Another Saturday, another significant station birthday. This time it's a 50th birthday and it's on the Underground, the anniversary station being Hatton Cross.
Saturday 19th July 1975 was ALSO the day a brand newrollingstock was introduced on the Piccadilly line, freshly fitted out with additional luggage space. The first such train made the inaugural public journey into Hatton Cross around 10am, and may well roll in again today 50 years later because TfL still haven't managed to introduce a replacement. I don't think any significant celebrations are planned.
Before 1975 the Piccadilly line terminated at Hounslow West but a drive to serve Heathrow Airport saw a sequential extension introduced, initially just to Hatton Cross and then in 1977 to Heathrow Central. Here's a poster from the time and here's the customerleaflet, both sides. Hatton Cross station was to serve "the maintenance areas on the south side of the airport and the large housing districts of North Feltham and Bedfont". Meanwhile "passengers for airlines and spectators" were urged to continue to alight at a remodelled Hounslow West and take the A1 Express bus from the station forecourt.
Being of mid-70s vintage, Hatton Cross has a certain brutalist aesthetic, or if you're feeling less polite looks like a concrete bunker. Its flat roof is because it was once meant to have a car park on top until the airport decided that might be a distraction to incoming planes, which do admittedly come into land incrediblyclose by. Look more closely and the ripples on the slabs round the perimeter of the roof are actually art, a concrete frieze by William Mitchell, although the artworks most people are aware of are the gorgeous mosaics down on the island platform.
Several of the tiled columns feature three stylised birds in flight, the 'Speedbird' motif of Imperial Airways/BOAC, gloriously picked out in blue against an orange background. If waiting for a train, perhaps changing for a looper to Terminal 4, they always brighten the soul. Meanwhile the roof is made from corrugated metal, the floor comprises panels of multicoloured terrazzo and the larger wall tiles are in shades of off-grey and subdued green. Note also the illuminated roundels, these now found only here and at Pimlico which had opened three years earlier. As a time capsule of mid-Seventies design the tube has no finer example.
Climb thestairs - Hatton Cross being the youngest tube station not to have lifts - and you reach a broad funnelling concourse. Beyond is a covered waiting area brightened by a glass lantern and several hanging baskets, where global travellers mingle with airport staff and perhaps take the opportunity for a nap. The shop unit still trades, although the name Newscafe is plainly out of date and they probably now sell more bottles and cans than anything else. The doors to the booking hall were originally operated by treadpads and opened automatically, which was proper cutting edge, but those to the bus station are more annoying as they all need pushing and one alas is full-on defective.
Hatton Cross got a spruce-up last year including the addition of vinyl artworks across many of the ground floor windows. The upper frieze features the Speedbird motif amidst a burst of colour, echoing back to designs downstairs, while below are Himalayan blue poppies and Shirui lilies, two species discovered by Frank Kingdon-Ward who once had a nursery close by. At the same time a so-called Energy Garden was added in the flowerbeds round the back and a few tubs out front. It looked dazzling in Ian Visits' initial report but the current reality is scrappy green plants in need of watering, so at best that means I missed their spring flowering but more likely suggests it's no longer getting the attention it deserves.
The station sits amid an oppressive urban environment with a major dual carriageway on one side and Britain's largest airport on the other. But look more carefully amid the sheds and hotels and the remnants of something older linger, because all of this has been built right on top of what was once a small quiet Middlesex village, a cluster offarms and cottages around a loop of country lanes, large enough for a pub and chapel but not a church or shop, surrounded by many acres of market gardening. Its misfortune is that in 1925 the Great South West Road was aligned straight through the middle, then brutallywidened ten years later, and where the village got lucky is that when London Airport expanded it got no further than the A30, thus a few scraps of Hatton remain to the south of the main road.
If it helps you to orientate, the centre of Hatton is now occupied by the screamingly blue Atrium hotel, where you should never ever book an overnight room if it's Runway Alternation Week One. The older house across the road with all the vans round the back was originally called The Orchard while the feeder road outside, now Dick Turpin Way, follows the alignment of a brief back lane. A tad more of Steam Farm Lane survives, now somewhere taxis and coaches park up during pauses between airport transfers. The boarded-off hall here was originally Hatton Mission Chapel, an outpost of St Mary's East Bedfont whose vicar travelled by horse and cart to hold a service on Sunday afternoons, and which finally closed in 1992 for fear of fallen roof tiles.
Behind was Hatton Farm, largest of the local farmsteads, one of whose many barns survives as a timber ruin amid a scrappy paddock. Horses are still kept here and in other nearby fields, even those containing airport landing lights, because equine residents tend not to complain about aircraft noise. And a short distance down Bedfont Road, a smidge beyond the car wash, are six old cottages still on their original Hatton footprint. It seems amiss to see an 1836 plaque on the front of the pebbledashed pair, unless perhaps they replaced something older, but the two teetering right on the edge of the flightpath look much more convincingly Victorian.
