Thousands of farmers, countryfolk and their supporters were in central London yesterday to protest against the imposition of inheritance tax on farmland. You could tell something was up by the number of people in Barbour jackets, tweed caps and sensible outerwear milling around mainline stations and aiming for Westminster. People who hardly ever come to London had come to London to make clear the strength of their opposition, from landed gentry with shooting sticks to the farmhands who keep the cattle in check. I think this group were probably overstating their case, though.
Their plan was to start in the centre of Whitehall, hear some speeches and then march down to Parliament Square and back. Instead so many people turned up that the march never happened, for reasons of safety and because it was a miserable cold wet morning. This meant that a lot of posters and banners never got properly waved, although I did spot classics like The Government Is Milking Us, No Farm No Food No Future, Back Farmers Not Starmer, Never Bite The Hand That Feeds You, Save Our Family Farms, Axe The Tax and Labour Lies Vindictiveness And Even More Lies. Very little propaganda manufactured by a political party was evident.
Whitehall was thus rammed, a mass of patiently angry people listening to a succession of short speeches being delivered from a stage a very long way away. A lot of those present were families but more were delegations from farms (i.e. whoever could get the time off) and local agricultural associations, often in branded fleeces. Given yesterday's weather it was just as well that most of them were well used to standing around in inclement conditions and had dressed accordingly. This looks interesting, I thought, and decided to walk quickly along the side of the demonstration to get a flavour of it. Instead it took me 40 minutes to extricate myself to the far end.
From being a bystander I was swiftly hemmed into the protestors, attempting to follow a crocodile of damp souls squeezing along the periphery. The lads in front were from Matlock, those behind from the Mole Valley and those coming the other way included one mother from the Midlands optimistically manoeuvring a pushchair. One particularly awkward tree near the entrance to Downing Street proved a particular bottleneck, as did a clump of green-jacketed gents outside the Cabinet Office with absolutely no intention of surrendering their ground. The demonstration was lightly policed but despite the prolonged crush never felt out of control, these being practical protestors keener on listening than gesticulating or causing disruption.
My lengthy walk meant I got to hear a lot more speeches than had been my intention. Some were from farmers, others from interested parties and a few were from very big names in politics and beyond. People listened patiently, cheering on cue and occasionally booing when the devil Rachel Reeves was mentioned. Ed Davey arrived to silence but won the crowd round with an impassioned defence of the rural economy and a pledge that his MPs would support the cause. Kemi Badenoch was less specific and thus less impressive, perhaps hamstrung by the impotence of opposition. But Jeremy Clarkson proved the star turn, appearing against medical advice and holding the crowd in the palm of his hand with a perfectly pitched combination of fury and humour. If he ever leaves his farm to enter politics, Labour's days are likely numbered.
It's debatable how disastrous to farming the forthcoming introduction of inheritance tax will be. It only applies to assets over £1m, anyone bequeathing land to a spouse or offspring gets a substantial additional buffer and at 20% it's only half the usual rate. The Treasury reckons only 500 farms a year will have to pay anything, at most, and the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies goes further to say "The changes will affect a remarkably small number of some of the most valuable farms." But what's clear is that tens of thousands of farmers believe it'll apply to them and are about to make business decisions based on their assets being sliced in the future, which indeed some of them will be. Whatever, if you want to better understand a point of view I can heartily recommend embedding yourself in the middle of it for 40 minutes, ideally in much better weather.
Southwark station opened 25 years ago today on 20th November 1999.
It's a lot of people's favourite station, architecturally.
There's no other station like it.
The platforms are much like many of the others on the Jubilee line extension, but the concourse between them is unique. Step through and you enter a long cylindrical space on two levels faced with unpolished stainless steel panels. At each end a streamlined glass beacon divides two staircases leading to a higher walkway - the upper lower concourse.
It's not always this empty but sometimes it is. From here three separate bores rise diagonally upwards, each with a solo escalator, like ascending into your own private firmament. The best bit is the intermediate concourse, a huge space with thin concrete ribs high above a beautiful curved blue wall. As if to prove how photogenic it is, when I turned up to take my photo another amateur with a big lens was earnestly waiting for me to get out of the way so he could take his shot.
Apparently the inspiration for the blue cone wall came from Karl Friedrick Schinkel's 1816 stage set design for ‘The Magic Flute’, according to architects (and when you see that, yes of course it did). The main set of escalators then climbs to a concourse lit by a circular skylight, beyond which is a drum-shaped ticket hall with a staff kiosk at its centre. Circles and curves are definitely the theme around here.
A final set of steps leads out onto Blackfriars Road. TfL HQ is just across the road so expect to find yourself amid a stream of lanyarded transport professionals. The strange thing about the surface building is that it's just a shell, even though planning permission was originally awarded for a 12 storey building on top. Even stranger is that construction of a 14 storey building finally starts this weekend, exactly 25 years on, with the station having to be closed over nine weekends between now and April. 400 student flats are on their way.
Perhaps Southwark's most unique feature is the separate exit into a mainline station, namely Waterloo East. It's not possible to exit onto the street here, only to pass through two gatelines (each watched over by a very bored member of staff) before climbing stairs to the platform of your choice. Southwark is the only tube station where paper platform tickets can still be bought and used, purely thanks to this peculiar interstitial.
