It turns out this is excellent clickbait because when people see the question they want to know the answer. It didn't matter that I'd provided a really bad answer, they clicked through anyway.
Two online portals proved highly amenable to sending visitors my way. One was Reddit, the social news aggregation community, and the other was Hacker News which has a more technology/software-based focus. In each case a blogreader submitted my article to the portal and in each case a swoosh of upvotes fired it up the main list. It didn't remain high on the list for long, these things always fall back, but a few hours of prominence meant a substantial audience came to read what I'd written. In Reddit's case it was members of the r/London community, generally local, but with Hacker News the pile-on was substantially more global. Hence the fifteen thousand visitors.
My thanks to the readers who submitted the links in the first place because these don't always take off. For example "Diamond Geezer: Griping at length about TfL's handling of the 347 withdrawal" got only 275 views and no comments, whereas "Where is London's most central sheep?" hit the jackpot. It's also worth saying that the link was to my original incorrect post, not to my subsequent apology, so thousands of people now have an entirely incorrect understanding of London's most central sheep. In this case it's not an important distinction, but this is how disinformation spreads.
On Reddit most of the subsequent conversation was about where London's most central sheep might be. People suggested "Mudchute farm?", "Vauxhall farm?", "Hackney farm?" proving they hadn't read what I'd written, only responded to the title. Others responded with non-living sheep, for example "Lamb and Flag, Covent Garden", "Shepherd and Sheep Statue in Paternoster Square" or "probably a Kofta in a restaurant" because they weren't playing by my rules because they hadn't read them. This is the way with so much online discourse, a fervent debate about a headline rather than a nuanced discussion based on the actuality of the situation.
The discussion on Hacker News was longer and a lot more varied, spiralling off on all kinds of tangents. One of these, obviously, was where exactly the centre of London is, especially from people who didn't realise there's a long-standing location. Another was where the most central rabbit/cat/bear might be, not just sheep, not just in London. But the most interesting tangent regarded the significance of how far you have to travel from a city centre to find yourself in the country.
"When my wife and I lived in Bristol we developed a metric designed to measure how enjoyable a city was to live in that we called "time to sheep". Basically it's a measure of how long you have to travel from the center of the city before you're in the English countryside surrounded by sheep and the best cities have a low (but not too low) "time to sheep" metric. It helped explain one of the reasons we loved living in Bristol so much when we had such a hard time living in London."
This attracted responses from around the world...
» If we instead consider "time to cows" then Cambridge does quite well
» In Canada we call it "time to moose"!
» In Africa I suppose we have time to lion...
» My metric for when you've left the city is "have I passed a field of potatoes"
» There needs to be a counterbalancing variable, though; presumably you want to live in a city, otherwise you'd just live in the countryside somewhere with a TTS of zero :) Maybe the other factor is "time for pizza to arrive at door"?
London's quite good for being able to reach the countryside easily, as opposed to just a park or city farm. Technically the most central finger of Green Belt creeps down the Lea Valley to end at Tottenham Hale, although if you want proper unbroken fields and woodland you have to go a bit further. Step out of stations in Stanmore, Cockfosters, Chingford, Bexley or Coulsdon and the onward countryside never stops, although I think the most central/rural interface is in Mill Hill, eight miles out. It's mostly horses round there though, not sheep.
Sometimes the strangest questions turn out to have the most interesting answers. But I doubt most of the 15,000 souls who landed here for the first time yesterday will ever come back.
It's time to revisit one of London's great answered questions.
Where is London's most central sheep?
Yesterday I claimed that this was London's most central sheep.
It is not, sorry.
Further information has come to light in the comments and I can confirm that London's most central sheep is not at Vauxhall City Farm, there's a closer one, possibly several, probably.
Please accept my sheepish apology.
My mistake was to assume that any sheep in central London would be on a City Farm and that I knew where all the City Farms were. This was not the case. In particular I assumed that the list of City Farms held by the London City Farms & Community Gardens Association would be comprehensive and thus include the location of London's most central sheep, but it did not. It's an easy mistake to make.
I did try to consider alternative locations before I plumped for Vauxhall City Farm, but obviously I couldn't check everywhere within 1½ miles of Trafalgar Square. I scoured a map for potential sheep-friendly locations. I checked London Zoo in case they had sheep but they don't. I checked the petting zoo at Coram's Fields but it's closed. Alas sheep are tiny creatures so could be holed up anywhere across six square miles, and indeed they were.