Hatton's oldest surviving building by far is The Green Man pub, allegedly Jacobean although its listing only reckons 18th century. It's a lovely higgledy building, formerly thatched, whose stables contain a highwayman's hide built into the open back of the chimney, now a feature in the Lounge Bar. If you're ever waiting a long time for a flight it looks a better place to enjoy chicken, chips and a pint than forking out for something fussier airside. For an even cheaper meal try Super Singh's, a no-frills cafe in a blue and white shed on Faggs Lane specialising in vegan pizza and eggless cakes. As for the business park across the road this replaced an extensive Catholic orphanage, the St Anthony's Home, which packed its dormitories tight but fled the area in 1962.
Close by is Hatton's only 20th century residential street, a cul-de-sac of houses and bungalows looped round a patch of parched grass called Hatton Green. In this brief enclave of neat hedged gardens and satellite dishes you could be anywhere in outer London, at least if you visit like I did during the half of the day when planes aren't thundering over. The penalties for living here are obvious but the benefits include a free parking space many visitors to Heathrow would kill for, plus the gift of a tube station a short walk away. It may have been built for the airport but it unintentionally best serves the village Heathrow half-destroyed, by the busy crossroads known as Hatton Cross.
In today's edition we investigate art, science, conspiracy and just what did the councillors know?
On the outskirts of Harrow a clump of empty-looking sheds lurks mysteriously beside the ring road. What is this and why is it here and how is it related to the future of the council?
It looks important, heavily signposted in gleaming red letters from both Greenhill Way and Station Road. A chain of blue and green lights beckons through an alleyway between a cake shop and a chicken shop, while a sign on a lamppost lures you in with promises of STREET FOOD ART AND MORE. But beyond the skips all we found was a silent cluster of lockable units, adapted containers and pseudo-greenhouses, all connected via a chain of timber ramps because this tumbleweed corner is nothing if not accessible. Who precisely is accountable for whatever hasn't happened here?
This is Harrow Art Park, supposedly a "vibrant destination for culture" opened just last month by Harrow Council as part of the £7m regeneration of Harrow town centre. It launched with a bang, or at least a week of special activities hitching onto the coattails of the London Festival of Architecture. Our bet is that the live music and local food was better appreciated than the panel on incremental urbanism, especially on a Thursday evening. And yet a month later nobody is here, not unless they're walking through from the adjacent street market, and the empty units echo with the sound of misplaced investment.
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A deep dive into Harrow's Art Park fiasco is below.
But first — a quick look at the big London stories this week:
🔎 The Mayor is in Africa on a trade tour this week, rather than staying behind to deal with the real problem of Lime bikes on pavements.
🔎 A new M&S Food Hall opened in Leytonstone yesterday because that's proper news isn't it?
🔎 Eastbourne is to get a new train connection from London Bridge, but only once a day and not at weekends and not in the off-peak so don't get your hopes up.
🔎 Something else we saw some other outlet mention is that floating bus stops are to be banned, or paused, or ripped out we're not sure we didn't read that far down.
🔎 Two mice have been seen at The Ivy, presumably without a reservation.
🔎 The Palm House at Kew Gardens is to close for five years as part of a major renovation project, and quite frankly if we're the first people to tell you then you're not paying nearly as much attention to London's news media as you ought to be.
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Our science correspondent rocked down to the Wellcome Collection on the Euston Road this week, only a month after the opening of their new exhibition Thirst! It's all about water and the lack of it, because we love to bring you the exclusives.
The exhibition's in the usual gallery on the usual floor and you walk round in the usual direction after entering through the usual door. According to a warning out front you might see a desiccated animal on your way round but we must have missed it so we were very cross. There are several themed areas, all water based, focusing on matters of scarcity and excess both in Britain and abroad. Several arid countries feature, which is excellent if you love a good wadi or if Beirut's fluvial trauma is something you've never previously considered.
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You get more out of the exhibition if you stop and wave your phone at a QR code on 11 separate occasions, then listen to five minutes of audio at each waypoint, but quite frankly who has time for that? We didn't stop to read everything either, just walked through and looked at the pictures so were out fairly quickly all told. The theme felt a bit loose and the art wasn't as engaging as it sometimes is, but the good bits were good and if retreating glaciers don't give you the willies you're probably ice-hearted. Thirst! continues until February 2026 which is basically forever, so it'll be worth a visit on a glum winter Saturday when you've run out of interesting things to do.
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Meanwhile in Harrow the new Art Park continues unabated.
One of the greenhouse things appears to contain a cactus, another is festooned with photos of the Art Park so feels a bit meta and the other two are empty. As for the surrounding units one has a clothes rail in it, one has become an offshoot of the rug shop on the market and another is being used by a cake decorator which isn't truly art. The most telltale sign that bugger all is happening is the map of the Art Park framed on the wall whose key is entirely empty, all the way from Units 1-14 to Galleries E-G. And yet it all started with such high hopes.
