Now that Midtown is no more, it'd be hilarious if there were another Business Improvement District with an equally overblown name.
Enter the London Heritage Quarter, or London HQ for short.
Brandingwise that's quite clever, but meaningwise it's uberbolx.
When I found a leaflet called "Christmas in the London Heritage Quarter" at Victoria station, I wondered where the London Heritage Quarter might be. I assumed it included Victoria, and indeed it did, but the map went a lot further than that.
From Belgravia to the Royal Courts of Justice via the Whitehall and Trafalgar Square, that's quite some heritage quarter. But although Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, the Palace of Westminster, Piccadilly Circus and the Royal Opera House are shown prominently on the map they're not officially within the boundaries of the London Heritage Quarter, nor are tourist classics like The Ritz, St Paul's Cathedral and the Tower of London. This is less a Heritage Quarter and more a commercial sausage with some heritage in it, because that's what happens when branding teams over-reach.
On the back of the map are "5 Ways To Celebrate Christmas In The London Heritage Quarter", because "what better way to celebrate than exploring this wonderful area". I really hate "what better way to...", it's such lazy copywriting, because there are invariably zillions of better ways than what's on offer.
Number 1 is to go skating at Somerset House - fair enough, although it's entirely sold out up until Christmas so bad luck. Number 2 is to "take in the amazing and illuminating lights throughout Aldwych, Strand, Villiers Street and Victoria Street", because those are the only lights the BID has funded. More desperately they invite you to "tag us in your festive snaps", which I see a sum total of zero people have done so far. Number 3 is to watch a screening of the Nutcracker at a Curzon cinema, which you've missed, and number 4 is a musical for kids at the National Gallery. And oh dear, number 5...
My issue here isn't the festive market in Trafalgar Square itself - there are many visitors who love a pop-up chalet village flogging glühwein, overpriced pretzels and assorted packaged trinkets. My issue is the ridiculous claim that you can "get everything on your list this year... at the pop up Christmas Market in Trafalgar Square". This is also lazy copywriting, a downright lie lifted from the cliché shelf, as is the habit of too many coasting marketeers. Numerous alternative phrasings exist (and could easily have been used), but these hype-merchants always have to go one step too far to make their event sound like it's the very best, not just great.
I can't find anything about Christmas in the London Heritage Quarter online - the London HQ website is essentially a vacuum - so this leaflet might be a one-off end-of-year throwaway. I've not even found any evidence of a London HQ press release being recycled by one of the usual suspects. It is astonishing to think that central London businesses are paying for this limp collateral out of their business levies, but such are the placemaking ambitions of their BID masters.
London Heritage Quarter is in fact the "umbrella brand" for four adjacent Business Improvement Districts - Victoria, Victoria Westminster, Whitehall and The Northbank. BID areas are generally quite small and can only fund projects within their own boundaries, so it makes sense to band together if you want to have wider clout. The same thing ultimately led to the downfall of the most up-itself BID of all, that's Midtown, which since it merged with Clerkenwell has been known by the mind-dulling name of the Central District Alliance. This hasn't stopped them from putting up their own Christmas lights, but it probably has stopped anyone being interested.
London now has over 50BIDs - you can see a possibly-not-up-to-date map here. BIDs with particularly jaunty names include Baker Street Quarter Partnership, Bayswater Village, Better Bankside, Blue Bermondsey, Camden Town Unlimited, Fitzrovia Partnership, Heart of London Business Alliance, Kingston First, Love Wimbledon, Paddington Now, Station To Station, Stratford Original, Successful Sutton, Team London Bridge, Try Twickenham, Vauxhall One and We Are Waterloo.
Many of them sound like a cross between a hedge fund and a sports team, as if named in a room buzzing with champagne, bitcoin and testosterone, but none has the overblown chutzpah of the London Heritage Quarter. If you've ever been out to enjoy yourself in Victoria, Westminster or the Strand, you invariably did it without their help.
Now I've written my list I'm going to choose five of them completely at random, and then attempt to write an interesting paragraph about each. The other 45 will remain unblogged.
21)I passed a milestone
I was walking down Red Post Hill in Dulwich, approaching North Dulwich station, when I spotted an incongruous milestone against a brick wall outside a very ordinary house. It was squat and triangular with initially indistinct writing, but if you looked closely there was mention of various central London locations, plus a 4 on one face and a ½ on the other. It seems this location is precisely 4½ miles distant from two places, so it might perhaps be better described as a halfmilestone.
I've checked since and it's genuine, indeed it's listed, and the words say "Miles from the Treasury Whitehall" on one flank and "Miles from the Standard Cornhill" on the other. I've seen photos from 2005 and the lettering was clearer then. Imagine living at number 20 and leaving your bins out beside an 18th century throwback. I like how the official listing has to specify "Number 20 not included."
3)I visited a cemetery
Well this is good, I'm picking all the interesting ones so far. I found myself in West Norwood with a gap between trains so I thought I'd pop into the cemetery, which is one of the Magnificent Seven. There was still snow on the ground and on top of many of the gravestones, although I doubt it lasted many more hours as the thaw set in. Some of the monuments are monumental, as befits Victorian magnificence, and others are small and topply with signs alongside saying "we've got our eye on this one and might remove it for health and safety reasons" (or words to that effect).
One that struck home was the grave of a lady who died on my 19th birthday and who had previously been a government minister in Mauritius, and yet was buried here in a small plot beside the main drive. Near the foot of the steps I found one of the circular plaques marking the passing of the River Effra, with a red arrow spray-painted alongside perhaps to mark the direction of flow. It was quiet in the upper parts of the cemetery because nobody gets cremated on a Sunday, plus it was cold and raining. On my way out I passed one mourner clutching a pot of flowers destined for a relative's plot, and we nodded, and the dead looked silently on.
34)I checked Citymapper
I checked Citymapper quite a lot yesterday because it's still terribly useful when you're out and about on public transport, especially in south London where trains can be half an hour apart. I have to keep remembering that they file the Overground under 'tube' not 'rail' because the app is not designed for pedants. But mainly I use it for buses because you can often dash and catch a bus you'd otherwise have missed at a stop round the corner if you know it's just about to arrive. It told me I was just about to miss a 417, and I did, but I would have missed that 200 back to Wimbledon otherwise. I know a lot of people whinged when the app greedily hid bus journeys behind a paywall, but they still show you what's arriving at nearby stops for free. It's much better than TfL Go if you want to know what's running now, in part because it's not so blinkered locally. Thank you Citymapper for not yet being useless.
