1) Ozzy the Bull, who you may remember stole the show at the 2022 Commonwealth Games opening ceremony, has been relocated to take pride of place at New Street station. To be fair he's been there since last summer but this is the first time I've seen him which is why this is 'news'. When you walk into Grand Central, the shopping mall atop the cavernous station, Ozzy's right there in the middle looking immense and bovine. Even better, every hour from 10:15am to 8:15pm he wakes up and performs, by which I mean his eyes light up and he moves his head from side to side very slowly. A bit of theatrical heavy breathing can be heard from time to time. After six shakes Ozzy goes back into a deep sleep for 57 minutes, but by then everyone who wanted photos or video has their digital content and a smile on their face.
2) The fibreglass animal of choice in Birmingham this summer is the bear. I found Jester in the Piccadilly Arcade, and apparently his themed decoration represents historic exploitation or something. He and his nine fellow bears are on the streets until 1st October, and quite frankly this kind of artificial placemaking trail lost its allure some time ago.
3) It's Cadbury's bicentenary this year, if you count the birth of the company from the day in 1824 when John Cadbury opened a grocer's shop at 93 Bull Street, two of whose products were cocoa and drinking chocolate prepared using a pestle and mortar. You can see a model of the shop made out chocolate at Cadbury World, but I wanted to see where it really was so I went to the original site in the city centre. Being Birmingham the entire block has alas been knocked down and redeveloped, possibly more than once, so there was nothing to see. Address-wise My Hair My Beauty is at 95-96 Bull Street, whereas Cex nextdoor is at 89-90 Bull Street so there isn't even a 93 any more, so basically don't waste your time looking.
4) Last time I was in Birmingham, which was 18 months ago, workmen were finishing off the new tram junction on the corner of Bull Street and Corporation Street in readiness for the Metro's Digbeth extension. They've now finished, as you'd expect, but the tracks go barely 100m before ending up in a mess of roadworks and unfinished rails so the new extension feels as far away as ever. I blame HS2.
5) HS2 has taken over a massive swathe of sort-of central Birmingham, mostly without a lot to see behind the barriers. The old station building on Curzon Street stands empty and pretty much alone, other than the Victorian pub across the road which is very busy on a Friday after work. Beyond all that I saw what looked like three pristine white viaducts, so might be where the platforms are going to go or else where they'll join on. What I learned from staring at these vacant acres is that it's not just Euston and Old Oak Common that are essentially an extremely unfinished railway desert, so is the Birmingham end.
6) Chiltern Railways are running a special promotion on Fridays this month where you can get tickets from London to Birmingham/Oxford for next to nothing. Ian Visits has the details, as ever, but the key thing is you have to book at the start of the week if you want to travel on the Friday. I paid just £6.40 to get to Moor Street (and another £6.40 to get back), and this is why you're reading the news from Birmingham today.
It was a strong Labour performance, taking over half of the votes, although turnout was only 15% so it's not quite as thumping a win as it looks. The Greens leapt into second place, reflecting a recent Green renaissance across this part of London, although their leaflet game was strong with three separate missives landing in my letterbox. The Conservative leaflet arrived so late that I'd already voted.
None of this will affect how Tower Hamlets council is run because we have a Mayoral system so Lutfur Rahman can do what he likes, indeed his Aspire party didn't even bother to put up a candidate. But Bow East's former councillor is now the MP for Westminster and the City, so who knows where Abdi might end up?
2) Bus Stop M still doesn't have a poster saying that route 8 no longer stops here. That's pretty appalling given it's now seven days after the route was curtailed to Old Ford. Meanwhile one of the posters at Bow Church DLR has been ripped off (and the other is heading that way), which is fine because route 8 never stopped there anyway.
Hurrah, it's that time of year again when TfL silently updates its spreadsheet of annual passenger entry/exit totals at every tube station.
To be honest they did this last month, that's how silently the data was updated, but at least this all happened pre-cyberattack.
As usual passenger numbers are surveyed for a typical week in autumn then multiplied up to a full year. In good news this is the first year since the pandemic free from any travel restrictions, so we're now back to whatever the new normal is. 2023 was also the first full year of Crossrail operations so what follows has a somewhat purple tinge in places.
London's ten busiest tube stations (2023)(with changes since 2022) 1) King's Cross St Pancras (72m) 2) Waterloo (70m) 3) Victoria (60m) 4) ↑3 Tottenham Court Road (59m) 5) Liverpool Street (57m) 6) ↓2 London Bridge (55m) 7) ↑1 Stratford (54m) 8) ↓2 Oxford Circus (51m) 9) Paddington (49m) 10) ↑3 Farringdon (40m)
It's business as normal at the head of the list where King's Cross, Waterloo and Victoria remain in the top three slots. But Crossrail is making itself felt with Tottenham Court Road climbing to fourth place, indeed half of the tube's Top 10 are also on the Elizabeth line. The spreadsheet confirms that this is gateline data, i.e. passengers entering or exiting the station, so interchanges are not counted and no distinction is being made regarding mode of travel. Oxford Circus remains the busiest tube-only station and Stratford is still the busiest tube station outside zone 1.