Councillors decided to replace 20 car parking spaces with an Art Park as part of "a bold new project dedicated to creativity, community and collaboration". It's a five year project overseen by Meanwhile Space on behalf of the London Borough of Harrow, the aim to "establish itself as a creative and social catalyst for Harrow's future". Beancounters should have run a mile when they read that the Art Park was to be "a hub of curiosity" but instead they paid up and this deadzone is the end result.
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The area's Labour councillor told the London Lens that the project highlighted Harrow Council's inability to plan and co-ordinate effectively, also that "hundreds of pounds in taxpayers' money is likely being wasted on keeping the lights on all day every day” which we're pretty sure is a ridiculous exaggeration. In response the Conservative council leader admitted it would take a few months to reach full occupancy as you'd expect with any new venue, then blamed Labour councillors for being too downbeat. "The Council is learning and adapting as we go along," he added, which to be fair did sound like a confession it was a bit rubbish at the moment.
The London Lens doorstepped the heart of the Art Park yesterday, keen to get to the bottom of things. We approached the central meeting space, a community hall with a grey ridged roof, and observed two shady characters lurking deep within. What secrets might they hold, what astonishing revelations might they reveal, and who on earth was paying them to spend Thursday morning awaiting visitors who would never come? As we stepped through the door and saw precisely what was laid out on the table inside, little could have prepared us for the unexpected truth we would discover by doing the proper journalism nobody else is doing. And in the centre of Harrow of all places!
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I remember film for cameras. You couldn't just wander around with a smartphone snapping willynilly, you needed special film like Colourprint II designed for instant loading cameras. You bought a box of film from the shop, in this case Boots, and had to manoeuvre the cartridge into your camera without accidentally overexposing it on the way in. This particular film only had space for 12 pictures so you had to take photos really sparingly or you'd run out before the end of the holiday. There was always a best before date, in this case May 1980, and note the depressing news that PRICE DOES NOT INCLUDE PROCESSING. Every film had to be sent away after use, in this case dropped into Boots, and then you'd go back a few days later and excitedly flick through the blurry messes you'd taken. No 'dodgy' photos in those days, Mr Chemist was watching. If you're a certain age you probably remember film for cameras too, also I'm aware you can still get it for certain retro devices, but my word instant photography has moved on in the last fifty years.
I remember free gifts in cereal packets. They were the most exciting thing ever when I was a child, the opportunity to find a random piece of card or plastic figure lurking at the bottom of your packet of cereal. Sometimes they were outside the bag and sometimes inside, so sometimes you thought they'd forgotten to put one in only to find it later, perhaps by urgently shaking the Coco Pops at an angle until a gift appeared. These ones came with Weetabix in 1975, a set of 24 cards featuring Dr Who And His Enemies just as Tom Baker hit his peak. You got 4 characters at a time, each of which had to be pushed out of its card before you could play with them in front of the colourful alien scene on the back of the packet. I never got the full set, instead I ended up with two Yetis, also I was only 10 so didn't remember any Dr Who stories containing a Quark or White Robot. Gordon Archer did the artwork and they're now eminently collectable, not that I realised this at the time. I also remember Magic Roundabout pencil toppers in Ricicles and Klondike Pete comics in Golden Nuggets, as will you if you're a certain age, and wow breakfasts got a lot duller when they stopped putting random freebies in cereal packets.
I remember Viewmaster stereoscopes. They had a plastic viewer with two eyepieces and then you could buy all sorts of discs on all sorts of topics to slot into them. Each 'reel' had 14 transparencies, and by viewing them in pairs you got to see seven 3D images as the disc rotated. This set's Wombles-themed from 1973, with three discs each bringing to life one of the stories from the stop-motion TV series. Ideally someone else read the text from the booklet out loud while you were clicking through, or else you knew the story off by heart because you'd watched them over and over. In the absence of video recorders, this is how we filled our afternoons. If you're of a certain age you'll remember Viewmasters too, maybe any age because they're been around since 1939 and are still in production. Originally the main content was tourist-related, so for example I have another set of reels from Niagara Falls, but eventually storytelling for children took over and in 2008 they stopped making scenic panoramas altogether.
I remember transfer lettering. There was no desktop publishing in those days and sometimes a Dymo label wouldn't cut it, so sheets of transferrable letting sold like hot cakes. You'd remove the protective backing sheet, locate the letter of your choice over the appropriate surface and scribble with a pencil. If you pulled the plastic away before you'd scribbled enough you could be left with an incomplete mess so you always had to be careful. This sheet's unusual because all the letters are the same, whereas normally you got a full alphabet and had to hope none of them ran out before you'd finished. Two Zs or seven Es and you might be scuppered. One of the joys was that you could buy all sorts of typefaces - Letraset made some stunners - and pick a decorative style for a bedroom cupboard or something more sober for the front of a presentation. Of course you had to try to keep the line straight or the end result looked wonky, plus the letters had a tendency to eventually rub off, but if you're of a certain age you will very much remember dry-transfer lettering.