35)I took some photos
Well of course I did, I was out and about. But I only took 15 photos yesterday which is well below average, and more than half of them just happen to be of things I've already told you about - the milestone and the cemetery. Of the remainder one's of Bow Church which I showed you last week except with more snow. Two were of a Chinese restaurant in Tooting which I thought might be a bit quirky but on reflection turned out to be dull. Which means I'm going to have to show you this one, which is the best photo I took in Green Dale Fields.
This used to be the Champion Hill Cricket and Lawn Tennis Ground, but it was liberated for the masses and also shrunk because a large proportion of the site is now smothered by an enormous Sainsbury's. Another significant chunk is now Champion Hill, the home ground of National League South mid-tablers Dulwich Hamlet who are London's pinkest football team. I could write reams about their financial history but won't, you can read that elsewhere, so just admire their floodlights in the rear of my photo. I would instead copy some fascinating facts off the information board in the foreground but that's all about flora and fauna, so best just admire the rippling melting snow.
40)I listened to radio
I suppose I had to pick one of the dull ones at the end sorry. Yes, I listened to the radio yesterday, quite a bit of radio in fact because that's Sunday for you. 6Music went on before half past seven and because I left the house mid-breakfast-show I caught up with the end of the Radcliffe & Maconie later. I also caught up with 2001 on Pick of the Pops (intermittently classic, fundamentally banal) and listened to the whole of Sounds of the 70s in case it included any milestone birthday requests (but it didn't). When Argentina scored those penalties I was instead listening to a medley of festive folk, and I also wondered where the new Adil and Lily story is heading in The Archers. Altogether I reckon I listened to at least ten hours of radio yesterday, which is unusual because normally there's more TV in there, plus absolutely nothing they wanted to show me on YouTube looked interesting.
I will not be writing about the other 45. You got lucky there.
London has three new bus routes - the 718, the 719 and the 720.
Proper bus routes, if temporary.
718: Queens Park to Harrow & Wealdstone 719: Queens Park to Wembley Park 720: Harrow-on-the-Hill to Watford Junction
I've been out to ride them all, which is clever because one doesn't officially start until Monday.
They're needed because the Bakerloo line and Overground are closed for a week west of Queen's Park for major engineering work. It's so serious that they'll need to close it for a week in February too, but the current shutdown is Saturday 17th to Friday 23rd December. Three parallel replacement bus routes have therefore been introduced, two for the Bakerloo section and one just for the Overground bit to Watford. By making them proper bus routes with proper route numbers TfL can charge fares and so recoup some of their considerable outlay. That said I was only charged for one of my three journeys yesterday so that plan hasn't necessarily worked out well.
In good (and unexpected) news, there's a map! In bad news it's a ridiculously complicated tangled map that serves mainly to confuse. Rather than just showing the three replacement bus routes it also shows eight other routes that might be useful, and then it makes all of them a different colour and throws them across the map like rainbow spaghetti. The lines aren't numbered except in a separate key and in a multitude of additional boxes, and then rail lines (open and closed) have been thrown in for good measure. Whoever made the crucial 718 route almost the same colour as the tangential 79 needs a better set of crayons.
Another dubious design decision is that the station names don't appear beside the stations, only in separate boxes at a distance, making the map remarkably hard to follow. Wembley in particular is a masterclass in under-annotation. What's more I only saw the map once during my day out, stuck to the door at Queen's Park station, and only discovered it was available online after I got home. I whinge a lot that TfL no longer produce bus maps of Greater London, but if this is what they believe a bus map to be then maybe it's just as well they no longer bother.
According to the map, and according to all the collateral stuck up at bus stops, route 719 runs 07:00 – 19:00 Monday to Fridays only. But according to the TfL status updates webpage, if you can decipher it, the 719 also runs 1000 to 1900 Saturday and Sunday, and this turns out to be correct. It seems a decision to operate the 719 at weekends was only taken after all the posters and notices had been printed, which isn't exactly helpful, and might help explain why the 719 I caught had hardly any passengers.
719: Queens Park to Wembley Park
The southern terminus at Queen's Park station was a hotbed of hi-vis activity. I counted 4 yellow jackets, 2 pink jackets and one blue jacket hovering round the first stop attempting to ensure that buses and passengers were dispatched on time. An additional yellow jacket with a sniffer dog prowled the Salusbury Road car park, which has been temporarily requisitioned for operational reasons, lest some terrorist had infiltrated the portaloos since his last circuit. After a short wait an empty 718 turned up and magically metamorphosed into a 719 while I was boarding, a switch which nobody announced and which would catch out a couple of passengers later.
We headed off to Kensal Green, where an unfortunate passenger had decided to wait at the stop second-nearest to the station so we left him on the pavement. He should have looked out for the yellow "replacement buses stop here" tile, I thought... although the stops at the next two stations turned out to be yellow-tile-less too. The bus stopped at the less obvious end of Willesden Junction station, so one passenger missed it, and then they missed Harlesden too because that stop's nowhere near the station. Normally the customer service agent on board yells out the name of each stop but ours didn't bother, he was far too busy engaging the driver in very loud conversation.
The bus stop in Wembley wasn't obvious either because the 719 turns off just before Wembley Central. This is to connect to a functioning tube station at Wembley Park, which alas wasn't where the bloke on the back seat wanted to go. He dinged until the driver let him off, not at a bus stop of any kind but adjacent to a traffic island, and let's just say the crew aboard the bus were lucky I wasn't some kind of inspector. They seemed surprised when I came downstairs at the final stop, as if they'd assumed they were running empty, bringing to an end a journey that had been very much sub-optimal.
718: Wembley Central to Harrow & Wealdstone
I didn't return to Queen's Park for this 718 journey, I hopped aboard mid-route on Wembley High Road. The bus took a while to turn up, my wait not being helped by all these buses being entirely invisible on apps like TfL Go and Citymapper. Normally the short hop to North Wembley takes two minutes by train but it took us 15 minutes by bus because no decent roads connect the two stations. Instead we had to divert all the way to Sudbury before looping back and ending up first in one contraflow and then another. The switcheroo confused a couple of new passengers who assumed that because the bus had arrived heading east it was going east, only to discover very swiftly that it wasn't. They dashed downstairs muttering mild expletives and urged the driver to stop, bruv, but got carried halfway to Kenton instead.