Quirky, gorgeous, unfinished and unique, that's Southwark station 25 years on. Best celebrate this rare success because only four new tube stations have opened since.
In this series I'm taking the train one stop beyond the Greater London boundary, getting off and seeing what's there. Today that means Carpenders Park, one stop beyond Hatch End on what will next week be the Lioness line. For positioning purposes we're two miles south of Watford, still just about in Hertfordshire, and what follows is a tale of two very different suburbs either side of the railway line, neither of which existed 100 years ago.
Best start at the station because this is 100% crucial to how the neighbourhood developed. The West Coast Main Line carved through in 1837 but it took until 1914 until the first halt was built, initially to deliver golfers to Oxhey Golf Club. Traffic picked up in the 1930s when a private estate was built on the east side of the line, which'd be Carpenders Park, then serviced by the extremities of the Bakerloo line. In the late 1940s a large LCC overspill estate was built on the west side of the mainline, entirely separate, this being the less well-to-do South Oxhey. The station was rebuilt in 1952 and is very much not a looker, an island platform accessed via a long ramp down to a crucial subway... turn left for South Oxhey, turn right for Carpenders Park. Only one road connects the two sides, an annoyingly narrow bridge some way to the south on Little Oxhey Lane, so people tend to pick their side and stick with it.
Carpenders Park is a spacious garden suburb from the days when land was relatively cheap and aspirations high. Long avenues of generally identical semis and bungalows splay out from the main focus by the station, each with a pitched gabled roof and sufficient parking space out front to keep cars off the roadway. On the upper slopes the contours fall away to reveal the opposing forces of South Oxhey beyond the rooftops of the street below, which ought to be enough to convince residents they're on the right side of the divide. If it all looks a bit inward-looking and curtain-twitchy, that may be because author Leslie Thomas once lived in Carpenders Park and set his infamous potboiler Tropic of Ruislip here, the location renamed Plummers Park.
Tucked away to the north are a slew of very different 1950s townhouses, mostly with flat roofs, added after the initial property rush. One of the twistier streets goes by the delightful name of Margeholes, this being the name of the wood opposite, although the developers clearly ran out of ideas after that because the road on the hill is called On The Hill and the road along the edge of the trees is called By The Wood. Another weird street name is Delta Gain, this the estate's hub where the main shopping parade is located. It's seen better days, the local Co-Op seemingly the only shop to have updated its frontage in years. As for the local school being called St Meryl's, you'll struggle to find her listed in Catholic canon because this Meryl was actually the wife of the estate's original developer!
At the start of the 20th century all that was here was a large Victorian mansion called Carpenders Park and a dairy farm on the other side of Oxhey Lane. In 1909 the mansion and its 250 acre estate were put up for sale ("a handsome Country House surrounded by beautiful pleasure grounds and approached by a charming carriage drive bordered by finely grown specimen trees"). The new occupant was a girls' school called Highfields who hung around until 1960, after which the property was demolished and replaced by married quarters for American soldiers stationed at nearby RAF Northwood. That's all since been replaced by private housing, obviously, while the last remnants of the farm were recently reborn as a nursing home. But a substantial portion of the mansion's grounds remain open space and now look like this...
This is Carpenders Park Lawn Cemetery, opened in 1954, where upright gravestones and permanent markers are eschewed in favour of acres of grass. Bulbs and bedding plants are permitted up to 15 months after burial, after which grave owners are given four weeks' notice and the plot is laid to lawn. It all looks appealingly sparse, apart from the area by the toilets where most of the recent interments have been. A separate section near the entrance has been dedicated to the Muslim community. Perhaps the strangest thing about the cemetery is that it's owned and run by Brent council so nobody local gets buried here, this because most of the cemeteries in Brent itself are hangovers when from inner London needed space on the outskirts. It's certainly odd stepping off a Hertfordshire street to read an anti-social behaviour order posted by a London council, also to discover that all the litter bins on site feature Brent's (former) logo.
The cemetery's finest feature, and another castoff from the original mansion, is the landscaped stream running along the northern border. This is the Hartsbourne, a tributary of the Colne which rises on the slopes below Bushey Heath. Here it runs through a heavily wooded stripe complete with rustic stonework and a former fishpond, connected via a footbridge to the cemetery's car park. Best of all a shady footpath follows it for a full half mile, a magic corridor sandwiched between back gardens where you could easily imagine E Nesbit's best loved characters playing at the water's edge... at least until you emerge through a gate round the back of a pub and the river disappears unceremoniously into a culvert.
OK, let's switch sides.
SouthOxhey is a different kettle of fish, still with sprawling avenues but laid out for Cockney migrants rather than owner occupiers. The London County Council compulsorily purchased the site for a paltry fee and built 4000 new homes between 1946 and 1952 using rubble from the London blitz as hardcore across the estate. As a nod to the history of the area, if not to the interests of the incomers, all the streets on the new estate were named after golf courses. The housing stock remained under the control of the GLC until 1980 when it was transferred to Three Rivers council, and today (thanks to the right to buy) it's estimated that over three quarters is privately owned. But you'd never guess any of this as you step out of the station because it all looks stonkingly new.