I remember Pocketeers. They were a series of hand-held non-electronic games released by Palitoy in the late 1970s and my brother and I were totally target audience. Each came in a green sleeve and generally what you got was a plastic box with some kind of clever mechanical game inside. Time Up was a maze through which you had to try to roll a small silver ball, scoring up to 100 points according to how far you got before a mechanical timer halted your progress. I also owned Steeplechase which was a mini-obstacle course, The Derby which was a wheel-turning four horse race and Pinball which was self-explanatory and ideal for 10 year-olds who couldn't go into pubs yet. My brother had Cup Final and Golf, the latter with a teensy player you took out of the box and set up to hit teensy balls into a teensy hole. We never got the fullset of Pocketeers because they cost 99p at the Co-op and that was beyond our pocket money but they were a much-loved possession that filled many an afternoon and I remember them very fondly.
I remember Double Agents. These were a boiled sweet produced by Trebor, named because they had a hard flavour outside and a soft sherbet inside. My absolute favourites were strawberries and cream Double Agents, numbered 004, closely followed by lime and chocolate (as pictured, 003). All the sweet wrappers had coded messages on them which could be unravelled if you found the packet with the right Spy Information printed on the inside (a simple substitution code but with all the words written backwards). Trebor often ran special offers - they sent me a Fingerprint Kit in 1978 in return for four wrappers and a 10p coin. Double Agents would have been the perfect sweet to eat while reading the KnowHow Book of Spycraft, an Usborne publication which I read and reread and which may still be one of the best books of all time. You may remember none of this, or you may have taken everything to heart and learned to reveal absolutely nothing.
I remember collectable cards. These are from ice lollies and teabags, two of the quintessential places to find a small rectangle of card in the 1970s. The first pair are from a set of 25 cards made by Lyons Maid for a lime, vanilla and strawberry ice lolly called Space 1999. I must have got through a lot of lollies in the summer of 1976 because I've got a dozen of them, also they stopped hiding picture cards inside the wrappers the following year. The artwork wasn't great because the real Dr Helena Russell looked considerably more realistic than that. As for tea cards we weren't a great consumer at the time so my grandmothers funnelled all their Brooke Bond freebies my way, and between us we managed to fill the entire album of The Race Into Space (1971), History of Aviation (1972) and The Sea - Our Other World (1974). Cuppas have never been so exciting since.
I remember ink cartridges. This is a pack of 10 Parker ink cartridges for my Parker fountain pen, cursive script being an essential part of a 1970s education. You needed a stash of cartridges because at any minute your nib might go a bit scratchy as the ink ran out and that could be the end of the world if you were in the middle of a crucial essay. I always plumped for black ink rather than the usual Royal Blue, either because I thought black looked cooler or because in the early days we only had a bottle of black Quink ink in the house. Also I note that this particular pack of ink cartridges is unopened, this because there was once a threshold in my life when the need to use a fountain pen became redundant and my lovely Parkers now sit in a drawer. In a way it's a damned shame, but also a good thing because I'm not forever hunting a sheet of blotting paper and my fingers no longer look like they're decaying from frostbite, indeed hardly anything needs writing any more and when it does biros and fibre tips have totally won out.
I remember BT Phonecards. They seemed so modern when they arrived in 1982, a green plastic rectangle you could slot into a payphone and make a call without the need for coins. It meant you had to make a purchase in a shop before you could make a call, but BT smiled because their payphones were no longer full of cash and a target for theft. Instead a strip on the front of the card was heated and 'erased' so they knew how many units you'd used, and if you could read the bumps you knew how many you had left. I think mine's fully used up which is just as well because cardphone technology was phased out in 1996 and otherwise I'd have wasted some of my sunk cost. You may remember BT Phonecards if you're old enough, but mainly when people get nostalgic about payphones it's all about dropping coins in slots and what the minimum coin was and giving three rings and how you had to press Button A and Button B, and one day people who use smartphones will be just as retrospectively tedious.
I remember Tamagotchis. These were little digital pocket pets which you had to nurture so they grew up properly and didn't die. Feed them right and clear up their poop and they might grow from baby to child to adult, but neglect them for too long and they'd get into bad habits or waste away and go up to heaven like an angel. Eventually you learnt it was OK to go to sleep at night because they'd still be alive when you woke up, but like today's phones they were always burning a hole in your pocket begging for attention. I know they still make Tamagotchis but this is one of the first generation circa 1997, not that I was still a child but there's no age limit on novelty zeitgeist gadgets, and I'm hoping that a lot of you who didn't remember any of the earlier things will definitely remember this.
I remember being 30. I got given a birthday card with this badge on... '30 and red hot' ...and I wore it at work all day. I didn't think I was red hot at the time but I look back now and sigh, recognising I was far more red hot than I thought I was and considerably red hotter than I am now, relatively speaking, indeed they don't make '60 and red hot' badges and they wouldn't sell anyway. But it's all too easy to spend your time looking back and sighing about the past, and droning on about the past, and fixating about the past, indeed focusing all your thoughts on the past, whereas the present is all we've got and the future is all we can change. Remember that.
