been due to hire the complex as a bolthole during his ill-fated O2 residency. Like I said, some grid squares just don't want to be visited.
Only if you head west from that fingerpost, along Belmont Lane, do you eventually reach some kind of suburban normality. Here finally is accessible woodland, then an open space with a micro-stream threading down the centre and residents walking their dogs across freshly-mown grass. The wooden bear in the gully was a little less normal, to be fair, but a QR code on its paw confirmed it was representing Goldilocks as part of the Chislehurst Society's Bear Trail. I knew I'd crossed the line from wealth to merely comfortable when I reached Woodside Avenue and saw a) two residents wielding hedgetrimmers b) three gleaming milk bottles on a doorstep c) pink roses round a front door d) a broom propped up in a porch e) 'No Flyers' stencilled across a letterbox f) copious amounts of leftover jubilee bunting.
A separate whorl of housing on the hillside looks more council. Nobody gets to live at the summit because that's a sealed-off open space - which seems to be very much the local story - but I see a new special needs school is about to be built up there which seems a positive step. More intriguing is the shopping parade on Edgehill Road whose extraordinary retail offer, apart from minimarket and Indian takeaway, consists of a tattoo parlour, an emergency plumber, a double glazing specialist and a lawnmower showroom. I was particularly impressed by the way the owner of Chislehurst Motor Mowers had lined up all his machines outside the shop despite the lack of any passing trade, and wondered how on earth his business had survived so many winters.
And oh look, it turns out the ordinary houses in TQ4471 merit a bus service, indeed two routes weave their way round the estate. It's therefore perfectly possible that I've passed through this grid square before aboard the 160 or 162, just not remembered, and it never was unvisited after all. But I prefer to err on the side of caution to be absolutely certain, and what's more I'd never have discovered the astonishing anomalies hidden in plain sight elsewhere otherwise.
UNVISITED LONDON: Dagenham
(sorry, that's an appalling title)
(these places can't be unvisited because I have now visited them)
(in my defence they were unvisited before I visited them)
(but technically that's true of everywhere I've ever been)
(sorry, it's an appalling title)
I'm starting my tour with two neighbouring grid squares on the banks of the Thames in East London. There'd have to be an extremely good reason for me not to have visited them before... and it turns out there are several. The riverside here is inaccessible to the public for a full two miles, all the way from the legendary Footpath 47 at Barking Riverside to the climactic section 24 of the London Loop. The Thames is at estuarine width so these grid squares don't additionally overlap the southern bank - an accessibility trick which works elsewhere. Both squares are south of the A13 viaduct and Eurostar tracks, otherwise I'd already have passed through several times. And both have been appropriated for messy commercial uses, especially waste management, being sufficiently out of the way that nobody lives close enough to complain. Finally getting inside wasn't necessarily going to be straightforward.
UNVISITED LONDON TQ5081: Hornchurch Marshes(Havering)
Grid square TQ5081 lurks on a bend in the Thames between the outfalls of the Beam River and Rainham Creek. The only way in is from the A13, or under it, swooshing down Marsh Way beneath a chain of fizzing pylons. You could even get the bus because route 174 was extended here in 2003 to serve a millennial technocampus called CEME (the Centre for Engineering and Manufacturing Excellence). Inside are workshops and plug-and-play serviced offices for laptop nomads, and outside a spluttering fountain, plenty of car parking spaces and mind where you step because the ducks have been everywhere. But we're not quite in grid square TQ5081 yet, this starts just the other side of Marsh Way's spiky fence.
The only way in is to stride past the security post at the entrance to Fairview Industrial Park. I ignored the unfriendly signs, most of which were aimed at drivers, and assumed the unassailable confidence of a man who had business at one of the yards or warehouses within. I might have been going for a cuppa and a Challenger Burger at the Munch Up Cafe for all the uniformed bloke in the black van knew, or indeed cared. Obviously I grabbed this photo on the way out, not on the way in, because the best way to engage in industrial psychogeography is only to make yourself obvious afterwards.
By passing security I had already 'visited' my intended grid square but chose to continue my exploration along the full half mile down Marsh Way. This runs almost due south towards the Thames and is lined by a motley collection of sheds, commercial units, micro-offices and storage facilities. Some of the bigger warehouses are for logistics, the road connections for heavy freight being impressively optimal, so it pays to watch out for reversing lorries. Others are smaller two-bit operations dealing with tool rental, roofing supplies or property solutions, and one makes those little metal connector things that help doors to close automatically. If you've ever bought some furniture from Roomes in Upminster, they probably loaded it onto the van in TQ5081.
