This monument popped up in the middle of Barking recently. I thought it was very recently but it was actually unveiled in April 2022 and I'm just not very observant.
It says "In Memory of those who lost their lives because of exposure to asbestos".
And it's here because Barking has one of the highest rates of asbestos-related deaths in the country.
In 1913 the Cape Asbestos Company built a huge asbestos factory beside the River Roding in Barking. The company mined asbestos-bearing rock at several sites in South Africa, then shipped them in sacks to a private quay in Barking for processing. Hundreds of people were employed to mill the ore into usable fibres and then process these into lagging, packaging, pipes, resins, boards and all forms of insulation widely used in the building trade. They worked without masks or other protection, the dangers of asbestos either unknown or not thought worth bothering about. And hundreds of workers died, often many years later, of insidious chronic respiratory disease.
I found a 32-page booklet published by Cape Asbestos in the days before blue asbestos was recognised as dangerous and banned, which was as late as 1985. It shows workers with rolled-up sleeves and women leaning over unshielded machines, all potentially inhaling enough fibres to ultimately kill them. I read reports about the local school in Barking, barely 100 metres away, saying that the playground was often covered in fine dust which children rolled up and played with as if it were snow. I read that mesothelioma was so common in the area it was known as the ‘Barking Cough’. These were different times, but times that linger on.
Cape Asbestos's plant eventually closed in 1968 and in its place was built the Harts Lane council estate, which is still not the loveliest corner of Barking. It included two tall tower blocks called Colne House and Mersey House, both of which Barking & Dagenham council would now like to demolish. This is chiefly because they're old and covered in combustible cladding, but the additional complications of potentially disturbing polluted land puts any remediation out of financial reach. It's always the insulation you have to watch out for.
The memorial in Barking Town Square comprises a polished chunk of blue pearl granite and was unveiled on Workers' Memorial Day 2022 in a ceremony attended by several trade unionists and representatives of the London Asbestos Support Awareness Group. The emphasis is partly on remembrance and partly on the importance of standing up for workers' rights to make conditions better for all. As the inscription says, "Remember the Dead and Fight for the Living".
My grandfather worked for another Cape Asbestos plant on Tolpits Lane in Watford. Originally it had been run by Universal Asbestos Manufacturing but in 1967 the factory was acquired by Cape as part of a diversification into cement-based products. They made corrugated roofing, flat sheets, decorated sheets, slates, soil pipes, decking for flat roofs and reinforced troughing - that kind of thing - the asbestos moulded into a multiplicity of shapes for the benefit of the building trade.
To him Cape Universal was just a convenient place to work, a short walk across the moor for a day's shift and then home again for tea. He worked there for many years, from the 1930s to the 1960s, rising through the ranks from a labourer to a machine operator on the factory floor. On his death certificate his occupation was listed as 'Asbestos Moulder', and it was very much a premature death because this didn't end well.
I don't remember very much about my grandfather because he died when I was 8. I know he was there when I took my first steps in his back garden and I can remember sitting at his dining room table and hoping nobody would force me to eat the celery. My final memory is being led up to his bedroom, I suspect not long before his death, to see an ill old man laid out in bed and struggling to breathe. I don't know what was said, nor how short a time I stayed in his presence, indeed my strongest recollection is of the room itself with its austere cupboards and the curtains drawn. And then at the age of 67 he was gone.
My family fought for asbestosis to be recognised as his cause of death but were not successful. I've read recently of fellow workers working at the Tolpits Lane factory now getting six figure payouts in compensation, indeed it's hard to research this topic without ending up on legal websites with popups urging you to make a claim. Even four decades after the factory's closure there are still employees severely affected, and many more already passed, as the toxic legacy endures. The factory site is now a rather cleaner industrial estate and business park, indeed it's where the National Lottery's been based for the last 30 years because risk and loss are still in play.
Today my Dad reaches the grand old age of 87, a full 20 years more than his father lived. Science has moved on a long way since the 1970s, also educational opportunities and also workers' rights. Health and safety is sometimes much derided but it can genuinely save lives, even much extend them, rather than everyone continually moaning about additional costs and annoying procedures. If someone had shouted earlier and louder about the dangers of asbestos I might have known my grandfather better, my grandmother could have had many more years of married life and my father could have had a father for much longer.
My Dad lost his Dad at the age of 34, which is no age at all in the grand scheme of things. By contrast I still have my Dad at the age of 60, which has meant an extra quarter century of guidance, support, advice, love and always being there. How lucky am I? Every day we overlap with our parents is a blessing and I've had 22,000 of them, for all of which I'm truly grateful. We're off out later to celebrate with a slap-up dinner, or as slap-up as an 87-year-old stomach requires, which the wider family are greatly looking forward to. What Barking's memorial reminded me is that many families have not been so fortunate, and sometimes that loss can be very close to home.
It's Sunday morning, time for coffee and a nice pastry.
You could go anywhere today, the outside world is rammed with interesting places to go. There are parks and palaces, gardens and galleries, museums and markets, shops and stadiums, woods and wildernesses, all kinds of possible places to visit. You could go out for a jog, a bike ride or a ramble, maybe take the train somewhere interesting and mooch around a bit. But all you really need to do is stick a few clothes on, target a nearby cafe and settle down for coffee and a nice pastry.
Time was when Sundays would have meant a trip to church but nobody does that any more, certainly not those who prefer coffee and a nice pastry. These days the gathering point is the cafe on the corner down the street, or maybe the special patisserie you saw on TikTok somewhere halfway across town. It still means sitting for an hour in communion, but that's communing with family and friends instead of listening to some pastor drone on, plus you get a lot more to drink and something more substantial than a wafer.
