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 Grange Hill, one stop beyond Hainault on the Central line shuttle. The station's barely outside London, indeed the boundary runs immediately behind the southbound platform, as a small bulge of Essex nudges unnecessarily into the capital. I should say up front that the iconic children's drama was never set here, indeed Grange Hill's only school is a primary, but if you walk to the far side of the suburb you eventually end up in Birds of a Feather.
Grange Hill was originally an isolated hamlet around a crossroads on the edge of Hainault Forest. North to Chigwell, east to Chigwell Row, south to Barking Side and west to Woodford Bridge, just to get your bearings. There was once a 15th century manor called the Grange and there is still is a hill, hence Grange Hill. Alas nothing pre-20th-century survives except a triangular green by the crossroads, complete with grubby village sign and minimal shrubbery. One of the old pubs took a direct hit from a parachute mine in 1941 and is now a Shell garage, and the other was sold off to developers in its 240th year and has been replaced by a block of flats.
What wrought the greatest change around here was inevitably a railway. The Fairlop loop opened in 1903 crossing open countryside to link Woodford to Ilford, with Grange Hill station slightly better used than lonely Hainault. A doodlebug took out the original station building in 1944, hence the somewhat utilitarian flatroofeddesign. But theplatforms only needed a new canopy so remain some of the most evocative on the Underground, complete with twiddly green columns with the letters GER entwined in the ironwork. Services were transferred to the extended Central line in 1947 and this was finally the trigger for a considerable burst of housebuilding locally - private developers to the west and an LCC estate to the east.
Grange Hill is one of three wards under the jurisdiction of Chigwell Parish Council, and closer you get to Chigwell proper the larger the houses get. Along Hainault Road the neighbours appear to be having some kind of blingiest gate competition, black and gold twiddles preferred, shielding sizeable detached homes and parking for several vehicles. Step back off the main road and the houses are more typically postwar, from half-timbered semis to gabled four-bedders, but still on the large side as befits the Essex fringe. Fontayne Avenue was one of the first additions and has a thick strip of hedge down the middle of the road, like some kind of suburban dual carriageway sloping down towards open farmland views. The bungalow at 22 Dacre Gardens is called Llamedos, and yes we see what you did there.
A decent parade of shops ascends from the station with estate agents and beauty salons perhaps over-represented. This being Chigwell South the local cafes tend to be either pink or cottage green, and a tiny chihuahua will meet you at the door of the Naked Lounge if you pop in for spa treatment or microblading. Obviously there's a florist, who with Valentine's Day imminent have erected a gazebo of blooms on the pavement and wrapped pink ribbons all around the pedestrian crossing. The top row of newspapers in the rack outside the Manor supermarket kicks off with the Daily Telegraph and continues Times, Sun and Daily Mail. It also has a slot for the Jewish Chronicle while the cafe nextdoor promotes Hot Salt Beef, so yes there is a synagogue up the hill, recently refurbished with funds from a local businessman and renamed the Lord and Lady Sugar Community Hall.
Grange Hill's most conspicuous church is St Winifred's, built in 1935 as a chapel of ease because traipsing all the way to Chigwell proper every Sunday wasn't ideal. Something about the building looks a bit off, perhaps the sparse tower with its painted black crosses, or more likely the fact it was cheaply built in brick then coated with cement. The local cemetery is more recent, accessed at the far end of the delightfully-named Froghall Lane which appropriately enough is a dead end. Here the parish council oversees a long sliver of land with a tranquil rural outlook, employs on-site groundsmen and charges a £40 release fee if your car gets locked in overnight. The oldest grave I could find is from the 1970s and the latest is marked only by Charlie's floral tributes, as yet unfaded. Looking on the back of the headstones I spotted one with the extra epitaph He Lived He Laughed He Loved, and I hope this isn't a trend that'll spread.
The cemetery is the only part of Grange Hill beyond the railway, this being the official boundary of the Green Belt. The tracks run in a cutting all the way to Chigwell, bar a brief section where the Edwardian engineers had to burrow through the spur of a hill. The Grange Hill Tunnel is only 237m long making it the shortest in regular service on the Underground and takes just 12 seconds to whizz through aboard a train. It's also perfectly straight as you can clearly see from the bridge outside the station, also the caged footbridge on the opposite side accessed up a muddy path from the corner of Wycliffe Gardens. Just be aware that if you want to see a train pass through they only run every 20 minutes, this because Grange Hill is the 3rd least used station on the Underground, beaten only by the next two stations up the line.
But if there's one worth seeing round here it's probably the Limes Farm Estate, that is assuming postwar housing is your thing. In the late 1960s Chigwell Urban District Council belatedly decided they ought to build a lot of council houses and picked an as yet undeveloped slope abutting the edge of Redbridge where most Essex residents would never see it. The architects had a field day, starting by drawing a single-exit loop road and then adding a maze of large apartment blocks and crisscrossing townhouses in the centre. The flats form three large U-shaped blocks facing a central car park, each of the trio distinguished by red, yellow or green detailing. The houses have timber, brick or chunky pebbledash exteriors and separate rows of garages. And just for a laugh they numbered them all 2-634 Limes Avenue round one side and 1-731 Copperfield round the other, which must make deliveries a nightmare.
The finest feature is the green wedge that tumbles down the centre of the estate, a bit squidgy at present but creating an attractive backdrop to urban life. A slim concrete footbridge connects the top of the estate to the summit of the hill where a bench has been plonked with views towards Docklands and Kent. The estate's parade has only four shops, and currently offers just takeaways or nice nails while a crew of refrigeration experts rips the interior out of Londis. Residents must be hoping the Post Office reopens soon. There's an underlying sense of isolation here, as tends to happen when a community is a developmental afterthought, with only a few short alleyways linking Limes Farm to earlier streets. But slip through to the south and you instantly enter cul-de-sacs with Redbridge bins, then it's barely five minutes to Hainault station, because that's how close to London a One Stop Beyond can be.
