It's about time I visited an unsung suburb in Sutton, London's most unsung borough. And this one's really off-radar, despite having several distinct parts and covering up to two square miles. You'll find Woodcote south of Wallington, west of Purley and north of Coulsdon amid a rural fringe most Londoners can't even comprehend. The main nucleus is Woodcote Green but there's also Upper Woodcote (which the Ordnance Survey annotates as Woodcote), the outlier of Little Woodcote and a heck of a lot of roads called Woodcote Something, also no pubs and hardly any pre-20th century buildings. Let's see what I can find.
Woodcote Green does indeed have a green and it's triangular in shape (very much scalene, largest angle about 110). The shortest side is part of the main road between Carshalton and Coulsdon, thus quite busy, while the hypotenuse is lined by well-spaced detached houses. An awful lot of Woodcote is occupied by "well-spaced detached houses", and at the very least its residents get a broad semi with a decent-sized garden. The green has everything you'd expect - moulting trees, dog mess bins and the remains of a seven-stick Sky Master rocket propped up in a litter bin, no doubt left over from a guerilla display at the weekend. Unusually it also has a WW2 air raid shelter in one corner, its bricked up entrance still intact and with a very obvious flattened hump evident in the grass beyond.
The green also has a very informative information board, which is just as well because Wikipedia's page on Woodcote Green is only two sentences long and otherwise the history of this place would be a mystery. There was a village here in 1332, the steamed-up text says, which at the time was larger than Wallington. But by 1586 the village had vanished and no traces remain, with what's now the green just a triangular field. Even the arrival of a railway at Wallington a mile to the north failed to spur development, other than a brief terrace of Edwardian council houses by the green, until in the 1920s rustic avenues swallowed up acres of farmland and merged into the adjacent towns. It probably doesn't help with local identity that Sutton council have erected a huge sign at the tip of the green but instead of Welcome to Woodcote Green it says Welcome to Wallington.
The dominant buildings here belong to Wallington High School for Girls which moved here in 1965 and which is now 20-times oversubscribed, so they must be doing something excellent. Come while they're in lessons and it's extremely quiet but time things for late afternoon and I imagine a throng of dark green blazers heads across the road to Woodcote Green's sole corner shop. A sign demands no more than three pupils enter at a time, but also demands they "strictly keep a distance from each other" because its been sellotaped to the door since lockdown. Other local sights include half a quaint cottage that appears to be in rapid decay, a shifted horse trough and an MOT-friendly garage that acted as an auxiliary fire station during WW2. I feel I'm scraping the barrel somewhat here.
↖ To find the oldest building hereabouts head north towards Wallington and turn off down Woodcote Avenue. The well-spaced detached houses eventually reach a maroon sign proclaiming that the remainder of the loop is a private road, and absolutely definitely no learner drivers. On the back it additionally warns that "the Woodcote Avenue Road Fund accept no responsibility for damage or injury caused by this sign" which is a level of litigative paranoia I'm not used to seeing writ large. The first building is Woodcote Hall, formerly one of the country seats of the Carews of Beddington, for many centuries the local landowning nobility. The latest incarnation alas isn't medieval, it's two Georgian stucco properties joined in the centre by a later extension and since converted to 14 flats, so nothing to walk out of your way for.
↘ Another post-Carew nucleus was Great Woodcote Farm, this to the southeast off Foxley Lane. I can tell you that in 1859 it comprised 622 acres, that its Edwardian owner helped found Purley Cricket Club, that in 1931 a ‘cat burglar’ made off with a £1000 haul of jewellery and furs. During WW2 it was also the HQ of Field Consolidated Aircraft Services Ltd, being highly convenient for Croydon Airport. However the farmhouse then became uninhabitable while its land was turned over to housing, and if you turn up at the corner of Farm Road and The Ridge today all you'll find are well-spaced detached houses and broad semis with a decent-sized garden. Half-timbered gables are extremely popular, also topiary services probably pay well, and if anything the apartment block on the farmhouse's footprint is the least impressive building of all.
↙ Little Woodcote is a completely different matter, still mostly undeveloped in favour of lowly agricultural usage. Surrey County Council created smallholdings here after the Great War to create employment for returning soldiers, buying up land previously used for the growing of lavender and peppermint. Construction began in 1920, and 79 cottages were built (total cost £87,875), each with a few acres of land. Somewhat unexpectedly these weatherboarded semi-detached beauties are still here, if mostly no longer used for their original purpose, and to walk its crisscross of tracks is to step back into a twitchy backwater of microbusinesses and scrappy paddocks. I wrote about Little Woodcote in 2017 so didn't re-explore fully this time, but if you were ever to visit stick it in your top three sights to see.
← What I did do is walk down Woodmansterne Lane to the first of the nurseries, Woodcote Green being the south London equivalent of Crews Hill. It's a Dobbies and once you've finally crossed the car park it turns out to be vast, also very much not just a garden centre. I wandered in past shelves of yarn and jigsaws, also a rack of sparkly personalised tote bags, also knitted welly socks and a special offer 20% reduction on branded wellingtons. The food hall stocked giftable chutneys and a display of Diddly Squat wines, beyond which an illuminated village was helping to flog collectible Bavarian miniatures. It felt more like I was up in Norfolk than on the edge of zone 5. But what really took my breath away were the restaurant and cafe which were both mostly full, despite it only being elevenses and still too early for a Cumberland Sausage Ring. This it turns out is the beating heart of Woodcote Green, its community centre and economic heart combined, because who needs any other village facilities when you've got a Dobbies?