Back in 2003 I saw a table on Jonathan's blog and thought "ooh, I wonder how he did that". I checked the source code and tried to unpick it, also consulted my Teach Yourself HTML4 book, and so sussed out how tables worked. Since then tables have been a regular feature on this blog, almost a defining feature, because I really enjoy arranging facts and data in a grid.
Most other blogs don't use tables, ever.
Most websites don't use tables either, not within the actual text.
Tables used to be more common, but not very common, perhaps for good reason.
Tables look fine on my laptop, and generally perfectly readable on my mobile, but I suspect they muck up all sorts of accessibility for all sorts of people.
Sorry if you can't read my tables easily.
But I still love tables and have no intention of retiring them.
They're all clickable, but given you've read them already there's no need to click.
Central Square got the most comments, with 18.
Balgores Square got the fewest comments, with three.
You'll notice I'm trying to do at least one square in every borough.
So far I have 11 boroughs left.
I still have 20 Squares to explore and would value your suggestions.
I asked you at the start of the year and got dozens.
So far I've visited 7 of the Squares you suggested, thanks.
n.b. I'm only visiting Squares that are listed in the National Street Gazetteer.
n.b. I need Squares in the 11 unvisited boroughs but also 9 more elsewhere.
n.b. Tower Hamlets has by far the most Squares, followed by Westminster and Southwark.
n.b. Harrow only has one public square so I know where I'm going, thanks.
Yesterday was St Swithin's Day.
And it rained, so it's going to rain for 40 days.
n.b. It may not have rained for you but it rained where I was and that's what counts. I had to hide in a hedge near Heathrow to avoid getting drenched, and I thought ah well, rain every day until August 24th.
n.b. Obviously the St Swithin's legend has been disproved as rubbish, obviously, because dead Saxonbishops don't affect our weather.
n.b. Also UK weather doesn't ever do 40 consecutive days of exactly the same thing. I investigated this in some depth back in 2022, so won't trawl over my four decades of personal data again.
n.b. As an example of how rubbish the folklore is, only 11 of the last 40 days have been wet in London but then July 15th went and bucked the trend with heavy showers.
Here then is my day by day record of the 40 days after St Swithin's Day 2025.
If a day is wet - even one drop - I'll turn the square blue.
If a day is dry - i.e. no rain - I'll turn the square yellow.
I'm calling it a SWITHINOMETER.
15
WET
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
n.b. This table will only be completed by the August bank holiday, before that it's just a work in progress.
n.b. I have a particular interest in St Swithin being wrong because my niece is getting married in the bottom right hand corner.
n.b. Expect to see this table on the blog again in late August, hopefully while I'm still nursing a mild hangover.
TfL sometimes struggle to get the media to notice a good press launch, but I got lucky yesterday and stumbled upon their latest project at Waterloo station while travelling home from riding a duff bus. I knew something was up when I noticed an art workshop at the top of the Jubilee line escalators and a stash of luxurious-looking leaflets in the rack by the ticket machines. And I confirmed my suspicions at the foot of the escalators when I walked straight into a full-on bash celebrating the launch of the latest Art on the Underground project. Imagine there are a couple of dozen leaflet-clutchers milling around to the left of this swirly songbird artwork, all looking important and admiring their handiwork, because there were and I've cropped them out.
This is Go Find Miracles by Rory Pilgrim, a new sound installation that'll be played out along the moving walkway at Waterloo station for the next couple of weeks. It was inspired by something unexpectedly tangential - the connections between London's architecture and the Isle of Portland - and combines choral music and spoken word in a looping ten minute presentation. Recording took place at two underground locations, one the disused Jubilee line platforms at Charing Cross and the other a Portland stone mine, with singers including alumni of the Prison Choir Project and following a creative workshop at a feminist library. There are so many surprising layers to this project that you'll only fully unpick them if you read the dense text on the Art On The Underground page or pick up a leaflet, which hardly anyone passing through will. It is a top-quality leaflet on posh paper in six-part gatefold which opens out to reveal a colourful songbird poster, this because Art on the Underground still has a proper budget.
I diverted off my planned journey to ride the travelator there and back to experience Go Find Miracles for myself. I would show you a photo but the passageway remains lined by dozens of distracting adverts for alibaba.com, not swirly songbirds, because marketing always trumps art. My passage was accompanied by forceful poetry with a musical soundscape, also a whole new crowd of arty guests who looked like they might have contributed to the project. But just as I was getting into the sequence of call and response a male voice interrupted with a long announcement about CCTV, looking after your belongings and ended with See It Say It Sorted, which is about as far from poetry as you can get. By the time the philistine intrusion ended we'd skipped 20 seconds of the sound installation, because health and safety always trumps art, and nobody's ever going to hear the full 10 minutes anyway.
The best way to experience Go Find Miracles may thus be to listen to the audio file on Soundcloud without fear of interruption, but Rory and TfL would rather you came and heard it for yourself this week and next, 10am to 5pm only, along an ad-strewn travelator. It's enchanting but if it causes one single traveller to go beneath the surface to imagine new structures of repair and possibility, or to muse on breaking cycles of harm to find space for miracles, it'll be a miracle.