When I was last here in 2013 the central square was surrounded by tired lookingshopping parades including a Nisa Extra, Sunny Boy's Cafe and a pub called The Ox. All have since disappeared as part of the £150 million South Oxhey Regeneration Scheme, a much needed boost to the local psyche, fully replaced by a dense stack of flats in the same brick vernacular you can find all over London. Upstairs now has two extra storeys stretching much further back, and down below are a characterless pharmacy, a mere Nisa Express and a full-sized Lidl. Over at the Marketing Suite the cheapest one bed apartment can be yours for more than the LCC paid for the entire estate in the first place.
The shops closer to the station have been similarly replaced by a staggered terrace of brick cuboids, this time untopped. Most are food related, including a Greggs, a Bangladeshi takeaway and a chippie, but residents can also frequent a bed showroom, a betting shop and a funeral directors. It says a lot for the imposed division of the railway that the Post Office here is just 250m from the Post Office in Carpenders Park. Pride of place is given to a jaunty cafe in a skew timber pavilion, ideally located to catch anyone funnelling off a train. In a move early residents would have found baffling it specialises in Portuguese pastries which can be eaten at swanky wooden tables while sitting on chairs with embroidered white cushions, because gentrification has arrived even in WD19.
To see the estate as it was, step back from the area around the station along a variety of meandering spine roads. These are lined by chains of council houses, some resembling squished semis, others cottage-style, as are the numerous intermeshed streets to either side. Variety was not the architects' watchword, although later owners have added myriad porches, shrubbery and even the occasional green telephone box to brighten the visual impact. When I went to school in the area we always looked down on fellow pupils from South Oxhey as coming from the bottom of the heap - sorry Ian - but walking round now it didn't feel overly dour, other than the mass of used firework tubes littering the green by the Moortown Road play area. Admittedly most communities of this size don't need their own police station, but equally when Gareth Malone turned up to start a community choir in a televisually unpromising location nobody thought it'd still be thriving 15 years later.
The only surviving building from before WW2 can be found beside the sports centre on Gosforth Lane. It's not the pyramidalparish church because that's not even the original All Saints built for the new estate in 1953 because that proved too large for later congregations and was demolished in 2000. Instead turn your gaze to the flinty building alongside, a freestanding chapel dating back to 1612... and yes that's the original oak door. The chapel was built for one of James I's barons when he moved into Oxhey Place (a house on the site of a former monastery), then repeatedly restored by several subsequent owners (including Thomas Blackwell of the Crosse & Blackwell dynasty). My favourite chapel fact is that when its roof collapsed during the chilly winter of 1963, Yehudi Menuhin bought the tiles for his Highgate cottage. These days the chapel is under the protection of the The Churches Conservation Trust so invariably locked, but weather permitting you can get inside for the All Saints carol service on 22nd December.
One of the best things about living in South Oxhey is the proximity of thick woodland, ancient and new. Oxhey Woods is huge, as you'll know if you've walked through it on the London Loop, and currently delightfully scrunchy underfoot. It's so large it's been chopped into three by local roads, but you don't have to go too far off piste to find wild service trees and, in the right season, bluebells and anemones. The survival of so many tongues of woodland also helps to explain some of South Oxhey's convoluted street pattern, and also why the local bus route has to follow a doubly meandering path to ensure nobody's left out. Carpenders Park has a much worse bus service, a far less exhilarating choice of dog-walking circuits and nowhere to buy pastéis de Nata, indeed some might argue it's been overtaken by its upstart neighbour across the tracks. There aretwo sides to every station, especially here one stop beyond.
Visit London is the flagship brand charged with attracting tourists to the capital, and in this we wish them well. But they do write some absolute bolx.
🎄 The one thing November does not mean is Christmas, Christmas is in December. I know the pre-Christmas season stretches further every year but "magical London Christmas" occurs in December, not the month before.
🎄 The arrival of November does not "only mean one thing". It means many things including fog, falling leaves, taking down your Hallowe'en decorations, fireworks, All Saints' Day, Movember, Thanksgiving and Jeremy Hunt's birthday.
🎄 If the arrival of November did mean only one thing, that thing would not be a magical London Christmas.
They made it worse in the accompanying 30 second promo video by featuring Winter Wonderland, Regent Street's illuminated angels, Christmas at Kew, Covent Garden's decorations and a churros stall of the kind you find at a pretend German market. This would not have been a problem except that the muppets slapped a caption on the video which said LONDON AS SOON AS NOVEMBER ARRIVES. But not a single one of these Christmas things is in place on 1st November, they all start later in the month, and this is the kind of hyperbolic white lie Visit London is absolutely excellent at.
Another example of their sloppiness is their list of "101 Christmas things to do in London", a list which starts off with Hogwarts In The Snow which as any fule know is in Hertfordshire. This was no careless slip, they doubled down with Windsor Castle at number 5, then threw in Stonehenge, Bath, Dover, Birmingham Christmas Market and Bicester Village for good measure. Anyone would think Visit London couldn't think of 101 Christmas things to do in London.
And fair enough, Visit London's target audience lives far enough away that they don't care whether Hogwarts is in London or not because it might as well be. But that doesn't excuse the team from pumping out inaccurate over-hyped claims, such as for example their regular overuse of the phrase "must visit".