The next 10: Bond Street, Bank/Monument, Canary Wharf, Euston, Green Park, Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus, South Kensington, Moorgate, North Greenwich
London's ten busiest tube stations outside Zone 2 (2023) 1) ↑1 Wembley Park (15.5m) 2) ↑2 Ealing Broadway (15.4m) 3) Barking (15.1m) 4) ↑1 Walthamstow Central (13.3m) 5) ↑1 Tottenham Hale (13.2m) 6) ↑1 Tooting Broadway (12.4m) 7) ↓6 Seven Sisters (12.2m) 8) Wimbledon (11.2m) 9) East Ham (10.8m) 10) Wood Green (9.1m)
Wembley Park scrapes into first place here, its roster of world class events beating the Crossrail influence at Ealing Broadway. Barking is the only other zone 4 station in the Top 10. Seven Sisters tumbles from the top spot, losing a quarter of its gateline numbers compared to 2022. Nevertheless northeast London has a particularly strong showing including two other stations on the Victoria line (Blackhorse Road just misses out in 11th place). If the list were to continue then Harrow-on-the-Hill (8.4m) would be the highest performing station in Zone 5 and Uxbridge (5.4m) the busiest in Zone 6.
London's ten busiest tube stations that are only on one line
Canary Wharf, North Greenwich, Vauxhall, Brixton, Camden Town, Old Street, Knightsbridge, Walthamstow Central, Covent Garden, Tooting Broadway
Tube stations with over 20% more passengers in 2023 than 2022
Richmond, Tufnell Park, Farringdon, Upminster, Chalfont & Latimer, Whitechapel, South Harrow
Tube stations with over 10% fewer passengers in 2023 than 2022
South Ealing, Seven Sisters, South Kenton, Lancaster Gate, Finsbury Park, Hyde Park Corner, Marble Arch
This is still my favourite list of the year...
London's 10 least busy tube stations (2023) 1) Roding Valley (268000) 2) Chigwell (332000) 3) Grange Hill (397000) 4) North Ealing (606000) 5) Theydon Bois (734000) 6) ↑2 Ruislip Gardens (807000) 7) ↓1 Moor Park (808000) 8) ↑6 South Kenton (821000) 9) Croxley (838000) 10) ↓3 Upminster Bridge (854000)
Roding Valley remains the least used station on the Underground, just like it always is. The Essex end of the Central line has a very strong showing including all three stops on the Hainault shuttle, as per usual. North Ealing is unusually lightly used for a zone 3 station, but that's because Ealing Broadway and West Acton are close by and more useful. It's worth saying that South Kenton doesn't have a gateline so TfL go along and do a proper manual count, that's how seriously they take this data.
n.b. In this particular set of data Kensington (Olympia) counts as an Overground station, recording 2.3m passengers last year, whereas if you were only to count District line passengers it'd almost certainly beat Roding Valley and be the tube's least used station.
The next 10: Ickenham, Fairlop, Chesham, West Harrow, West Acton, Barkingside, West Ruislip, North Wembley, West Finchley, Hillingdon
The least busy tube station in each zone (2023) zone 1) Regent's Park (2.3m) zone 2) Goldhawk Road (1.8m) zone 3) North Ealing (0.6m) zone 4) Roding Valley (0.3m) zone 5) Ruislip Gardens (0.8m) zone 6) Theydon Bois (0.7m) zone 7) Moor Park (0.8m) zone 8) Chalfont & Latimer (1.6m) zone 9) Chesham (1.0m)
And while we're here...
DLR Top 5: Canary Wharf (12m), Limehouse, Cutty Sark, Lewisham, Woolwich Arsenal
DLR Bottom 5: Beckton Park (0.5m), Stratford High Street, Abbey Road, Elverson Road, Royal Albert
n.b. Tube stations with DLR services don't count, otherwise Bank, Stratford and Canning Town would be in the Top 5.
Beckton Park remains Tumbleweed Central after the neighbouring office development stalled. Pudding Mill Lane spent two decades in the Bottom 5 but thanks to ABBA it's no longer even in the Bottom 10.
n.b. Tube stations with Crossrail services don't count, otherwise every station from Paddington to Whitechapel would beat everything here.
Southall, West Drayton and Acton Main Line all more than doubled their passenger numbers in 2023 compared to 2022, such was the impact of launching cross-London services.
Overground Top 10: Clapham Junction (13m), Liverpool Street, Denmark Hill, Shoreditch High Street, Shepherd's Bush, Hackney Central, Dalston Junction, New Cross Gate, Dalston Kingsland, Surrey Quays Overground Bottom 10: Emerson Park (0.3m), Headstone Lane, South Hampstead, Bushey, Hatch End, Theobalds Grove, Kilburn High Road, Wandsworth Road, South Acton, Barking Riverside
n.b. Tube stations with Overground services don't count.
Barking Riverside being one of the ten least used Overground stations is disappointing given it's the sole station on an extension that cost £327m, but that's because they built the railway before most of the houses.
And as we await the imminent renaming of the Overground lines, here's a final list with a touch of zeitgeist about it.
The least used station on each Overground line (2023) Suffragette line: Barking Riverside (844000) Mildmay line: South Acton (749000) Windrush line: Wandsworth Road (747000) Weaver line: Theobalds Grove (686000) Lioness line: Headstone Lane (459000) Liberty line: Emerson Park (274000)
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 Kempton Park, one stop beyond Hampton on the Shepperton line, a station which exists solely because of the racecourse alongside. Originally trains only stopped on race days, in which case one stop beyond was Sunbury, but in 2006 the station got a spruce up and became a regular part of the rail network. It's still not terribly busy.