Route 700: Colliers Wood to Phipps Bridge Estate Location: London southwest Length of bus journey: 1½ miles, 7 minutes
Every so often, usually because of roadworks, TfL introduce a newtemporarybusroutewith ahighnumber. The latest is the 700, a number chosen because it replaces part of route 200, a lowly twiddler in the borough of Merton. It's needed because there are joint gas and water main works on the edge of Mitcham Cricket Green, which incidentally are causing havoc with other buses being diverted round jammed-up roads but that's a different story. What's important is that the 200 is normally the only route down Church Road and that's now blocked for two months, so a special route was needed to reach the Phipps Bridge Estate which would otherwise be bus-less. And that's the 700.
In good news it's a spanking new bus. A gleaming double decker has been gifted to the route, just the one most of the time because it's not a long circuit and one vehicle can generally cope. The young bus fans who came out to ride the route were very excited by the vehicle, and yes the youth contingent were out in force with their TikToks, vastly outnumbering the freeloading pensioners you'd normally expect. One of them said his mate skipped school to ride the first day on the SL4, that's how hardcore they are. It also means there already multiplereelsandvideos available if you want to see what shenanigans occurred aboard the 700, or instead to watch several minutes of the journey viewed from not quite the front seat. I'll thus merely summarise for the old school contingent who still like text.
In good news there's a map, courtesy of TfL's We Only Make Maps For New Routes Department. In bad news the map's wrong, also the timings on it don't seem to be right, also I saw no timetables at bus stops round the route, also route 700 is much less frequent than the 200 it replaces, also the iBus system inside the bus thought we were on route 57, so let's go for a ride and I'll point out all the duff bits.
The 700 starts outside Colliers Wood station, which you can tell because the stop has a special tile saying '700 Shuttle bus'. Indeed The Blokes Who Swap The Tiles have done a fine job all along the route, apart that is from adding '700 Shuttle bus' tiles at four stops where the 700 isn't stopping. The Blokes Who Change The Timetables have done less well, adding timetables to precisely zero of the stops I looked at, although apparently they have added them at some stops because I saw it on YouTube. I did whip out an app to see if that could tell me when the next bus was coming but the live arrivals thing wasn't working... or maybe I just got unlucky.
According to the map Route 700 runs 'every 20 mins 06:00-19:00 Mon to Sat' but this is nottrue. The 20 minute frequency is only before 9am and between 3.30pm and 7pm, and only on weekdays, otherwise it's every 30 minutes. I turned up late morning and believed the map, which was foolish because technically I could have walked to the far end of the route before the bus even turned up.
Off we went past Dunelm and a couple of stops the 200 still stops at, but then we were on our own down Church Road. The route really comes into its own once it turns off into the Phipps Bridge estate, this being part of TfL's commitment to run buses within 400m of as many Londoners as possible. What was odd was that all the bus stops on the other side of the road had yellow covers saying 'Bus stop not in use', despite also having '700 shuttle bus' tiles underneath. According to the map they're all served, also according to the route listing shown on the TfL website, also according to the app I flipped open. But in real life they're not being served, four stops in total, because the bus isn't doing what the map says it is.
The map says the 700 goes as far as the roundabout outside the parish church, then turns round and follows the same route back. What appears to be happening in real life is that buses are skipping the detour round the estate on the way back, instead heading straight back direct along Church Road. Practically it makes sense, it's quicker, plus everyone on the estate can board the looping bus on the way out without needing to wait for the way back. But I think it's a last minute change because all the maps and tiles say these stops are in use and only the yellow covers say they're not. It certainly confused a mother and daughter waiting patiently at Frensham Court for a clockwise bus towards Colliers Wood, only for our driver to wind down his window and yell over to cross the road and climb in because he wasn't coming back.
It is amazing how much of a mess you can make of a 7 minute bus route, but turning a 'there-and-back' into a loop without telling anyone certainly managed that. Perhaps these were just Day One wrinkles but who's to say, and fortunately unless you live on the Phipps Bridge Estate these two months of inconvenience will just pass you by.
45 Squared 25) MARKET SQUARE, N9
Borough of Enfield, 70m×50m
Also a town's centre but utterly different to Richmond, that's Market Square in Edmonton. New not old, enclosed not open, basic not aspirational, blouses not yogawear, also you can't drive a vehicle into it which I think is a first in this year-long series. Come with me to the heart of Edmonton Green Shopping Centre, N9's sinuous concrete stripmall.
Edmonton had a fairly typical town centre until the late 1960s when the newly-formed Enfield council decided to bulldoze the majority in favour of full-on retail redevelopment. Frederick Gibberd & Co (of Harlow fame) came up with an innovative brutalist concoction mixing tower blocks with shopping opportunities and car parks, while Edmonton Green was substantially remodelled for through traffic. A new bus station replaced the old marketplace and all the stalls were moved into a large covered square at the core of the new development. North Mall bears off from one corner, South Mall from the opposite corner and a lowlit connector to the outside world from one side, all feeding shoppers into Market Square. Five parallel bands of glass let the light in.