There might be a queue but that just goes to show how popular coffee and a nice pastry has become. Nobody minds standing outside a cafe and watching everyone else enjoying their selection because it confirms how excellent the upcoming experience will be. Ideally it's a cafe with a scattering of outside tables so you can spy on which pastry they picked and whether you might want a different one, also watch each group with increasing frustration as they finish their last mouthful and then just sit around gabbing for ages when they could be clearing the way for you to grab the table instead.
You need never get bored when it comes to coffee and a nice pastry. There are more types of coffee than you can shake a stick at, plus a multiplicity of special milks and syrups to create a truly unique blend. As for pastries you could have a different one every weekend for a lifetime and still not repeat, that is so long as you vary your cafe regularly and don't simply return every week to the same limited selection. Is the flavour sweet or savoury, is the pastry laminated, choux or brioche, and would you like your fruit filling to be apple, apricot or mostly custard? No Sunday is ever the same when you plump for coffee and a nice pastry.
If done properly, a coffee and a nice pastry is just a really good excuse to leave the house. You can't stay in all day slobbing on the sofa watching Netflix, tackling some tedious DIY task or playing some multi-player shoot-em-up against unseen opponents. But you can do all these things if you go out first for coffee and a nice pastry because it won't take long and then the rest of the day is yours to waste away as you best see fit.
You could make coffee at home but a shop-frothed cup is always nicer, plus the barista with the quirky beard always makes a pretty swirl you could never do yourself. Likewise you could have bought pastries from a supermarket the day before and simply warm them up in your microwave, but selecting a fresh one from the counter always delivers a finer mouthful. Likely they didn't really bake it this morning, it originated from a shed on a trading estate somewhere in zone 4 and was delivered by van last night, but the illusion of curated provenance is all important when selecting coffee and a nice pastry.
It won't be cheap because these pastries cost a small fortune for the few sweet mouthfuls they ultimately deliver. You could enjoy an entire box of Mr Kipling at home for half the price, or even heaven forfend learn how to bake your own. But inevitably it's all about convenience, relying on someone else to do the hard work so you can slump with friends and debate the football, Strictly, what nextdoor's cat has been up to or why it is that Oxford Street already has its Christmas decorations up. A coffee and a nice pastry is one of life's simplest pleasures, well worth the unnecessary cost.
Saturday is the day for dashing around and exerting yourself, getting chores done and keeping busy. Sunday by contrast is a day to unwind, especially if last night was heavy, and ideally for meeting up with friends. A local patisserie is the ideal destination with the promise of easy refreshment barely any distance away. The entrepreneurs who open cafes know this, ensuring every neighbourhood has an attractive-looking window display of baked goods and a multi-levered machine capable of adding milk to beans, with adequate counter space to accommodate the weekday commute and just enough tables to cater for the Sunday rush. Grabbing coffee and a nice pastry has never been easier.
If you've not seen Mags and Kian for months why not agree to meet them in Kilburn at that cafe you saw on TikTok? An hour's catch-up is all you really need, then maybe a short walk or just slink back to the station, obligation met. You can always delay the initial rendezvous until noon and call it brunch if you need a longer lie-in, or nip in really early at nine to dodge the queues that'll inevitably build up later as everyone comes out for coffee and a nice pastry.
Coffee and a nice pastry can also be a status symbol if shared properly on social media. It's all about the plumpness of the pastry, the shininess of the glazing and the succulence of the fruit. You can't go wrong with a cronut or cinnamon bun artfully arranged, and there are always bonus points for alexandertorte, knieküchle or multi-coloured macarons. For added kudos be sure to tag your vanilla slice as #mille-feuille and your apple turnover as #chausson-aux-pommes, otherwise all your attempts at perfect framing will have gone to waste.
Obviously independent cafes are best but feel free to lower yourself to a chain outlet if you must. Gail's is plainly the pinnacle, as all the yummy mummies and young professionals locally already know. Perhaps dodge Paul because it shows a total lack of originality, and never risk Greggs as they don't have sufficient tables. Remember that any outlet whose name is coffee-focused is likely to be less talented on the cake front, also that any old-school bakery that still makes Chelsea buns won't have a clue how to froth a drink. A one-off with a fancy name is always best for coffee and a nice pastry.
Few can resist the addictive allure of coffee and a nice pastry. No need to debate how to fill your Sunday morning, merely where, and the precise details of what to pick can wait until you get there. Sure it's expensive for what it is, but if you'd all travelled across town to some alternative attraction somewhere it would've cost much more, so coffee and a nice pastry is inevitably the cheaper option.
You could always make a game of it, trying to tick off the most ridiculous flavour combinations week after week. Just one outlet could allow you to catalogue a Honey & Smoked Salt bun, a Marmite, Schlossberger & Spring Onion swirl, a Bacon & Maple Danish and a Cross-laminated Gianduja over the course of a month, then switch venues and you can work through saffron, vanilla, pastel de nata and signature fig sourdough as the weeks proceed. The more artisan the better when it comes to coffee and a nice pastry.
Every Sunday more and more people make a pilgrimage across town to join the back of a line of millennials 40 strong, edging forwards towards an understaffed counter to order a few carbs and a locally-ground drink before grabbing a bench seat and snapping a photo of something that'll take 30 seconds to gulp down. The new mantra has become "where can we meet up and eat? ...anywhere on trend will do", and all because it's Sunday morning, time for coffee and a nice pastry.
This is Rail Clock, 'the first national clock designed for Britain's railways in over 50 years, inspired by the iconic Double Arrow'.