↲ I had one more old building to try to visit and that was Woodcote Grove, an unswallowed country house once the abode of the Campbell-Johnstons. To get there I followed the entirety of Woodcote Park Avenue, lined initially by some of the most exceptional well-spaced detached houses, even by Woodcote standards. On the first bend the tarmac runs out and the road becomes an unmade track entering a tunnel of yellowing leaves, running alongside a field in which Dogs Must Not Be Exercised. Four other exclusive avenues join at intervals, as desirably peripheral as London gets without tipping over into gated hell. Over the hedge is a patch of privatised allotments, a company called Roots taking advantage of Sutton's four year waiting list, complete with central teepee. Finally at the end of what feels like a country lane is yet another big secondary school, that's Woodcote High, also a recreation ground so unloved the welcome sign's disappeared. And turn right.
↲ At the top of Meadow Hill is Woodcote Park Golf Club, founded in 1912 and with a splendid monogram above what used to be the clubhouse door. The course has eight flat holes to the south, ten sloping holes to the north and an obliging membership who enjoy a civilised circuit before retiring to the Captain's Lounge. A farm track leads past a row of tractors to the entrance of Orford House care home, which it turns out is what Woodcote Grove was ultimately repurposed as, and far enough up the drive to be entirely inaccessible. It's just one of Woodcote's scattering of peripheral oddities, easily overlooked amid a blanket of well-spaced detached houses, indeed easily overlooked altogether. And I haven't even mentioned the most extraordinary Woodcote of all which is Upper Woodcote, a reclusive beauty that needs an entire post of its own...
The last time TfL updated its website was 2014 so it's about time they did it again, and they are. The changeover's by no means complete but yesterday a switch was pulled and a majority of webpages switched over to a new template.
The big change is bigger chunkier text, spaced out links and more white space. This is to make the site more accessible on phones and tablets, these being the dominant means of access while on the go. Arguably the template should have been updated years ago because what was cutting edge in 2013 very much isn't now. But it takes time to get things right, also they did update several pages last year seemingly as a practice run, for example the Status updates page which lists disruptions changed to the new template in March 2025.
One of the big changes is to the menu bar at the top of the page, which has been simplified somewhat as you can see here.
In the old style: Plan a journey | Status updates | Maps | Fares | Help & contacts | More In recent changes: Plan | Status | Maps | Fares | Help | More In yesterday's change: Status updates | Plan a journey | Help with travel | How to pay
For the last of these, the latest change, I've also shown the drop-down menu that appears if you click on one of the items. This may give you some additional idea of the spreadout-whitespaceness of the new design.
It definitely works better on a mobile, with a lot of vertical menus leading to more legible subpages. But as a laptop user it's extremely frustrating because we are no longer the priority, thus the site is now harder to use. As I wrote in 2013, and is alas again true...
Previously I could read six news stories without scrolling down, now it's only one. What's frustrating is all the wasted space where there could be useful information but no, everything's designed for portrait rather than landscape these days. Websites once offered responsive templates which could tell whether you were reading on a laptop or a mobile and adjusted their dimensions accordingly. Sadly these days almost nobody bothers, thus every time any website updates it's always a dumbing down on my home screen and means a lot more scrolling down.
But here's something else I've spotted which looks excellent, and that's a domain called www.elizabethlinego.co.uk.
It exists to provide up-to-date details of Elizabeth line departures and is available in 38 different languages - you choose! Pick a station, say Ilford, and up comes a list of the next ten departures. It tells you which platform to use, how long until each train arrives and whether it's on time or not. Sorry if it's hard to read on here but it is of course optimised for a phone, not a blog.
And it does a lot of rather clever things...
• if you click on a train it tells you the expected time of arrival at all the stations.
• if you select a second station, it'll just show you the times from here to there
• live departure information is updated every 30 seconds
• service status and engineering works have their own blocks at the top
• a separate tab covers 'Station information' rather than 'Live departures'
• a link is provided to the station's location in Google Maps
• a list shows whether each of the station's lifts is available (excellent)
It's not clear whether this is a prototype of things to come, perhaps on other lines, or just a tourist-facing portal. It's also not new because TfL mentioned it in a press release back in May. However it wasn't a press release anybody took interest in, nor have TfL mentioned www.elizabethlinego.co.uk again since, so maybe they're not especially interested in promoting it.
It may be some time before the full TfL website gets the latest upgrade because I imagine coding some pages is a lot tougher than others. But it's been twelve years since anything similar happened so it's about time (but for some of us alas far too soon).
Last year someone drew a banana on a map of London and it went viral.
The banana starts in Barnet and aims for central London keeping east of the Edgware Road. It includes pretty much all of Camden, Islington and Westminster, but only the affluent western slice of Haringey. It then swings southwest through Kensington & Chelsea and Fulham before crossing the Thames into (most of) Lambeth, Wandsworth, Merton, Richmond and Kingston. The eastern half of London doesn't get a look in.
Initially it wasn't so much the map that went viral but the incendiary accompanying comment.
A brutal generalisation, demonstrably false, but with a hint of truth to it.
People agreed.
» "There is a lot of truth and accuracy in this, it must be said"
» "Has been the case for 30/40 yrs. You just noticed?"
» "Move it over slightly to the left to include Kilburn and Willesden and eliminate Battersea and Wandsworth and it's probably pretty accurate overall."
People also disagreed.
