Today is Shrove Tuesday, Chinese New Year and the start of Ramadan.
How unusual is that?
Very unusual, obviously.
But also perhaps not ridiculously improbable because all three special days are connected to the moon.
And if a new moon crops up in mid-February it's going to be a possibility.
Let's start with Chinese New Year.
The Chinesecalendar follows these two basic rules:
• Months start on the day of a new moon (Beijing time).
• The 11th month always contains the winter solstice.
The 12th month thus starts on the first new moon after the winter solstice.
That's the last month of the year.
So Chinese New Year is always the second new moon after the winter solstice.
This can be any date between 21st January and 20th February.
And that's the easy one.
This year
The winter solstice fell on 21st December 2025.
The new moon on 20th December didn't count.
The first new moon after the winter solstice was on 19th January 2026.
The second new moon after the winter solstice is on 17th February 2026.
Which is today - Kung hei fat choi!
OK, on to pancakes.
Shrove Tuesday is the day before Lent, i.e. the day before Ash Wednesday.
It always occurs 47 days before Easter.
The gap is six weeks and five days, always from a Tuesday to a Sunday.
Easter Day can fall anywhere between 22nd March and 25th April.
So Shrove Tuesday can be any date between 3rd February and 9th March.
Chinese New Year and Shrove Tuesday can thus only overlap in the period 3rd February to 20th February.
i.e. you need a late Chinese New Year and an early Easter.
Specifically Easter has to fall between 22nd March and 8th April.
If Easter is 9th April or later then Shrove Tuesday and Chinese New Year don't mix.
But if Easter is before 9th April, it's not unlikely they overlap.
That's because Chinese New Year is the day of a new moon, and Easter is the Sunday after a full moon.
That gap from new moon to full moon is 1½ lunar months, or 44 days.
And if the 47th day happens to be a Sunday that's when the coincidence happens.
This year
🌑New 17th Feb → 🌕Full 3rd Mar → 🌑New 19th Mar → 🌕Full 2nd Apr
Thursday 2nd April is the first full moon after the spring equinox.
The next Sunday is Sunday 5th April, which is Easter Day.
And 47 days before that is Tuesday 17th February, which is both Shrove Tuesday and a new moon.
I've checked all the years in the 20th and 21st centuries.
And these are all the years when Chinese New Year coincides with Shrove Tuesday.
That's 22 years out of 200, or 11% of the time.
It may seem unfamiliar because it last happened way back in 2002.
But it's due to happen again very soon, in 2029.
There's often only a three year gap between Chinese New Years also being Shrove Tuesday.
And roughly speaking they coincide one year in ten.
Which brings us to the first day of Ramadan.
Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar.
Like Chinese New Year, it starts with a new moon.
However it's not always in winter, it moves repeatedly through the seasons.
That's because Islamic years always contains 12 lunar months, with no leap days or leap months to get things back in sync.
They're always 354 or 355 days long, i.e. about 11 days shorter than our calendar year.
Last year: 🌑New Moon 28th February
This year: 🌑New Moon 17th February
Next year: 🌑New Moon 6th February
At the moment Ramadan's in February but it hits January in 2028 and December in 2030.
By 2040 it's retreated to September and by 2050 it's in May.
Only in 2058 does it again return to February and the period we're interested in.
A February Ramadan comes around only every 32 years or so.
Ramadan and Chinese New Year are both triggered by a new moon, remember.
So if Ramadan starts in the period 21st January to 20th February then it also coincides with Chinese New Year.
This happened in 1929/1930, then again in 1961/1962/1963, then again in 1994/1995.
It's happening in 2026 and will again in 2027 and 2028.
And it'll next happen in 2059/2060/2061 and 2091/2092/2093.
But for Ramadan, Chinese New Year AND Shrove Tuesday to coincide the window is much smaller.
This time we need a full moon in the period 3rd February to 20th February.
That rules out 1929, 1963, 1995, 2028, 2060, 2061 and 2093.
But we also need that full moon to be on a Tuesday.
And it turns out 2026 is the only year that happens, at least in the 20th or 21st centuries.
It's not going to happen again until 2124.
You'll not be around the next time Shrove Tuesday is Chinese New Year and the first day of Ramadan.
But...
Ramadan is of course more complicated than that.
The month doesn't start at the new moon, it starts when that new moon is sighted.
And that brings all sorts of observational unpredictability into all this.
If you follow the Islamic calendar, observational unpredictability is a monthly fact of life.