Nothing in London is must-visit, especially not a bunch of gingerbread sheds, a converted horsebox flogging drinks and a few lights in a garden. I can assure the folk at Visit London that a London Christmas need not involve a trip to Kew Gardens in order to be complete. Christmas at Kew has only been running since 2013 and nobody ever felt their festive season was incomplete before it started. Also it has limited capacity so 95% of Londoners couldn't attend even if they wanted to. "X isn't complete without Y" is the kind of lazy phrase copywriters bash out when they've run out of better ideas.
I despair at the phrase "what better... than...", because it's invariably followed by something that's very easily beaten. In this case I think we can all think of something better than going to North Greenwich's teflon tent and filling a plastic tray with small flavoured chocolates. That's not to say you might not enjoy it but the claim was "there's nothing better" and there very much is. Seeing your favourite band, taking a world cruise or staying at home and stroking a kitten are all potentially much better than going to the back of an outlet mall and paying £15 for 300g of fatty gobbles.
Peak bolx might just be the insistence that visitors take a specific "must-do" walk.
It's accompanied by a minute-long video, the title of which is YOU NEED TO DO THIS CHRISTMAS LIGHTS WALK IN LONDON.
No you don't.
The walk "through five of London's iconic light displays" starts on Oxford Street ("the famous Sky Full of Stars"), turns into Regent Street ("these dramatic angels soar above red buses and taxis") and then enters Carnaby Street ("probably one of London's most vibrant areas"). You're then on your own to find a "picturesque stroll" between here and Covent Garden, before crossing Waterloo Bridge to end on the South Bank at the "cosy winter market". The lights there look less amazing but hey, they sell gluhwein. The video's closing caption says MAKE SURE YOU SAVE THIS WALKING ROUTE FOR YOUR TRIP TO LONDON THIS CHRISTMAS, and I would argue whoever wrote that has an inflated opinion of their own importance.
Yesterday they added another "You have to take this walk when you’re next visiting London🙌" must-do video. This time it's a multiple river-crosser from Tower Bridge to Buckingham Palace which perversely prioritises Westminster Cathedral over Trafalgar Square, but rest assured you don't have to take that either.
And yes I know the average foreign tourist doesn't mind the exaggeration, they're more interested in seeing the iconic sights of the city, ideally for real. They're also highly unlikely to scroll back to an excitable tweet from months ago when they finally get round to visiting the city. All these trumped-up boasts will be quickly forgotten, if indeed they were ever noticed in the first place, and the must-walk walk will go unwalked.
But it really ought to be possible to write promotional copy without resorting to exaggerated claims, trite cliches and false superlatives. Most organisations manage it, bigging-up their brand without tipping into inaccurate hyperbole, whereas Visit London have a seemingly relentless passion for deliberate overstatement. And that can only mean one thing, you don't need to do this, a real must-not-do.
5pm update: They're stillat it today.
• Covent Garden at Christmas is a must!✨🎄🎁 (no it isn't)
• You need to add these festive-themed spots to your ultimate London Christmas travel checklist🎄 (no you don't)
• Winter Wonderland is an absolute must-visit (no it isn't)
• No trip to the city is complete without a trip to this festive destination (yes it is)
• Make sure you add these five activities to your festive Christmas bucket list (don't bother)
Cromwell Road bus station in Kingston has reopened.
There are eight versions of today's post, according to your level of interest.
(click to jump to the right one)
1) I just need the basics 2) I never intend to visit but tell me more 3) I sometimes use this bus station 4) I need accessible options 5) I am very very interested in buses 6) I only want to know what's wrong with it 7) I like laughing at press releases 8) I hate buses, please stop writing about them
1) New bus station reopens
Cromwell Road bus station is the larger of Kingston's two bus interchanges. It closed in August 2023 for a complete rebuild including new facilities and a brand new canopy. Yesterday it finally reopened (later than hoped after a few months of snagging). It looks a lot nicer than before and should be better at warding off the elements. TfL are very proud of how much more sustainable and energy efficient it is.
2) Bus station refurbishment complete
The previous bus station opened in 1995 on the site of a former coal yard. It was 12 bays long with four additional bus stops alongside the ring road. TfL first proposed major modernisation in 2013, submitted plans in 2015 and had them approved in 2016, because that's how long it takes to fund a project and bring it to completion. The redevelopment is bookended by two new pavilions which include waiting rooms, an information counter and facilities for staff. Inbetween is a longcanopy formed from diamond-shaped openings through weathered steel plates supported by curved cruciform columns. The new seating is chunky wooden benches rather than less-comfy green-painted metal. It all looks great.
3) Praise be, the bus station is finally open again
It's been a very long fifteen months hasn't it? Not having a bus station has been a right faff with services despatched from temporary stops on the ring road or much further afield, but now thank god they're all back in one place again. The important thing is that all the buses are leaving from exactly the same stop as before, nobody's reshuffled them like they normally do. Here's what departs from where.
♿ A4
285 A5/A6
111 A7/A8
216 A9
411 A10
461 A11
481 458 A12
K1 A13
71 A14/15
465 A16
central walkway
A1 213 371 SL7 K2 K3 K4 K5
Z1 alight only
A2 57 85 131 K5
A3 65 281 406 418 513 514 515 715
Posters showing which bus leaves from which bay have been posted all over the place. Be aware that the northbound 65 and westbound SL7 depart from a nearby street - a special arrow on signage points the way. If you need more help there's an Information and Assistance window, although it may not always be occupied. The waiting room isn't ready yet. A heck of a lot of security cameras are watching every move you make. The new canopy looks well smart, like the cloisters in an Escher cathedral or a huge block of melting chocolate. It's not rusty, it just looks like that.