Preston Road was another Metropolitan line drop-off, at the expense of visiting South Kenton which is only reachable by single decker. We then got to whizz down Woodcock Hill, which was good because no normal bus ever goes this way, permitting a fine view of icy hills in the middle distance. North Wembley to Kenton eventually took 20 minutes for what's normally a two-stop journey. Indeed I was amazed quite how long the 718 had spent meandering around just the London borough of Brent, well over an hour, because the replacement bus is always the arthritic tortoise option. By the time we alighted at Harrow and Wealdstone I was bursting to get off.
720: Harrow-on-the-Hill to Watford Junction
I had no idea where to catch this one. The map doesn't specify, the website doesn't specify and the status updates page just says "Harrow Bus Station". I walked the length of the bus station finding nothing, so went up to the information desk at the far end to ask the supervisor there. He didn't get up from his desk because that would have involved effort, and merely attempted muffled conversation from a distance. He indicated that replacement buses departed from the far side of the tube station, so I walked over there and found nothing at all and then I walked all the way back. This time the supervisor ignored me for a while because he was too busy on his computer, then he told me he had absolutely no idea where the bus left from, he'd never heard of it, and left me to it.
It turned out the 720 leaves from bus stop Z which isn't in the bus station, it's a short distance down the road. I worked this out just in time to see a grubby red bus setting off without me so faced a 20 minute wait for the next. I considered going back to the supervisor's office and educating him, but decided to remain by the stop and endure the studious indifference of the employee there instead. When the next 720 finally turned up it wasn't red, it was a vehicle they normally use for the Thorpe Park Express and it was filthy, the windows smothered in dirt as if they hadn't been washed this winter. On the positive side the bus wasn't fitted with a card reader so we all got our rides for nothing, which after all that palaver felt precisely like the right fare.
We collected several more freeloading passengers at Harrow & Wealdstone. The windows were so dirty we reached Hatch End before I realised we hadn't stopped at Headstone Lane. I hoped to enjoy the pastoral snowy views along Oxhey Lane, another road no other bus normally takes, but the windows were too filthy for that too. At Carpenders Park the bus stuck to the South Oxhey side of the tracks, and that was another ten minutes to do one stop. The bus was quite busy now, indeed the busiest of any I rode that day. Had I been wanting to alight at Bushey I'd have totally missed it and had to walk back, thanks to the muck on the window and the lack of announcements. Watford High Street was Christmas-shoppingly busy. And my entire journey aboard the filthwagon took the best part of 50 minutes, so I got the tube home rather than endure any of that again.
In conclusion the three replacement bus routes were badly publicised, ill-coordinated and (in the case of the 719 and 720) sloppily operated. These things are always an endurance test and rarely the journey of choice, but I confess I hadn't been expecting quite so poor an experience. Good luck to you, northwest Londoners, you've got a week of this and then another to look forward to in February. Alternative routes are available and might well be advisable.
2) The start date of December 24th is also the latest it's been this century.
Normally the double issue Radio Times covers Christmas Eve/Christmas Day and New Year's Eve/New Year's Day. That's straight-forward if Christmas Day is on a weekday because everything fits happily into the Saturday-Friday format. It's not straight-forward if Christmas Day is on a Saturday because New Year's Eve is a Friday and you can't then shoehorn Christmas Eve and New Year's Day into a Radio Times fortnight. On such occasions the magazine always goes early (18-31 Dec) rather than late (25 Dec - 7 Jan).
This year Christmas Day is on a Sunday, so it makes sense to start on Saturday 24th December and end on Friday 6th January because that contains all the important dates. But in previous years with a Sunday Christmas (1983, 1988, 1994, 2005, 2011, 2016) they've gone early and produced a double Christmas edition (17 -30 Dec) followed by a separate New Year edition (31 Dec - 6 Jan), which means 2022 is really quite unusual.
It's actually the first time since 1982 that the double issue has started on Christmas Eve, and that was a proper wildcard because December 24th was a Friday so the double issue contained 15 days. This year's festive edition is thus the first proper Christmas Eve starter since 1977, forty-five years ago.
3) Where are the big Christmas films?
Miracle on 34th Street: 11am, Film4, December 24th It's A Wonderful Life: 1.25pm, C4, December 24th Home Alone: 5.25pm, C4, December 24th Elf: 6pm, Sky Showcase, December 24th White Christmas: 11.35am, BBC2, December 25th Love Actually: 10.45pm, ITV1, December 25th Mary Poppins: 2.25pm, BBC1, December 26th Die Hard: 9pm, ITV4, December 27th Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: 3.20pm, ITV1, December 31st The Sound of Music: any time, Disney+
4) 7% of the double issue is about streaming.
Radio Times has long not been about just radio, but these days it's also not just about radio and television. This year a 16-page section up front suggests lots of things you might want to watch on streaming services instead, plus there are also 4 pages of adverts for streamables. It's telling that the most expensive advert of all, on the back cover, is for the Netflix film Glass Onion (indeed Netflix have taken the back cover every Christmas since 2017, so that's where the money is).
The most popular category of advertising this year is live events with 11 pages. People who can stump up £5.25 for a listings magazine might also stump up considerably more to go to a theatre show or concert. Other advertisers include Sky television (3 pages), upcoming films at the cinema (2 pages), furniture sales (2 pages) and urging you to get a smart meter (2 pages).
5) It's the longest double issue ever.
This year's festive edition is 302 pages long. Normally in recent years it's been just under 300 but this year's has just breached that.
The data: 2022 302 pages, 2021 292 pages, 2020 292 pages, 2019 292 pages, 2018 292 pages, 2017 292 pages, 2016 292 pages, 2015 sorry I lost interest at this point
I'd been doing really well this week walking round town in these icy conditions. A lot of London's backroads and even several of the main roads are still slippery from Sunday's snowfall after a succession of freezing nights and near-freezing days. I've been sensible and gone out with boots on rather than mere trainers, and have safely negotiated near-lethal footbridges in Brent Cross, hills in Charlton, backroads in Hornsey, pavements in Chadwell Heath and subways in Bromley-by-Bow. But I finally met my match yesterday at the foot of Westcombe Hill where I slipped dramatically on a patch of black ice, landing with a thwack on my arse and my right hand. Yeeouch.