When this blog started I wrote a lot less, included far fewer photos, didn't go exploring much and discussed topics of limited importance. What if I tried that again now?
Thursday, February 12, 2026
Hasn't it been really wet recently? It's rained in London every day this month so far, though January 31st was dry so it's only 12 consecutive damp days. According to my favourite weather site at Hampstead we've already had more than the average rainfall for February and it's only the 12th of the month, and that's on top of a January that delivered 175% of normal rainfall. Apparently we've only had ten dry days this year and half of them were over a month ago.
As for cloud there have only been six sunny hours so far this month, which is grim, whereas four days in the first week of January had seven hours each. The UK climate is often perversely atypical in one way or another so we can't read too much into this, but in good news Secret London says "Londoners Are Set To Face Rainy Weather Every Day For The Next Two Weeks" so it's sure to clear up soon.
The longest distance between consecutive Winter Olympics: Vancouver to Sochi (9553 miles) The shortest distance between consecutive Winter Olympics: Garmisch-Partenkirchen to St Moritz (145 miles)
Thursday, February 12, 2026
I was heading west on the Elizabeth line yesterday when the lady next to me tapped me on the shoulder and asked "Does this train go to Terminal 5?" No it doesn't, I said, it goes to Terminal 4. She seemed quite flustered by this news. I told her she should stay on and change at Terminal 2 but that went straight over her head. "It doesn't go to Terminal 5?" she said, more in shock than as a question. She was a smiley well dressed soul, at a guess Italian, and the intricacies of the Elizabeth line were beyond her comprehension. Just stay on, I said, and change at Heathrow. "I stay on to the end?" she asked, and I had to say no again because it's a right faff getting to T5 if you accidentally end up at T4 and don't know what you're doing. She looked even more tense and looked at me as if to say "I don't understand what's going on." I tried to show her the tube map on my phone, but the tube map at Heathrow is a complex knot combining two lines and that didn't help either. She tried asking again and I told her I had to get off the train at Bond Street but she should stay on to Heathrow and change there. "But it doesn't go to Heathrow T5?" she asked and I had to say no because it didn't, just stay on the train. She followed me onto the platform.
I wanted to point her towards to a T5 train on the departures screen but annoyingly there wasn't one. They only run direct every half hour and just our luck there wasn't one on the board. Instead I pointed at the next T4 train and specifically the yellow text saying "change at T2&3 for T5" but that didn't register either. I don't think she understood the concept of changing trains so the more I pointed the more confused she got. Her linguistic ability to ask a question seemed pretty good but her comprehension of my explanations less so. I hoped to be able to direct her to a helpful member of staff on the platform but annoyingly there weren't any. Bond Street is supposed to be the station where you alight to alert staff about accessibility needs out west but there was nobody to ask, not even on the concourse at the foot of the escalators. I eventually found a line diagram on the wall and pointed at T2, T4 and T5 to show how the line branched, but that only baffled her more. Get the next Heathrow train, I said, the train that says T4, then change later. She smiled, still baffled, and turned to ask another passenger on the platform "Will this train go to T5?" Yes, he said, even though it wouldn't, and that was the matter settled.
I wandered off defeated by my inability to help, and wondered what would happen as the lady's journey progressed. Would she get on the T4 train only to ask someone else "Does this go to T5?" and get off again. Would she find some other good Samaritan further down the line who'd explain everything satisfactorily? Would she consult an app and suddenly everything would become clear? Would she ride to the end of the line at T4 not T5 and collapse in a gibbering emotional heap? Or would she hang around on the platform at Bond Street for so long that a T5 train would eventually appear and all would be well? Some days the London transport system is just too baffling to explain, even if you get lucky and happen to ask someone who knows what they're talking about.
Thursday, February 12, 2026
Aren't Arsenal doing well at the moment? They could of course still balls it up but six points clear in February is pretty good, plus it's only Brentford tonight, plus Tottenham are basically imploding, plus Wigan are bound to be a doddle in the Cup. Also Arteta has been saying all sorts of meaningful things like "We have to focus on ourselves" and "Let's put all the energy into what we do" and "We have to be able to adapt" and "The players' qualities are the most important thing" and "You have to win a lot of games", and when you're being managed by a tactical genius like that nothing can stop you.
Thursday, February 12, 2026
I got a hyacinth for Christmas, essentially a bulb on a jar, and left it behind the curtains with some water to do its thing. According to the instructions you're supposed to leave it for 10-12 weeks but it's already burst into flower so I've shifted it to my windowsill instead. Unfortunately the thick stem is really floppy and keeps leaning over and I'm really struggling to keep it upright. I've tried turning the bulb, I've tried attaching an elastic band and I've tried resting it against a giant bobbin but it keeps slipping and leaning over anyway. My latest brainwave is to blutak a green Berol pen to the windowframe so it sticks out, then rest the hyacinth on that, but I'm not convinced it'll ever stay put for more than an hour or two.
Anyone else have problems with floppy hyacinths and know how best to keep one upright?
2026 means local council elections in London and the early collateral is already piling into my letterbox. The Greens left a card saying they'd called, with a handwritten "Sorry we missed you". They've also sent Issue 1 of 'Bow East News', which to be fair contains very little about Bow East and is more about the three candidates. One's a research scientist, one's a legal assistant and one is the Head of Public Affairs and Communications for a Palestine Rights organisation. Labour's candidate for Mayor of Tower Hamlets also came round, got no response and left a leaflet but that's more a survey about what I want rather than what he's offfering. Nothing yet from the Liberal Democrats or Conservatives or Aspire but the election is still three months off, plus Aspire don't need support from my ward to sweep the board again and reinstate the innately dubious Lutfur Rahman as Mayor. Watch this space.