It was almost lunchtime so the bottle blonde in the burger shack was readying the grill and awaiting local custom. Meanwhile two rival sandwich vans made their advance up the street, repeatedly pulling in and playing their chimes to a hundred rumbling stomachs. In the background two of the Dagenham wind turbines did their twirly thing, somewhere within the entirely inaccessible half of the grid square where thousands of cars are sometimes stored. And no it turns out you can't walk all the way to the Thames, and the landing stage originally known as Old Man's Head, because the road runs out at the barriered entrance to a gas bottle stockist. This didn't seem the place to linger, but it turned out to be a heck of a lot more pleasant than my next unvisited square upriver.
UNVISITED LONDON TQ4981: Ford Dagenham Works(Barking & Dagenham)
Yes, the reason I'd never been to TQ4981 is that it'd been given over entirely to the manufacture of motor vehicles. Ford's massive Dagenham factory opened here in the early 1930s, attracted by the prospect of an estuarine location with a deepwater dock, and was pitch-perfectly positioned to keep this grid square entirely off limits. The last Fiesta rolled off the production line 20 years ago and the Stamping Plant is now in the very early stages of being turned into 3500 homes, but Ford retains an engine-building plant by the riverside that mere mortals cannot hope to access. A set of very makeshift turnstiles now blocks Kent Avenue for anyone not in possession of a security card, so I deduced that my only chance of creeping into TQ4981 was to attempt a very oblique incursion.
ChequersLane crossed the Dagenham Marshes long before the automobile was invented, and somehow still does. Today it starts at a Brewers Fayre rather than a proper pub and it's been impossible to drive all the way down since Eurostar abruptly severed the level crossing. But the southern section remains connected, indeed you can even ride a bus down it these days past the giant empty space where Barking Power Station used to be. Previously I'd always turned off by the Hovis factory rather than continuing to the river, or whatever industrial hellhole lay at the far end, because it never looked terribly inviting. Alas with an unvisited grid square to visit I had no choice.
The first factory smelled of wood chippings and was immediately followed by an Ocado distribution depot, but that was as pleasant as the rest of Chequers Lane got. A bit further down I got the unmistakeable whiff of waste, and the road was unexpectedly busy with trucks, white vans and lorries rumbling by at lively speeds. I was initially impressed that this peripheral dead end boasted pavements and a separate cycle path thereby minimising levels of peril, but only until I reached the section where several trucks had been parked and blocked everything. The heavy traffic was stirring up such a mist of dust that one breakers yard had tied a hosepipe to its gate which was merrily firing a stream of water at chest height across the road.
The local refreshment option is called the Enjoy Cafe. It doesn't need a menu outside because it has a captive audience, but I can confirm it serves tea and Walkers crisps, plus probably a hearty plateful of something fried. Only here did I finally cross into the grid square next to the one I was trying to get to, at the very tip of Chequers Lane, where a lofty tarmac plant blocked access to the river. Here too was the edge of a huge cluster of silos, 113 in total, which could only be the Stolthaven Dagenham top-tier bulk liquid storage terminal. When Ford's factory was in its prime this was where a network of cranes and railways fed coal into the plant from ships berthed in Dagenham Dock, which was (and is) an actual facility, not just the name of the local station.
I was now less than 100m from the edge of TQ4981 and praying that the final dogleg didn't peter out before I got there. The road rapidly became less convincingly public, forking either side of four vast sheds for the mass recycling of paper and cardboard. The driver of a big orange articulated lorry looked down from his cab bemused as to why I might be edging across this concrete wasteland, the chief reason being that I'd worked out the rear of his vehicle was in TQ4881 but the front was in TQ4981. I spent barely ten seconds in my unvisited grid square before retreating but that was sufficient, achievement unlocked. I hope that's as bad as the remainder of my quest gets.
There are lots of ways to measure this, including how many boroughs have I been to (all of them), how many bus routes have I ridden (all of them), how many stations have I visited (almost all of them) and how many places have I been to (pretty much the lot, depending on the list). But for a proper measure I need something a bit more comprehensive and a lot less subjective, so I've gone for squares.
The Ordnance Survey cover the country with a grid of squares - at the highest level 100km×100km which wouldn't be terribly useful for assessing intra-London coverage. Far better to use 1km×1km grid squares because they're properly granular, so all the better for distinguishing between 'nearly been to Chislehurst' and 'genuinely been to Yeading'.
My first job was to count how many 1km×1km grid squares there are.