None of Britain's 59 racecourses are in London but Kempton Park very nearly is, by a matter of 100m or so. It opened in 1878 after a businessman bought up the grounds of Kempton's ancient manor and turned 200 acres over to jockeying. It has two concentric courses, a larger triangular circuit with jumps used for National Hunt racing and an inner loop used for flat racing, so is a very flexible site. Its biggest race is the King George VI Stakes on Boxing Day, plus several other extravaganzas between September and April, but Monday evening racing seems to be how it ticks over across the year. I dodged that, not least to avoid the dress code which officially says to come “dressed to feel your best” but appears alongside photos of ladies with fascinators and tweedy men in baker boy caps.
On a Wednesday the place is almost deserted, but you can walk into the enormous car park if you want to have a chat with a bloke in a cabin about selling your vehicle. Elsewhere course staff were taking advantage of the inactivity by painting the ticket gates, strimming the topiary and nipping up the floodlights to check the CCTV. As you'd expect you can see very little of the course without paying, only the back of the grandstand and a welcoming lobby, but squint through the gates and a couple of equine statues are visible in the parade ring (one's Desert Orchid and one's Kauto Star) and also a slim distant curve of white rail. I understand things are very different here on Thursdays when "the largest weekday market in the South of England" turns up, so if you fancy fashion, flowers, footwear and food, including cut price deals from the team at Bracknell Meats, that's today.
Kempton Park station is only accessible through the racecourse car park, and from the far end. Passengers arriving from London get to walk straight out, whereas those heading back into town have to hike over a broad lattice footbridge, which can't be easy in high heels after an afternoon on the fizz. This platform is substantially covered by a wooden canopy, all the better to protect a grandstandful of racegoers when the next train could be up to half an hour away. The big news, according to a poster, is that contactless payments are coming to Kempton Park in 10 days time, which might make the ticket machine almost redundant.
It's so quiet here that this would be London's fourth least used station if only it were in the capital, so I wasn't surprised to have the place entirely to myself. I was surprised when I saw what looked like Harry Potter walking over the bridge, but it turned out to be a young cleaner in an SWR tabard carrying a broom. A few genuine London-bound passengers ambled across a short time before the next train was due to leave, but generally Sunbury station is much more convenient so the vast majority of locals head there instead. It's only 600m away and has an identical service, but it gets six times the footfall.
Nobody lives to the north of the station - a land of waterworks and reservoirs and also a rumbly Highways Department depot. The dual carriageway which carves through is the A316, but after barely any distance this is the precise point where the M3 begins and launches itself over the Sunbury Cross roundabout. A footbridge leads across the maelstrom to a giant Costco and a Land Rover showroom, although quite frankly everyone drives, and these are further reasons why the station is so quiet. London begins halfway down the first layby, which is the location (you may remember) of the capital's only addressable location in the TW16 postcode, a painted shipping container with a greasy spoon cafe inside.
For anything vaguely interesting you have to head south into the streets of Lower Sunbury. The interest is admittedly only vague to start with, a slew of attractively anonymous avenues dotted with occasional recreational opportunities. Kempton Cricket Club has a thriving colts section, apparently, and the Sunbury Adult Learning Centre offers tai chi and lipreading for beginners on Tuesdays. Some people own a big pile and look like they've visited the aforementioned Land Rover dealer, others appear to have decorated the front of their homes via a catalogue that fell out of a magazine, but most live somewhere pleasantly normal by Surrey standards, i.e. one rung up from nearby Hounslow.
Houses generally get older the nearer you get to the Thames as befits a riverside settlement with ancient roots. French Street is named after Huguenot refugees who once settled here, and also once housed Gary Wilmot so is patently historic. Alas I can't tell you about the lovely church, the Millennium Embroidery cafe, the Walled Garden or The Three Fishes pub because they're all marginally closer to Sunbury station than to Kempton Park. But I did explore some of the newer properties by the riverside, places where boatlovers who don't mind their gardens being submerged occasionally still want to live. At one point the motley houses break to leave space for a narrow footbridge across to three dozen properties on Sunbury Court Island, and I hate to think how its residents cope on house removals day.
But one of the islands is undeveloped and accessible, that's Rivermead Island, and the locals use it like you'd use a local park. Access is over a low bow-shaped footbridge past signs warning no BBQs, no tents, no marquees, no bivouacs, no dog fouling and no fishing without a licence. On the far bank the Thames drifts languidly by, relatively narrowly for those used to Central London widths, with views across to a giant weir fed by a water treatment works. But what's weird is that halfway along this minor island the local authority suddenly switches from Spelthorne to Elmbridge, indeed it used to switch from Middlesex to Surrey, indeed there used to be a coal tax post by the waterside. Whatever's going on?
It turns out this one island used to be two islands but the channel between them silted up. On the far side was Swans Rest Island whose fishing rights were linked to the southern side, hence the administrative disconnect, but today you simply step across through the trees without ever realising. Follow the clearing to the wooded tip, three minutes max, and you emerge opposite a landing stage facing the minor navigation channel behind Sunbury Court Island. I suspect this is a favourite drinking spot for local youth and perhaps not for the very faint hearted, but I think I'd rather be here than at the racing in tweed and a baker boy cap.
Underwhelming London: Pig Farm Alley, Worcester Park
Pig Farm Alley is a long straight path, off limits to traffic, in the London borough of Sutton. It runs from Trafalgar Avenue, off Stonecot Hill, to an edgeland nomansland by the Lower Morden Equestrian Centre. It's about a kilometre in length, all of it immediately alongside the boundary with Merton. It felt quite hemmed in by railings on both sides, with only a couple of exits along the way. This probably has a fascinating backstory, I thought. I may have been wrong.