» I am not sure everywhere in this banana is so nice as you claim"
» Harrow, Maida Vale, lots of Surrey, Epping, Canary Wharf & Dulwich should be inside the banana"
» Most of my adult life has been spent outside the banana and has been just fine, thanks."
It's plainly bolx to divide London into two parts and claim that everything in one part is great and almost everything in the other is horrible. Nothing in geography is that cut and dried, not unless you're a provocateur over-generalising to get a reaction.
"It seems I accidentally perfected minimal-effort tongue-in-cheek rage bait for English people."
Amid the replies Saul did say "it's not an exact science" and that the banana has "a fuzzy border" but obviously that nuance got lost in the pile-on. Instead all that twenty million people saw was a bald statement of dubious certainty which either confirmed their prejudice or was inherently incorrect, which is essentially how social media warps minds these days.
The London Banana was alloverthepress last summer because they love stuff like this, mainly because divisive content turbocharges engagement. The Standard did at least top up their pointless voxpops with some research into the origin of the map.
Sadka told the Standard he was inspired to create the map after “seeing a person in a balaclava menacing someone with a stick quite openly on a high street just outside the banana". Although Sadka admitted the banana was “randomly made up based on personal experience,” he argued it “actually aligns pretty well with a number of quality-of-life proxy maps, such as violent crime rates, property prices, and more”.[The Standard, 3rd September 2025]
And I mention all this because, after following up his London Banana multiple times over the last year, Saul's pinned tweet now references something I created.
I'm not used to my blog content being seen over a million times, especially something I knocked off in an hour on Saturday morning. But if you look at my map of Waitroses it does appear to provide convincing evidence of a banana-shaped curve of affluence across west London.
And I can do better than that. Saturday's map used four colours to categorise the posh supermarkets, but see how it looks with three...
The stripe of nine dark green boroughs with five or more Waitroses is an incredibly strong approximation to the London banana. Really astonishingly good, as if that's where all the disposable income for buying higher-priced groceries is. However Bromley is also dark green because it has five Waitroses, specifically in Beckenham, Biggin Hill, Bromley South, Green Street Green and Orpington. Bromley is nowhere near the banana, not even close, so is a counterexample that negates the rigidity of the concept.
Let's take a look at four more maps and play spot the banana. You can click on each to see where I got it from.
These are Gail's bakeries, purveyors of prestige-priced pastries. The graphic shows that 79 of the 113 Gail's are inside the banana making a 'banana share' of 69%, which is incredibly high for a shape that covers only 20% of Greater London. But if you tweaked the edges very slightly another ten of the Gail's would fall within the boundary, also the two tips are very sparse, suggesting a banana isn't truly the perfect shape here.
This is average property price across Greater London, with darker reds being the most expensive. This is very convincing bananawise, with the darkest colours stretching out along two axes from central London at roughly eight o'clock and eleven o'clock. That said there are also two other broad property price hotspots, namely the northwest and southeast edges of the capital, with Bromley again a screaming outlier. We have to be careful not just to see what we want to see.
This is deprivation, as determined by the latest government statistics, which you'd think would be a good indicator of how "horrible" an area is. The least deprived areas are the greens, and again they splay out from central London along the two arms of the banana. But greens are spread far more widely, particularly in the outer suburbs, and you'd be hard-pushed to identify a banana here unless you'd been prompted to look for one. More intriguingly a clear arc of oranges spreads down the Lea Valley and along the Thames estuary, which we could perhaps describe as the London croissant. We could also throw in a smaller croissant from Heathrow to Kilburn, another curve of deprivation, were we in the mood to draw further food-shaped conclusions.
This is crime rate, where the oranges and reds denote levels of reported crime above the national average. This is perhaps the map where you'd most expect to identify areas that are "horrible" and to "avoid". But this time the banana's barely there at all, the safest areas instead forming an approximate doughnut around the city suburbs. Most of the outer ring is green, a huge area where crime rates are in fact lower than the national average, which isn't the scary impression trolls on social media generally give about levels of safety in London.
There is definitely some truth to the notion of a London banana, two distinct spokes of relative affluence radiating northwest and southwest from central London. But it's not well defined, also it only applies in certain data categories, also several areas outside the banana's border display very similar traits. Holloway and Vauxhall arguably shouldn't be inside the banana, similarly Chiswick, Orpington, Pinner, Purley, Upminster and Wanstead aren't all miserable places to be. A simple outline on a map can't tell you for sure whether somewhere's great or horrible, only suggest a general trend.
It is thus patently untrue that "as long as you stay within the Banana, you'll have a great time", also that "almost everything outside the Banana is horrible these days, best avoid". The banana maps are fascinating and hold a number of truths, but the accompanying claims are just provocative hyperbole because London's nowhere near as grim as some might gleefully suggest.
HS2 is amazing, as you can tell if you go and look at it.
This is the Colne Valley Viaduct, a two mile concreteswoosh on the western edge of London. Specifically it's the point where fast trains to Birmingham will cross the Grand Union Canal, close to Harefield Marina, during a rare burst above ground on the approach to the Chilterns. To get here I took the bus to The River Garden pub and walked down the towpath past 26 moored narrowboats and a tabby cat stalking a moorhen. The viaduct curved majestically through the silence, its geometric arches briefly spanning the cut before fading into the fog above a gravelly lake. I was hugely impressed by the architecture and the civil engineering triumph it represents, but not excited. Because, well, several reasons...