It looked like a pipe had burst because there was a larger than usual puddle by the side of the road, which I was studiously avoiding when a white truck drove by and very much didn't avoid it at all. The resultant splash hit my jeans and the book I was carrying in my left hand, and obviously I looked down to see how bad the brownish stains might be. This meant I took my eyes off the pavement for a crucial couple of seconds and failed to spot the black ice that had formed beside the puddle and whoosh, over I went. My hand landed with a gritty scrape, tearing a flap of skin, and my coat-covered backside took the rest of the impact. My resulting yell caused the driver of the subsequent car to slow down and check I was OK, which I was, as I swiftly proved by standing back up. The pain rapidly subsided as I brushed the muck off my palm, dabbed the bloody wound with a handkerchief and walked to the nearby bus stop, where normal sensation resumed.
As I headed home (via a hot tap and soap), I gave thanks that my body's still resilient enough to cope with an unexpected fall. All I appear to have ended up with is a cut, a slight ache in my wrist and some messy trousers, but give it a couple of decades and a tumble like that could have had more far-reaching implications. It only takes a second to go from vertical to horizontal, especially in a cold snap like this, and a nasty slip can happen to any one of us. Take care out there.
In micro-local news, it's 20 years today since the McDonald's drive-through beside the Bow Roundabout first opened. Join me for a 20-part celebration of its history, its evolving function and two decades of community impact. To whet your appetite, number 16 is "I live less than two minutes away but during the last 20 years I have never once been inside."
1) McDonald's first tried to build a drive-through beside the Bow Roundabout in 1995 on a site that had previously been "a factory and warehouse for processing peanuts". This is so long ago that the road alongside was still the A102(M), an urban motorway, not the A12 it is today. We'd like to build a single storey McDonald's drive-thru restaurant building with 32 car parking spaces and associated landscaping, they said, plus a couple of flagpoles to hoist the Union Jack and McDonald's Corporate flag. But they failed to secure acquisition of the site and so withdrew their application.
2) In 2000 they tried again. Local residents complained that the new restaurant would exacerbate the existing traffic congestion by the roundabout causing long tailbacks, high levels of pollution, additional traffic noise, detrimental litter build-up, increased disturbance on local estates, unwanted smells and all sorts of other nimby issues. Tower Hamlets council approved the application. The restaurant would be a major improvement to the existing appearance of the site, they said, so please go ahead and build it but you must also contribute to help fund the 'Bow Road Roundabout Gateway Improvement Scheme'. The final go-ahead was given in April 2001, but no such pedestrian crossing scheme ever materialised.
3) In September 2002 workmen finally turned up and levelled the site. Initially the only evidence of any construction taking place were a few basic foundations and a couple of workmen drinking tea. But by the end of November a whole new single-storey building had sprung up, filled with cling-wrapped plastic tables and encircled by a paved roadway. It became increasingly clear that not only would you be able to drive round the back and leave an order but you could also walk in from the pavement which meant I was about to have a burger restaurant on my doorstep.
4) The McDonald's drive-through by the Bow Roundabout opened on Monday 16th December 2002. I know this because I'd just started blogging at the time and considered this event worthy of a mention. Blogging was briefer in those days so I can cut and paste the entire post here.
McUpdate: A month ago there was a plot of wasteground at the bottom of my road beside the Bow Flyover. Three weeks ago a drive-in McDonalds suddenly sprang up on the site. Today they're serving burgers to the three customers who've noticed the restaurant has just opened. Oh, and potato wedges are back - in which case they may have a fourth customer very soon.
I did not go in and buy any potato wedges.
5) Within a month I had noticed an unfortunate side-effect.
I have the misfortune to live exactly one burger's distance away from our new McDonalds. The pavement outside my house is therefore now littered with Big Mac wrappers, squashed french fries and discarded brown paper bags. McDonalds have been community-minded and put litter bins outside their restaurant, except that nobody walking home has finished their burger by that point in their journey. The council have woken up and installed another new litter bin further up the road, but that's permanently full and most people walking home don't get that far while they're still eating. So please could someone stick a litter bin somewhere inbetween, like outside my house, just so that I don't have to walk round a spreading pool of strawberry milkshake every morning?
6) Fairly soon after the drive-through opened, Mam's Fish Bar at 163 Bow Road closed and reopened as a kebabbery selling spicy foods McDonald's didn't cater for. The last fish and chip shop hereabouts went down the grill route about 10 years ago and whilst I can't necessarily blame McDonald's for that, their spindly fries don't really cut it for a decent chippy tea.
7) In 2006 Crossrail realised they'd have to divert the Wick Lane Sewer before they could build their connecting tunnel linking Stratford to Whitechapel. This would necessitate building three new permanent access shafts close to the A12, one of which would have completely wiped out the Bow Roundabout McDonald's drive-through. Thankfully they found a better way to engineer things and the restaurant survived this serious existential crisis.
8) The McDonald's drive-through is one of the few places you can park a vehicle near my house, but not for very long which is one reason why my longer-distance friends with cars never come round to visit.
9) In 2009 McDonald's refurbished the restaurant and patio area and added a customer order display. In 2010 they installed an additional drive-through booth and added another customer order display. This is a high profile site and the number of drive-through customers has only ever increased.
10) In 2017 the drive-through started offering home delivery. I was particularly nonplussed when they poked a flyer through my door advertising this new service, given that I could walk down there and buy a Quarter Pounder and be back home within five minutes so why on earth would I want to pay extra for someone to deliver it for me. I could see the logic in them delivering this flyer a bit further away from the restaurant because many people are intrinsically lazy and/or cash-rich, but mine went straight in the recycling. A downside of this new focus on delivery has been that the congregation of moped riders don't usually drive out of the main entrance but instead nip out onto the pavement and weave round passing pedestrians or head the wrong way up the adjacent cycle lane.
11) The McDonald's drive-through (and some flats by Bromley-by-Bow station) are the only buildings west of the A12 which fall under the jurisdiction of the London Legacy Development Corporation, because for some reason its planning boundary bends outwards to encompass the entire Bow Interchange. I'm therefore surprised nobody's ever proposed to demolish the drive-through site and replace it with a towering block of flats, which is exactly what happened with the 34-storey Capital Towers on the other site of the roundabout. Maybe one day.