4) Accessible options at the forefront
The unique thing about Cromwell Road bus station is that none of the twelve bays are suitable for accessible boarding. This is not a thoughtless omission, this is deliberate. Instead all those with wheelchairs, pushchairs and mobility needs are directed to bus stop A4. This is located beside the exit from the bus station so every vehicle has to pass it on the way out. It has a drop kerb and also a bench you can wait on until the bus you want arrives. What it doesn't have is a poster explaining where all the buses go, you're expected to know that. Conveniently the accessible stop is located beside the accessible toilet, because hurrah there's now one of those too.
5) Revamped bus station is bustastic
Sixteen bus stops makes this the largest of all TfL's bus stations. Vehicles you can spot include Streetdeck Electroliners, Enviro200 MMCs and Superloop-branded 10.4m Geminis. All yourfavouriteteenagecreators were down here on the first morning filming videos to save you the bother of turning up. Respect for the uploaders. Sadly the small unit that's potentially a coffee shop is utterly empty so you'll need to bring your own thermos.
6) Yes there are mistakes and omissions
A clock would be nice. There isn't a clock. Yes there are two electronic departure boards, one at either end, but you can't see either of them if you're waiting at a bus stop. The other thing there isn't is a map. A spider map would be really useful, particularly given this is an interchange with a huge number of departure options, but these days nobody can be bothered to produce any up-to-date spider maps for the two Kingston bus stations or the town centre. It's all very well having a simple list of destinations if where you want to go is a terminus like Putney or Epsom, but for intermediate places like Surbiton or Cheam your only option is walking up and down and scouring all the timetables. Also at bus stop A12 they got the name of the operator and the days of operation wrong so those parts of the sign have had to be covered over with white tape.
7) The PR desk has been working overtime
» "This brand-new bus station will make bus journeys in Kingston much more convenient, safe and attractive." (Attractive yes, safe perhaps, but it's the same stops in the same place which I don't think is "much more convenient") » "...with a new canopy in the waiting area to keep passengers warm and dry throughout the seasons" (I can assure you the canopy does nothing whatsoever to keep people warm, and won't keep you dry either if the wind direction is wrong) » Lorna Murphy, TfL's Director of Buses, said: "The new bus station has been designed with customers in mind" (I'd hope so because the alternative would be ridiculous) » "The 1,600 square meters of Sustainable Drainage System (SuDS) at Cromwell Road bus station adds to TfL's annual target of 5,000 square meters of SuDS catchment" (if a single bus station can contribute a third of your annual quota then your SuDS target is miserably unaspirational)
8) I was in Bushy Park and this young stag just trotted past
The Kingston area's not all about buses, it's also about close encounters of the antlered kind. But you could get here by catching a 111 from bus stop A7 and alighting at Hampton Grove, if only you did buses.
Sometimes you just want to go for a nice walk, nothing too taxing, a bit of a stroll, wildlife guaranteed, railway-adjacent, mostly dry underfoot, broad pylon vistas, binocular opportunities, possibility of lapwings, won't take long. So here's a brief birdwatching treat near some gravel pits in Sutton, nowhere near enough to make a day of it but a nice walk all the same.
It's called Beddington Farmlands not because that's what it is but because that's what it was, a huge wedge of marshy fields to the south of Mitcham Common. Sewage from the town of Croydon was first used to fertilise the crops in Victorian times, then sludge beds appeared and in 1969 a full-on sewage works was built. Ornithologists learned to appreciate the wide range of birdlife that flew in to enjoy the sprawling wetland habitat. But in 1993 Thames Water sealed off the site for gravel extraction and landfill operations, covering most of the former sludge beds and severing the one remaining right of way that linked the Hackbridge and Beddington flanks. Thankfully there is still a permissive path along the western edge, a full mile long, from which a reborn Beddington Farmlands can be intermittently seen. And that's the nice walk.
The easiest place to slip into Beddington Farmlands is the northwest corner of Beddington Park, just down the road from Hackbridge station. Most people ignore the entrance, the park being a much easier place to roam and let their dogs run amok, plus once you're through the gate there are very few alternative exits so it might feel a tad oppressive. But give it a go and you enter a stripe of woodland alongside a long secure fence with a few surprises ahead, the first of which is a box of squirrels. To be fair it's more a large cage supported on a post, with a single wildlife access point via a long perspex pipe and a seed-filled bird feeder hanging free inside. I was torn as to whether the target diners were squirrels or birds, but because it's all behind a locked gate I couldn't get close enough to check.
Where things get good, and a tad unexpected, is when a short path opens up on the right-hand side with a bird hide at the end. It's a low cost bird hide, essentially a screen of corrugated metal with a few horizontal slots and absolutely nowhere to sit should you fancy resting here a while. I know some people do linger because the three binbags hanging alongside are bulging with takeaway wrappers, empty cans and bottles of vodka. But it does its job, shielding occasional humans from the waterfowl on the southern lake and the southern reedbed so they can flap around in oblivious privacy. What I will say is that this is not the best of the bird hides due to an excess of intermediate foliage so best move on.