1) It's exceptionally slow
HS2 was officially proposed in 2009 and by the following year its route had been sketched across Ordnance Survey maps as far north as Crewe. We'll have it open by December 2026 they said, and for all sorts of complex political and engineering reasons they plainly haven't. Construction eventually began in 2020, the hope then being that trains might first run sometime between 2029 and 2033. Alas a more realistic recent reset has kicked that even further into the future, this despite massive downscaling and truncation, and the first services are now expected to operate "between May 2036 and October 2039". That's anything from 10 to 13 years away, and merely for trains between Old Oak Common to Birmingham Curzon Street.
The full scheme into Euston isn't expected to open until sometime between May 2040 and December 2043, that latter date still SEVENTEEN YEARS AWAY, and this for a project first conjured up SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO. That's a third of a century to build 140 miles of railway, and only if things go to plan which they never do so likely longer. Even Crossrail only took 18 years from Exchequer approval to first train, a gap which felt interminable, and this is far longer than that. How can they have built so much already...
...and yet be still over four thousand days from project completion?
2) I might never use it
Standing under the viaduct yesterday I wondered wistfully when I might finally get up there for a ride. Current best case scenario is late 2030s which for me would mean I'd be in my early 70s, which is just far enough into the future for me to wonder if I'll get that far. I'm not being morbid, just realistic, because there's a not insignificant chance I'll be in no fit state to take a train by then. I have similar feelings about the mooted Bakerloo line extension (estimated opening date 2040) and am considerably more pessimistic about Crossrail 2 (if the stars align, perhaps 2050). I'm thrilled for the rest of you who should get your chance to ride, but for me it's entered a grey area where I might not be around, or rather I've reached an age where long-term projects start to have completion dates that may not overlap with my consciousness.
Alternatively I might be more concerned with the project's mortality than my own. 2036 is at least two General Elections away and we might well end up with another government that seeks to throttle HS2 rather than complete it. Then there's a decade of wider world events to contend with, so again a significant but unquantifiable probability that a fast train linking London to Birmingham may no longer be a civilisational priority.
3) I might not want to use it
Crossrail has a myriad of purposes linking umpteen destinations, and even one-off visitors to London likely find themselves aboard at some point. HS2 will instead be a one-trick pony, initially at least, linking central Birmingham to off-centre London thus rather less useful. Who precisely will travel on HS2 has long been a moot point, indeed digital communication removed much of the need for business travel some time ago, though you'd hope a fast connection between the UK's two largest cities would always have a purpose.
A more important negative consideration might be the price of a ticket. It's far too early for HS2 fares to have been mooted, let alone decided, but I think we can agree they're not going to be cheap. An off-peak London to Birmingham return currently costs anything from £40 to £72 if bought on the day, the better price on the slower Chiltern line, and an HS2 ticket is sure to cost more. The only precedent we have is on HS1 to Kent where a train via the High Speed line costs maybe 20% more, suggesting at least a similar premium for reaching the Midlands via HS2. Those heading to Birmingham in 2036 might want to take HS2 for the speed but it'll always be far better value to go the slower way, prioritising saving money over saving time.
4) It's such a mess out there
You won't know if you've not been, but HS2's civil engineering works are exceptionally expansive and intrusive in scale. Take Euston, for example, where a 60 acre flattenedvoid exists to the northwest of the mainline station. Demolition of houses and businesses began in 2019 and yet it still looks like barely anything's been built since, this for the simple reason that plans for the ultimate form of Euston's HS2 station remain in flux. Take a double decker up Hampstead Road and the size of the void is simply astonishing, also likely unnecessarily large now they're only planning to add six platforms rather than 11. It's hard to get excited about a neighbourhood destroyed prematurely and as yet unreplaced, indeed greedily scandalous given no trains will depart its footprint before 2040.
Further out the landgrab is much larger, a vast scrape of mostly fields appropriated for construction along the line of the route. From the tunnel portal at West Ruislip the worksite extends almost two miles towards the Colne Valley Viaduct and in places is more than half a mile wide. Riding down Harvill Road aboard the U9 bus has long meant traversing a giant scar carved out of the landscape, now finally entering a remediation phase as huge amounts of soil are piled up instead on former agricultural land. One day everything'll be returned to a greener state, perhaps even nicer than before, but not before local residents, ramblers, dogwalkers and golfers and have had to put up with this extraordinary intrusion week in week out for the best part of a decade.
5) The view's going to be rubbish
One of the joys of train travel is the view out of the window, and you'd think an express whizz between London and Birmingham would offer a decent panorama. Alas not so. So much of the route has been placed in tunnels and cuttings for environmental mitigation, also behind eco-screening for noise reasons, that it's been estimated passengers will only experience “meaningful” views for nine minutes of the journey. It'll be like flying through cloud or zooming through the Channel Tunnel, inherently amazing but with no way of seeing where you are as all that carved-up countryside passes by unseen. If you hate it when Avanti or LNER stick you in a 'window seat' with no window, HS2's going to be like that for the vast majority of the journey.
6) It's a woefully castrated project
The original planners had such high hopes for HS2 as a fast link not just to Birmingham but to several northern cities. It'd finally connect the country, a project worthy of our Victorian forebears who built the existing choked network. Instead costs have spiralled and the project's scope has inexorably contracted, as planners fouled up and the political zeitgeist swung from firm commitment to chokehold. As things stand everything useful north of Birmingham has been extinguished in a wilful lack of vision and we're left with a single stunted track that's been overengineered for the rolling stock that'll eventually use it. Electoral timescales just aren't compatible with a project on this scale so here we are getting a suboptimal over-priced railway bypass to carry passenger traffic that may not eventually manifest, and all to create a bit of extra capacity that'll allow a few more trains to stop at Bletchley in 20 years time.