Thursday, February 12, 2026
The joy of old-school blogging is that it doesn't take long to write. All of the above took only three hours whereas a typical 2026 blogpost can take much longer than that, not to mention all the time taken out and about doing research. No outdoor travels were required for any of the above, other than a train journey I was making anyway and an incident that was all over in five minutes flat. It just wasn't possible to go exploring midweek in 2003 when I had a job, plus I also had a busy social life so blogging had to be something it was possible to dash off between removing my tie and vanishing out the door for a beer. I dashed out the door again last night so a blogpost done and dusted before 7pm was an absolute godsend. Also when you write about stuff that happened to you or stuff you saw online there's no need to do any research because it's not about facts and nobody can pick holes. Normal service will be restored soon with an in-depth visit to somewhere historically intricate or an extensive takedown of some embryonic transport project but in the meantime I hope a dose of meaningless minutiae satisfied sufficiently.
TfL are certainly fickle when it comes to alcohol.
Last month it was Heineken but now it's Guinness.
Cheers?
The latest ad-splash is a week-long campaign for Guinness, specifically the new brewery experience in Covent Garden which the Kingopened just before Christmas. Two tube stations have had a makeover, one minimally and the other more map-based. And while one aspect of the campaign is creatively brilliant, overall it's just an expensive tourist attraction overselling itself.
Here's the clever bit.
Eleven Northern line maps at Tottenham Court Road station have been 'inverted' so the line is white and the background is black, thus resembling a pint of Guinness with a white frothy top. Where the stairwells meet the platform it looks like two pints side by side. Full marks to the creative team for that idea.
It can't be a coincidence that the TfL blog sprang into rare action yesterday with a post entitled Commercial Partnerships at TfL: A balancing act. It asserts that commercial income is an essential part of TfL's wider strategy to grow and diversify revenue. It recognises they haven't always got it right ("Following the Burberry activation at Bond Street, which created some unintentional customer confusion, we reviewed and improved our approach"). And it lists three guiding qualities every time an activation like this goes live. Only one is a positive - raising money - whereas the other two are essentially 'we promise not to muck up'.
• Revenue generation – aiming to infuse colour and fun into the network while generating essential income
• Customer clarity – carrying out essential planning to ensure no customer is ever confused or misdirected
• Accessibility – embedded at every stage of planning and delivery, so no customer is disadvantaged
The inverted map is certainly accessible, indeed arguably clearer than the normal black on white. The only branding is a small harp beside the name of one station, assuming passengers will make the Guinness connection for themselves. Tellingly they've had to add a drinkware.co.uk URL at the bottom of the map, even at the bottom of the Central and Elizabeth line diagrams in the ticket hall, lest the tiny harp drive you to drink.
Yes they've changed someroundels, don't they always? Three on each platform have been swapped, a gold harp substituting for the red circle. Yes they've plastered a few corridors and slapped some Guinness ads up an escalator. Yes they've used black and gold along the top of the platform, though only partially. Yes there is a small toucan perched in the ticket hall, in fact two if you look carefully. No they haven't touched the Elizabeth line, not as far as I saw, because why waste extra money unnecessarily? And yes there is a large exhortation just before you leave the station to go and sample "The Home of Guinness in London", so I did.
And here's the stupid thing, Tottenham Court Road isn't the closest station to the Guinness Brewery. It isn't even the closest Northern line station, which is Leicester Square, but 95% of the marketing budget has still been spent here. The closest station is actually Covent Garden and all that has is half a dozen roundels - hardly any statement at all - but I guess the last thing TfL wants is more tourists at the deep awkward station with the busy lifts. Instead it's a 9 minute walk from Tottenham Court Road to the brewery, as the smallprint up the escalators attests, and that's assuming you know which convoluted way to go.
The Guinness Open Gate Brewery is an oddly-unfocused attraction tucked behind the streets of Covent Garden. It's partly based in historicbuildings around Old Brewery Yard but also sprawls along an access corridor to a separate piazza, filling whatever floors the developers could get their hands on. Guinness was never brewed here, despite what the heritage murals might hint, and indeed isn't brewed here now. Instead the on-site microbrewery team explore "the new frontier of beer flavours", "from classic cold lagers to innovative low-percentage brews and sours with a tropical twist", "brewed to bubble at the centre of your conversations". If you manage to find a bar where they sell proper Guinness, it's all shipped in from Ireland.
And they'd rather you didn't just come for a Guinness but were tempted by alternative purchases. The most prominent door leads to a restaurant where £14 gets you a sausage and £6 a side of chips, while a more expensive seafood restaurant lurks upstairs. A portentous stairwell leads to a basement events space available for hire. If you hang around the main yard after the tables have been set out a black van will sell you a bespoke pie with a smidgeon of Guinness in the gravy. Don't try looking for a pub, there is no pub, all the better to help pay off the £73m development costs.
A separate building, opposite where Stanford's map shop ended up, hosts the experiential part of the experience. Here you can book tours to view the non-Guinnesses being brewed, take part in a tasting session and in the final room try your hand at pulling the perfect pint. I imagine the finale is seriously Insta-friendly ("come on Jason, don't let it all froth up") and that drinking said pint occupies a fair proportion of the 90 minute tour duration. Meanwhile downstairs is a Guinness store specialising in merch rather than beer, should you genuinely have need of a branded umbrella, branded beermat, limited edition tank top or weird designer creation invented for the sake of it. The supposed must-have is a personalised glass with the engraving carried out on site by faux heritage staff wearing black and gold braces, and the whole place reeks of the fundamentally unnecessary.
I'm not averse to a Guinness souvenir, my fridge is bedecked with a tortoise magnet purchased 25 years ago at the St James's Gate Brewery in Dublin. But that felt like a proper tour whereas this is just windowdressing masquerading as heritage with a price tag to match, not so much celebrating a beer as pimping a brand. And that's also why Guinness have splashed themselves across a busy tube station this week, a siren call to the neo-proletariat to visit WC2 for an extended black and white experience. Londoners won't be getting lower tube fares as a result but some marketing executives will be very happy, and that's the only pure genius frothing up here.
Six other things to see in Southgate (that's old Southgate by The Green, not the upstart civic centre by the tube station)
1) Village stocks!