No Islamic astronomer is going to spot the new moon today, it's both too thin and too close to the Sun.
They might spot it tomorrow, in which case Ramadan starts on Wednesday.
Or they might spot it the day after, in which case Ramadan starts on Thursday.
Every single new month in the Islamic calendar is essentially unpredictable until the night before.
It means today isn't the first day of Ramadan, sorry, just the full moon that triggers it.
And if Ramadan is always after the date of the full moon, it can never coincide with Chinese New Year.
Sorry, I appear to have wasted your time here.
Also I've failed to take into account the effect of time zones.
The Chinese Calendar assumes a prime meridian of 120°E, aligning with Beijing.
But Ramadan is based on local lunar observations, which here means 0°.
These are 8 hours apart, so a new moon after midnight in China is before midnight here, i.e. one day earlier.
It doesn't affect 2026, but in 2030 the key new moon is on 3rd February in China but 2nd February in Europe.
Also the date of Easter isn't based on the real full moon but an ecclesiastical full moon devised in the 4th century.
The whole thing is a mess, and trying to define simple rules and patterns doubly so.
It's all overly muddy so perhaps best not try.
But it IS true that Shrove Tuesday and Chinese New Year coincide this year.
And it's highly likely that the first day of Ramadan will coincide with Ash Wednesday instead.
Two celebrations take place today and two fasts start tomorrow.
And maybe those are the most appropriate coincidences of all.
For my next alphabetical visit to unsung suburbs we're off to Downham, an enormous LCC estate built 100 years ago to rehouse escapees from city slums. It sprawls across 500 undulating acres at the southern end of the borough of Lewisham (plus a sliver of Bromley), a web of interwar avenues with a fair few trees intertwined. The east side's near Grove Park station and the west side mostly untroubled by trains, so a rather harder commute, which may be why the place is mostly off-radar. It took me an hour and a half to circumnavigate yesterday and I was utterly soaked by the end, more like Pissing Downham, so when viewing the gloomy photos remember it doesn't always look like this.
Until 1924 all this was just two farms off the main road between Catford and Bromley. As perfectly undeveloped land it drew the attention of the London County Council seeking sites for overspill estates in southeast London, spurred on by government funding, so they bought up Holloway Farm and Shroffolds Farm and brought the diggers in. The first turf was cut in 1924, the King turned up for a public opening in 1927 and the whole place was finished in 1930 which isn't bad for a brand new suburb with six thousand homes. As no previous settlement existed the new estate was obsequiously named after Lord Downham, Chairman of the LCC. Houses were pleasant but lowly, generally two-storeys and run together into brick terraces of four or more, but a world away from what the new tenants had left behind. They loved the bathrooms, back gardens and semi-rural setting - definitely better than being sent to Becontree - and paid their 12 shilling rent with pride.
Planners essentially had a blank canvas and drew lines on their maps with gusto. A swooshing spine road called Downham Way linked the existing main roads to either side of the estate, this wide enough for trams, with a web of backstreets added beyond. Shops were eventually added at each end with a lesser parade in the centre, ten schools were liberally scattered and every Christian denomination got its own church. Greenspace was retained where appropriate, with the hilltop preserved as part a long sausage-shaped recreation ground. But it took a long time for some of these promised facilities to actually get built which wasn't ideal for a rapidly burgeoning population, and several early residents grew tired of the isolation and moved away. [1930s map]
A good place to start might be The Downham Tavern, the single watering hole at the heart of the estate, which with such a large catchment to serve was briefly the world's largest pub. Its monumental brick exterior contained two saloons, a public lounge, a beer garden, a ‘lunchroom’ and 34 bedrooms packed upstairs, all finished off with a dance hall nextdoor. It's said the two longest bars were both 45 feet long, which would help explain how the pub got a licence to serve 1200 people. Alas by the 1990s it was beyond refurbishment so Courage sold it to the Co-op who built a supermarket in the car park, then demolished the pub to create a larger car park. As part of the deal they built a rather smaller pub in the corner of the site, barely characterful apart from a squat wooden clocktower, and in 2024 even that dubious establishment closed down. Peering in you can almost imagine the tables set for Sunday lunch with Sky football blaring, if only it weren't actually Sunday lunchtime and patently obvious no cleaner's been inside for months.