I decided not to worry about the squares on the boundary. Some of these are almost entirely in London but others are tiny slivers with zero public access, so rather than get obsessed with fractions far better to discount the lot. I therefore ignored this black rim and focused on the undivided remainder in the middle. By my calculations there are 1463 1km×1km grid squares entirely within Greater London, a massive total, and how brilliant would it be to have visited the lot?
I had a fair amount of spare time during lockdown so I made myself a spreadsheet and then I coloured it in.
It soon became apparent that there are several kinds of 'visit'. The gold standard was to have visited on foot, to have stepped at least once inside the perimeter of the square. Other squares I'd only ever driven through in a vehicle, generally a bus, car or coach, so technically I'd seen them if not properly been. One rung down the ladder were squares I'd only ever been through by train, and if none of the above applied I had a genuine virgin square. I used yellow if I'd walked it, green if I'd been driven, blue if I'd only been by train and red for entirely unvisited.
Here's what northeast London looked like at the start of the year. Home is the purple square and the bottom left hand square is Streatham.
Unsurprisingly, for someone who's walked all over London, it turned out I'd visited the vast majority of squares. Anywhere close to home I'd walked to by default. Central London was pretty much a given. Long distance paths like the Capital Ring, London Loop, Thames Path and Green Chain ticked off a surprisingly high amount. But I'd also stepped out of outlying Overground stations, ridden to the end of minor bus routes, yomped around on random borough excursions and followed a lot of unlost rivers which covered a lot more squares. Plus I'd deliberately been to hundreds of obscure places for blogging purposes, like tracking down level crossings in Havering or following the David Beckham Trail through Waltham Forest, and suddenly these ridiculous safaris paid dividends.
For me it turned out the vast majority of London was yellow - I'd been to about 93% of all the squares on foot. But there were still little random unvisited islands all over, because gridlines have no respect for local geography, so in some cases I'd very nearly been but not quite. Also some parts of London really are in the back of beyond, having no main roads, no bus routes and no railways, maybe only a few suburban streets or a couple of country lanes. If you're sitting there thinking "I bet I've been to more than 90% of the grid squares in London" I bet you haven't, because I only just reached that total by being a London obsessive over two decades.
The grid square I bet fewest Londoners have been to is TQ4790, which is the square I've marked with a thick black border. It's on the Redbridge/Havering boundary near Marks Gate and is totally agricultural. It contains no roads, no railway, nor even a single building of any kind, and can only be accessed via a minor unattractive public footpath. I've blogged about it solely because it's so atypical, and you would have to be similarly dogged (or very local) to have been there too. Umpteen other grid squares are way off the beaten track and therefore woefully unfrequented (for example TQ0689, TQ4661, TQ5279, TQ5483 and TQ6085) but only TQ4790 is entirely undriveable.
Over the last few months I've been out to visit some of these green, red and blue squares in an attempt to turn them yellow. That ride on the 399 bus got me to TQ3797. A knitted postbox cover in Stanmore got me TQ1790. A borough triple point won me TQ4891. My visit to the hamlets of Hockenden and Kevington was mainly to turn two outlying squares yellow. Even tangential references to Ardleigh Green, Clayhall Avenue, Holders Hill, Ruislip Gardens, Sundridge and Woodcote Green weren't entirely coincidental. My blogging horizons have been properly boosted by visiting the unvisited.
This is how my coloured map looks now.
• It's now 95% yellow - that's 1386 of the 1463 grid squares.
• There are still 54 greens - that's squares I've ridden through but never stepped on.
• Only six squares are blue (i.e. train only, specifically on the Metropolitan line, beyond Orpington and south of Purley).
• And 17 squares remain red, that's 18 square kilometres I've somehow never ever been to.
🟨=1386, 🟩=54, 🟦=6, 🟥=17
I will continue to visit the green and blue squares to turn them yellow, so if you see a post about Tyler's Common, Mogden Sewage Works or Monks Orchard, that's what that's about. But mostly I have my eye on the 17 reds because these are unarguably unvisited.
Most of the reds are in Croydon or Bromley, unsurprisingly a long way from where I live. A few are on the peripheral northern edge of Hillingdon, Harrow and Barnet. I intend to report back on these rural outposts and suburban backwaters over the next few months. But I'll make a start with the two red squares nearest home - adjacent but mutually inaccessible - which I look forward to telling you about tomorrow.
It might take me a while to turn all 17 squares yellow, but how brilliant it'll be to have visited the whole of London.
These are the prices of petrol at Bow's four garages yesterday.
Rather than leaving an opinionated comment to tell us what you think, just pick numbers.