Time was when every village had its stocks for punishing local miscreants by chucking stuff at them, indeed a statute in 1351 insisted on it. Such behaviour is now deemed unacceptable and has been since 1872 when stocks were last used in anger in Berkshire, but who's to say they'll never come back into use. Southgate's alas aren't the original because those went missing during WW2 and are instead a Coronation gift in 1953, themselves heavily restored in 2002 because the oak had rotted heavily. Other London locations with stocks include Havering-atte-Bower, Ickenham and anywhere else someone might know about.
2) A nice fingerpost!
Everyone loves a good fingerpost and Southgate Green has an excellent one. It marks the junction of the A1003 and the A1004, two distinctly minor A roads, and dates from an era when quarter miles were still a significant distance measurement. One finger points towards New Southgate which is very much not old Southgate like what this is. From my wanderings I'd say there are far more nice fingerposts in north London than south, notably in the boroughs of Enfield and Barnet, and I wonder if future generations with satnavs will one day wonder why we ever needed to know where towns are.
3) Blue Plaques!
Rarely have I been more disappointed by a blue plaque than the inscription on the cottage at 40 The Green. As I got closer I saw it read 'In 1881 this house became the first seat of local government in Southgate', and sorry but the separation of Southgate from the Edmonton Board of Health is not an exciting heritage fact. Of more interest is the plaque down the road marking the house where Benjamin Waugh lived in 1884 when he founded the NSPCC. Admittedly Waugh was honorary director under Lord Shaftesbury as Chairman, and admittedly the NSPCC was founded at Mansion House rather than here, and admittedly Waugh's house has been demolished and replaced by a bank which is now a nursery, but it's still more interesting than the blue plaque at number 40.
4) A Very Old Pub! The Cherry Tree has had the plum spot opposite The Green for over 300 years. The former coaching inn now has Victorian brick frontage and a Mock Tudor porch but at its heart is a much earlier timber-framed building. If you ever need a dull fact about Southgate, be aware that the Loyal Adelaide Lodge of Manchester Unity of Oddfellows held their meetings here for over 100 years. Until last year it was a proper pub but then Mitchells & Butlers turned it into a generic brasserie called Brown's, not Ye Olde Cherry Tree, and local drinkers were nonplussed. A Telegraph journalist even published an article subtitled "The 17th-century inn has lost all of its character, with no chance of a decent cask ale or even an interesting bottle", and if nothing else a grey hard-to-read inn sign has since been added bearing the proper name.
5) That postwar typeface
You see a lot of that nice 1950s typeface around Southgate Green, the slanting serif much used on postwar buildings, for example on this block of flats and on this sign referencing H Miller & Sons, longstanding Plumbers and Decorators. But what precisely is it called? I went down a font-based wormhole and it turns out there are lots of very similar styles including Stymie Bold Italic, Clarendon Bold Italic, Profil, Egyptian Italic and Festival Egyptian (an official style of the Festival of Britain). But I'm not sure any of these perfectly match the As and Os I saw here in Southgate, so maybe I'll just go on calling it That Nice 1950s Typeface and at least you'll still know what I mean.
6) Dionysus!
Pre-Crossrail if you wanted fried sustenance at the end of a West End night out you stopped by Dionysus, the Greek chippie in the prime corner spot outside Tottenham Court Road station. Many's the hangover quelled by one of their special kebabs or salty bags. But in January 2009, in advance of station redevelopment, they were sadly forced to close. As I blogged at the time, "I watched as staff gutted the interior, then piled sinks and ovens into the back of a hired van and drove off to start anew elsewhere." Well, likely that elsewhere was Southgate because here they are in a smart cafe with the precisely same logo above the door. Given they were "established 1969" this may alternatively be the original Dionysus and TCR was merely a branch, but if you ever fancy a nostalgic takeaway then head straight to N14.
Yesterday I went in search of one more extremely old tree.
And this time I headed to Southgate (in Enfield).
The Minchenden Oak(800? years old)
Middlesex was once awash with country seats and one of these was Minchenden House, just along the ridge from Arnos Grove. It was built in the 1660s and passed through a succession of gentry before one particular daughter married above herself becoming the Duchess of Chandos. The house had a classical pillared dome, a premier location on The Green and was said to have one window for every week of the year. The estate was sold off in 1853 to the neighbouring brewing tycoon in an attempt to stall the advance of suburban housing, a fate which befell his amalgamated 300 acres in 1928, and today the Arnos Grove estate smothers the slopes above the Pymmes Brook. Minchenden House may have been demolished but locals campaigned to save the enormous medieval oak round the back of the parish church so that's still here, and huge, and tad on the secret side.
To find the Minchenden Oak look for the brick archway down Waterfall Road, inconveniently labelled Minchenden Oak Garden on a small copper plaque. What lies beyond is a small space barely 30m wide with lawn and shrubbery, also paved paths that don't quite go anywhere and on the far side a whopping ancient oak tree. It has a gnarled bulbous trunk like some great cloven leg, and a fairly scraggly top with several thick upright branches that end with an abrupt cut. It's hard to reach a ripe old age with all your bits intact, thus the Minchenden Oak has been fighting a long battle against nature and gravity. Two limbs succumbed to a storm in 1899, others later needed propping up, then in 2013 considerable decay was discovered within the timber and fifteen tonnes of wood had to be lopped off to protect the central trunk. It's hard to square the current tree with the 1873 claim that it had the largest canopy of any tree in England (38m across and 'still growing') but still an impressive sight.
"Its boughs bending to the earth, with almost artificial regularity of form and equidistance from each other, give it the appearance of a gigantic tent; with verdant draperies, drawn up to admit the refreshing breezes that curl the myriads of leaves which form altogether a mass of vegetable beauty and grandeur, scarcely to be equalled by any other production of the same nature in the kingdom. It is a magnificent living canopy, impervious to the day." (Sylva Britannica, 1826)
The Minchenden Oak Garden was officially opened on 12th May 1934 in a ceremony involving the local choir and various borough dignitaries, including two hymns and the singing of Psalm 23. The garden screams 1930s with its rustic stone pillars and low decorative walls, as if a magnificent tree wasn't sufficient in itself, and has a small sunken terrace at one end with a broken pedestal in the centre. In a lovely touch the benches around the garden are made from wood removed from the tree in 2013, these replacing a seat that once circled the great trunk because nobody's allowed that close any more. Even the surround of the main information board comes from the old oak, ditto an arty selection of sliced stumps where a small group of children might sit.