The red arrows travel around the rim every 60 seconds, with the new minute ticking over when they cross at the top. The clock was designed by brand design agency Design Bridge and Partners who won a global competition organised by Network Rail, the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Design Museum. It's 1.8m in diameter and was installed this week above the concourse at London Bridge station. It looks mighty fine.
The plan is to roll out Rail Clock across the country, generally on existing screens, say in the corner of the departures board. Such are the advantages of a simple digital design. If I read the pressrelease correctly there'll also be wall clocks and sticky-out-discs with clocks on, but so far London Bridge is the sole confirmed example of a physical clock. The digits are really clear to read, being in the typeface Rail Alphabet 2, whose designer Margaret Calvert was one of the competition's judges. [screensaver]
Meeting under the clock at London Bridge might now become a thing, just as it is at Waterloo. If you do stand underneath you'll find a disc with the double arrow at the centre and 24 rail-related phrases around the edge. These range from the half-decent (Friends reuniting) to the peculiar (Cans warming) to the contrived (Earlybirds tapping) to the weird (Thoughts tocking) to the plain odd (Glimpses glancing) to the cringeworthy (History mingling) to the ill-advised (Headphones blaring). Thankfully the disc is a vinyl sticker so can be removed one day when the branding team see sense.
For the first two days there was also a pop-up shop on the concourse, this time outside the gateline, selling Rail-Clock-related merchandise. The stock list included a hoodie for £45, "shoudler bag" for £40, t-shirt for £20, water bottle for £20 and socks for £15. I can't believe they sold much product given limited publicity, inadequate signage and distance from the actual clock. However all the unsold stock will be available in the Design Museum's shop, this presumably why they got involved, should you want to wear a timepiece that's permanently stuck on 20:25. The clock is lovely though, and hopefully we'll all be seeing it on rail journeys soon.
Yesterday I took a bold step into certified late middle age and acquired my first pair of varifocals. I am still getting used to them.
Previously a normal lens sufficed, in my case for short sight, which means for the last five decades I've needed glasses for watching TV, driving and generally getting about. The first slight indication something was changing was on my 48th birthday, squinting slightly to read the reservation details on a dimly-lit Eurostar train heading to Paris. My first significant issues with reading were during lockdown when going to the optician wasn't an option so I found a workaround, and only now have I finally bitten the bullet and gone for proper lenses.
When you're young nobody warns you that one day your eyesight will decline due to the decreased elasticity of your eyeballs, gradually making long distance vision trickier. The effects can be eased by wearing reading glasses but if you already have a prescription then switching spectacles soon gets tiring. The solution used to be bifocals, split-lensed glasses with your normal strength up top and a separate narrower lens underneath optimised for reading. Varifocals are a cleverer solution whereby the two prescriptions merge into one single lens, thus less conspicuous and less clunky, but also much more expensive making this my dearest purchase since I last bought a new phone.
It's really hard to imagine quite what varifocals will be like until you've splashed out and got your hands on a bespoke pair. I had to base my decisions on which type to buy based on a few scrappy diagrams on my optician's table, unsure if anything they were trying to upsell was really worth having. In the end I plumped for a better lens rather than flashier frames, hoping that was wise, and only yesterday did I finally put them on and discover how varifocals look. A tad blurry in places, it turns out.
If you imagine a spectacle lens divided into a 3×3 grid numbered top to bottom, then sections 1, 2, 3 and 5 are optimised for long distance, 7, 8 and 9 for reading, and 4 and 6 are blurrier because there has to be a bend somewhere. The more you pay, the broader section 5 is. That means you see long distance if you look ahead, much clearer text if you look down and less clarity to either side unless you turn your head. I'm basing this on 12 hours of wear and also on my specific prescription, so apologies if this isn't always the case.
I tested my new glasses while walking through Whitechapel Market and was slightly unnerved to see a shimmer rather than clarity in certain directions. I tested my glasses on the Elizabeth line and discovered I can read a book much more easily than before, even if I'm not looking through the lower strip. I tested my new glasses along the Euston Road and found my surroundings look sharper if I tip my head slightly lower than I'm used to. I tested my new glasses on Thameslink and found people-watching much harder because side-eye no longer works. I tested my new glasses on the steps at Hendon station, having been told stairs might now be an issue, but everything seemed fine. And I tested my new glasses on the top deck of a bus in Harrow and can still read numberplates in the distance, which is obviously the crucial thing.
Where things are currently hardest to reconcile is at home. I don't mind the carpet looking fuzzy as I walk around and I'll get used to the clock under the TV being less sharp than the picture above. The main issue seems to be my laptop because my normal eye position isn't what my glasses were designed for. Text on the screen is crystal clear if I tilt my head up slightly to the optimum angle, but in future I reckon I'm going to have to adjust my usual posture, lower my laptop or raise my chair. Alternatively I could revert to the reading glasses I was using previously but that feels like a waste of hundreds of pounds so I'll try to adapt instead.
The best thing is being able to read easily again, and the worst is a nagging blur that follows my eyes around. It's very early days so I still have much to learn about my complex compartmentalised choppier vision. But overnight I've become one of those old people who wears varifocals, and I hope you'll never notice.
NATIONAL TRUST:575 Wandsworth Road Location: Clapham, SW8 3JD [map] Open: pre-booked tours at 11am, 1pm, 3pm, Thursday & Friday only (May to October) Admission: £12 Period: A long-term millennial project
Khadambi Asalache was born in Kenya, studied fine art at several European universities and moved to London in 1960 at the age of 25. He wrote poems and books, and after further studies in mathematics took a job at the Treasury, commuting in each day on the number 77A bus. In 1981 he spotted that a former squat on Wandsworth Road was up for sale, turfed out the chickens and moved in, inexorably transforming it into an astonishing work of art. You'd never guess from out front, other than a small National Trust sign inviting pre-booked visitors to wait outside.