We're currently round the back of Hackbridge station, not that you'd know other than the occasional sound of a braking train. The path has opened out a little to reveal what looks like a power station in the distance and is in fact the Beddington Energy Recovery Facility, burner of the refuse from four boroughs and the reason why this 400 acre site is no longer used for landfill. There'll be a much better view later. But you do now get a first sense of how vast and undulating the reclaimed brownfield is, and also how verdant because they've been transforming it into something much nicer over the last couple of years - the Beddington Farmlands Nature Reserve.
The plan is twofold, to make the site much more attractive to wildlife and also to permit public access for the first time in 30 years. It looks wonderful in the most recent consultation, an undulating landscape of open meadow pocked with lakes and drainage ponds threaded through with paths linking to at least four new entrances. But site owners Valencia Waste Management have been progressing their plans at a glacial pace causing local residents to wonder if it'll ever open, and they're also highlyunimpressed by recent downgrades to the number of accessible paths and the diversity of grassland habitats. Big business alas doesn't always deliver on its green promises. In the meantime only keyholding members of the Beddington Farm Bird Group are permitted inside, one of whom I spotted yomping up a dirt track past an inquisitive fox towards a lakeside hide, and I could only look on wistfully.
The only intermediate access point along the permissive path is along what's left of Mile Road, a direct link across the railway to the heart of Hackbridge. Most joggers and dogwalkers bear off here, alongside what should one day be the main western entrance to the reserve. But hardier souls continue north along the peripheral woody strip with no hope of egress for the next fifteen minutes. The path initially splits in two, one concreted, the other immediately alongside but a tad lower and potentially muddier. And eventually another bird hide is revealed, this time with a far less obstructed view across the northern lake, distant meadowed slopes and potentially a few large grazing animals. The tops of Croydon IKEA's chimneys poke marginally above the horizon.
Just round the next bend, where the Irrigation Bridge used to land, the adjacent landscape switches to (very) wet grassland. A third and final hide provides the finest view of all, the one where I spent most time, above a marshy scrape that birds just love. I smiled when I thought I'd spotted three motionless herons but one proved to be just a reflection in the water. Above all this is strung a chain of pylons and over to the right the full-on vision of the Beddington ERF busy consuming Sutton's cardboard and Kingston's peelings. Keep panning and the towers in Croydon town centre stand proud, intermingled with loads more pylons, those IKEA chimneys and a foreground of teasel-edged lakeside. Yes I did bring my binoculars and yes they did get good use, both for bountiful birdlife and for infrastructure.
The path continues along its narrow woody corridor, currently finely bedecked in autumnal shades, with the railway shielded somewhere behind the trees. I passed beneath lofty transmission cables and dodged past two cyclists making the most of an imaginative shortcut, while high in a tree a raucous rookery launched en masse from their roost and swirled above my head. Further locked gates suggested additional landfill access might be possible if only people pulled their fingers out and furthered their plans. As the final gate approached, with its entirely illegible spraypainted sign, I kept wondering how I'd never realised all this was here.
This mile-long nice walk ends in the middle of nowhere beside an old freestanding railway bridge. Cross that and you land in a wooded corner of Mitcham Common, near Carla's shrine, with maybe a five minute walk to the main road. Straight ahead is the 7th tee of Mitcham Golf Club where an unsigned stile crosses the fence, but I didn't fancy running the gauntlet of a party of retirees so chose not to risk that. Instead I turned right and followed another long stripe of woodland which eventually emerged at the end of Beddington Lane tramstop. I'd always wondered where that exit went and now I know it leads somewhere ultimately unique. Just hurry up and open it up properly.
The plan, starting next month, is to open the cablecar later than now.
On weekdays that means an 8am start rather than 7am.
On Fridays that means a 9am start rather than 7am.
On Saturdays that means a 9am start rather than 8am.
On Sundays nothing's changing - still a 9am start.
🚡 🚡 🚡
Now
From December
cut
Mon-Thu
07:00 to 22:00
08:00 to 22:00
1 hour
Friday
07:00 to 22:00
09:00 to 22:00
2 hours
Saturday
08:00 to 22:00
09:00 to 22:00
1 hour
Sunday
09:00 to 22:00
09:00 to 22:00
-
You might be surprised to discover that the Dangleway opens that early but it always has. This was because it was sold to Londoners as a public transport option tourists would also enjoy, hence an expectation it'd be used for the morning commute. This was patently ridiculous, but the gondolas have rolled out every weekday at 7am just in case. Now, finally, TfL have quantified quite what a waste of resources that's been.
They've done this in a consultation, because apparently it requires a consultation to change the cablecar's opening hours. This was launched on Friday, then almost immediately taken down for some reason, then republished earlier this week. It doesn't say much but it does say they intend to make the change on 1st December so it's pretty much a done deal.
That's not just tumbleweed, that's the very definition of transporting air across the Thames. That's 100 cabins crossing the river of which 96 are empty. That's a 15 minute gap between anybody turning up. That's more staff on duty than passengers. And this is happening every weekday before 8am, wasting public money on a service barely anyone's using and nobody actually needs. The real question isn't "Should we start later?", the real question is "Why on earth have we been starting so early?"
And this is not new!🚡
We have data to show that Dangleway usage has been minimal first thing in the morning for years. Darryl Chamberlain (of the Greenwich Wire) used to submit an FoI request every year asking for hourly passenger numbers in the second week of October. Afternoon and weekend figures were always fairly healthy. But between 7am and 8am they've always been anything but.