The Minchenden Oak is a warning that great old trees don't always survive, and a triumph in that much of it somehow has. But how much better to have seen it at its zenith in the 19th century, long before suburbia turned up, a tree that was already ancient when the first rich man built a house here.
Yesterday I went in search of four extremely old trees.
You find them in the strangest places.
Barney, the Barn Elms plane(270? years old)
The London plane(Platanus x hispanica) is the capital's most common tree despite being non-native - a hybrid of American sycamore and Oriental plane. It proven particularly resilient to polluted air, the peeling bark an ideal way to shed contaminants, thus planes have been planted along many an avenue since the 18th century. London's tallest plane is also believed to be its oldest, a proper girthy specimen at Barn Elms, and to find it you have to wander into a huge sports ground and hunt for the leftover patch of woodland in the middle.
Barn Elms is seriously busy on a Sunday morning as a steady stream of parents arrive in the car park to deliver their offspring to multifarious sporting activities. They hop out of their 4×4s and tie their boots before dashing off to football, rugby, tennis, lacrosse, pickleball or whatever, scattering to one of umpteen pitches across the 52 acre site. Ignore them and walk out past the changing rooms and cinder track to an unmarked gate by the fishing lake. Beyond is a rectangular scrap of woodland just large enough to get lost in, and at its centre a taller tree than all the rest which is Barney the Barn Elms plane.
It has the knobbly flaking trunk planes are known for, also bulbous protrusions aplenty as a result of centuries of growth. Stomp across the undergrowth and you can actually touch it, also walk right around it, staring upwards to where the trunk divides into elegant multiplicity. In its highest branches I saw native birds not yet embarked on their spring courting, also squawking green parrots bringing the ancient plane right up to date. I had wondered if winter was the ideal season to be visiting an old tree, but had I come later in the year I'd only have heard the birds and would never have appreciated the plane's majestic silhouette.
Only when I got home did I discover that the maze of muddy paths I'd been following was really the site of a former mansion and its landscaped garden. Barn Elms was originally a Tudor hideaway accessible only by river, the estate purchased in 1750 by Sir Richard Hoare, a wealthy banker and former Mayor of London. He planted a fine avenue of trees down to the river and also (it's believed) this plane tree, the species then very much an innovative peculiarity. The Hoares moved out in 1827 when the opening of Hammersmith Bridge caused a main road to divide their land, and a disastrous fire in 1954 led to demolition of their former manor. Now only Barney lives on, 35m tall and 8½m around, in glorious woody isolation.
The Fulham Palace Holm Oak(500? years old)
Across the river, but annoyingly half an hour away on foot, are the grounds of Fulham Palace. This has been the official home of the Bishop of London for over 1300 years, so is thus perhaps the ideal place to find some very old plants. Nobody's quite sure when this holm oak was planted but it's likely to have been by Bishop Grindal (1553-1559), a budding botanist who grew grapes for royalty and introduced the tamarisk to England. A Mediterranean-sourced specimen planted just outside the Tudor walled garden would have been right up his street, and it continues to grow today roped off behind signs reading 'Protect our 500 year old Holm Oak'.
The holm oak is Quercus ilex, or holly-leaved oak, hence this tree's currently smothered with leaves and your average oak is not. Its age is apparent from the multi-stemmed trunk with huge twisting branches, many of them propped up to prevent premature collapse. The tree appears to erupt from the ground in several places and is best seen from the path, not the adjacent lawn where a burst of leaves and a separate tree get in the way. It's believed to be Britain's oldest surviving holm oak, or at the very least England's, and if you give it a few weeks it'll be surrounded by a fine fringe of crocuses too.
The Charlton Mulberry(416? years old)
Across town behind a greengrocers in Charlton Village is another ridiculously old tree doing its best to live on. The location makes more sense if you walk round the corner to the library where the full glories of Charlton House can be seen, a large Jacobean manor in a prime hilltop spot. The mulberry tree is tucked away in the corner of the gardens below the Summer House on a path many parkgoers follow, thus securely fenced off to prevent over-curious interaction and scrumping of the berry harvest in August. It's believed to date to 1608 when the great house was built, which would also match with James I's plea to the gentry to plant mulberries to boost the silk industry.
One thing this old tree has in abundance is signs telling you what it is. The oldest is now cracked in half and makes the bold statement that this was the first mulberry planted in England, which I don't believe can be the case, although it is now the most ancient in London. Alongside is a green plaque confirming this to be one of the Great Trees of London, a list initially compiled by a charity after the Great Storm, then given published credence in a Time Out Guide. A third plaque confers the even greater honour of being one of Fifty Great British Trees appointed for the Queen's Golden Jubilee in 2002, only two of which were in London. The most unnerving board tells you all about black and white mulberries but is printed on a mirror, eek. And the most informative panel is old enough to remember when Charlton House's tearoom was the Mulberry Cafe (who baked mulberry pasties in season), but I see it's now called Frilly's instead.
The West Wickham Oak(800? years old)
Finally to a suburban street in West Wickham, the quintessential Bromley suburb. Woodland Way lies just south of the shops and is lined by a typical string of attractive white-fronted semis, you'd think of no great longevity whatsoever. But the tree that pokes out between number 30 and number 32 is enormous, and at this time of year a great branching mass completely out of scale to the rest of the street.
Usually you find such monsters in parks or in the grounds of former stately homes, but this one's remarkable for being at the bottom of someone's back garden. 2 Southcroft Avenue is a redbrick detached house accessed via an alleyway, and because its garden backs onto Woodland Way the tree gets to dominate the street. I found a photo taken at time the house was last sold, in 2010, and the back garden's just a scrappy lawn with a small garage and a monster oak tree at the far end. A plaque out front confirms that this is the West Wickham Oak, another of the Great Trees of London, and one look at the thickness of the trunk confirms this is no ordinary tree.