Khadambi died in 2006, 20 years after starting work on the ultimate interior design project. It started out as a means of covering up damp on a wall shared with the nextdoor laundry, and eventually spread across every room in the house. It's perhaps best described as fretwork, a series of wooden twiddles in geometric and naturalistic forms, although additionally combined with a splash of paint, homely artwork and an accumulation of objets. Most of the wood was reclaimed from skips or other local leftovers, and all of it hand-carved using a Stanley knife with a padsaw blade. I can't show you what the interior looks like because Khadambi didn't believe in photographing his work sovisitorscan'teither.
Before his death Khadambi's friends encouraged him to pass it on to the National Trust, who then took four years to decide whether they were able to take it on. 575 Wandsworth Road finally opened to the public in 2013 after substantial fund-raising, with the caveat that only 2000 visitors a year could gain admittance. It's a narrow terraced house and a lot of the surfaces are potentially fragile, still with sticking-out pins in places, so free-flow visits could be a disaster. Each tour is thus restricted to just six people and there are only six tours a week, plus the house is closed from November through to April for conservation work. It is thus ridiculously hard to visit because the places go so fast, so I was most fortunate to snap up one of 2025's last tickets.
You start on the lower ground floor seated around the kitchen table for scene-setting and the health and safety talk. Every visitor is asked to bring rubber soled slippers or thick, gripped socks to protect the painted floors upstairs, although staff do keep a few spare socks in case anyone forgets. The intricate fretwork is readily apparent all around, never quite symmetrical but always in harmony and balance. I can only imagine how long each short section took to complete and how much of Khadambi's spare time this project absorbed. The shelves also include a surfeit of glasses, crockery and lustreware, all the better to reflect light and give the house some sparkle. Many of the plates still have a price label on the back, not that you're allowed to look and check.
Upstairs things get brighter and dazzlier, especially the living room with its African wall hangings, hand-carved lampshades and decorated doors. The Trust retained everything including Khadambi's extensive book collection, and it's wonderfully jarring to see a stack of compact discs preserved as part of a National Trust historic house. Every item is regularly cleaned by house staff and meticulously put back in the right place in the right orientation according to photographic guides treated as gospel. The bathroom is a little calmer, with much of the design work invisible were you lying in the bath. But the hallway is exquisite, like a backpassage in a Moorish palace, complete with well-disguised coathooks where Khadambi used it as his transition into the outside world.
I can't imagine how long the landing took to decorate, this a later stage of the project so more colourful, more elaborate and with birds and elephants amongst the symbols in the fretwork. The bedroom has even more painted elements with an African flavour, including a tiny green parrot drawn looking into a mirror, plus hearts and CND symbols incorporated into the wooden flourishes at the foot of the bed. From his typewriter in the study Khadambi could look down across a flourishing garden, now without the mimosa that was once its centrepiece (which had to be removed so it couldn't affect the foundations). The drive for authentic preservation even extends to the kitchen where all the original foodstuffs remain in the cupboards, even the opened packet of cornflour. The conservators are currently debating whether the time has finally come to empty the bottle of mustard vinaigrette now that mould has appeared around its stopper.
You won't get into 575 Wandsworth Road this year, and given the paucity of spaces probably not next year either. But if you do ever get the opportunity then grab it because it's astonishing to see how a very ordinary terraced house has been transformed into something utterly extraordinary through one man's brilliance and artistic vision.
NATIONAL TRUST:Rainham Hall Location: Rainham, RM13 9YN [map] Open: 11am-4pm, Thursday-Saturday only Admission: £6.50 Period: The Georgian one
Rainham is an outlier village almost on the Thames estuary, now the southernmost suburb in the borough of Havering. It seems ridiculous that the National Trust should have anything here but a Georgian merchant's house survives in situ by the parish church, conveniently close to the station. It took them over 60 years to open it up to the public, also £2.5m to fund the renovation, but since 2015 it's been a Queen Anne jewel not enough people traipse out to see. Don't worry about the scaffolding all over the front of the building, it's nothing structural.
With no furniture and fittings to show off, bar some Delft tiles and a dumb waiter, what the National Trust has done is dig into the catalogue of 50 former residents and tell their stories instead. In opening year it was Captain John Harle, the merchant sea captain who built the Hall in the first place, followed by some babies from a postwar nursery. In 2019 they played their trump card - Anthony Denney, a flamboyant photographer for Vogue - who spent much of the 1960s here as the Trust's tenant/custodian. The current focus is Nicholas Brady, for 33 years the rector of neighbouring Wennington, who used the Hall as a vicarage rather than live closer to his flock.
It is somewhat extraordinary to find a three-roomed exhibition devoted to one of London's remotest villages but also rather brilliant, not least because St Mary & St Peter has lots of goodies they can lend. Exhibits include a winged lectern, the Reverend's memorial plaque and some fabulous glass negatives showing how the interior of the house looked on his watch. Brady took a long-term interest in zoology, archaeology and crystallography, which may explain some of the clutter. In the 1890s a nonagenarian relative called Henry Perigal came to stay, most famous for his five-piece cut-and-shift dissection proving Pythagoras's theorem, a diagram which appears on hismonument in Wennington's graveyard.
Where the Trust have been clever is in reusing material from previous exhibitions on the upper floors. Hence John Harle's story still fills two rooms (or three if you include the fleet of ships in the bath), most notably the incredibly unlikely tale of how his will was uncovered by a Rainham resident at a car boot sale in Newark. Anthony Denny's leftovers are gorgeous, and smell good too courtesy of a display referencing the cookery books he illustrated for Elizabeth David. The rooms given over to the nursery and the early 20th century residents aren't quite so engaging but are still very much part of the overall story and may be highlighted downstairs eventually.