It's hard to get pumped up about a project that could have been so much more for so much less, and may arrive so late that I'll neither want to ride it nor be able to. It looks amazing, it will be amazing, but it's not a project I can get excited about.
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Do you ever think about where the things in your life come from and where they go?
Take this cup of tea, for example.
I know the tea has come from the Nilgiri hills of South India because it says so on the packet. Yes it's Earl Grey what of it? The bergamot is only flavouring, not from genuine Italian oranges, so we can ignore that. I like to imagine the tea bushes being hand-trimmed by ladies in saris on hilltop terraces beneath a beating sun, but that's probably an opinion I got from a Ladybird book decades ago. A more realistic illustration would still involve fields but probably more automation, maybe shear harvesting, maybe full-on mechanical harvesting, I'm not buying top-tier tea here. Also it'll have rained a lot, ultimately retaining water from the Indian Ocean in my tea leaves, not to mention nutrients from the soil, all transported over 5000 miles from there to here.
Then the leaves get processed, I guess on site or nearby because it makes sense to trim the unwanted parts before transporting the tea any distance. The process starts with withering with warm air to dry the leaves, then rolling to release their juices, then oxidation to develop flavour, then drying with hot air to seal the deal. My tea will then have been sorted and graded so I got the medium quality leaves, not the very best, not the value dregs, and at some point chopped into small granules because we're only making teabags here. It's the sort of thing Play School would once have shown through the square window, had four year-olds been interested in tea, and which you can now watch on YouTube if you're not too busy laughing at kittens.
The back of my teabag box says 'Tea from India. Packed in the UK', so stage two happened closer to home. They could have flown it over because it's only light, but I bet it came by ship because that's much cheaper, also these are not rapidly perishable goods. These container ships depart from ports like Cochin or Nhava Sheva and take weeks to travel thousands of nautical miles from there to here, tucked away in boxes in the hold or stacked on deck. Likely they came via the Suez Canal because it's relatively safe through the Gulf of Aden at present, but given the time lag they might have rounded the Cape of Good Hope instead. The tea that I drink is ridiculously better travelled than I am, perhaps having crossed the equator twice or cruised the Mediterranean which is more than I have.
It'll have arrived here at a huge coastal terminal like Tilbury, Felixstowe or maybe Thames Gateway Port. Somewhere inside a huge stack of containers, amid the fridges and lawnmowers and Temu hoodies, was the stash of tea that ultimately brewed my mug of tea. I suspect it was transported next by road, not rail, perhaps thundering down the A12 or A13 on the back of a great big articulated lorry. Most UK supermarket retailers don't do their own packing, they use external suppliers, so maybe the raw materials went to Tetley at Eaglescliffe, Typhoo in Gloucester or PG Tips in Trafford. It's quite possible these tea leaves came round the M25 a dozen miles from where I'd eventually drink them before whizzing far away for manufacture.
The bagging process is another mechanised wonder worthy of Play School, inserting precisely the right amount of tea leaves (about 2g) inside a permeable pouch of something resembling paper. These days it's all plant-based and biodegradable, usually polylactic acid but also potentially woodpulp or cotton, replacing the former plastic evils of polypropylene or nylon. Then the right number of bags has to be placed in the right sized box and a stash is dispatched to the distribution centre, which could again be a considerable distance away. My tea likely spent hours or days in huge sheds at Waltham Cross, Rainham or Purfleet, these being the three Tesco distribution centres closest to where I live. At some point a delivery will have been made to the supermarket at Bromley-by-Bow, then one of those gentlemen I regularly see wheeling pallets will have stacked a shelf in aisle 7 where I eventually picked it up. Of the incredibly long journey these tea leaves made to my home, I was only responsible for the supply chain's last half mile.
Then there's the milk. Who's to say precisely where this came from but it'll be from one or more dairies, each of which supplied a blend from dozens or hundreds of cows. The dash of milk that finished off my cuppa will thus have originated as blades of grass in an unknown number of fields, could be six, could be sixty, and been responsible for a finite amount of methane entering the atmosphere. I might even have walked through one of those fields, if not for this particular brew then for one I've drunk in the past. Thankfully I don't have sugar in my tea else that'd be another lengthy global story, so I think I've dodged at least three more paragraphs there. And of course the vast majority of what's in the mug is water, all heated by my kettle, so I could at this point launch into a lengthy retrospective on where water and electricity come from but let's not go there.
After brewing I dispose of the tea bag via the usual route. We don't have food waste collections here in Tower Hamlets, not yet, although they are finally on the brink of introducing them. I also don't have a compost heap because I live in a flat, so all my used teabags end up in general waste and are carted away by the municipal dustcart. If I lived in a neighbouring borough I might have a food caddy and my used leaves would end their lives in a recycling facility where they'd be turned into fertiliser or biogas used to power homes - apparently 6 teabags can create enough electricity to boil a kettle. Instead they end up on some landfill site somewhere, likely down the estuary, meaning the tea leaves that started out in the beautiful hills of Kerala end their days under a stinking heap in Thurrock.
As for the tea itself, I'll have urinated most of that out. From my toilet it'll have made its way under the streets of Bow and down the Northern Outfall Sewer, ultimately finding its way to Beckton Treatment works (or, if I go to the toilet elsewhere, some similar facility). But some of my mugful of tea will have been absorbed into my body instead, not just the water but stimulants and nutrients from the tea leaves and the milk. A lot of these molecules don't hang around but some will have been converted into energy or broken down into something else my body needs, meaning there are cells in my body that contain compounds that originated on the Indian subcontinent. At an atomic level I am part tea, but also part milk, apple, tuna, Club biscuit, Riesling, aspirin, grass pollen, diesel and microplastic.