Allegedly it's 800 years old, or at least that's what it says on Wikipedia, but I don't have a copy of the Time Out Guide nor can I find any official confirmation online. All I can tell from oldmaps is that the tree was originally on the edge of a large field, nothing obviously manorial, and must have been retained circa 1938 when the developers turned the surrounding land into housing. I'd thus treat the 800 year claim with a dose of scepticism, just as I don't believe Wikipedia's 1680 date for the Barn Elms plane either, indeed tree longevity claims are often wild guesses given credence by being repeated endlessly online. But what is for sure is that this West Wickham oak is a fabulous ancient outlier, and now I want to come back in the spring and admire its full flush of towering green.
TfL trials new bus shelter designs at 27 locations across London
TfL is running a 12-month trial on new bus shelter designs to improve accessibility, safety and customer experience
It said that improvements include "better lighting and seating, priority spaces, a more sustainable modular construction approach, a new roof design, more robust anti-vandalism materials and CCTV". It said the trial began at the end of January and will run for 12 months. And it said the 27 locations would span Barking & Dagenham, Bexley, Camden, Croydon, Hackney, Havering, Hillingdon, Kingston-upon-Thames, Lambeth, Southwark, Wandsworth and Westminster, but it didn't say where any of the shelters were.
Thankfully when they sent the press release to trusted partners they attached three photos, one of which showed a bus shelter in situ beside an existing bus stop. And thankfully when Time Out regurgitated the words they included a big version of the photo so I could zoom in on the name of the stop, and so I've been to have a look.
And it looks good.
This is a new shelter in place at bus stop SB opposite Southwark station. I should have guessed it'd be here because this is the closest bus stop to TfL HQ on Blackfriars Road and they like to do a lot of their prototyping here. It's a lot easier to check how the trial's going if you can simply pop out and look, rather than having to troop out to Sidcup or wherever.
The thing passengers are most likely to notice are the seats. Normally they're red ribbed plastic but here they're polished wood, which instantly adds a touch more class. At one end are two distinct seats - again an innovation - one of which says 'This is a priority seat'. You would of course hide the sign by sitting down, but hopefully your conscience would be pricked if anyone in genuine need turned up. Alongside is a thin bench which I can confirm slopes gently forwards, so even if you're a very short thin homeless sleeper you're still going to roll off.
The roof is swooshy and red all the way round, not just at the ends. This flash of red should make the bus shelter easier to identify from a distance. The ends are thicker still, ensuring they stand out more. And crucially they allow the name of the bus stop to be written in larger letters than before, also aiding accessibility. I walked down the road to a normal bus shelter in an attempt to compare the two end designs, hopefully standing the same distance away each time. It's definitely an improvement.
The lighting inside the shelter is considerably brighter than before. Normally you wouldn't be able to tell mid-morning but yesterday was so damp and gloomy that the lights had come on, adding a homely glow to the interior. It's probably LED-based, collectively glowing through a mesh of tiny circles inside a long glowing strip. Better illumination is clearly a boon at night, especially with the safety of vulnerable passengers in mind, but also makes it easier for drivers to see if anyone's waiting so is doupleplus good.
As for information this particular stop still has a Countdown display so TfL aren't backing away from those. Yes there are electronic adverts on both sides of the panel at the far end but that's the case with a normal shelter too, plus they help fund the installation of a shelter in the first place. Alas what nobody's yet got round to adding here is a spider map, despite other bus stops on Blackfriars Road having one, but it is totally par for the course for maps to be an afterthought.
The shelter looks more vandalproof without being clumsily robust. The supporting poles seem a tad thicker. An extra metal bar connects the poles just below the roof. The roundel-patterned glass is likely stronger than usual. And because the roof slopes a little more it should be harder to lob things up there permanently, although I don't mean that as a challenge.
Importantly not all the trial bus shelters will look exactly like this. According to the press release "two different designs and four different configurations of features will be used to test the new approach, ensuring a broad range of criteria can be assessed throughout". CCTV is mentioned and I couldn't see any cameras here, so maybe that's part of Design Number Two. Reference is also made to "a dedicated waiting space", presumably for wheelchairs and pushchairs to line up better with the middle doors, and maybe that's part of the alternative design too.
We have no clues as to the other 26 locations, other than names of boroughs, so tracking them down would be extremely difficult. I did however hit gold by spotting a truck with a crane just up the road on the other side of TfL HQ. A team of three men were busy dismantling the existing shelter at Stamford Street, two of them up portable scaffolding wielding power tools. They had the roof off and lying on the ground, the innards already on the back of the truck and were preparing to disconnect the Countdown display. I note that the double-sided ad panel remains in place throughout the replacemet process, only the rest of the shelter has to be switched.
Before you get carried away, the trial is a mere drop in the ocean and is unlikely to crop up on any of your journeys. There are 14,000 bus shelters across London and only 27 are being tweaked, which is less than 0.2% of the overall total. Also there are 19,000 bus stops, only three-quarters of which have bus shelters, which lowers the percentage still further to 0.14%. TfL recognise how low this is.
Alongside the trial of new shelter designs, additional bus shelters will be introduced at locations that previously had no provision. Approximately 20 new Landmark London shelters are being installed at some of the network's highest demand stops, many of which have not had a shelter before. 11 refurbished shelters are being redeployed across the network to further improve waiting conditions for customers at unsheltered stops.
You could read that as great news, or you could note that adding 31 bus shelters at unsheltered stops is a complete drop in the ocean, not even enough for one extra per borough.