It looked like it was going to run alongside the Pyl Brook, but that bore off too early. At one point a really tall fork lift truck poked over the highest part of the fence, because local sights include the Garth Road Reuse and Recycling Centre. The only people I saw along the path were cyclists, this no doubt a result of the alley being upgraded to a shared use path in 2014. The graffiti artist @worcesterparksfinest has been colourfully busy along one stretch of wall. A couple of pylons really added to the ambience at the far end.
My interest was piqued when I saw a sign saying this was PROW 1, i.e. Public Right Of Way 1, because Sutton like to use the PROW acronym on their footpath signs. Ooh, I thought, I could run a feature on the lowest numbered footpath in every Outer London borough. But when I checked for Public Rights of Way on Sutton's website all they have is a map with red lines on it, none of them numbered, so my footpath idea fell at the first fence.
What I've since discovered is that Pig Farm Alley was once the southern boundary of Morden Common, ancient grazing lands originally under the control of the Manor of Morden. Part was used for market gardening, including "a strawberry farm, where gooseberries and raspberries as well were grown in abundance". Part became a brickworks with stables, an engine house and moulding sheds, now replaced by the Garth Road industrial estate. Part became a cemetery, but not the big cemetery round here, the smaller one. Merton Historical Society published an excellent 8-page history of Morden Common in 1991 which is available to read here, but that still doesn't make the area especially interesting.
What the booklet doesn't say, because it's on the Sutton side, is that the Worcester ParkSewage Works at the northern end was closed in the 1990s and transformed into New England-style housing. You don't really see that from Pig Farm Alley because of the fencing. And the reason it's called Pig Farm Alley is because before World War Two there used to be a pig farm at the far end, nothing more, nothing less. As Underwhelming London goes, Pig Farm Alley is right up there.
In Motspur Park I saw a newsagent that still has an advert for the Surrey Comet above the awning. Is that still going, I wondered. And yes, it turns out it still publishes, though now as the Epsom & Surrey Comet.
So I wondered what other weeklylocalnewspapers London still has.
Here's my attempt at a list, which will be wrong.
Barnet Borough Times Brent & Kilburn Times Ealing Times Harrow Times Hillingdon & Uxbridge Times Uxbridge Gazette Camden New Journal Hampstead & Highgate Express Enfield Independent Tottenham & Wood Green Independent Westminster Extra
Barking and Dagenham Post Docklands & East London Advertiser Hackney Gazette Islington Gazette Islington Tribune Newham Recorder Ilford Recorder Romford Recorder Wanstead & Woodford Recorder Your Local Guardian
Epsom & Surrey Comet Richmond & Twickenham Times Wimbledon & Wandsworth Times Sutton & Croydon Guardian Croydon Advertiser
Over the weekend TfL withdrew bus route 549, extended route W13 and substantially restructured routes W12 and W14. I wrote about the changes last week, and how TfL's information strategy relied substantially on a very complicated map. I went back yesterday to see how the implementation had gone, and it turned out it had gone bafflingly.
In good news the buses were going to the right places and all the tiles had been successfully changed. That's not always a given. In bad news the apps hadn't picked up the changes yet, there were no timetables anywhere and the very complicated map wasn't really helping. Unsurprisingly passengers were somewhat confused.
I caught the W12 from Woodford Bridge ("hang on, where's the W14 gone?"). I caught the W13 from Leyton Mills ("hang on, where's the W14 gone?"). But my most illustrative ride was when I attempted to catch the new W14 from Snaresbrook Road, so let me run you through that.
The W12 used to go this way, ran every 30 minutes and turned left at the end of the road. The W14 by contrast runs every 60 minutes and turns right. And the problem with an hourly bus that has no timetables is you have absolutely no idea when it's going to turn up. Normally I'd check the timetable at the bus stop but there wasn't one. Normally I'd then turn to an app but the underlying data hasn't been updated so that was no use. Normally I'd then turn to an online timetable but TfL's webpage hasn't been updated and the message "The stop you selected has now been removed from the route and therefore we cannot show you a timetable. The route page will be updated shortly to reflect these changes" was of no help. Normally I'd then turn to Robert Munster's excellent but unofficial londonbusroutes.net, but even that doesn't have a W14 timetable yet so I was stumped. The next W14 could be along in 1 minute or in 59 minutes and I had no idea which. My saviour came from an unlikely source.
A lady at the neighbouring care home opened the window to the day room and called over "you've just missed one". I think she was happy to have an audience to assist. "They changed it. It's only running every hour now. The next one's at quarter past." She told me all this twice. It turns out that when nobody's bothered to sort any timetables, what you really need is an old lady with time on her hands and a roadside sofa. I came back again at quarter past and she was bang on.
At the first stop in Wanstead High Street a middle-aged lady saw we were a W14 so boarded without thinking and sat absorbed in her smartphone. She didn't notice when we unexpectedly turned left down Nightingale Lane, something the W12 used to do, nor spot anything amiss as we weaved round tightly parked backstreets. Only when we reached South Woodford station ten minutes later did she suddenly twig the W14 had gone "the wrong way". She asked the driver whether he was going to Leytonstone and he shook his head, it being hard to have a conversation through glass, and she alighted somewhat disconsolate. I don't know if she spotted that either the W12 or the W13 would now take her there, but she didn't bother consulting the very complicated map before she left so perhaps she took the tube instead.