There's also a decent-sized garden to enjoy, complete with long herringbone path, stone urn and the pumpkin it seems obligatory all National Trust houses display at this time of year. Part of the original funding conditions was that this be a community garden so everyone's welcome to wander the borders, although it's only unlocked for 25 hours a week so harder to take advantage of than it could be. The cafe in the coachhouse operates similarly. My thanks to the stewards who offered full background info on my way round, be that waiting politely to be asked or creeping into the room and launching into a full-on anecdote. And come on, £6.50 for all of this is a bargain so do come and make Rainham Hall's acquaintance soon, especially if you already have National Trust membership and it's all free anyway.
The National Trust maintains nine historic houses in London but only four are open for walk-up visits, the others now require advance booking. So I've walked up to the four you can still walk up to and given my membership card a wave, because it pays to reacquaint yourself rather than assume you've seen everything before. Here are the easily visitable foursome, largest first, in the hope I might encourage some visits and revisits.
NATIONAL TRUST:Ham House Location: Richmond, TW10 7RS [map] Open: 12-4pm, daily Admission: £17 Period: The Jacobean one
You don't have to leave London to visit a large stately home with glorious gardens, there's a fine one by the banks of the Thames just upstream of Richmond. Ham House was built in 1610, then extended in the 1670s when it was taken over by a court favourite of Charles II. Its original H-shape was half filled-in to create a south-facing facade looking out towards a formal garden, and the interior was lavishly redecorated. The Earls of Dysart looked after the place until maintenance costs became too much and the National Trust snapped it up in 1948. It's scrubbed up beautifully since.
Your wander round the house begins in the Great Hall with its chequered floor and looping overhead gallery. The self-guided tour soon heads upstairs via the wonders of the Great Staircase, its dark wooden panels all hand-carved and watched over by old masters, but also a tad gloomy because they didn't have spotlights in the 17th century so a few electric candles are doing a lot of heavy lifting. The finest first floor room is the Long Gallery, a vision in black and gold flanked by paintings of royalty and the nobility. The house is also littered with intricate cabinets, be they marquetry, lacquerwork or merely ebony and tortoiseshell, these a particular decorative favourite of Elizabeth, Countess of Dysart. They're not labelled so you'll need a QR code to unpick them all, or else ask one of the many strategically-located stewards because they're only too willing to impart a nugget of hard-learned background info.
Back downstairs a long chain of richly bedecked rooms leads through the Queen's Apartments to a ducal bedroom, with furniture, wallpaper and tapestries to match. Even the closets are unnecessarily showy. Exit is through the cellars, which prove to be extensive, including a kitchen and a cloaked tub on a dais that formed one of England's first internal bathrooms. Visitors are then nudged towards the gift shop and second-hand bookshop, both a courteous distance across the courtyard, where the lavender bushes are now going for half price. The Orangery Cafe looks out across a splendid walled garden that's still blooming and delivering seasonal veg, and beyond is that a large formal lawn and criss-cross wilderness garden. My favourite zone is the diagonal parterre with its clipped box cones surrounded by yew hedges, even if it has no basis in the house's horticultural history. And all of this is on Londoners' doorstep, so lucky us.
NATIONAL TRUST:Osterley House Location: Osterley, TW7 4RB [map] Open: 11am-3pm, closed Monday and Tuesday Admission: £17 (£9.50 for just the gardens) Period: The neoclassical one
Osterley was a quiet corner of Middlesex when banker Sir Francis Child bought a Tudor house and asked architect Robert Adam to remodel it. It took him 20 years. Today the Heathrow flightpath roars down one side of the estate and the M4's swiped the other, but the neoclassical mansion in the middle still looks out across a pastoral scene of fields and lakes. Hounslow residents love to drop by and enjoy the parkland, not to mention the cafe, but the National Trust guard the kiosk that allows you further in. The big attraction is the house, a U-shaped block with turrets, pedimented screen and a central courtyard visitors no longer enter through. Instead you slip in through a side door and then straight upstairs - already dazzling - to discover what sights a circuit will bring.
There are several ostentatious rooms to look into, including a tapestry-walled drawing room and a bedroom with a dome-topped eight-poster. Someone from the 18th century had a penchant for greens and pinks which you could describe as clashingly vibrant or else tonally unwise. The extravagant entrance hall is the finest space, a monochrome riot of columns and curves designed to impress. Alas I turned up while the six-monthly floor-wax was taking place so could only stare into the panelled long gallery through a door at the far end for fear of inhaling fumes. Also I see the scullery's no longer part of the free-flow route, and with several rooms roped off if I'd paid the full £17 I'd have felt short changed. That said the fee also lets you into the grounds which are seriously extensive, spanning woodland trails, a Long Walk by the lake and a Tudor walled garden, so could occupy anything from 10 minutes to an hour.
If nothing else, come see the outer park.
NATIONAL TRUST:Eastbury Manor House Location: Barking, IG11 9SN [map] Open: 10am-4pm, Friday and Sunday only Admission: £8.00 Period: The Tudor one
Clement Sisley built his marshside manor during the reign of Queen Elzabeth I, an amazing survivor given it later got seriously neglected and put to alternative use as stables, hayloft and cart-shed. The Society for the Preservation of Buildings recognised its worth in the 1910s and ensured it ended up safely with the National Trust, even when postwar housing estates were built all around it. It's still astonishing to walk down council avenues between Upney station and the A13 and find a Tudor house with twizzly chimneys and a knot garden plonked incongrously in the middle.