The original stalls are long gone, replaced by brighter permanent units with standard fascias. Some are small with space for key-cutting, engraving or a nail bar, a few are substantially larger and the majority appropriate for medium-sized traders in luggage, Caribbean groceries or dried nuts. The three prime corner units are all occupied by greengrocers, such is the demand for low-priced fruit and veg hereabouts, all neatly arrayed in bands of red, orange and green across hundreds of plastic bowls. Why walk all the way to Asda or Lidl when Letherbarrow's has all the loose tomatoes, peppers and grapes any family could need? Then there's Crystal Meats who are from the shrinkwrapped tray school of butchery, any three for £10, also Fashion Express who sell those huge checked bags ideal for taking washing to the launderette. It's all impressively tidy.
Stallholders who bother to turn up on Sunday aren't always rushed off their feet so wait patiently lest anyone genuinely need a quilted bathmat, marbled laundry bin or silver chain. The proprietor of the shoe stall shares a table outside Koffee Box watching not much of the world pass by. The couple who run Men's Fashion have chosen to arrive an hour late and are arranging their polo shirts and £2 tees beside the walkway in the hope that some will have been sold by the time they wheel the racks back in. Meanwhile a few proper shops ring the outer edge of the square, the remaining beacons including JD Sports and William Hill, although the draw was considerably higher when Superdrug was still a Tesco. As for the Railway Tavern this claims to be a traditional pub, and indeed the original did stand by the level crossing on the Green for years, but this glum replacement has all the character of a dingy unit in the corner of a postwar market.
Oh and there's also an upstairs, assuming you can get there. For some impractical reason it's only accessible up a single tissue-strewn staircase, or an adjacent lift, so first floor businesses must suffer terribly from low footfall. That said if you want the Turkish accountants, the special needs theatre or the local MP's office, you're more likely to be on a mission than just ambling by. What's unexpected is that after you've walked round the balcony a separate passage heads out onto the open roof... and into a street in the sky. A lot of councils tried mall-top living in the 70s, notably in Wood Green, but it's still surprising to see a row of eight townhouses on top of Clarks and Cardfactory, complete with washing hanging on the line and a lady sipping coffee in her front garden.
My initial conclusion was that Edmonton Green Shopping Centre was a postwar success, still very well used and with a minimum of empty units. Then I remembered that there is essentially nowhere else for Edmonton's shoppers to go, the exterior retail offering having been so comprehensively extinguished, so of course tumbleweed has been held at bay. At least Market Square itself remains a cut above what most towns of this size offer, still appealingly blessed with everyday essentials, so long as you don't look round the edge or go upstairs.
45 Squared 24) THE SQUARE, TW9
Borough of Richmond, 60m
In the very centre of Richmond, junctionally speaking, several fine Georgian streets and passageways come together beneath a zinc-scaled dome. One of the main streets is The Quadrant, one of the passageways is The Passage and stretching briefly to the east is The Square. This isn't square, just as The Quadrant isn't part-circular, although it may once have been more rectangular than it now looks, perhaps. Sorry, I thought the centre of a historic town would be easier to research, but rest assured there is a history behind all this somewhere.
The Square is an evasive thoroughfare, plainly labelled on a couple of street signs but not necessarily on the correct addresses. It connects two landmark buildings, the Old Fire Station and the Dome, and I believe once passed behind the former and now loops round the latter. The Dome is everything a prominent Victorian building should be, especially if you need activewear for your next yoga session because the lower storey is now a branch of Lululemon. Excitingly the top floor is currently up for lease as open plan office accommodation, including a boardroom inside the dome itself offering 360 degree views in case your meeting content is particularly tedious.
Also part of this odd complex is a small Persian restaurant called Saffron with a reassuringly dense menu pinned up outside, should you fancy an al fresco skewering. Even smarter is Major Son & Phipps alongside, a thin estate agents with a chic Parisian feel to its signage, one of whose staff is a dog called Scooby who merits his own page on the company website. Across the road a plaque above the Nationwide Building Society references The Imperial 1890, this being the pub that once occupied the building before a pizza chain moved in in the 1980s. The bubble tea shop isn't original either, ditto the Argentinian steakhouse and pizzeria in what is now The Square but used to be The Passage. Do try to keep up.
The final standout building is the Old Fire Station, an overtwiddly redbrick number from 1870 with a distinctive clock tower that would have looked right at home in the centre of Trumpton. Look out for the carved heads of two moustachioed Victorian firefighters above the ex-entrance. When fire engines grew too big the main body became a shop and is currently yet another estate agents with a solicitors' office perched above. Meanwhile the front end became public conveniences, but Richmond council don't believe in those any more so it's now a coffee shop whose slogan is "Every single step is artisanal", so still very much taking the piss.
The Square is only brief but everyone who heads south round Richmond's one-way system passes very briefly through half of it, and now you know what it's called even if it's hard to discern precisely where it starts and why it finishes.