12) During 2020's lockdown kerfuffle the drive-through closed at 7pm on Monday 23rd March and reopened at 11am on Friday 5th June with a limited menu offering no vegetarian options, no McWraps, no McSpecials and no breakfast items. It eventually switched back to 24-hour opening, which is useful if you ever fancy a Filet-o-Fish after speeding through the Blackwall Tunnel at two in the morning.
13) Earlier this year McDonald's revamped the restaurant again, with Bow acting as a pilot for their "Convenience for the Future" programme. This involved removing most of the seats and adding a special courier collection room where delivery drivers could pick up their orders. The direction of travel is increasingly away from customers walking in through the front door and very much towards the product heading out of the site in a car or on the back of a moped. Orders for collection now flash up on a little screen beside the 'deliveries only' door, a bit like you used to see at Argos, and I'm always amazed when I walk past at breakfast time to see quite how many local people are starting the day with a McDonald's delivery.
14) Since May the ability to walk up to the counter and swap a pound coin for a cheeseburger has also been removed. Now you get to push buttons on a big screen and wave your bank card so that all the minimum wage muppet at the counter has to do is hand over your order. You could argue that this is an efficient use of time and resources, or you could argue it simply allows McDonald's to employ fewer staff while you do all the financial work for them and that in fact the new muppet is you.
15) The Bow Flyover drive-through is the only McDonald's restaurant in the E3 postcode. The nearest other McDonald's are in Stratford (×2), Canning Town (×2), Bethnal Green and Shadwell.
16) I live less than two minutes away, but during the last 20 years I have never once been inside.
17) I'm not claiming sainthood here. I like a good burger and I've been into several other McDonald's over the last 20 years. But I have never once been into my local because I thought that might be the thin end of the wedge. You drop in once for a hot apple pie and then next time it's a Quarter Pounder Meal and then it becomes a regular snack or a staple dinner and before you know where you are you've gone up a waist size and your veins are swimming in claggy fat.
18) OK, there was that time when BestMateFromWork came round to watch some DVDs and insisted on walking down to the drive-through and returning with a burger-based meal. He'd come round once before and I'd made him my special mince-based dinner, and he decided there and then that I would never cook for him again hence the trip to McDonald's. But I didn't go myself and he insisted on paying so I've never given the drive-through my custom.
19) I see they're doing festive mincemeat and custard pies at the moment and those sound lovely, but I will not be offering Ronald McDonald any money for one, be that here in E3 or elsewhere.
20) The McDonald's Bow Roundabout drive-through celebrated its 20th birthday with the usual curl of cars snaking round the back queueing for steaming brown paper takeaways, the usual departing vehicles blocking the cycle superhighway while trying to push into the traffic on Bow Road and the usual slew of moped drivers chilling outside while waiting for some nearby resident to get the munchies. It performs a useful function locally and even more so for those passing up the A12, so likely won't be disappearing any time soon. But I have no intention of going inside for the next 20 years either, however the takeaway business continues to evolve.
When it snows, which it might not have done round your way but it has round here, a lot of people start dashing around taking photos. It's just the same old local stuff with snow on top, but unusual enough that capturing unusualness becomes the thing. We rarely intend to do much with these photos, other than perhaps clog social media with them for a few hours, and then they languish in our devices' memories because nobody wants to see a frosty dusting after the event.
I have been guilty of this over the last few days, taking pointless snaps of things solely because they're whiter than usual, so I thought rather than wasting them in oblivion I'd subject you to a dozen here. You don't have to pretend to be interested, just as I wouldn't be particularly interested if you showed me a dozen of yours.
This is the churchyard at St Mary's in Bow looking much as it must have looked to generations, other than the wooden planters and the low-emission buses and the new flats in the background. It's a shame the snow came on a Sunday evening because without the steady tread of worshippers' feet that path might have looked even more Victorian.
This is the Gladstone statue outside St Mary's church, and this isn't the first time I've taken his photo with a snow-topped arm, indeed it's not even the second, but it is obligatory to capture this image every time the weather permits.
The Olympic Park was fairly unsullied by stompy footsteps on Monday morning so I took this shot of the pines they planted above Carpenters Lock which give the whole place a slight Scandinavian touch. it doesn't look like this any more, sadly.
If you remember the premature Olympic Park daffodil I showed you in a post on Sunday, well it wasn't looking quite so cocky by the following morning weighed down by a mass of snow on its back and surrounded by an inch or two of pristine coverage.
This is just a bog standard photo of the northern Olympic Park under a layer of snow, other than the row of ducks who just happened to be crossing the river in a mighty photogenic way for a few seconds. These are the times you just have to point and click or the moment is gone forever.
A decent drop of snow also means joy for people who like building snowmen, or in this case a snowcat. I think it's an attempt at a Japanese lucky cat but I'm not sure, and sadly its nose has fallen off. I also like that there happen to be three more snowmen of various sizes in the background.
To be fair this is just a photo of a classic old launderette in Leyton, but because of the icy pavement and the snow clinging to a yellow flower I couldn't use this photo on the blog at any other time of year so here it is now.
While waiting for two cancelled trains on the Overground there's not much to do other than a) freeze b) check apps c) take a photo of metal seats no passenger has yet been stupid enough to sit on.
This is no longer Monday as you can probably tell by the fact the sun's come out. But the snow here in Plumstead still hadn't melted yesterday and the trees in Bostall Woods covering the hill behind were sparkling like a winter wonderland. I can't imagine ever taking a photo of Bastion Road otherwise, let alone sharing it with you.
The lawn outside Charlton House was also still covered yesterday, so safer than walking on the pavement. I like the incongruity of the palm tree with snow across its leaves like an icy grass skirt. As local libraries go this one's particularly photogenic, even in nicer weather.
This is Nelson's Ship in a Bottle by Yinka Shonibare, which in 2010 stood on the Fourth Plinth but which can now be found round the back of the National Maritime Museum. The top of the bottle is amusingly covered by snow which perhaps you can't see clearly in this small version but it looked a lot better in real life.
And finally this is Greenwich Park with its observatory atop a frosty hill and the weak midwinter sun creating a halo effect as it struggles through approaching cirrus. I reckon this photo simply exudes cold so maybe you could store it away to look at during our next 40°C summer heatwave because it might just chill you down.
Keep your fingers crossed it won't snow properly again for a few months, or even years, so I won't feel the need to show you another dozen photos of dull vistas coated with frozen water.