It's amazing how all these compounds originate in such diverse locations across the globe and ultimately end up in our homes, in our food and in our bodies. We barely notice where it comes from, we never stop to think, and yet an enormous supply chain operation is required to bring these things to us and every day it does, such is humanity's economic excellence. Of course not everyone is so fortunate as those of us with a supermarket around the corner, but hurrah for global logistics and its impressive ability to bring nourishment from across the planet. Every mug of tea is a freight distribution triumph, at least so long as fragile international systems permit, and how we'd miss them if disruption ever intervened. We are all made of where we live, but also half a world away.
A couple of days ago, while I was walking between listed buildings in Grange Hill and Chigwell Row, I spotted a old bus stop.
This is Lambourne Road, a road that no longer has any buses, so that immediately made me stop and look. But what really piqued my interest was the flag onthe bus stop because that still had the symbol for the National Bus Company on it, and they disappeared about forty years ago.
Alongside was the name of the local bus company at the time, Eastern National, and they disappeared ages ago too. How on earth had this survived?
Looking closer another word had been stuck on top in red letters, worn down by the elements, and that said BORDABUS. I'd never heard of them, so how long had all this obsolete signage been lurking here?
And then I carried on with my life.
» As can you, unless you have a particular interest in this topic.
Here's where the bus stop is on a map. It's the blue cross.
» This is the last printed bus map from March 2016, which I've had to update because the route of the 462 was changed three months later.
» The orange tyre tracks mark the boundary of Greater London.
» I've also marked "the point in London furthest from a listed building" from yesterday's post. It's the pink dot.
No buses go along Lambourne Road because very few people live there, whereas thousands of people live on the Hainault estate just to the south so all the buses go there. The Essex village of Chigwell Row is very fortunate to have a regular bus service on route 150, but it enters past the country park and stops 200m beyond the Greater London boundary, entirely skipping Lambourne Road. So when did Lambourne Road last see a bus?
I started by checking the longevity of the National Bus Company. It was founded in 1969, absorbing London Transport's country area in 1970 and introducing the red and blue logo in 1972. Then in 1988 the Thatcher government dissolved it, selling off all bus services to private operators between 1986 and 1988. EasternNational was part of a management buyout in 1987, becoming FirstBus in 1995. We can thus date this Lambourne Road bus stop to somewhere between July 1972 and February 1987, so it's been here for at least 40 years.
» If it were 200m up the road it'd be in London and TfL would have removed it, but it's in Essex and nobody has.
» If National Bus Company branding interests you, this look at its corporate design will be of interest.
Researching BORDABUS is easy because it's a really unusual word, but also hard because not much comes up. This did, though, which again points to the 1980s.
I also found some bustimetables, because the internet is surprisingly excellent. This one's from April 1984.
It's an odd route because "Passengers are carried to or from Romford only". Also it only ran three days a week, suggesting it was a service for market day shoppers. It stopped at our bus stop at 1013, 1213 and 1513, if you were lucky.
I also found photographs of this bus, or should I say coach, because Men Who Like Buses were also taking photos of Bordabus vehicles in the 1980s. Here's a double decker number 8 in Romford in July 1990, here's a number 6 coach in Hainault in November 1981 (it even says Via Chigwell Row on the front) and here's a a Bordabus and a Bordacoach at Abridge in 1981. I know Bordabus 6 also stopped at our bus stop because I found this bus map dated 1986.
The road's green because the B6 was a very infrequent service at this time, according to the timetable just three trips a day between Abridge and Brentwood, schooldays only.
Jumping ahead to a 1996 bus map there were now three services along Lambourne Road, the 8†, the 206† and the 511†.
• The 8 was Bordacoach route 8, a Wednesdays only service between Cheshunt and Romford (1997 timetable here). A Thursday-only route 9 ran in the summer months between Cheshunt and Southend, apparently, but that's not recorded on the map.
• The 206 was a similarly infrequent route between Loughton and Chigwell Row, including a twiddle round the Limes Farm Estate. It's all that remained of a former London Transport service running every 20 minutes between Walthamstow and Chigwell (timetable here).
• The 511 was a market day service from Romford operated by London Transport (details here), but because it looped anti-clockwise it never stopped at our surviving bus stop so we can ignore that.
However by the 1999 bus map all three services had vanished and Lambourne Road was busless again. And it's been busless ever since.
» Technically Epping Forest Community Transport ran a minibus twice a week from Chigwell Row to Epping on behalf of Chigwell Parish Council as recently as March 2020, but you had to be a Chigwell resident to use it, also it was Hail and Ride so never used our bus stop so it doesn't count.
In conclusion, this bus stop on Lambourne Road was last served by a scheduled bus route somewhere between 1997 and 1999, almost 30 years ago, and yet it's still here displaying the logo of a company which last operated in 1987, almost 40 years ago. Would never happen in London.
There are almost 20,000listed buildings in London, from palaces to pubs and parish churches to phone kiosks. They're particularly prevalent in inner London because that's where most of the old stuff is, and somewhat sparser towards the outskirts. There are also a few larger gaps where nothing's been listed, these generally suburbs in former agricultural areas where nothing old was noteworthy and nothing newer has proved architecturally significant. Today's question is thus...