Passenger numbers between 7am and 8am (second week of October)
Before 8am the cablecar only twice exceeded 30 passengers an hour, that's one passenger every two minutes. The average was 20 passengers an hour, i.e. one every three minutes. For comparison the 2023 figure from the latest consultation would have been 8 passengers an hour - four one way and four the other. That's lower than all the 2010s data, suggesting early morning numbers are even worse now than they used to be, but they've always been negligible.
Cyclists are getting a 40% cut to their free time🚡
One of the best unsung Dangleway bargains is this.
At present this means you can turn up with a bike at any time from 07:00 to 09:30 and you'll be waved aboard for nothing. Bargain! But from December this perk will only work between 08:00 and 09:30 which is an entire hour less, or in percentage terms a 40% decrease. To be fair if only four people are turning up before 8am then barely any cyclists are going to be inconvenienced, but the impact may be more serious on Fridays when the free period will shrink to 09:00-09:30, a mere half hour!
Also, as the consultation's FAQ remind us, there will soon be a special bus for cyclists operating through the Silvertown Tunnel.
This'll mean no cyclist arriving before 8am need miss out, they'll be able to board a bus nearby and get across the river anyway, initially for free. But the lack of customers on the Dangleway does suggest the early start on the shuttle bus could be a complete white elephant too. Why start the bus at 6.30am when all the evidence suggests cross-river cyclists are barely present before 8am?
But is an 8am start still too early?🚡
Changing the cablecar's start time to 8am makes sense if barely anyone's travelling before that. But is anyone travelling during the next hour, i.e. 8am to 9am, or is running the cablecar then a waste of money too? Sadly the consultation doesn't include data for any other hourly time period and it would take too long to put in an FoI request to find out. So I did the next best thing and stood beside the Dangleway one morning this week and counted the passengers.
The great thing about doing a Dangleway passenger survey is that you can do it all from one side of the river because everyone either comes in or goes out. Also the cabins have glass windows so if anyone's doing a round trip for sightseeing reasons you can count them too. So I arrived on the north bank at 8am and started counting, and continued counting until 9.10am to make sure I'd included everyone who boarded on the south side before nine. It proved an exercise in tumbleweed.
In the first ten minutes there were only two passengers, both heading south, and the rest of the time the cabins churned round carrying nobody. Things perked up a bit around quarter past eight, if you call eight passengers perking up, then dropped back over the next half hour. All the early danglers appeared to be off to work, some in offices and some on building sites, including a tiny handful aiming for City Hall. Just seven of the passengers had bikes. No tourists were apparent before 8.45am. Travelling south towards Greenwich was more popular than heading north, that is until just before nine o'clock when the tide turned.
Dangleway passengers between 8am and 9am
🚡 Total heading north: 15
🚡 Total heading south: 24
🚡 Total passengers in one hour: 39
These figures are much better than the four passengers an hour TfL claim are travelling before 8am, but they're still paltry. The 15 passengers heading north are essentially one minibus-ful, and the 24 heading south the equivalent of a single single decker. By my calculations every cabin crossed the Thames six times during the hour I was there, just short of 200 crossings altogether, but only 27 of those had anybody inside. Having stood and watched the minutes tick by I can only imagine how bored the staff must be.
Just start the day at 9am and be done with it🚡
You can tell 9am is when the cablecar really kicks into action because it's when they turn the music on and target tourists. As Hey Jude reverberated around the Royal Docks the first family group turned up with the intent of crossing and finally gave the ticket office staff something to do. A third of the passengers I surveyed turned up in the last ten minutes and could easily have waited until 9am to start their trip. TfL must know what a waste opening early is.
It's great that a few people have managed to incorporate the Dangleway into their morning commute, but it really is a few people and it wouldn't hurt if the big beast wasn't switched on until 9am. Despite all pretences it is essentially a £6-a-time tourist attraction and should be treated as such, rather than keeping it running this early to save face.
As I said nine years ago, "TfL could easily close the cablecar before nine in the morning and inconvenience almost nobody, but they never will because to do so would be to admit that the cablecar is not a useful commuting option, which was the main reason given for building it in the first place." We're halfway there.
Once again TfL have silently published their annual spreadsheet listing the number of passengers using every London bus route and how many kilometres those buses travelled. Data is for April 2023 - March 2024. Comparisons are with the previous year.
n.b. Because of leap years this year's data is for 53 weeks rather than the usual 52 (but I've tried to balance this out when making comparisons).
London's ten busiest bus routes (2023/24) 1) -- 18 Euston - Sudbury (13.0m) 2) -- 149 London Bridge - Edmonton Green (12.3m) 3) -- 29 Trafalgar Square - Wood Green (11.5m) 4) ↑6 207 White City - Southall (10.9m) 5) -- 86 Stratford - Romford (10.7m) 6) ↓2 25 Holborn Circus - Ilford (10.5m) 7) ↓1 5 Canning Town - Romford (10.2m) 8) -- 279 Manor House - Waltham Cross (10.1m) 9) ↓2 36 Queens Park - New Cross Gate (10.0m) 10) ↑1 35 Shoreditch - Clapham Junction (9.9m)
The next ten: 109, 53, 243, 141, 43, 38, 55, 185, 21, 183
For the fifth year running London's busiest bus is the 18, long-term plier of the Harrow Road. The runners up remain two northern workhorses, the 149 and 29. The 207's leap is because it's the sole non-express route between Southall and Acton now the 427's been cut back. The 25 tumbled from the top spot in 2019 after being cut back from Oxford Circus, but along with the 86 is proving that east Londoners are still happy to use the bus rather than ride Crossrail. The 36 is the busiest route with a significant presence south of the Thames. To give you some idea of how passenger numbers have yo-yo-ed, five years ago route 18 recorded 17 million passengers, mid-pandemic just 6 million and since then it's rebounded to 13 million.