Fifty years ago two Americans clambered up a ladder into their lunar module and took off from the Moon. The date was 14th December 1972, the mission was Apollo 17 and the astronauts were Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt. At the time, as an awestruck seven year-old, it felt like anything was possible and the mysteries of space would open up during my lifetime. Instead all further exploration beyond Earth's orbit ground to a sudden halt and absolutely nobody has been back to the Moon since. As of today we've endured half a century of lunar disappointment.
The Apollo space mission remains one of mankind's greatest ever achievements, along with building the Pyramids and the decoding of human DNA. The project required an enormous amount of time, an enormous amount of money and bucketloads of revolutionary scientific expertise, all to get twelve men to the Moon and back. Even more impressively the Americans managed all of this back in an age when computers were the size of wardrobes and the Ronco Buttonneer was cutting edge technology. Today your phone contains massively more processing power than all of Neil Armstrong's onboard computers put together, and yet he still managed more with his than you've ever done with yours. Perhaps even more importantly the Apollo missions also brought us non-stick teflon saucepans.
The blurry black and white TV broadcasts sent back from the Moon made a huge impact on all of us alive at the time, however young we were. I didn't stay up to watch Neil Armstrong's moonwalk because it took place at three in the morning and I was only four years old at the time. But my dad did take me out onto the veranda at the back of my grandparents' house during the landing so that I could stare up at the distant satellite and imagine two tiny figures on the surface. I also got to watch an actual moonwalk on our TV later, presumably with commentary by James Burke, which isn't something anybody under the age of 50 can now claim. How did our promised future fade away so fast?
The Apollo program only lasted twelve years, most of which was research and development. The first crewed mission wasn't until October 1968, and the scientists then rattled through three more dry runs of various complexity in seven months flat. Apollo 8 was the first to reach lunar orbit, sending back that famous Earthrise photo on Christmas Eve which revealed how insignificant we are. Apollo 9 was only sent up to prove the lunar module worked so never left Earth orbit. But Apollo 10 was essentially a dress rehearsal for the big one and came within nine miles of the lunar surface. On its return it broke the record for the fastest human spaceflight, a record it somehow still holds 50 years later, which makes it all the more exciting that you can see the actual Apollo 10 command module in London's Science Museum.
After June 1969 NASA's long-term view drifted from the Moon to establishing a space station in orbit around the Earth. To this end they cancelled the proposed Apollo 20 mission in favour of saving a Saturn V to launch Skylab, so that was one fewer lunar trip. In 1971 President Nixon also cancelled Apollos 18 and 19, there being less money in the budget once a successful Moon landing had been achieved, and he almost cancelled Apollos 16 and 17 too but was thankfully persuaded otherwise. Against such a backdrop it's amazing we ever got as many as six crewed missions to the Moon, however pitiful a total that now seems.
Moon landings 1969: Apollo 11, 12 1971: Apollo 14, 15 1972: Apollo 16, 17
We once believed space stations would be created as stepping stones to the planets, that a permanent lunar colony couldn't be too far away and that humanity would spread out and seed the stars. Advances in technology would eventually make space accessible to all, we thought, which might not mean day trips to the Moon or holidays to Uranus but at the very least we'd end up nipping around our own planet in personalised hoverjets. But inexorably the expectation that our future lay beyond the Earth has ebbed away, and fifty years later those aspirations look even further away than they did back then.
That said, with timing that can't quite be described as coincidental, this month NASA has finally sent a rocket round the Moon and back again. Artemis 1 touched down at the weekend after spending three weeks in space, including two lunar fly-bys and a distant retrograde orbit to grab some tip-topshots of the Earth and its satellite from a distance. But yet again the program's been years in the making, its origins in the Bush administration, then mothballed by Obama and reinstated by Trump, with Biden the lucky president to reap the first rewards. That said the next Artemis flight isn't due until May 2024 and the third (with an actual lunar landing) won't be before 2025 and that'd be a incredible 53-year gap since Cernan and Schmitt were last there.
In total humanity has been present on the surface of the Moon for less than 300 hours, and since 1972 never. Apollo 17's landing represents a quarter of that total all by itself. Of the twelve men who've stood on the Moon only four are still alive, the youngest of whom is already 87 years old. Twelve more men have flown around it, half of whom have passed away, hence the number of living lunar astronauts is only just in double figures. To have flown to the Moon it turns out you had to be male and born between 1923 and 1936, so those of us who grew up in the early Space Age had no chance of following in their footsteps.
The Artemis program is designed to deliver the first woman and the first person of colour to the Moon, in part as a signal of how much society has changed since 1972. It's also a multi-agency project linking America, Europe, Canada and Japan, because getting off this planet has become too expensive for one nation to try alone. But we're still moving at a snail's pace, at least compared to the most optimistic future envisaged across decades of science fiction and in our collective imaginations. It's a damned shame, because if we could send a lump of aluminium powered by a Sinclair ZX81 to the Moon fifty years ago, imagine where we could be by now if we'd put our minds to it.
Hello, we're the Army and we've been called in today to take over the Diamond Geezer blog.
It wouldn't be right to deprive the capital of its daily fix of London bloggage, even if the original author is taking unwarranted strike action, so we'll be doing our best to bring you whatever it is he normally does.
Stand Ready.
423: Hatton Cross to Beavers Lane Location: London southwest Length of journey: 1.5 miles, 7 minutes
If you're billeted at Cavalry Barracks in Hounslow you're going to want to take the bus. The double decker 423 is your friend, shuttling as it does between Heathrow Terminal 5 and Hounslow Bus Station, but only a dweeb rides the full route. Instead grab the tube to Hatton Cross and wait in that miserable windswept bus station for a 423 to turn up which it eventually will. Then endure the lengthy twiddle on the way out where there might be a big swooshing plane to watch coming in to land, but that's the Royal Air Force's domain so the average squaddie doesn't care. Now is a good time to open your army rations if you want to have them finished by the time you reach the barracks.
Look here we are on the A30, a major trunk road which starts at Land's End and ends just up the road but we're not going that far. The A30 has already passed all sorts of key army locations including Sandhurst Military College, Salisbury Plain and Porton Down, but we're not going that far either. Instead we pass a big lake that doesn't have a name on Google Maps so clearly doesn't have a name at all, but that's the Royal Navy's domain so we don't care about that either. We leave the Great South West Road just before the roundabout where all the other buses are going, and then skirt round two sides of Chester Road Park. It's a great place for press-ups and other fitness training (but only in your own time).