As part of this year's Railway200 celebrations, special events and community get-togethers with a rail connection are taking place across the country. And yesterday a very special one took place at Motspur Park station because, coincidentally in this 200th anniversary year, it was celebrating its 100th birthday.
How did I know this was happening? Joe Brown always posts a London rail anniversary on Twitter and Bluesky every morning and yesterday it was that Motspur Park was 100 years old. Ooh a centenary, I thought, and on a Saturday too. I wondered if anything special was going on... and it was.
Motspur Park is a full-on cliché of a suburban railway station in that before it opened there was nothing here but farms and fields and within ten years, hey presto, ubiquitous commuter avenues. It was also an afterthought in that trains ran direct from Raynes Park to Worcester Park for 60-odd years but only in 1925 did the railway company add an intermediate halt to exploit the area's potential.
Effectively it means the community of Motspur Park is 100 years old too so they pulled out all the stops and organised an exhibition in a library. To be fair it was a very good exhibition with an extraordinary centrepiece, and several very important people turned up to celebrate. There was also cake.
The local MP turned up. This is southwest London so he's a Liberal Democrat, but he hoped Labour's nationalisation strategy went well and urged us all to get behind rail travel and rail expansion. He also praised the strong community connections in West Barnes and Motspur Park.
The Mayor of Merton turned up. He admitted to being a railway fan and urged everyone to watch Jago Hazzard's new video about Motspur Park station. He said the recent completion of step-free access at the station was a gamechanger locally. He also praised the strong community connections in West Barnes and Motspur Park.
sidenote
Did the Mayor of Merton come by train? No he came by car (a chauffeur-driven black Ford Mondeo, registration M1 LBM). An hour after the event the car was back in its special space outside the entrance to Merton Civic Centre. To be fair there aren't any direct trains, and I wouldn't risk coming by K5 bus either.
The two of them also cut a ribbon outside the station. All yesterday's speeches were supposed to take place outside the station but they moved most of them inside the library instead because of the hot weather. After cutting the ribbon Paul and Martin held up an original station sign for the cameras, this too exactly 100 years old to the day.
The Vicar of the local church turned up. She blessed the station, which arguably is a strange thing to do, but she got away with it because her prayer was also addressed to all those who pass through the station. "May they go to places of joy, may they all find seats".
sidenote
Do any other rail stations have a 100th birthday this year? According to Wikipedia, only four surviving British stations opened in 1925. Two are Croxley and Watford on the Metropolitan line so they don't count for Railway200 purposes. The only genuine railway centenarians this year are Motspur Park and Penmere in Cornwall.
SWR's Community Manager turned up. She said SWR had decided to focus all their Railway200 celebrations around station birthdays, but Motspur Park was the only one to have a proper 100th birthday this year. She loved the celebratory bunting around the station and across the local shops. She also said she was amazed and impressed by quite how many people had turned up.
One of Railway200's top brass turned up. He seems to appear where the best anniversaries are, so yesterday it was Motspur Park's 100th and today it's the 50th anniversary of the reopening of the North Norfolk Railway. He said a proper centenary plaque would be installed in an appropriate location later. He was also inspired and humbled by how the campaign he joined two years ago had inspired this local community and so many others.
sidenote
When exactly is the proper 200th birthday of railways in Britain? It's arguable, do you go with Stockton and Darlington in 1825 or the Rainhill trials in 1829 or some other event? But essentially who cares. If you disagree you're just an opinionated bloke in an armchair whereas the Railway200 team have picked a date and made great things happen.
Christian Wolmar turned up. He gave a talk in the library before the ribbon cutting and the speeches took place. He also hung around to sign some books.
One of the Friends of West Barnes Library turned up and led the speeches. He seemed quite excited that everyone would be going in and out of the library at least twice because this would do wonders for their visitor numbers. He was also genuinely moved that well over 100 people had turned up.
And Paul Gumbrell turned up, and he'd brought this.
This is part of the layout of the Green Valley Railway, a model layout based in a back garden in West Barnes. They only had room for a small proportion of it here, a representation of the line through Motspur Park as it was on its opening day, complete with ropey footbridge, Hornby island platform and specially-commissioned model gasometers. The modern Motspur Park station sign in the centre was the perfect final flourish.
This is not what you expect to find in the middle of a library complete with two trains circling round, and I think everyone was fairly blown away.
sidenote
The Green Valley Railway holds three open weekends each year and the next is in two weeks' time. The Edroy Garden Line's Summer Gala Open Weekend takes place on 26th and 27th July from 1pm-5pm at 173 Westway SW20 9LR.
Elsewhere within the library was an exhibition about the history of Motspur Park, also a scale model of the local estate in the 1920s, also a table selling local history books and centenary fridge magnets, also a framed board for Motspur Park Monopoly (not for sale). A separate Picnic in the Park had been scheduled for the afternoon. The effort here was off the scale and it was a privilege to drop in on a cohesive community that bothers to turn out in large numbers for events like this.
And all because a station opened here 100 years ago, because railways have truly shaped Britain, not just Motspur Park.
Route 700: Colliers Wood to Phipps Bridge Estate