The next ten: U10, 375, 146, 209, 497, 464, 467, 359, R2, 404
These are all the usual suspects, topped off by a pair of brief turns in Barnet connecting daytime residents to the shops. The only change in the top 10 is that the R5 and R10 have swapped places (they operate the same route in rural Bromley but in opposite directions). However the 549 was withdrawn a couple of months so won't be appearing in the list again and the 347 is also getting the chop on a date yet to be advised. Technically the new 439 should be third in the list but I've ignored it because the passenger data only covers four weeks. Route 18 is busier than the fifty least used buses put together.
London's ten most travelled bus routes (2023/24) 1) -- 18 Euston - Sudbury (2,000,000 km) 2) ↑7 111 Kingston - Heathrow (1,890,000 km) 3) -- 5 Canning Town - Romford (1,870,000 km) 4) ↑1 86 Stratford - Romford (1,840,000 km) 5) ↑5 182 Brent Cross - Harrow Weald (1,810,000 km) 6) ↑2 174 Harold Hill - Dagenham (1,800,000 km) 7) ** SL7 Croydon - Heathrow (1,784,000 km) 8) ↓2 102 Brent Cross - Edmonton (1,781,000 km) 9) ↓2 96 Woolwich - Bluewater (1,760,000 km) 10) ↓6 53 Lambeth North - Plumstead (1,760,000 km)
The next ten: 207, 38, 466, 183, 34, 113, 55, 229, SL8, 279
This is a chart of the routes whose vehicles travelled the greatest distance in one year. Long distance buses (like the 111) and high frequency buses (like the 18 and 86) tend to travel the furthest. Only three of these serve central London, most are busy zipping across the suburbs. The SL7 has leapt into the top 10 because its frequency doubled when it joined the Superloop (and because the route's ridiculously long). Meanwhile the 183 has tumbled out of the top tier because its frequency was reduced when a new Superloop route paralleled it. The 389 remains London's least travelled bus route, covering just over 8000km per year.
London's ten most crowded bus routes (2023/24) 1) -- W7 Finsbury Park - Muswell Hill (8.3 passengers per km) 2) ↑4 98 Holborn - Willesden (8.25) 3) ↓1 149 London Bridge - Edmonton (8.0) 4) ↓1 238 Stratford - Barking (7.8) 5) -- 29 Trafalgar Square - Wood Green (7.8) 6) ↓2 35 Shoreditch - Clapham Junction (7.7) 7) ↑1 109 Brixton - Croydon (7.2) 8) ↓1 41 Archway - Tottenham Hale (7.1) 9) ↑18 120 Northolt - Hounslow (6.9) 10) -- 69 Canning Town - Walthamstow (6.9)
This Top 10 is determined by dividing the number of passengers by the number of km travelled to get a 'number of passengers per km'. The higher the number, the less likely it is you'll be able to find a seat. By this measure the most crowded bus is the W7 which, along with the 41, delivers residents of Muswell Hill and Crouch End to their nearest tube stations. The 98's big leap is probably from passengers who can no longer ride the 16. The 120's bigger leap is harder to explain. Most London bus routes carry 2-5 passengers per km.
The next ten: 58, 9, 104, 205, 94, 25, 18, 52, 141, 169
The ten routes with the biggest increase in passengers: SL7, 1, 485, 533, H26, 482, 278, U5, 9, E11 The eight routes with the biggest decrease in passengers: 11, 209, 23, R68, 427, 187, 22, 359
The SL7 has the biggest year-on-year increase because its frequency doubled when it stopped being the X26. The 1's also 50% up on last year as a result of absorbing the 168. The other route with a really chunky increase is the 485 which now serves Wandsworth Riverside Quarter and runs on Sundays. The 11 has the biggest decrease because its entire City section got withdrawn. Other big tumblers following a major route tweak include the 23, 427 and (temporarily) the R68. The eight routes listed all lost more than 10% of their passengers last year.
Routes introduced between April 2023 and March 2024: SL1-SL10, 439, S2 Routes withdrawn between April 2023 and March 2024: 168, 332, 455, 497, 507, 521
Thanks to the Superloop London's gained more new routes than it's lost.
London's ten busiest nightbuses: N15, N25, N18, N207, N29, N279, N9, N8, N98, N140 London's ten least busy nightbuses: 486, 158, 213, N33, 365, 85, 474, N72, 321, 119
Passengerwise the N15 is 40% ahead of its nearest competitor, the N25.
London's ten busiest single deckers: 235, C10, 195, W15, 316, 170, 366, 214, 112, 358 London's ten least busy double deckers: 467, SL6, 481, 412, 317, 498, 215, 492, 428, 357
All those single deckers are busier than all those double deckers.