Insert photo of 423 bus
We don't have one of those, sorry.
We assumed bloggers just borrowed one off the internet but it seems that's not the done thing. Not even the MoD image archive has a photo of a 423 bus, sorry, but you know what one looks like, it's just a red bus with 423 on the front for heaven's sake.
Green Lane is no longer either green or a lane, but it does contain the shooting range for the Heston and Hounslow Rifle Club so it's not all bad. It's time to thread round a lot of large sheds shielding dull logistical activities related to airline operations at Heathrow Airport, but what do you expect when you're directly underneath the noisy bit of the flight path? The 423 diverts specifically around the BA Distribution Centre and let's be frank, this suburb is neither a pretty nor a desirable place to live. No doubt that's why the barracks is here, unless that's a longstanding historical connection to Hounslow Heath we don't have time to properly research.
For the Fusiliers Block you want the Beavers Crescent bus stop and for the Irish Guards Block you want the Cavalry Barracks bus stop, or you would if only the Barracks were still open. Instead the entire garrison was closed in June last year and is currently being levelled by Hounslow Council, doing a job not even the Germans or Russkies previously managed. Ultimately there'll be 1600 sustainable flats on the site, because of course there will, and as many as ten locally-listed buildings are being demolished to make way. So our apologies, no soldiers are billeted at Cavalry Barracks any more so nobody's ever going to want to take the bus, but we write from what we know and some of us used to catch that 423 all the time.
The diamond geezer blog has previously visited these excellent army museums and you should definitely go, mainly because it saves us writing a review ourselves.
Which tube station is closest to The Changing Of The Guard?
On the face of it this is a simple question, we just need to find the closest tube station to the front of Buckingham Palace. It's not Green Park or St James's Park, they're both 570m distant, it's Victoria at 530m, so Victoria wins. But you can't walk in a straight line from the tube stations to the south, so it turns out St James's Park and Victoria are both 700m away which means Green Park at 570m wins.
But this world-renowned ceremony in fact involves soldiers in hats shuffling between three key locations, not just Buckingham Palace but also St James's Palace and Wellington Barracks. It turns out Green Park is only 350m from St James's Palace and St James's Park is barely 80m from Wellington Barracks so there's our new winner. But you can only see Changing The Guard from the front of St James's Palace or Wellington Barracks and getting there takes longer. The front of St James's Palace is at best 600m from Green Park but the front of Wellington Barracks is only 400m from St James's Park so St James's Park is ultimately victorious.
Insert photo of Changing The Guard
We don't have one of those, sorry.
No soldiers would ever waste their time watching a poncey bit of tourist ceremonial, indeed we suspect hardly any Londoners have a photo either, plus the Google Streetview car didn't go past at the right moment.
Of course the Changing The Guard also takes place on the roads inbetween these three locations so maybe one of these is closer, but I'll save you worrying and tell you no, nothing can beat the 400m from St James's Park to Wellington Barracks. We haven't walked any of these to check, we're army personnel not a geezer with too much time on his hands, but our Signals Division tell us it all looks terribly plausible on a map. In real life, obviously, any of the three tube stations will do depending on where you're starting your journey from, but it's reassuring to know that St James's Park is officially the best.
Let's have an ARMY quiz!
These are all clues to words made from the letters A, R, M and Y.
How many can you guess?
6) laser fish? 7) Winehouse 8) male sheep 9) ground force 10) divine mother
11) Egyptian god 12) African tuber 13) Scottish town 14) belonging to me 15) indefinite article
Answers in this special comments box: comments
And just one guess each, thanks.
We were down at Woolwich Barracks the other day and we saw what many media platforms would describe as the most unique roadsign in London. Here it is.
That is amazing. Not the fact that Repository Road is written on the tarmac, that's because we nicked this image from Google Streetview. Instead it's the exclamation sign that says 'Soldiers Marching', which has always made us chuckle because we've never once seen anybody doing it. Also there's only one sign in a southerly direction, there isn't a matching sign if you drive north, so it genuinely is the most unique sign you can possibly imagine.
That should be enough Army content to keep the readers happy. We've managed to include a bus ride, an obscure suburb, something that's going to be flats, retrospective linkage, three tube stations, dubious map measurements, a quiz and an intriguing road sign, so that's all bases covered.
And if he ever dares strike again rest assured we'll be back with more subliminal recruitment musings.
In solidarity with other public service workers, diamond geezer is going on a 24-hour strike.
With no Government intervention in the negotiating process to resolve the dispute, and in the absence of any pay rise for content delivered over the last 20 years, the planned industrial action is going ahead as scheduled.
Sometimes you just want to go for a nice walk, nothing too taxing, a bit of a stroll, lots to see, pretty views, historic buildings, close to public transport, refreshment options, frostproof underfoot, won't take long. So here's a classic mile round a bend in the Thames in Richmond, nowhere near enough to make a day of it but a nice walk all the same.
Let's start by Richmond Bridge. I'm aware that this is the same place I began a previous nice walk but this time we're starting under the bridge rather than on it, plus you could always string the two together and make a doubly nice two miler.
Richmond Bridge has spanned the Thames here since 1776, which is plenty long enough for a selection of pubs and restaurants to have sprung up so revellers can admire the view. Grab a beverage of an appropriate temperature, which in this case would be as warm as possible because a frosty, foggy, subzero riverbank awaits. A sign outside the Tide Tables Cafe confirms "you are welcome to use our tables without purchasing items from the cafe", which although generous would be unwise in weather like this unless you want icy trousers. A chain of rowing boats adds a splash of colour to the wintry scene, although its board advertising boat hire and ice cream looks jarringly out of place.
The riverside is a favoured spot for local promenading couples and families, especially of a weekend. Those escorting the smallest children don't look like they'll be promenading very far. The yapping of dogs echoes off the less lovely apartment blocks on the far side of the river. The outdoor economy is in hibernation so the benches at Stein's Restaurant have been upended until spring. The plane tree beside Gaucho is said to be the tallest/oldest in London (delete as applicable). If the doors to Richmond Canoe Club are open this suggests several freezing souls are out on the river.
Richmond council have kindly labelled various segments of the public gardens you walk past, including Mears Walk, Gothic Gardens and Midhurst Site. The most intriguing diversion is Grotto Gate, a flint-lined, barrel-vaulted tunnel which ducks under Petersham Road to emerge at the foot of what sounds like a fountain... but if you climb the narrow steps nah, it was just a gushing pipe. There's much to explore on the upper riverbank, plus classicviews from the higher slopes, but that was essentially my previous nice walk so best not head there now.