[1] It just keeps going up and up... [2] I remember when petrol used to be a lot cheaper. [3] That's nothing, you should see the price round here! [4] I paid £100 for a full tank the other day. [5] This is why I cycle/walk/bus/train/EV everywhere. [6] Blimey, it really pays to shop around! [7] I blame Brexit/Putin/Boris/Covid/Shell/BP. [8] My car stays in the garage these days. [9] We used to measure it in gallons you know.
I'm used to Bow Road station being closed at weekends for engineering works. During the last two months it's been closed for five of them, including two extended bank holiday weekends, for reasons to do with Crossrail, updated signalling or whatever. Such is life. At least I can always catch the replacement bus service.
This weekend's closure was a brief gap between Tower Hill and West Ham, as it often is. The replacement bus ran non-stop to every station except West Ham, because that's difficult, and then continued to Canning Town and Barking to make connections. Don't get too het up about the route, they've optimised it over the years and the current set-up works well.
The replacement bus is free to ride and frequent enough that it's barely ever full. So it was baffling this weekend to see posters up at stations suggesting you don't use it, you catch a normal bus instead.
And it was even more baffling that this alternative advice was almost entirely wrong.
• Routes 15, 115 and 242 run between Aldgate, Aldgate East and Tower Hill.
Well the 15 does but the others don't. Routes 115 and 242 only run between Aldgate and Aldgate East before heading off elsewhere. Worse, Aldgate and Aldgate East are so close that nobody in their right mind would catch a bus between them, indeed doing so would take longer than walking. The 115 and 242 are total red herrings and have been added to this poster by an idiot.
• Route 254 also serves Whitechapel station.
Well yes it does, but the poster fails to mention any other station the 254 serves so that's absolutely no help either. Nobody has read this poster carefully before printing it.
• Routes 25 and 205 run between Aldgate/Tower Hill, Aldgate East, Whitechapel, Stepney Green, Mile End and Bow Road stations.
Neither the 25 nor 205 go anywhere near Tower Hill so that shouldn't have been mentioned. Everything else is correct, indeed the 25 and 205 are the obvious best alternatives to the replacement bus. But they also stop at every bus stop whereas the replacement bus is fast, essentially an express, so much the better option for a longer trip.
• Route 276 runs between West Ham, Bow Road and Bromley-by-Bow stations.
God no. Route 276 does indeed stop outside West Ham station but it misses Bow Road by 400m and Bromley-by-Bow by 600m. This poster reads like it was written by an underling squinting at a map with no understanding whatsoever of local geography.
• Route 323 runs between West Ham, Bromley-by-Bow and Mile End stations.
Again no. Route 323 does not pass West Ham station, indeed in one direction the nearest bus stop is over half a mile away. It gets tolerably close to Bromley-by-Bow but doesn't stop outside, and you'd be mad to take it from Mile End because it goes all round the houses relatively infrequently.
• Route 425 runs between Bow Road and Mile End stations.
Hurrah they got one right. Or you could walk it in eight minutes. Or you could catch the free replacement bus.
• Route 488 runs between Bromley-by-Bow and Bow Road stations.
No it doesn't. In one direction it drops you 400m short of Bow Road station and in the other direction it stops 400m short at both ends. It'd be absurd to wait for a 488 to make this single-station journey, especially when there's a replacement bus that serves both ends nigh precisely.
I don't know who compiled the information for this poster but they should never be allowed near passenger-facing bus route information ever again.
And I don't know who thought this poster might be a good idea in the first place, all of a sudden, after several years of coping fine without.
If I'm feeling charitable I could assume they were attempting to be helpful, except they mistook 'comprehensive' for 'useful' and bombarded the public with unchecked facts they didn't need to know. If I'm feeling cynical I might instead assume that TfL are trying to nudge passengers off free buses onto paid-for routes to save a bit of money. It might even be to soften us up for replacement buses being withdrawn altogether if the budgetary crisis hits too deep.
There seems to have been a concerted effort this weekend to spread news of the District line closure far and wide. I heard laboured announcements about the closure between every station on the Metropolitan line, for example, even though I was travelling away from it. I even spotted the bus poster beside the gateline at King's Cross St Pancras station where it would be of no use whatsoever.
We're not due another closure of the District line through Bow Road until next month, thankfully. But I hope we'll never see this travesty of a poster again, because nobody needs to be nudged off a free express bus in response to a compilation of misinformation that's far more likely to hinder than to help.
Teaser: Yesterday I walked to a village just outside London that used to be a hospital.