Across the street were once Downham Baths and Downham Library, now combined as Downham Health and Leisure Centre. Lewisham council consolidated local services into one megahub 20 years ago, and whilst their intent was efficiency the resulting facility has all the aesthetic appeal of a recreational warehouse. Keep walking up the slope to reach the all-weather pitches, which I can confirm were thoroughly defeated by yesterday's cloudburst and firmly locked. And beyond that the hilltop opens out to reveal a grand vista looking across repetitive rooftops towards the Crystal Palace ridge and all the way round across Bromley. I don't think you can see the City from the summit of Durham Hill but I confess visibility yesterday was very poor, also paths are few and far between and I wasn't willing to squidge across the grass from the community orchard towards the broken bench and check fully.
But traipsing around Downham mainly involves an awful lot of residential streets. The finest face onto linear greens planted with mature trees, but most are part of long residential chains in brick (and occasionally pebbledash). They're nothing special but the architects did imbue them with sufficient variety to add character, perhaps a teensy porch or a geometric flourish in the masonry, though never a bay window or a garage, it being the 1920s rather than the 1930s. The local contours inevitably add more visual interest. What stands out is the uniformity of the living space within, this being an egalitarian estate where nobody got a one-bedder and nobody got four, just homes fit for the families of wartime heroes. The lack of parking spaces does mean most people have to park in the street, but equally those streets are capacious enough and don't feel too clogged.
One of the more dubious chapters in Downham's history involves the 'class wall' at the foot of Valeswood Road on the Lewisham/Bromley boundary. Back in February 1926 the developer of the adjacent estate resented the arrival of a council estate alongside his private development so built a seven-foot wall topped with broken glass across the top of Alexandra Crescent. It meant cutting off direct access to the local park but it also kept the plebs out so was deemed social necessary. Shamefully the wall remained in place until 1950, neither council willing to step in, and only a need for fire engine access finally reopened residents' convenient shortcut to Bromley town centre. All you'll find here now is the derelict shed of the Downham Gardens Guild, no longer dispensing horticultural supplies every Sunday, and some slightly nicer houses than anyone in Downham got.
You might know Downham from the Capital Ring, specifically the start of section3. This swoops in across the railway to pass the fire station... hang on no, Boris Johnson closed that in 2014 and it's been replaced by a long block of flats (a true 3-storey rarity round here). Next comes the Total Garage... hang on no, it's now Shell and with a whopping phone mast planted by the car wash. But beyond that everything's much as it ever was, including the other local recreational highlight which is the Downham Woodland Walk. This ¾-mile path zigzags round the back of umpteen houses and was originally a field boundary, hence all the mature trees. It's a bit of a rustic mirage because only this narrow strip got saved, but still a pleasant stroll and the best place locally to walk a dog. Yesterday however weather conditions were so atrocious that I met nobody for 15 minutes, bar a sporty Dad who'd brought his son to the playing fields for a kickabout only to find the gate locked so they drove straight home.
So comprehensively was Downham developed 100 years ago that it's rare to come across anything substantially new. One of the most jolting intrusions is a massive crescent-shaped wedge resembling either a driving range and/or an electric heater, this the result of a secondary school rebuild in 2005. But generally there isn't anything left to replace, just streets and streets of dependably average houses with modest back gardens in an appreciably green setting. It's no Garden City, as one local journalist optimistically wrote in 1930, but many Londoners would happily swap their stunted flats for a basic dwelling with a front door and proper neighbours. We don't build Downhams any more, London no longer has room, but a lot more large tracts of bogstandard social housing wouldn't go amiss.
12 things I didn't manage to shoehorn into the narrative: The Go Go Cobblers, a chip shop called Rock'N'Roe, the Greenwich Meridian, the somewhat elongated frontage of St Barnabas, the Spring Brook, Downham's slightly rounded streetsigns, Glenda Jackson's son's eye, the meandering 336 bus, His Glory Arena, the Glenbow Road traffic filter, King Arthur, the Splendid Cinema Suggested title for clickbait journalists cannibalising today's blogpost: The Secret Suburb Where You Can Buy A Co-op Limited Edition Spicy Tuna Sandwich On The Site Of The World's Largest Pub Ds I considered going to but didn't: Dartmouth Park, Dormers Wells, Drayton Green, Ducketts Green, Ducks Island, Dudden Hill
1: Place a coin in each box (or leave it empty) so that the totals across and down are correct.
3p
5p
10p
8p
6p
4p
2: There are three ways to give change for a 5p coin. (11111|2111|221)
How many ways are there to give change for a 10p coin?
(and, for increasingly harder questions, a) a 20p coin? b) a 50p coin? c) a £1 coin?)
3: What's the greatest amount you can have in small coins (1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p) and not be able to give change for £1?