At Buccleuch Gardens the river veers right on a great scenic bend, so best switch to the grassy path and aim to follow almost alongside. Come in summer and you'd miss the frosty treetrunks, the bare branches and the icy undergrowth, but where would be the fun in that? The gate at the far end is designed to be impassable by bike, but is easily circumvented if you have the upper arm strength to lift your bicycle over. Should you decide to drop into Eileen's cafe, a fairly recent addition, best not ponder that it used to be a disused toilet block and ideally choose the hot chocolate over the gelato.
A choice of three routes now beckons. The most obvious is across Petersham Meadows, the historic water meadow where cattle have grazed for centuries. They used to be a dairy herd until that became woefully uneconomic so the current lot, overseen by the National Trust, are part of a beefy smallholding. They're only let loose from April to October, however, so striding across frozen pasture in December is safe even for wayward dogs. The second most obvious route hugs the riverbank and a third traces the narrow gap inbetween, bounded by a fence on one side and a low concrete flood wall on the other. All three will deliver you to the same point on the far side at the top of River Lane.
That ½-acre islet midstream is Glover's Island, named after the Victorian chancer who bought it for £70 and then tried to flog it for £5000 to the council, who declined. A resident of Richmond Hill eventually paid £1600 and gave it to the council anyway on the condition it was never built upon, which obviously it never has been. Boats only tie up along the far bank, not this, but canoeists may be spotted anywhere at any time, carving through the water in colourful but insufficiently thermal clothing.
Only the hardier strollers get this far, at least in this freezing weather. Yesterday most looked like they'd stepped out of the pages of a winterwear catalogue, immaculately turned out in matching coats, hats, scarves and pristine boots that'd been waiting in the wardrobe for a day like this. That's southwest London for you. Occasionally someone walked past in a rowing club gilet or amateurishly knitted woolly, but Primark and JJB Sports outerwear was noticeably absent and I felt properly common in my Millets jacket.
The last quarter mile is an isolated riverside path hemmed in behind Petersham Lodge Woods, the local Sea Scouts' enclave and a fenced-off meadow. Many of the benches here look quite recent judging by the dates of those they commemorate. One is dedicated to Count Stephen Ouvaroff because that's Richmond for you. I was particularly intrigued by the plaque to My Incredible Labrador (2003-2018), it not being clear whether Dave Pollard was the name of the dog or its owner. Eventually Marble Hill House becomes visible on the opposite bank and then, beside a useful fingerpost, is the landing board for Hammerton's Ferry. This is currently closed for the season but reopens on Christmas Eve for weekend crossings at £1 a time, so this is where I've chosen to end my nice walk.
In the absence of a ferry the next Thames crossing is the Teddington footbridge almost two miles ahead. The only other means of escape here is down the side of Ham House, perhaps dodging kids having riding lessons, and potentially linking up with the other end of my other nice walk at the top of Petersham Hill. I waved my National Trust card and enjoyed a look round Ham House instead, which is currently decked out in full-on festive finery (but not especially warm because the Jacobeans weren't big on central heating). A very nice end to a nice walk.
So cold that the first of the daffodil in the Olympic Park has already opened.
We seem to be deep into a big chill at the moment, a run of at least ten days with temperatures dipping below zero at night and rising no higher than 5°C during the day. But how unusual is that?
I've dug back into my favourite meteorological archive, the NW3 weather station at Hampstead, and counted up the number of days it's got cold over successive winters. In particular I've counted...
• the number of days the temperature stayed below 5°C all day
• the number of days the temperature stayed below freezing all day
• the number of nights the temperature fell below freezing
n.b. I've counted every chilly day between one summer and the next, the earliest being in October and the latest in April.
n.b. Hampstead is 200ft above sea level so a bit cooler than central London, but also benefits from the heat island effect so a bit warmer than locations further out. Unless you live in Hampstead the data isn't going to reflect where you live. But what's really interesting is the variation and the underlying patterns, and they work relatively well wherever.
Winter
days staying below 5°C
days staying below 0°C
nights going below 0°C
2009/2010
49
0
39
2010/2011
41
5
38
2011/2012
17
0
19
2012/2013
50
2
41
2013/2014
1
0
5
2014/2015
17
0
15
2015/2016
8
0
10
2016/2017
14
0
20
2017/2018
25
3
30
2018/2019
13
0
13
2019/2020
0
0
6
2020/2021
30
0
25
2021/2022
7
0
14
2022/2023
?
?
?
The chilliest recent winters were 2009/2010, 2010/11 and 2012/13, each with over 40 chilly days and about 40 freezing nights. Even so there have only been 10 days since 2010 when the temperatures has failed to exceed freezing, and none at all in the last five years. There have also been some ridiculously mild winters, notably 2013/14 and the absolute outlier of 2019/20 when every day managed to stay the right side of 5°C. With energy prices at an all time high we could really do with another 2019/2020, but 2022/23 is already careering towards the centre of the distribution and we're not even halfway through December yet.
Now let's try looking month by month...
Month
days staying below 5°C
days staying below 0°C
nights going below 0°C
October
0
0
1
November
13
0
21
December
69
5
62
January
97
2
92
February
73
2
56
March
18
1
32
April
2
0
9
Adding up the figures for all 14 winters we see that January is generally the coldest month, as you might expect, with December and February roughly on a par. Meanwhile March is chillier than November and April is chillier than October because early spring tends to be colder than late autumn. The sun may be higher in the sky in spring but autumn benefits from summer's heat baked into the ground and that's all disappeared by midwinter.
Another way of looking at variation might be to consider the date of the first emerging daffodil in the Olympic Park. I can't claim that all these dates are bang on, but yet again 2019/2020 lays claim for the winter that barely happened.
• 15th December 2019
• 1st December 2020
• 12th December 2021
• 9th December 2022
n.b. we reckon these daffodils are Rijnveld’sEarly, a species predisposed to start flowering in December/January rather than the more usual February/March.
These figures prove nothing about climate change because annual variations in weather trump any underlying warming trend. 2022/23 is certainly getting off to a colder start than any winter since 2010/11, but several more weeks of potential chill or warmth remain so who knows how it'll end up. Fingers crossed we can take our gloves off soon.