There's plenty of house to explore, including attics, backstairs and courtyards that bring a frisson of discovery. Only one of the original spiral staircases survives, ascending via an astonishing curl of oak planks to an upper garret with views towards Barking and Docklands. One room has a fine old fireplace (but not the original, which for some reason ended up in Sussex), another some wispy wall paintings commissioned 400 years ago by a City alderman. But there's a lot of emphasis here on noticeboards and interpretation rather than the shell of the building, including a new exhibition called Eastbury Saved I hadn't had the chance to enjoy before. Even the cafe's more a ploughman's and paninis kind of counter, I suspect in attempt to tempt in more local punters for whom olive and feta frittata probably wouldn't cut it.
I like that you get a proper folded map to take round with you, also that there's so much to read which definitely extends the length of your visit. Eastbury feels a lot more homespun than the two big mansions described above, and is all the better for it.
NATIONAL TRUST:Rainham Hall Location: Rainham, RM13 9YN [map] Open: 11am-4.30pm, Thursday-Saturday only Admission: £6.50 Period: The Georgian one
I'll save this one until tomorrow, save to say it's always well worth the trek.
If today's post inspires you to visit any of these four NT houses, do come back and leave a comment to say so. They're all open on Fridays, so you could plan to make an early start.
According to the National Street Gazetteer there are only seven Squares in Waltham Forest. Three are long thin loops on council estates with a scrap of grass up the centre, and four are part of modern housing developments overlooked by newbuild flats. I plumped for one of the latter because I hoped it might stretch to three paragraphs.
We're on Wood Street, an east Walthamstow neighbourhood with a run of half-decent shops. Around ten years ago the council saw the opportunity to do up an existing precinct and a car park, also to replace past-it flats on the Marlowe Road Estate with a mass of mixed-tenure apartments. The development was called Feature 17 in honour of the fourfilmstudios that existed around Wood Street between 1910 and 1924 - not precisely here, but that doesn't matter when you're a branding agent in need of a local heritage angle. I'm still not sure why the upgraded plaza got renamed Troubridge Square, given that the only famous Troubridges derive from a baronetcy that originated in Plymouth, not E17. Update: It's named after HMS Troubridge, the WW2 destroyer adopted by Walthamstow during “Warship Week" in 1942.
The only survivors from the former precinct are a very tall CCTV pole and five concrete cubes, each with a single letter spelling out PLAZA (because this was formerly Wood Street Plaza). Another row of concrete cuboids suffices as unvandalisable seating, and the remainder proved so bleak they came back later and added three small flowerbeds. An enlarged Co-op got built before they knocked the old one down and this gets most of the footfall. It's also the canvas for the portrait of an inspiring local resident, as captured by fellow resident and photographer Matt Joy. In warmer weeks the potentially lively part is the grid of dry deck fountains at the far end (on at 10am, off at noon), but for now the large playground area is where lots of parents take lots of kids.
At ground level on the south side is the new Wood Street Library. It replaced the landmark building on the corner of Forest Road, which is now a block of flats, and now finds itself beneath another block of flats in a move nobody round here wanted. According to the council "the new library is fit for purpose and offers a more cost-efficient and modern way to deliver vital library services to the community", but I'd say it looks quite light on books. Also the bus stop outside the demolished building is still called Forest Road/Wood Street Library so perhaps somebody at TfL could sort that. Meanwhile the plan is to complete the redevelopment of the Marlowe Road Estate by this time next year, having added 440 homes, and only then will Troubridge Square and its overbricky environs be complete.
If it's mid-October then Tate Modern must have plonked some fresh art in their Turbine Hall. So what have we got this year? Hides and fencing.
These are the animal skins, 72 reindeer hides strung out on electric cables from floor to ceiling. They don't move or flash but there is the occasional buzz as part of the ambient soundscape. Apparently they also smell, this the ‘váivahuvvon hádja' that reindeer release when in a stressful situation, but I didn't get any notion of a tang, whiff or aroma when I walked by.
This year's artist is Norwegian, more specifically from the Sápmi region of northern Scandinavia formerly known as Lapland. Máret Ánne Sara's art journey began when her brother was ordered to cull 40% of his reindeer herd as part of a national quota system. She exhibited 200bullet-piercedreindeer skulls outside the Norwegian Supreme Court, they voted down the legislation and here she is on the South Bank. The juxtaposition of hides and cables is meant to represent the tension between energy extraction and ecosystems, obviously.
That's Goavve and at the other end of the Turbine Hall is Geabbil, a loopy labyrinth with walls made from birch branches. At certain points you'll find vertical clusters of reindeer remains - a stripe of jaws, a wall of skulls - also signs urging you not to touch. Within the maze are four listening areas where you can sit down on reindeer skin and don chunky headphones to hear conversations with Sámi reindeer herders and knowledge keepers. What they don't warn you is that the four audio streams each last 20-30 minutes so nobody's going to stay for all of them, plus they're a bit dry, so to save you the effort I flashed the QR code so if you're really interested you can read the transcripts at home.
The shape of the artwork is based on the internal anatomy of a reindeer's nose. Their snout is mostly cartilage and cavities, an energy-efficient arrangement which rapidly heats inhaled air across an extensive surface area, such is the genius of evolved nasal geometry. According to the blurb "as we move through the structure, Sara invites us to connect with the enduring knowledge and energy that flows through its materials and passages", although if you're a small child you'll probably just run around a lot.