Where in London is furthest from a listed building?
Thankfully Historic England provide a scrollable map on which every listed building is pinpointed, so I started there. This is a snapshot from northeast London, where you can see lots of listed buildings in the lower left-hand corner in Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Greenwich, and rather fewer as you continue outwards. A lot of these can be found along main roads because that's where settlement and commerce began, leaving several listed voids inbetween. I hope it's not too much of a spoiler to say that London's most heritage-non-adjacent location is on this map.
To find the largest gap I tried to identify the largest circle that could be drawn on the map without enclosing a listed building. To do this I took a roll of sellotape and moved it around my laptop screen until no blue pins were visible through the gap in the middle. I found five locations altogether, the only qualifying criterion being that the centre of of the circle had to be in London. Each centre turned out to be over a mile from any listed building, mainly because I got lucky with the size of my sellotape, and then it was just a case of measuring the radius of each circle as accurately as possible.
I can therefore confirm that the place in London furthest from a listed building is here, near enough.
This is the junction of Forest Road and Hainault Road in the London borough of Redbridge. The precise location is across the hedge in the middle of a large ploughed field about 100m south of the roundabout, but it's not public land and the entire boundary is shielded by a thickety hedge so that's the best photograph I managed to get. The nearest place you might know well is Fairlop Waters Country Park which is a ten minute walk to the west, alternatively Hainault Recreation Ground which is a large expanse across the road. The only nearby residents live on a caravan park, and although the 462 bus drives past it doesn't stop, there being no local need. Instead the land hereabouts is mostly open fields and the roads are super-useful ratruns for Essex-fringe drivers who pass through in great numbers.
So why is this the place in London furthest from a listed building? One reason is that centuries ago this was all Hainault Forest where nobody lived. Another reason is that after the forest was chopped down in the 1850s it all became agricultural land so the only buildings were three farms, none of them noteworthy. Another reason is that Fairlop Plain was acquired in the 1930s not for housing but for an airport, which when WW2 broke out became RAF Fairlop instead. Another reason is that the airfield was so comprehensively erased after 1946 that nothing of wartime significance survives. A final reason, possibly key, is that all the surrounding land then became either Green Belt or the huge Hainault council estate. That meant either you couldn't build on it or nobody built anything inspiring enough to be notable, and that's how this field became the only place in London to be over 1¼ miles from a listed building. [map][map]
And here are the listed buildings it's just over 1¼ miles from.
» The alien-looking one is the very wonderful Fullwell Cross library, designed by Frederick Gibberd in 1959 and given Grade II status in 2007. It dominates the roundabout at the top of Barkingside High Street, and if its dramatic copper-topped drum bears some resemblance to Liverpool's Roman Catholic Cathedral that's because Gibberd designed them both. Events today include Chatty Cafe, Scrabble Club and Lego Club, or simply borrowing some books beneath the inspirational ring of clerestory windows.
» The terrace of weatherboarded cottages is 195-209 Manor Road, likely built in the early 19th century and Grade II listed in 1979. I'd never noticed them before because they're set back from the road and have since been screened behind a lot of trees and shrubbery. Their old-school construction puts them at odds with most of the surrounding suburban housing, but they are very close to Grange Hill station so make an excellent commuter bolthole.
» The first church is All Saints Chigwell Row, a fine Gothic pile built to serve the growing village in the 1860s. It was only listed in 2024, but even before that Chigwell Row had so many listed houses that my sellotape circle wouldn't have been any bigger.
» The second is the Church of St Peter, Aldborough Hatch, also from the 1860s but listed much earlier in 1979. Its building material included chunks of Portland Stone from the original Westminster Bridge which had just been demolished.
The fifth and final listed building on my circle's periphery is Furze House Farmhouse in Marks Gate. It's the oldest of all the listed buildings listed here but I don't have a photo because it can't be seen. The farmhouse is tucked away behind a locked gate at the end of a long driveway, all of which are encased so completely within a sheath of woodland that you'd think some previous owner really wanted to be invisible. Everything between here and the centre of my circle is arable farmland, hence no buildings, hence no listed buildings, indeed fewer listed buildings than anywhere else in London.
In second place is a landfill site on the Rainham Marshes.
You can't get inside the landfill site so my photo is of Coldharbour Lane alongside, a remote dead end lane that curls around the huge spoilheap to terminate alongside the estuary. Absolutely nobody lives here, indeed nobody even lives within a mile, let along in anything listed. All that's been built even vaguely nearby are industrial sites and warehouses, some of them across the river in Erith, and basically whenever you ask a "Where in London is furthest from...?" question these marshes inevitably pop up.
In third place is the 18th tee of Addington Court golf course, close to Selsdon Wood and the Forestdale estate. It won't surprise you that there are no listed buildings in New Addington, and that's mainly why these fairways are nowhere near any of them whatsoever.
In fourth place are Tolworth Court Farm Fields in the Hogsmill valley, specifically Finch Hoares, a former hay meadow alongside Jubilee Road. Nothing in Tolworth is listed, especially not that ugly tower block, and it's over a mile until you find one that is.
In fifth place, I think, is High Wood in the extremely rural hinterland beyond Orpington, beyond even the outpost of Pratt's Bottom. When I tried visiting every 1km grid square in London this is pretty much the last square I went to, so you won't have been either.
I hope I used my sellotape correctly to devise this ordering, confirmed by careful manipulation of online maps. But I do think I have the definitive answer to the question Where in London is furthest from a listed building?