55 years ago, on Decimal Day, we went from this...
...to this...
Here's how.
1961: Government sets up the Committee of the Inquiry on Decimal Currency. Farthing withdrawn. 1962: Bank of England urges the committee to retain the pound as the main unit in any decimal system. 1963: Committee reports. They propose 100 new pennies to the pound, with coins to be ½ 1 2 5 10 20. 1966: Government proposes to adopt the changes. Decimal Currency Board established. Five-year changeover period begins. Publiccompetition to design the new coins. 1967: Parliament approves the Decimal Currency Act 1967. Coins will be ½ 1 2 5 10 50 (not 20). Nearly 9,000 million coins will be needed. The minor unit will be the new penny (symbol p). Production of pre-decimal coins ceases.
1968: 5p and 10p coins introduced (identical in size to the existing shilling and florin). Souvenir sets of ½p, 1p, 2p, 5p and 10p coins issued in advance of wider circulation. 1969: Old halfpenny withdrawn. 50p coin introduced, the world's first seven-sided coin. "Use it just like a 10/- note". 1970: Half crown withdrawn. Ten-shilling note withdrawn. Massive public information campaign underway (posters, films, songs, TVadverts, booklets, conversion tables, TV programmes)
15th February 1971: Decimal Day, or D-Day. 2p, 1p and ½p coins become legal tender. Banks switch immediately. British Rail and London Transport switch a day early. Most shops show prices in old and new money. Shops continue to accept payment in old coins but always issue change in new coins. Twelve low-value definitive stamps released. 1971: Old penny and thruppeny bit (3d) withdrawn six months later.
1973: First commemorative coin - the European Economic Community accession 50p (with nine clasped hands).
1980: Sixpence (2½p) withdrawn, nine years later than originally anticipated. [1551-1980] 1981: Announcement that a £1 coin will be introduced. 1982: Seven-sided 20p coin introduced. Intention is to reduce the weight of the coins in your pocket. The word “NEW” dropped from newly-minted coins (e.g. the 10p inscription changes from “NEW PENCE” to “TEN PENCE“). 1983: £1 coin introduced. 1984: ½p coin ceases to be legal tender [1971-1984, the first decimal withdrawal] 1988: £1 note withdrawn. [1797-1988]
1990: Smaller 5p coin introduced. Original 5p coin (and shilling) demonetised. [1548-1990] 1992: Smaller 10p coin introduced. 1p and 2p coins now made of plated steel rather than bronze. 1993: Original 10p coin (and florin) demonetised. [1849-1993] 1994: Coinage review proposes introduction of bimetallic £2 coin. 1997: Smaller 50p coin introduced. 1998: £2 coin introduced. 1998: Original 50p demonetised. [1969-1998]
2005: Coinage redesign commissioned by the Royal Mint. 2007: New set of coins introduced based on heraldic designs. No numerical values shown.
2011: 5p coins now nickel-plated steel rather than cupro-nickel. 2011: 10p coins now nickel-plated steel rather than cupro-nickel. 2017: 12-sided £1 coin introduced to reduce counterfeiting. Original £1 coin withdrawn six months later. [1983-2017]
2023: New set of coins with animal designs to mark King Charles' reign. Salmon 50p and bee £1 coins enter circulation. 2024: No new coins ordered by the Treasury from The Royal Mint this year. 2025: Oak-leaf 5p coin enters circulation. 2026: Dormouse 1p, red squirrel 2p, capercaillie 10p, puffin 20p and floral £2 coins not yet in general circulation.
The Lower Lea Valley has long suffered from significant disconnect, both along and across. It still isn't possibly to walk down the river between Bromley-by-Bow and Canning Town without diverting into a manky industrial hinterland. And it still isn't possible to cross the river for over a mile between Bow Locks and the A13, this despite thousands of new homes being built in the locality. Now finally a connecting bridge might actually be built, although I've said that before so any confidence may be utterly misplaced.
1993: Lea Valley Walk follows the Limehouse Cut to the Thames because the last mile is inaccessible 2000s: Half-mile dead-end riverfront promenade opens opposite Bow Locks 2009: Plans for linear Leaside park and riverside path (the 'Fatwalk') 2012: Cody Dock opens, connecting dead end to industrial estate 2016: Fatwalk renamed the Leaway (but remains unbuilt) 2016: Ramp opens linking Twelvetrees Bridge to Lea towpath 2019: Cycle ramp opens beside A13 underpass 2021: Funding for new Lochnagar Bridge (but no subsequent action)
Here's a map I showed you in 2019, since when nothing has changed connectivitywise. There are still no extra bridges across the river and the 'Coming Soon' along the river never happened.