Whatever, keep your eyes peeled and you might just spot a trial bus shelter somewhere, in which case do come back and tell us where it is. It wouldn't surprise me if researchers pop out over the forthcoming year and ask passengers at these stops what they think, joining feedback from disability focus groups, the RNIB, the Suzy Lamplugh Trust and London TravelWatch. And come 2027 or beyond we may start seeing more bus shelters that look like this, which would be nice, but only when they need replacing, repairing or if funding comes through to pay for new ones so don't get your hopes up prematurely.
David Bowie Centre Location: V&A East Storehouse, 2 Parkes Street, E20 3AX [map] Open: 10am - 6pm (until 10pm on Thursdays and Saturdays) Admission: free Two word summary: Starman's hoard Five word summary: documenting David's life and creativity Website:vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/david-bowie-centre Time to set aside: half an hour
When the V&A Storehouse opened in the Olympic Park in May last year, one corner of the 2nd floor wasn't open. The David Bowie Centre's door was finally unlocked in mid-September but, to regulate numbers, you had to book a free slot in advance. Finally on Tuesday the requirement to plan ahead was removed and now anyone can wander in and admire the creative ephemera of a boy from Brixton. Oh! You Pretty Things.
David planned ahead keeping decades of cuttings, papers, props and costumes, then bequeathing his 90,000 item archive to the V&A. They decided the best place for it was their new Storehouse at Hackney Wick with its acres of storage space, filling racks with stacks and stacks of boxes. Only 159 items made the cut for display, at least in the initial selection, but other objects can be booked in advance for your hands-on perusal in a separate lab alongside. When I walked in yesterday a woman was examining two of David's gold discs, her hands carefully covered by a pair of purple disposable gloves, and when I walked out later the frames were being packed respectfully away.
The first glass cabinet contains Fan art, shoes and instruments, which it has to be said is not a typical museum category. They couldn't really kick off with anything other than a jacket with a Ziggy Stardust slash, archive number 1972.2035.0025. As with every other item in the V&A Storehouse it doesn't have an information label but yes it is the real thing designed by Freddie Burretti in red lamé for David's most iconic tour. Alongside are glam platform shoes, gold boots and some kind of guitar, and whilst they're all lovely to look out you'll only know precisely what they are if you notice the QR code, get your phone out and scan for a catalogue. I don't think I saw a single visitor do this with any of the exhibits in the Centre, merely staring with ignorant admiration, so essentially all the V&A's descriptive curatorship is going to waste. The QR link leads to this index, should you want to dig down deeper for yourself.
The main space is extremely tall and divided into two halves, one with shelves and the other with ten tall glass-fronted displays. Within are an eclectic selection of things to admire and things to read, notionally themed but you'd never really guess. Some of the suits are fabulous, for example an Alexander McQueen Union Jack concoction, a lurex jumpsuit and a narrow-waisted turquoise number as seen in the video for Life on Mars. I was less drawn to the photographs, perhaps because images are more easily shared and all you're seeing is a print, although they do form a considerable proportion of what's on show. But I did love the many manuscripts scribbled in David's handwriting and somehow saved through the years, including sheet music for Fame and (omg yes) the lyrics for Heroes as they were first written in black pen on a sheet of torn red graph paper.
Items are often symbolic of culture at the time, for example an electronic Stylophone used on Space Oddity (1969), an East German entry permit (1977) and a Yahoo! Internet Life Online Music Award (2000). The cabinet for the Glass Spider tour is topped off by the gold resin wings Bowie wore on stage in 1987, again not that most people staring up at them would have realised. A couple of the displays focus on artists who worked with Bowie rather than the man himself, which although emblematic of high esteem did feel overly tangential when space here is so limited. But I did love David's rejection letter from Apple Records dated 15th July 1968 ("The reason is that we don't think he is what we're looking for at the moment") and also a reference written by his father a few years earlier, perceptively noting "It is impossible to get him to relax and once having made up his mind to do something nothing will stop him in his effort to make a good job of it".
The opposite wall is stacked high with boxes, all labelled but closed. A few items are available for you to flick through in flappy plastic folders on the study table in front. High above are 21 iconic costumes hung on a looping rail, but all inside sturdy plastic wrappers so you can't see much of them, only read some text explaining what they are. And on the wall is a huge screen playing Bowie videos and live performances, which a large proportion of the visitors were watching rather than studying the actual objects. It does provide the best soundtrack you'll ever hear in an exhibition space but equally you could just sit at home and watch most of these on YouTube, plus they'd be in the proper landscape format rather than lopped-off portrait.
One thing which struck me while looking round was how a single Londoner was being celebrated on such a great scale. Imagine being deemed so important that a national museum chooses to celebrate your work with a named gallery. Imagine them taking ownership of tens of thousands of items relating to your career development. And imagine people standing reverently in front of some post-its you scrawled on for a project you never realised! Who keeps everything from their early scribblings to later artistic paperwork, who has sufficient space to stash it all away and who also has the nerve to consider the nation might think it worth saving? Personally I have enough old papers that that V&A could easily fill a cabinet with several formative childhood works, were I ever to be deemed a key national icon, but instead the contents of my spare room will all be heading down the tip after I'm gone. Such is the rarity of genuine Fame.
The visitors yesterday were a mix of older folk who experienced the magic first time around, and were maybe transformed by it, and youths too young to remember anything. It seemed a particularly popular destination for middle class family groups, say 60-something parents and 30-ish offspring, each thrilled to be pointing things out to each other. The entire crowd at the V&A Warehouse are those with culture on their mind, barely a Brexit voter amongst them, because why hang out at Westfield when you could enrich your artistic credentials up the road in E20. A sign outside the David Bowie Centre warns that visitors may be held outside if the room exceeds capacity, so this weekend may not be the most convenient time to visit. But it's well worth a look when you have the time, in both Sound and Vision, very much Hunky Dory, as Boys Keep Swinging.
If you want a weekly summary of rail-related transport news, Ian Visits and London Reconnections have you covered every Friday. I'm here with a much less interesting round-up of London's less newsworthy dregs, most of them not even about trains.