On my other bus journeys much of the chatter on board was about where the bus was going, or more often where it wasn't. Even folk with apps or Google on their phones, who aren't used to being confused, were very confused indeed due to the lack of up-to-date data. Are we going to Leyton, one woman asked the driver, and had to ask again because she thought he'd thought she said Leytonstone. It has to be said that having multiple buses heading to multiple places called Woodford Something, and also Leyton, Leytonstone and Loughton, doesn't make for simple exposition. As for the very complicated map, half its coloured lines were now obsolete and irrelevant because what would have been terribly useful wasn't a 'before and after', just an after. But the biggest issue was probably the lack of timetables, both online and at bus stops, making it ridiculously difficult to work out what was going where when.
It may be that TfL's ongoing cyberattack has caused some of these problems, in which case passengers across Redbridge and Waltham Forest are presently suffering in a somewhat unexpected way. Or it may just be an example of piss poor preparation and an institutional expectation that people should be able to work it all out, which it turns out they very much can't.
Roadworks are supposed to have started at the Bow Roundabout but they haven't yet, indeed it's possible they've actually been put back by two weeks. This is somewhat peeving given substantial bus mitigation has already taken place - five routes have had their frequency temporarily reduced and route 8 is now starting and finishing over half a mile away.
In good news there is now a poster saying that route 8 won't be stopping at Bow Church until 5am on a very specific Wednesday in 2025. In bad news the poster has been plonked outside Bow Church station, which isn't somewhere route 8 actually stops, indeed it's over 300m away. There is as yet no poster of any kind at Bus Stop M, only a continuing number of baffled passengers wasting their time waiting for buses that are never coming. If only they'd thought to walk here via the DLR they might have realised, and maybe over the next four months many of them will, but for now the only information provided is in the wrong place so not really helping. Theory: Whoever designed the poster thinks that route 8 stops at Bow Church DLR but it doesn't, and for that matter neither do alternative routes 276 and 488. All three stop at Bow Church instead.
We do have some new roadworks though, necessitating an annoying temporary set of traffic lights installed halfway between Bus Stop M and the Bow Roundabout. A gas company is digging up Payne Road which has entirely cut off the usual access to the McDonalds drivethrough, so cars now have to drive in from the Bow Road end which has been made temporarily two-way. The lights are 3-way to allow traffic from some flats to escape as well as from the restaurant, but generally absolutely nothing's coming out so traffic's queueing unnecessarily on Bow Road, and all squeezed into a single lane. Drivers aiming for McDonalds are generally baffled, and may or may not deduce that the diversion route involves a big loop via Old Ford. Thankfully it's only for a week. The real disruption has yet to begin.
Today I invite you join me on a hill-walking challenge in Kensington. The most well-known hill locally is Notting Hill, but that's a mere bump whereas I'll be tackling a proper summit and taking you to the very top of Campden Hill, a full 42 metres above sea level. Here it is on a topographic map, a raw bruise to the east of Holland Park, entirely untroubled by public transport. [1872 map][2024 map]
Campden Hill rises to the south of Notting Hill Gate, slotted inbetween Holland Park (the park) and Kensington Church Street. It's named after a baronet from Chipping Campden, Baptist Hicks, who built himself a house on open farmland here in the early 17th century. The land was sold off for housing in the 1820s, generally very grand housing with several acres of estate, and has been redeveloped much more densely over the years without ever losing its exclusivity. Thus on today's walk we'll be passing the former houses of poets, philosophers, photographers and detective novelists, even a bouffant Sixties chanteuse, as we climb up to the roof of Kensington.
The best place to set up base camp is on Kensington High Street, a mere 21m above sea level, where you can stock up on vital provisions before striking out for the summit. The nearest food outlet to the start of the ascent is the Orée boulangerie where a small strawberry tartlet will set you back £6.40, or if you prefer something sturdier for your backpack Holland and Barratt do a varied line in oaty flapjacks. I planned carefully and found Kensington Farmers' Market in full flow beside the Central Library, brimming over with sourdough loaves, shiitake trays and bone broth options, not to mention gourmet delights from the Tiny Fungi Wellness Shop. Come on a Sunday if you want to mingle with the smartly-dressed locals.
The mountain trail we seek is called Campden Hill Road, appropriately enough, and wends half a mile uphill from an access point between Santander and Amazon Fresh. Clues to the relative poverty of the local population can be found in the window of Dexters estate agents where the cheapest property starts at £1½m and weekly rents range from £692 to £8000. The path ahead is clear, a steady climb between three-storey stucco villas and the brick bulwarks of Kensington and Chelsea Town Hall, all overshadowed by a line of luscious plane trees. Poet Sir Henry Newbolt is the walk's first recipient of a blue plaque, perhaps best known for "Play up! play up! and play the game!" and less so for dying here in 1938.
The first significant point of interest is a peculiar five-way road junction at the apex of the Phillimore Estate. Several benches have been provided, allowing you to take a well-earned break after six metres of breath-taking ascent, and perhaps to look back down towards the foothills of lower Kensington. Overseeing all this is Campden Hill Court, a cupola-topped redbrick Victorian monster and one of the first steel-framed mansion blocks to be built in central London. It sprawls across the former gardens of Sir James South, a reclusive astronomer who invited Isambard Kingdom Brunel to help supervise the building of a dome to house his twelve-inch telescope, hence named his home Observatory House. After his death the house was replaced by an utterly elegant curve of villas called Observatory Gardens, although in the 1990s everything behind the facade was hollowed out to create luxury flats with underground parking and everyone now has much nicer taps than you've got.