The latest development is a joint project between Tower Hamlets and Newham because a bridge has to involve them both. It's called the Mayer Parry Bridge and is one of five tentative crossings the councils put forward for levelling-up funding in 2021. At the time the intention was to focus on the Lochnagar Bridge instead, a footbridge roughly halfway down the disjoint mile. It has planning consent but not full funding, also still no sign of developers building any of the proposed flats on the west side, so that's been mothballed in favour of something deliverable. The Mayer Parry Bridge has thus been promoted from option 2 to option 1, and if all goes to plan construction could begin next year. Where the red line is.
(the other crossings that look like footbridges only carry cables, so ignore those)
On the Tower Hamlets side the bridge launches off from the corner of the old Poplar Gasworks, which is currently being transformed into 2800 homes. One day the entire squarish plot will be covered, but for now only the west corner has flats. On the Newham side the bridge lands in the corner of what before 2022 was the Mayer Parry scrap metal recycling yard, since cleared out. It too is to be redeveloped, indeed the groundworks have already started. Annoyingly these two sites aren't opposite each other, the remainder of the riverside occupied by industrial units and business estates, so the cunning bit is to make the bridge cross the river on a diagonal. Across here.
This is the view from the A13 bridge, an unpleasant roar that those on the Poplar side have to cross if they want to get to Canning Town station. The Mayer Parry Bridge, if built, would provide many with a quicker and more pleasant shortcut. Down below is the seriously tidal end of the River Lea, known as Bow Creek, held back at the highest tides behind a floodwall of corrugated metal. You can see a huge crane is already on site marking out the land ready for the laying of foundations. The new development will be called CrownWharf, will have 800 flats and is presented as "a fantastic opportunity for Newham to densify around a major transport interchange." Four riverside towers are planned and you already know exactly what they'll look like, but feel free to click here to confirm.
What really surprised me is what's planned for the far end of the site between the flats and the start of the Mayer Parry Bridge. It's an absolutely massive data centre, to be precise an 80MW Hyperscale Data Centre, designed by Foster and Partners no less. To fit the space it needs to be over 70m tall, already cut down from 90m during the planning process, with separate blocks containing plant, data halls, heat recovery and water processing. It's the perfect spot for one of the largest data centres in the UK because The London Internet Exchange, a key global switch-house, is just across the river. Even so, blimey, the rundown urban backwoods of Bidder Street will never look the same again.
As for the landing point on the west bank, it takes a very long time to turn a gasworks into housing. Poplar's gasholders were disassembled as long ago as 2017, then during lockdown I watched as remediation works eventually gave birth to the first few residential skeletons. Thus far only two blocks are complete and two more part-sold, with the developers planning a "Special Lunar New Year Open House Weekend" which tells you all you need to know about the intended purchasers. It feels strange to be able to walk into what was once heavily contaminated land, past boards promoting swimming pools and spa rooms for residents, down generic walkways that could be any new housing development in London.
The Mayer Parry Bridge landing site is screened off and entirely inaccessible, it being part of Phase 3 whereas we're still only on Phase 1. You can however walk down to the river's edge because that's where they located the Sales Office, inexplicably crunching across hundreds of purple shells scattered across the promenade. From the gull-splattered rail you can then look out towards another development shooting up on the far side of a mudflat meander, also two more locations where nobody can afford to build a footbridge. Without a crossing it takes 30 minutes to walk to the opposite bank rather than potentially two.
A consultation event for the Mayer Parry Bridge is taking place on Tuesday between 9am and 2pm at a cafe on the Poplar side. I would have gone but I'm out of town that day so feel free to interrogate the staff on our behalf and report back. I'm particularly interested in the great unmentioned subject in all the online collateral which is whether the footpath along the Lea gets completed at the same time as the bridge. There's already a mothballed promenade beyond Cody Dock so all that was ever needed was an onward connection through the old scrap metal yard, and seemingly the bridge connection delivers that too. What a brilliant outcome that would be, for locals, cyclists and long distance ramblers alike.
The intention is for construction to begin on the Mayer Parry Bridge in 2027, with the slender diagonal span opened to the public in 2029. But as I said we've been here before and nothing's happened, even with all parties onside, so it wouldn't surprise me if I'm still writing about utter inaccessibility in the Lower Lea Valley in 2030 and beyond.
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.
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.