💷 The Mayor announced his 2026 fare rises in December but didn't publish the usual detailed fare tables alongside. His Mayoral Decision documentation was finally (and silently) published last week. We now know TfL fares will rise on average by 3.2% on 1st March 2026. (but on the tube, DLR and Overground it's 6%). Also the freeze on bus and tram fares lasts only until 04:30 on 5 July 2026, by which time "the Mayor must decide whether to extend the current bus and tram fares freeze or introduce changes to the fares".
🚡 In further fare rise clarification, the single fare for a one-way dangle on the cablecar will remain at £7. However the round-trip fare will increase by 50p to £13.50 (i.e, you'll only be saving 50p for a double crossing). Also the price of a 10-ticket carnet will increase from £19 to £20, i.e. it'll now be £2 per journey, so buy now to beat the March fare rise.
🚌 On Sunday a roadrun of vintage buses will take place to commemorate the first day of RM1 in public service on Wednesday 8th Feb 1956. Participating vehicles will gather at the Ace Café from 8am, then depart Golders Green station between 9.30-10am to follow historic route 2 to Crystal Palace. Passengers will not be carried. Buses are expected to arrive at the Crystal Palace coach park between 11.30am-12.30pm and then hang around until 3pm, so that's probably the best place to see them. Happy birthday to the Routemaster!
🌺 If you fancy seeing the Hawaiʻi exhibition at the British Museum, you can get two tickets for the price of one if you show proof of travel via the TfL Go app at the ticket desk. For those of us who don't pay as we go, a TfL Oyster photo card or a TfL Staff photo card are also acceptable, which is a nice improvement on previous offers. Alas the 30% off entry to Kew Gardens offer expired at the weekend, having run since 2024.
🚽 The toilets at Wimbledon station are closed from 28th January until "early spring", whenever that is.
💳 I mentioned previously that Chase have agreed to sponsor all TfL's Oyster pads for the next five years, replacing Google Pay as ‘Official Payment Partner’. The first stickers appeared in December but over the last week they've started spreading all over the network so you'll be seeing them everywhere imminently. According to the contract TfL have to have every pad stickered by 2nd March, after which they rake in £2½m a year until 2030. The sponsor is entitled to suspend payment if "the Government of the United Kingdom dissuades members of the public from using public transport for any reason" for a period of at least 30 days.
🚌 A recent consultation proposes diverting route 310 between Archway and Finsbury Park to travel via Holloway Road rather than Crouch Hill. We know there's no business case for route 310, it exists solely to ease travel between Golders Green and Stamford Hill, but hopefully following a different route to the 210 will boost wider ridership.
🚆 There are no trains through Dartford this weekend, or next weekend, or for the entire week after that. It's for engineering works replacing rails and for narrowing the gaps at Dartford station. Replacement buses will operate between Slade Green and Gravesend and between Barnehurst/Crayford and Dartford.
🚌 Bus stop U in Aldersbrook still has a yellow poster advising passengers that route 308 will be diverted over nine future weekends due to Crossrail construction work. The poster is nine years old, its contents having expired in September 2017, and I'm not saying it's London's most out-of-date bus changes poster but it must be right up there.
🚡 Have you ever wanted to use the cablecar but been held back by an access need? Well now you can apply for an IFS Cloud Cable Car Digital Access Pass and staff will know how to assist. Relevant needs include visual assistance, level access, distance limitations, audible information, urgent toilet access, priority boarding and help from staff while queuing. An IFSCCCDAP also permits an essential companion/carer to travel free of charge, although you still have to pay because the card's not a freebie. If you already have an Access Card you don't need to apply again. Also you don't have to have a special card to ride the cablecar, you can just turn up, but it might just smooth your journey.
🚌 Starting tomorrow the frequency of buses on route 3 is decreasing to every 12 minutes rather than every 10 minutes.
🎨 Art on the Underground are launching an "Art Map" in March 2026 which'll be available to pick up from zone 1 stations. I don't know any other information, having merely seen a poster, but it may well be an update of a previous Art Map launched in 2016 (which was very good, is still relevant and which you can download here).
🚌 Bus route 724 will be stopping at the bottom of Scots Hill, Croxley Green, from 22nd February. Ditto the 725 which is like the 724 but goes to Stevenage not Harlow.
🚲 The cycle hire docking station at Manbre Road in Hammersmith is closed until Tuesday 3 March. I did say this was dull transport news.
Hasn't it been really wet recently? It's rained in London every day this month so far, though January 31st was dry so it's only 12 consecutive damp days. According to my favourite weather site at Hampstead we've already had more than the average rainfall for February and it's only the 12th of the month, and that's on top of a January that delivered 175% of normal rainfall. Apparently we've only had ten dry days this year and half of them were over a month ago.
I got a hyacinth for Christmas, essentially a bulb on a jar, and left it behind the curtains with some water to do its thing. According to the instructions you're supposed to leave it for 10-12 weeks but it's already burst into flower so I've shifted it to my windowsill instead. Unfortunately the thick stem is really floppy and keeps leaning over and I'm really struggling to keep it upright. I've tried turning the bulb, I've tried attaching an elastic band and I've tried resting it against a giant bobbin but it keeps slipping and leaning over anyway. My latest brainwave is to blutak a green Berol pen to the windowframe so it sticks out, then rest the hyacinth on that, but I'm not convinced it'll ever stay put for more than an hour or two.
2026 means local council elections in London and the early collateral is already piling into my letterbox. The Greens left a card saying they'd called, with a handwritten "Sorry we missed you". They've also sent Issue 1 of 'Bow East News', which to be fair contains very little about Bow East and is more about the three candidates. One's a research scientist, one's a legal assistant and one is the Head of Public Affairs and Communications for a Palestine Rights organisation. Labour's candidate for Mayor of Tower Hamlets also came round, got no response and left a leaflet but that's more a survey about what I want rather than what he's offfering. Nothing yet from the Liberal Democrats or Conservatives or Aspire but the election is still three months off, plus Aspire don't need support from my ward to sweep the board again and reinstate the innately dubious Lutfur Rahman as Mayor. Watch this space.