The further you climb the posher it gets. 1 Campden Hill is an Edwardian Arts and Crafts mansion formerly occupied by the Uruguayan ambassador and then put on the market for £75m because, unusually for up here, it has architectural panacheand a huge back garden. Nextdoor to this current building site is the Nigerian High Commission with limos and diplomatic vehicles crammed in out front, and admittedly we are now following the contours of the hill rather than climbing it but if you've never seen infamous comprehensive Holland Park School in the flesh, look there it is. Sheffield Terrace on the hill's eastern flank is also worth a brief visit because Agatha Christie lived at number 58 between 1934 and 1941, tapping away at the manuscript for Death On The Nile in her sparse ground floor workroom. One of her many blue plaques marks it out.
We're nearly at the summit now, the weary climb approaching its end, and as the road finally levels out the housing becomes more diverse. Some are quaint old things, others monstrous thin villas, some modern white confections with squared-off sun terraces and others looks like someone let a bunch of Seventies architects loose. The block of flats where the Grand Junction Waterworks, its reservoir and its chimney used to be is called Kensington Heights, because prosaically that's what this is. Another nod to our lofty elevation is the Windsor Castle pub, supposedly named because it had sight of that royal residence when it was built in 1826, before mass intermediate development concealed Berkshire for good. Feel free to nip in for a beer and a bowl of Timperley Rhubarb & Apple Crumble with vanilla creme anglaise to celebrate your conquest of the hilltop.
But the precise summit is a tad further away along Aubrey Walk, the ridgetop road. This is delightful, or at least the side that wasn't the waterworks is delightful because the other's been infilled with deluxe gated hideaways. What stands out is St George's, a lofty Gothic pile in polychrome brick, which stands pretty much where the Ordnance Survey trig point would be if only there was one. I note they host immersive French lessons for babies on Wednesday mornings, which perhaps says a lot about the disposable income of the local parish. Keep walking and there are late Georgian terraces, cute cottages, repurposed workshops, even a K2 phone kiosk with a ceramic rabbit in it, also the white-fronted townhouse where Dusty Springfield lived at the end of the 60s. It's easy to see why people would pay a fortune to live here - and AubreyHouse at the far end was indeed the most expensive house ever to be sold in London when it was bought by a publisher in 1997.
To end the walk we need to return to the flatlands again, and this is done via a single short descent of Aubrey Road. You could alternatively descend via Campden Hill Square nextdoor, skirting its central verdant rectangle because that's strictly off-limits to mere non-residents, but Aubrey Road'll get you down in just a couple of minutes. Several of its properties are being reimagined by new wealthy owners (one by a company called Basement Force), others boast private parking along a squeezed sliproad, and this is not what you expect to find a stone's throw from busy Holland Park Avenue. At the foot of the hill turn right for Notting Hill Gate, aim straight ahead for Ladbroke Grove or (for the quickest escape by tube) turn left for Holland Park, the lowest of them all. I hesitate to say Campden Hill is hiding in plain sight, but its residents sorely hope ramblers and climbers will never notice it's there.
Like millions of Britons I have the BBC News app on my phone, and like millions of Britons I get Breaking News alerts flashed to me on my screen when something happens. But all too often I find myself thinking "That's not breaking news", or even "that's not news", as another journalistic non-event whizzes by. So I thought I'd do some proper research to try to see what the app is actually pumping out, because facts are always better than supposition.
What I did was keep track of every Breaking News alert on the BBC News app for a week. I picked the first week of September - that's the seven days just completed - and attempted to count and log them all.
For example these are Tuesday's seven Breaking News alerts (or at least the gist of them):
I may have missed a couple of alerts during the week because the notification soon disappears if you're not watching carefully, but I'm hopeful I got (almost) the full set. And here's what I found.
1) Last week the BBC News app sent out 43 Breaking News alerts.
That sounds like quite a lot. But on average it's six a day, or one every four hours.
2) Not all days are equal, because news doesn't work like that.
A typical weekday, it seems, does see about six alerts. Maybe this is deliberate, in that the team who send out the alerts have a nominal daily limit and try not to overwhelm us. Weekends seem to be quieter, mainly because workplaces, court rooms and the Houses of Parliament are closed.
But some days are special, in this case Wednesday because that's the day the Grenfell Tower report was published. I received as many as five alerts about the Grenfell report that day (which interestingly left six alerts for everything else).
3) Some news stories generate multiple alerts.
In Grenfell's case the first three alerts were "Grenfell Tower final report published..." followed a few minutes later by "Damning Grenfell Tower final report published...", followed shortly afterwards by "Grenfell: Tower's path to disaster". After lunch came Sir Keir's apology, "It should never have happened", and later in the afternoon a link to a much more detailed response in "Merry-go-round of buck passing". On the same day there were also two alerts about a US school shooting, one to say it'd happened and another to say a 14 year-old had been arrested. That's a lot of alerts for just two stories, but on a day like Wednesday probably justified.
4) The alerts are broadly focused.
About 60% of this week's alerts have been about UK news while about 40% were on foreign affairs. The foreign stories included four on Israel/Gaza, two on Ukraine and seven from the USA. Two were even about events in Africa. In UK news only five alerts were specifically about politics, five about what I might describe as 'police matters' and three about sport. Education, consumer affairs and prison overcrowding also got a look in. You may not be interested in all of these, but it's hard to argue any one topic predominated.
5) The alerts aren't obviously biased.
Looking at this week's list of 43 alerts they are not pushing a certain agenda or explicitly skewing the narrative, indeed they were generally very factual.
6) Not all the Breaking News is breaking.