The location I missed is Oasis FarmWaterloo, a half-acre strip of former wasteland opposite St Thomas's Hospital. The farm's been there since 2014 offering its natural resources to support the community, a joint venture between Oasis Hub Waterloo and Jamie's Farm. Crucially they describe themselves as an urban farm not a city farm so they're not on the London City Farms & Community Gardens Association shortlist, so I didn't notice. And they appear to have sheep.
Their website's homepage features a photo of a sheep so it's a fair bet they've got one. If you go to Waterloo, which I now have, you'll see they also use a sheep on their promotional materials suggesting it's at the top of their animal hierarchy. But you can't go in and have a look, they don't take walk-ins, only pre-booked groups and very occasional public events, the last of which was cancelled.
Thankfully you can peer in through the railings from Royal Street but it's a half-obscured squinty view, in one case through a cage of chickens. The animal sheds are on the far side and I definitely saw two cute white animals chomping away on the hay, although there might have been more just out of sight. The number of sheep at Oasis Farm Waterloo thus appears to be at least two, suggesting these are London's most central sheep and not those in Vauxhall.
Where is London's most central sheep?
At Oasis Farm Waterloo, less than a mile from Trafalgar Square.
But they might have been goats. Their heads were hidden so it was hard to be 100% sure what kind of cloven animal they were. The Oasis Farm Instagram feed has a number of photos of sheep but also some of goats so it is possible I saw the wrong animal. Their website also says "our farm animals rotate from Jamie's Farm in Wiltshire", suggesting they're not always here, and also that "we usually have a ewe with her lambs", which before lambing season may mean they currently don't. Alas this isn't cut and dried.
Where is London's most central sheep?
Probably at Oasis Farm Waterloo, unless there isn't one here at the moment because there are only goats, in which case at Vauxhall City Farm.
This is my new definitive answer, unless I've missed something you haven't told me about.
I was thus also wasting my time trying to determine London's second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth most central sheep. Once you're uncertain about the first sheep the rest of the list just falls apart. Also I completely missed Battersea Park Children's Zoo and they have fivesheep according to their website, and distance-wise they'd be the third closest flock.
0.8 milesOasis Farm Waterloo: currently at least two animals that might be sheep 1.4 milesVauxhall City Farm: I counted seven sheep 2.2 milesBattersea Park Children's Zoo: seemingly five sheep 2.8 milesSpitalfields City Farm: ten sheep
It turns out I wasted my time going to Spitalfields City Farm because they definitely don't have any of the top ten most central sheep. It also turns out pretty much everything I stated in yesterday's post about the centrality of sheep was incorrect, for which I apologise. Normally when readers kindly point out things I've overlooked I can slightly rewrite it, but in this case the whole thing was so wrong it's essentially unrescuable.
There is nothing important in the big scheme of things about the location of London's most central sheep. However there are lessons here for all of us.
1) Don't state something as fact when you haven't researched it fully. 2) Remember that when you do state something because you believe it's fact, it could be based on incomplete information. 3) If you're not 100% sure about something, best introduce at least some element of doubt. 4) Don't trust everything you read just because somebody you trust presented it as fact.
We all like to think we're right and very often we're not.
We don't always have all the facts to hand, even if we think we do.
This applies just as much to you as to me.
But yesterday it applied very much to me, sorry.
It's time to tackle one of London's great unanswered questions.
Where is London's most central sheep?
I'm only interested in live sheep, so not a cuddly toy in Hamleys nor lamb cutlets at The Ritz. I'm not interested in temporary sheep like those that get driven over Southwark Bridge in September or shorn at the Lambeth Country Show in June. Also by 'most central' I mean closest to the centre of London which is generally agreed to be Trafalgar Square, specifically the statue of Charles I at the top of Whitehall. Hopefully that's clear.
I don't believe Charles III keeps sheep at Buckingham Palace, nor has anybody else nearby got a large enough back garden. London Zoo's website does not reveal the existence of any sheep - at best llamas. Also none of the armed forces based in London have a regimental sheep, the UK's sole ovine mascot being a ram called Pte Derby XXXIII owned by the Mercian Regiment in Lichfield. So, city farms it is.