Goavve-Geabbil won't detain you long, it's fairly slight given the voluminous space available. I don't think it's as poor as The Guardian's 1-star review, and does at least shine a light on indigenous art we rarely consider. But it's not up there with the greatest Turbine Hall commissions, indeed it's been four years since the last must-see, as yet another artist fails to grasp the full possibilities of London's largest gallery space.
You may remember I've been trying to spot all the pairsof letters at the start of a modern vehicle registration plate.
AA AB AC AD AE AF AG AH AJ AK AL AM AN AO AP...
BA BB BC BD BE BF BG BH BJ BK...
CA CB...
...
........YJ YK YL YM YN YO YP YR YS YT YU YV YW YX YY
There are a heck of a lot of them.
You might expect there to be 26×26 = 676 possible combinations, but the letters I, Q and Z are never used (for alphanumeric confusion reasons) which shrinks the list to 23×23 = 529.
Also four pairs have never been issued. FO and FU are banned for sweary reasons and NF for fascist reasons. The only other blacklisted pair is MN, which has long been reserved for the Isle of Man but the IoM has never taken up the DVLA's kind offer. This reduces the list to 529 - 4 = 525.
Also XA-XF are reserved for exports. You don't expect to see these on UK roads so I've discounted them too. This reduces the list to 525 - 6 = 519.
Well the good news is that I've finally seen all 519 of them, and it only took 22½ months.
I started on 1st December 2023. It was a bit of a torrent to start with because most of the pairs are quite common, especially those starting with L (London), E (Essex) and G (Kent). Pairs starting with B (Birmingham) and S (Scotland) are also frequent because they're issued across populous parts of the country.
By the end of December I'd seen all the As, Bs, Ds, Ks, Ls, Ss and Ys and was already up to 433 out of 519, that's 83% of the overall total. By the end of January I'd added all the Es, Fs, Hs, Js, Ts and Ws and was up to 480 (92%). And by the end of February I had the Cs and Ms under my belt and had reached 495 (95%). How difficult could the last 24 pairs be? Very, as it turned out.
The catch is that some pairs are considerably rarer than others.
i) 4 letters aren't used as regional identifiers. You'll only find J, T, U and X at the start of a personalised plate, not a bogstandard forecourt-bought vehicle.
ii) Some geographic regions don't issue all the pairs they have ownership of (so for example Reading seemed very reticent to release RC, RG, RL, RM and RP).
iii) Some letter pairs are held back so the DVLA can make some money out of them. The definitive list is AH, AL, BY, DR, ED, EH, GO, HO, MO, MR, MS, MY, OK, ON, OR, OS, RU, SU, VD, VW and WC.
I was fairly amazed when I finally saw a VD, but I've since seen several more.
After six months I was missing ten pairs (NR, RL, UE/UT/UV, VH/VJ/VL and XG/XY).
After nine months I was missing four pairs (UE/UT/UV and VH).
After twelve months I was still missing four pairs, that's how tough this game is.
UT finally turned up on an Audi in Crewe in March 2025.
VH finally turned up outside the Texaco garage on Bow Road in April 2025.
UE finally turned up on a Toyota outside Bromley-by-Bow station in June 2025.
And at the weekend I finally spotted UV on a Volkswagen in Ilford.
Obviously I got off the bus to take a photo.
The car was parked outside a block of flats on Ilford Lane. I've been down this road several times in the last two years but never seen it before, so maybe it was a one-off visitor. It starts with U so it has to be a personalised plate. The digits and last three letters appear to form the word LOSER. I'm still speculating why someone would pay good money for this particular plate, but I thank them deeply because otherwise I'd still be playing, almost 700 days later.
I have finally spotted all 519 pairs of letters at the start of a modern UK vehicle registration plate, and it only took 22½ months.
I'm still trying, very slowly, to visit England's 100 largest towns and cities by population. At the start of the year I had 13 to go but since then I've ticked off Sunderland (32nd), Hartlepool (84th), Stockport (60th), Chesterfield (85th), Mansfield (99th), Warrington (34th) and St Helens (71st). I'm chuffed to have halved the list this year. Of the six towns that remain the largest is Huddersfield (33rd), the southernmost is now Oldham (49th) and all lie in a narrow stripe between Lancashire and Lincolnshire.
Visiting Warrington ticked off another postcode area (WA), so my sole omissions within England and Wales are now BB and HD, i.e. Blackburn and Huddersfield.
In the last ten years I've been to every county in England at least once except Northumberland and Lancashire. I have obviously been to both of those, just longer ago. Technically I went to the historic county of Lancashire last week when I went to St Helens, but not the ceremonial county so it doesn't count. Only four miles out though.
I managed to keep the cost of my 430-mile round trip to just £25 by taking advantage of an LNWR half-price flash sale. The 6.43am departure from Euston to Crewe always has rock bottom advance fares anyway, plus Northern offer advance fares on certain bogstandard local routes so I managed to pre-book Warrington to Liverpool for just £1.30.
To complete my Top 100 list I reckon I need a day trip to Blackburn/Burnley, a day trip to Huddersfield/Barnsley, a bolt-on to Oldham next time I'm in Manchester and a potentially pointless day trip to Scunthorpe. I doubt I'll be able to manage any of those so cheaply.
St Helens is an industrial town between Liverpool and Manchester, and close enough to the former that it forms part of Merseyside. It has a six-figure population and not much of a history before the 18th century. It's best known for glass and rugby, specifically rugby league, of which more later. It has a 10,000 word Wikipedia entry which could really do with trimming down. And it's only seven miles northwest of Warrington so I hopped on the 329 bus and fitted in a trip to both. [Visit St Helens][20 photos]
glass
Pilkingtons started out in 1826 as the St Helens Crown Glass Company, a family business ideally situated on the Lancashire coalfield. It grew and grew, becoming the sole British manufacturer of plate glass and the dominant producer of sheet glass, so you may have a lot of St Helens in your house. In the 1950s an employee called Pilkington discovered how to produce float glass - still the global industry standard - and despite a Japanese takeover in 2006 more than a thousand people are still employed here. If you've ever bought Ravenhead Glass for your kitchen it was named after the St Helens neighbourhood where the factories were, and where the skyline is still mostly chimneys.