Set-up: I was standing in Croydon High Street and I thought I'd catch the first bus south which turned out to be the 405 to Redhill. Bus fact to keep the bus nerds happy: Almost half of route 405 is in Surrey. Clarification of geography: I stayed aboard the bus beyond Coulsdon until just after the Greater London boundary and hopped off in Hooley. Description of Hooley based on being in it for three minutes: Hooley's a small village on the A23 with a filling station, an off licence, a few old cottages and a nub of streets. It's nothing special. Actual research on Hooley carried out after I got home: If I'd walked quarter of a mile up Star Lane I'd have found Chipstead's grade I listed parish church founded in the 12th century. Hooley spent almost 30 years in Greater London until residents rebelled and voted to return to Surrey. Clarification: Hooley is not the village that used to be a hospital, that's the other side of the railway.
Railway bit to keep the rail nerds happy: The railway is actually two railways, both parallel, both in 30m-deep slots with a very narrow chalk ridge inbetween. One channel is for the Brighton mainline and the other is for the slow line. This is the HooleyCutting and it's susceptible to nasty landslips. You get a good (and slightly surreal) view from Forge Bridge Lane. Reassurance for the reader: The village that used to be a hospital is now only half a mile away. Ironic aside: The developers who converted the hospital into a village spent so much building a decent bridge across the railway that they had to sell off a lot of the site and never built the pub they originally promised. Smug bit for non-drivers: The only main road into the village follows a double hairpin bend. Pedestrians get to take a short cut. Revelation: It's quite a climb up to the village because the village is called Netherne-on-the-Hill and the clue is in the name. Observational interlude: On the ascent I passed a resident finding the climb quite tough and was overtaken by another resident dangling a white sliced loaf.
Finally some history:Netherne Mental Hospital opened on former farmland in 1909. It was built by Surrey County Council because Brookwood Asylum was getting crowded. It housed up to 960 patients in separate symmetrical villa blocks for males and females. Eleanor Roosevelt dropped by in 1948 because treatment was thought to be progressive. The hospital finally closed in 1994. You can read a full history here on the excellent Lost Hospitals of London website. What it looks like now: It looks like a housing estate, obviously, and a very Nineties housing estate at that. Some of the houses are for Surrey folk with a lot of money, some for those with a fair amount of money and in one corner are a few old cottages where hospital staff once lived. The admin block is now flats. A few lucky souls live up the converted water tower. What it looks like from above: I've found aerial shots of the former hospital and the replacement village. What happens in the village: The village hall is hosting a silent disco next week. The village shop sells ready meals, beer and hardware, and does cashback, dry cleaning and fresh coffee. There is no pub for the aforementioned reasons. Link to map in case it helps:Here.
Another teaser: The centrepiece of the village is the green surrounding St Luke's, the hospital's former chapel. All the doors were locked and the only signs said 'Fire Exit' so I assumed there was nothing special inside. I was very wrong, as this video reveals. The numbers bit: About a thousand people live in Netherne-on-the-Hill. The village covers 50 acres. The Green Belt bit: Building an isolated housing estate on the edge of the North Downs was only permitted because the Edwardians desecrated it first. The Low Traffic Neighbourhood bit: Five of the roads have been blocked to discourage ratrunning, and the end result is like one of those mazes in an eight-year-old's puzzle book. Chapel reveal (for those who prefer not to click on video links): What's inside St Luke's is a lovely swimming pool for residents, plus gym plus sauna. Locals know it as the Leisure Centre.
We're getting towards the end now: I walked out of the village via the public footpath on the edge of Tugwood Close. It looked like a simple half mile on OpenStreetMap but was in fact a steep drop down the side of Boxers Wood followed by a sharp climb up the other side of Ditches Shaw. Beechy trunks, ripening ears, glorious. Wry observation: The owners of Boxers Wood specialise in 'private property' notices warning everyone to keep out. Apparently they know who the flytippers are but don't want to be forced to report them to the police, and I thought yeah right pull the other one. The close shave: I met an incredibly enthusiastic labrador halfway down ("she's friendly, she's just very bouncy") and I thank the owner for having her on a lead despite being on a walk in the middle of nowhere, otherwise I'd have flipped from happy to trauma in ten seconds flat.
What I found at the top of the slope: The Greater London boundary, Ditches Lane, Devilsden Wood. Apology: The rest of my walk was much more interesting but I've blogged about it before. Hereabouts are London Loop Section 5 (so you've likely been), Happy Valley (Croydon's recreational jewel), Farthing Downs (the views, the views!) and the southernmostpoint in Greater London. You're not getting all that again, lovely though it was. Glib conclusion: This is why sometimes you should get on a random bus.