It's in the borough of Redbridge in a ploughed field 100m south of the roundabout at the junction of Forest Road and Hainault Road, over a mile and a quarter from any listed building. And because it's all Green Belt round here that's very unlikely to change.
Sun 1: At the end of today's Radio 4 Midnight News the headlines were followed by a trail and then the programme Take Four Books. Hang on, I thought, where did the weather go? The Midnight News has always been followed by a beefy weather forecast ever since I started listening in the 1990s. The same thing happened tonight - no weather presenter, no weather - so I checked the Radio Times and they have indeed killed it off.
Until last night the listing always said News and Weather, but from today onwards it's only News. This cancellation wasn't announced, but it is plainly part of the latest round of BBC cost cutting, essentially forced by the last goverment enforcing a lengthy licence fee freeze. Other plans include scrapping the late-night weekday weather bulletin on BBC Two and using automated graphics for the overnight edition of Weather for the Week Ahead on BBC One. It's all so weather presenters don't need to do a late shift any more, saving cash and also helping the BBC to slim down their team of meteorologists by three. The Radio 4 Midnight News is also due to be cancelled before next spring so I shall be going to sleep less well informed on all fronts. Cold fronts, alas.
Sun 1: Today is the 10th anniversary of the introduction of the slogan 'See It. Say It. Sorted.' It's annoying, it's senseless and it gets played far more often than you'd like, but it is extraordinarily memorable and that's why it's still around ten years later. Apparently more than 200,000 texts are sent to 61016 every year, and since 2016 over 80,000 crimes have been recorded by the British Transport Police. Use of See it. Say it. Sorted. is mandated across every train operator and station in England, Scotland and Wales, so if you want to escape either take the bus, stay in your car or head to Northern Ireland instead.
Sun 1: This sign outside Meridian Water station intrigued me. It tells passengers which platform to use for various destinations, and it's not very good. Firstly the red lines are misleading because these lines branch rather than being sequential. No trains go direct from Stratford to Hackney Downs (p3), for example. But mainly I thought "hang on, can you really get a train from here to Cambridge?" because northbound trains from Meridian Water are exceptionally thin on the ground. So I checked the timetables and no you can't, ditto zero trains go direct to Stansted Mountfitchet. Also only the last train of the day goes to Liverpool Street, all the other southbound services go to Stratford, and only the midnight train goes to Hertford East. They really have made this much more complicated than it should be.
Southbound trains per weekday to Stratford: 41 to Liverpool Street: 1
Northbound trains per weekday to Bishop's Stortford: 7 to Hertford East: 1
In total 316 trains depart Meridian Water station every week, 85% of which go south to Stratford, so most of the rest of what's on the poster is irrelevant most of the time. Or indeed wrong.
Sun 1: Oh come on, it's far too early for the supermarkets to be launching their Christmas TV ad campaigns. Sainsbury is repeating its BFG theme which wasn't very engaging last year, and Tesco has a sugary 'delivery driver goes the extra mile' storyline that I expect to be sick of by Bonfire Night. It's also much too early for Tesco to be screening an advert for turkey prices at Waterloo station, and FFS even the John Lewis Christmas ad is launching today (3.11.26).
Mon 2: If you're taking part in Movember, I'm pleased to say I've spotted A Mustache Barber in Whitton. That said this may just be a traditional barber shop, not a tache specialist, because the list of specialist trims in the window goes no further than a flat top or a beard trim. If only they had a website or some online presence beyond an Instagram account they gave up on three years ago then we might know better.
Mon 2: What station is this?
You know Fulwell .
Mon 2: Today was the 90th anniversary of BBC Television commencing public broadcasting from Alexandra Palace, i.e. television was 90 years old today. There are many ways to commemorate the event, my favourite of which is always to watch Adele Dixon singing the opening song, The Magic Rays of Light.
Alternatively you can download the very first Television Number of the Radio Times as a 100 page pdf here (or view the next week's issue with the first TV programmes here). Also BBC4 is screening one of those first night programmes on Wednesday evening at 11.45pm, making Television Comes to London the BBC repeat with the longest gap between first and second showings... 90 years and 2 days.
Mon 2: As usual poppies have appeared on the front of many tube trains, as here on the Waterloo & City line. But I wonder if they've stuck poppies on both ends? You can see this end as trains enter the platform at Waterloo and when they arrive at Bank. But the other end is invisible to passengers because it's always in the tunnel at Bank and beyond the platform at Waterloo. Technically you could see it if you were standing on the arrival platform at Waterloo when a train arrived, but nobody does this so I wonder if they bothered with two poppies or just one.
Mon 2: Tower Hamlets libraries are holding their Writeidea festival again on the weekend of 20th-21st November, a chance to hear two dozen authors talk about their books in the comfort of the Town Hall. Most talks last an hour and all are free, even if you're not a signed-up borrower or indeed live outside the borough. Authors include Deborah Frances-White, Tim Pope, Dan Cruikshank and Owen Hatherley, so for example on Saturday at 4pm you could be hearing about LGBTQ history in the suburbs, how football shirts reflect politics or how best to draw a pub. Website here, programme here.
I do love my local library. Today I returned one novel on the Booker Prize shortlist and left with two more, which hopefully makes me better read than most.
Mon 2: Today was the 90th anniversary of BBC Television commencing public broadcasting from Alexandra Palace, i.e. television was 90 years old today. There are many ways to commemorate the event, my favourite of which is always to watch Adele Dixon singing the opening song, The Magic Rays of Light.