A lot of towns created a millennial attraction with the aid of a lottery grant, and in St Helens that was World of Glass. It brought together a historic production site and a museumsworth of artefacts, right on the edge of the town centre, and 25 years later is still the best thing to do in St Helens. You enter via a tall brick cone, inside which is an artwork created by local comic Johnny Vegas, and proceed into an airy atrium with a lot of glass walls. The approved route is into a gallery that weaves briefly through a history of the town, then delivers as many concepts related to glass as the museum's creators could think up.
The main sweep is a selection of glass items from ancient bottles to intricate studio glass sculptures, like a miniature outpost of the V&A, plus a few examples of cosmic glass that arrived here in a meteorite. Most of the rest is physics-based, optics being particularly suited to hands-on educational exhibits... twirl this, look through that, laugh at the special mirrors. Upstairs are more examples of gorgeous arty glass, including one of the four chandeliers that once graced Manchester Airport, and downstairs a proper art gallery where the latest exhibition is local architecture-y photos.
Initially I thought that was it, other than the cafe, until I worked out that the glass footbridge across the canal had doors you could push. On the other side is the Tank House, the world's first regenerative glassmaking furnace, a huge chamber with a vast flue above an irregular floor of bricky stacks. It's all explained if you stop to watch the film. For added fun you also get to walk underneath through a narrow brick tunnel (the hardhats aren't really necessary) and see further wiggly tunnels that were crucial to the means of production. Midweek I got all this to myself, and therein lies the rub.
World of Glass used to be a paid-for attraction but that only works for so long before everyone's been so the only way to retain footfall has been to make admission free. Inevitably it's been losing money - the glassmaking demos and gift shop aren't sufficiently supporting - so earlier this year everything was placed under threat of closure unless additional funds were raised. Thankfully local people came together to donate a five figure sum and, on the very day I visited, the government granted an extra six figures from the Arts Everywhere Fund. The National Glass Centre in Sunderland may be closing for good next summer but St Helens floats on.
other industry
In 1757 a desire to transport coal from here to Liverpool inspired the building of the Sankey Brook Navigation, England's first canal. It followed the Sankey Brook from St Helens round to Warrington, then ran parallel to the Mersey before entering the estuary near Widnes, and didn't fully close until 1963. At the St Helens end several sections have been filled in but others restored to create a genial waterside walk starting round the back of World of Glass. This section of the canal was once known as 'The Hotties' because waste water from Pilkingtons glassworks warmed the cut to an appealing temperature for bathing, though I wouldn't recommend it today.
Another industrial first was the brainchild of laxative supremo Thomas Beecham who in 1859 opened the world's first factory built specifically to produce medicine. His Beecham's Pills became a global brand marketed under the tagline "worth a guinea a box", which is one of the very earliest advertising slogans. The company grew to become a pharmaceutical giant, its name long swallowed up within GSK Ltd (formerly GlaxoSmithKline, formerly SmithKline Beecham), while the St Helens factory evolved into the company's HQ. It's now part of St Helens College campus and partly flats, while Beecham's gothic clocktower faces off against sweaty students pumping in a top deck gym.
rugby
St Helens have been playing top level rugby league since 1873 and are one of the twelve teams in the Super League, recently finishing mid-table. Their 18,000 seater stadium opened on a derelict glass factory site in 2012, part funded by flogging half the land to a monster Tesco superstore, and was originally called Langtree Park. But in 2017 the naming rights were sold to a Blackburn-based vaping and e-cigarettes company, hence it's now called the Totally Wicked Stadium and there are grinning red devils on the exterior. This is particularly inappropriate for a team nicknamed the Saints, but that's lowbrow capitalism for you.
The town's motto 'Ex Terra Lucem' is also emblazoned around the stadium, meaning 'From the Earth, Light'. It references the coalfield that brough local industries to life and is cited by local writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce as a key inspiration for the 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony. I find it amazing that the first team's fixture list for 2025 includes just 13 home games, but that'll be why the club are so keen for you hire one of their suites for a party, wedding, conference, awards dinner, prom or wake. Only Saints need apply.
The Town Hall can be found in Victoria Square, its clocktower patently missing something on top (a steeple lost to fire in 1913). The building's not listed but the two telephone kiosks out front are. Any urban character slips away somewhat as you head downhill towards the chunky parish church, which has had the misfortune to be surrounded on three sides by a postwar shopping centre long past its prime. The council have already swept away the town's second shopping mall which is now an unnervingly large pile of rubble anticipating rebirth as a hotel, offices and new market hall. Other northern towns are way ahead in the regeneration game and it shows.
Sights unfamiliar to a Londoner include multiple branches of the same pawnbroker, a darts megastore, a family butchers called the Womble Inn and estate agents' windows offering 2-bed terraces for £90,000. I was particularly taken by the food options where fancy pastries play second fiddle to proper pies and rolls. Imagine kicking off the day with a Brekky Barm of bacon, sausage, spam and egg, then grabbing a jelly pork pie for dinner and taking home a family hotpot for tea. Life expectancy in Town Centre ward is ten years below the national average. I've been to several towns that felt more run down, both in fabric and in spirit, but St Helens has a lot of catching up to do.