If a story's been on the BBC News website for several hours, I always think it's a bit cheeky when it pops up as a Breaking News alert. This week we had "Has Starmer's bleak message for voters gone too far?", a political opinion piece suddenly blurted out hours after publication. There was also a lengthy report comparing cladding issues at two tower blocks in London and Margate, plus on Tuesday that in-depth analysis of Joe Biden's economic record. All of these were exemplary journalism and likely well worth reading, but not in any way 'breaking'.
7) Not all the Breaking News is news.
Sometimes the Breaking News alert is merely a blatant plug for another BBC programme. On Monday we had "How social media algorithms show violence to boys" which was a summary of that evening's Panorama, and yesterday we had "Starmer's 'blame the Tories' strategy will not hold forever" which was essentially Laura Kuenssberg trailing her big Sunday interview. That's two in a week - arguably too many, but perhaps not excessive.
8) Not all the Breaking News is genuinely important.
I don't know who decided "John Lewis brings back 'Never knowingly undersold' pledge" was worthy of Breaking News treatment but I think they over-reached. That's the most egregious of this week's alerts, the vast majority being far more justifiable. But it's a shame you can't turn off some of the topics you're not interested in (in my case the sport), or indeed opt for a Top Stories only option.
9) In summary...
It's hard to judge, but I'd say about 20% of this week's alerts were neither properly 'breaking' nor properly 'news'.
10) If it really annoys you, you can always turn it off.
You might then be last to hear the King's died, Sir Keir's resigned or that aliens have landed. But on the whole BBC Breaking News alerts aren't that over-frequent, ill-judged or over-needy. You just have to count them to see that.
Roadworks have yet to start at the Bow Roundabout but buses on route 8 have already been curtailed so they no longer start at Bus Stop M. Unfortunately nobody's told the passengers yet. They're still standing around waiting for buses that aren't coming, some for ages until the penny finally drops. They're checking their phones, they're double checking the timetable and they're looking at the Countdown display and thinking "hang on, it says no 8s are due for the next 20 minutes", before eventually wandering off. Normal procedure is that someone official adds a yellow poster at the bus stop advising passengers of the change, in this case "no buses until February, please catch an alternative bus from the other side of the church". But in this case nobody official has bothered and the end result is dozens of confused and inconvenienced passengers, maybe hundreds by the end of the day, and this is piss poor.
Things are equally poor at Bus Stop OL, which is normally the penultimate stop on route 8 but has suddenly become the final stop instead. Eastbound passengers are all being dumped here, as the blind on the front of the bus suggests, but without any indication of how to make the jump to Bow Church. In fact it's easy, you just board a 276 or 488 and it'll take you there, but again there's no yellow poster advising of this. What tends to happen is that one astute soul announces this to their fellow waiting passengers, so the old lady with the walking stick doesn't look too distraught, but it is pretty unforgiveable to chop a bus for five months and not tell anyone you've done that.
The London borough of Redbridge has boasted a solid mid-tablemuseum since 2000, housed in a bespoke corner on the second floor of Ilford's main library. But it's needed a bit of a refresh for a while so they used lockdown as a chance to start updating it with lottery money and it's been closed ever since. Until now. Originally the plan had been to reopen the museum space in 2022, then early 2023, then late 2023, and it finally reopened last month. Inexplicably there's been zero publicity - not even the museum's Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts have yet noticed - but the earliest date in the visitors book is 30th August so it seems to be a very recent reopening indeed.
Don't head in through what looks like the main entrance off the lift lobby or you'll enter mid-story. Instead advance into the reference section and immediately turn right where you'll find the prehistorical introduction. Ilford, it turns out, is one of the most important Ice Age sites in Britain thanks to the discovery of hundreds of animal bones in the Roding gravels. These include a nationally significant example of a mammoth's skull, although that's in the Natural History Museum so you'll have to make do with smaller bits of jaws and tusk or nip down to the first floor to see a replica. Roman and Saxon remains are much thinner on the ground, this because most of Redbridge was forest at the time, so don't expect to see much more than tiles from a villa in Wanstead and a burial urn excavated near the Redbridge roundabout.
What changed the area from a potato-growing backwater to full-on suburbia were the railways, transforming Ilford into a busy town centre and the fields outside Woodford into crisscrossed avenues. Some rather nice maps show all the old farms your house might have been built on, also the chunk of Hainault Forest the City of London bought up to rein in development, also the line of what became Eastern Avenue snaking across an ill-prepared landscape. Out-of-borough visitors might be more excited by the enamel sign showing the Hainault Loop and the Ongar shuttle, rescued from Chancery Lane station during a refit. Many large country mansions consequently disappeared and these are comprehensively catalogued, along with major institutions like Claybury asylum which were merely repurposed. The level of historic detail is both comprehensive and accessible.
Rooms recreating home life are a staple of many a local museum - here it's Victorian and 30s suburbia - but generally the focus is on explicitly local history. The famous Fairlop Oak is here, at least in spirit, also memories of civic provision like parks, pools and libraries. If you've ever wanted to see the leather gaiters worn by Wanstead Park's parkkeeper or the ceremonial key that commemorated the opening of Ilford Swimming Baths, they're here. I think a lot of these artefacts were in the former incarnation of the museum - my archive of old photos suggests similar themes - just not so well explained or displayed. Two former local persons of note are Winston Churchill, who gets an entire cabinetful, and suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst (whose section you can enjoy from home on a lovely bespoke website knocked up by the curators to spread the word).
Former local businesses very much get the nod, including electrical manufacturer Plessey and instrument makers Kelvin & Hughes. The display of Ilford photographic equipment is both evocative and a masterclass of graphic design, and I learnt that after their factory fled to Basildon in 1976 it was replaced by an enormous Sainsbury's (still present alongside Roden Street). The last sequence of cases brings the Redbridge story up to date, particularly regarding the arrival of other cultures, as is most appropriate in what the census confirms is the UK's 3rd most ethnically diverse district. I particularly liked the spiral-bound books providing additional background detail for each display, for example the DVD of Grandma's House is backed up by the fact that author Simon Amstell and actor Rebecca Front once lived in the same Gants Hill street.
If you live in the borough you really should make the effort to drop in, and everyone else should remember that population-wise Redbridge is larger than Newcastle, Derby or Brighton and Hove, so if you'd make an effort to visit a museum there you should make an effort to visit this one. Opening hours are from 11am five days a week, as befits the upper floor of a flagship library. It's been a terribly long wait but the outcome is well worth it.
And while we're talking Ilford...
Until the end of next week there's a small display downstairs at the National Portrait Gallery inspired by the photographic heritage of Ilford Limited. Redbridge Museum invited hip hop photographer Eddie Otchere to lead a group of young people (for which read 'born in the 21st century') in digging into the archives and shooting photos in the local area. Four portraits of former employees take pride of place, also a stack of film packaging and cameras, though alas there's very little on how the youngsters got to grips with non-digital imaging. The exhibition's only small so you'd get most of the flavour from its webpage, but turning up in person brings the bonus of being able to sit on an Ilford-branded box. I had the whole room to myself, despite the rest of the museum being busy, but then I'd had the whole of Redbridge Museum to myself earlier and I thought both were better that way. One temporary, the other permanent, so take your pick.
Two years ago today Liz Truss became Prime Minister. That went well.
With the country in a state of political flux I took the opportunity to ask who you thought would win the next General Election. I offered four options and asked you to "pick the outcome you expect, not the outcome you want". 83 of you had a go.
I'm not sure if you'd count that as a success or not.
Only 16 people, that's 20%, correctly predicted a Labour majority.
Given that the eventual majority was 174, not a narrow squeak, that seems quite a miss.
At least 70% of you predicted a Labour Prime Minister, so the correct direction of travel was forecast.
But equally 60% of you predicted a hung parliament which absolutely didn't happen.
It's interesting to look at some of the comments some of you left with your predictions.
LABOUR Majority
• But only by a hair's breadth.
• Landslide time
• SNP collapse, Labour boost, mark my words!
• A big swing needed for this but Truss's (lack of) popularity and the effect of the increased cost of living on people may be enough for it to happen.
No Majority Labour PM
• Labour supported by lib-dems in coalition or confidence/supply.
• Labour *should* get an easy majority, which is why they’ll somehow find a way not to. They’ve never quite grasped the idea that political parties mainly exist to win elections.
• Labour's total loss of Scotland makes a UK majority just about impossible.
• It should be a walk in for Labour. But with Starmer's Labour so weak, timid and uninspiring, I'm guessing few people will feel motivated to get out to vote for them.
No Majority Tory PM
• Think they will just about survive, sadly, despite the last however many years and all the scandals and incompetence.
• Dear God no. But with our broken electoral system I can't see any other outcome.
• Can see Starmer imploding, Lib Dems or someone being second largest party.
• Can see the Tories doing enough to lose the next election, but am not convinced Labour will do anything that lets them win it unless the expected impending crisis is really on an extremely large scale.
TORY Majority
• Devastatingly inevitable, I feel.
• Labour do not look electable in their current form.
• Truss will play the populist card, which in turn will go down well with a lot of voters. I can't see anything other than this realistically happening.
• All my adult life the tories have snuck in against the interests of the country. I'd love it to be different, but have lost faith that's the kind of country we live in.
Some of those look really perceptive, others ridiculous, but only with the benefit of hindsight.
A heck of a lot happened between autumn 2022 and the election, indeed a heck of a lot happened in the three weeks after I asked you the question, so a lot of your initial assumptions proved ultimately incorrect.
To be fair I asked you again three months later, at Christmas 2022, and you were a lot better then.
This time 43% of you correctly predicted a Labour majority, a big boost since September, such was the impact of Liz Truss's calamitous premiership. But many of the associated comments were still insistent it'd be a small majority, and 50% of you still thought there'd be a hung parliament, so even this much better prediction wasn't entirely indicative of Sir Keir's thumping win.
And what all this shows is that we're generally very bad at making long-term predictions because timescales are hard to judge and events get in the way.
For example...
» At Christmas 2021 I asked who you thought would be Prime Minister in a year's time - only 16% of you picked Rishi Sunak.
» At the start of 2021, with lockdown about to be imposed for the third time, I asked when you thought households would be allowed to mix indoors again. Half of you picked 2022 or 2023, and 88% of you picked a later date than the eventual release in July 2021.
» Midway through 2020 I asked you to predict where we'd be at the end of the year regarding Covid, Brexit and Trump. 60% of you correctly guessed Biden would beat Trump, but only 30% of you foresaw Christmas lockdown restrictions and only 30% of you predicted Boris would get a Brexit deal.
It's all too easy to look back and think "how were we ever so stupid?", whereas in fact the future we ended up in wasn't in any way obvious at the time.
And I mention all this because it's still very much the case that the future isn't obvious, indeed it pretty much always isn't, and perhaps we should remember this when sticking our neck out and making predictions with undue certainty.
So today would be a good day to ask you to look into the future one more time.
Who do you think will be the next American President?(poll closed)