Where is London's most central city farm?
That's easy, it's Vauxhall City Farm which is just over a mile south of Trafalgar Square. It's been here on the edge of the Pleasure Gardens since 1976 so is one of London's oldest city farms and receives over 60,000 visitors a year. Some of its residents live out front in wooden pens but they're not sheep, they're goats as any self-respecting three year old could tell you. The entrance is off to the left past an outdoor desk staffed by cheery volunteers who'll grin, sell you feed and encourage you to make a donation. The City Farm is 50 next year so has an anniversary appeal underway, should you have part of £250,000 to spare. For the sheep turn right.
Where is London's most central sheep?
Here she is. She's in the sheep enclosure at Vauxhall City Farm, lapping away at a bowl of water resting on a spare tyre. She's a Shetland, a hardy breed with a good-natured temperament, so ideal for pottering around with toddlers in a confined space. There were many such underage visitors during my visit, all overexcited to be right up close to a sheep's head nuzzling through railings. Crossing the divide into the yard itself is more of a paid-for activity, or if you're a volunteer just part and parcel of your dung-sweeping duties. Alas I don't know what this sheep's name is, the City Farm isn't as keen as some in pinning biographical details to the railings, but there is no closer sheep to Trafalgar Square so she is London's most central sheep.
Where is London's second most central sheep?
You didn't think there was just one sheep did you? Here's another, this time a Herdwick, a larger shaggier breed. She's called Daffodil, or Daffy for short, and she's very much the poster girl for sheep at Vauxhall. I didn't see her initially, she was hiding inside a free-standing wooden structure as if trying to escape the hubbub, the yard also being home to three occasionally frisky alpacas called Rolo, Toffee and Cookie. I suspect sometimes Daffy hops up the steps to the top platform and surveys her domain like a woolly empress. She is thus not always the second most central sheep in the capital, sometimes she's first depending on the precise location of the other sheep.
Where is London's third most central sheep?
There are of course several sheep at Vauxhall, it would be silly and a tad cruel only to have two. Here are four of them crowding up against the railings by the pigpen because a small child has proffered a handful of scrummy animal feed. School parties tend to be taller and thus less conducive to low-level feeding, plus they may be about to be given a wheelbarrow each and asked to get stuck in. This particular corner of the farmyard by the entrance is actually the furthest north so I can state with some certainty that the back ewe was London's most central sheep at the time I took this photo, and next to her the second, third and fourth.
Where is London's fifth most central sheep?
Daffy didn't appear in that last photo so she was London's fifth most central sheep at the time.
Where is London's sixth most central sheep?
Also at Vauxhall City Farm. I counted seven sheep in the yard altogether, I just never managed to get them all in the same photo. I did try asking the keeper to confirm the precise number of sheep but unfortunately she didn't know. Whatever, given my count it must be the case that London's seven most central sheep are all here in SW8... and free to visit. Be sure to wash your hands thoroughly before exiting past the geese and buggy park, and yes the acrid whiff of animal excreta does eventually fade as you return to the outside world.
Where is London's eighth most central sheep?
Park that question for a second.
Where is London's second most central city farm?
That'll be in Spitalfields. It took some working out to confirm that this was the second closest to Trafalgar Square, I had to make myself a map using the extremely helpful list of London's city farms at londonfarmsandgardens.org.uk. They reckon there are twelve city farms in London but I reckon one of those is just over the border in Essex so it's eleven. The map's interesting because eight of the city farms form a near straight line running diagonally from Kentish Town through Hackney and Mudchute to the foot of Shooters Hill, but I think that's a coincidence. Spitalfields City Farm is on the site of a former railway depot and was also born in the 1970s, but is less cramped, easier to walk round and less pungent.
Where is London's eighth most central sheep?
That'll be Beatrix, another Herdwick ewe, here at Spitalfields City Farm. Their information game is strong so I know she used to graze on the North Downs in Surrey but lost an ear in a dog attack when she was young and moved here in August 2020. Her enclosure is a much better size, with scattered wood and the inevitable spare tyre, even room for gambolling. Don't expect to get close enough for feeding but that's fine because feeding's not permitted here anyway.
Where is London's ninth most central sheep?
You didn't think there was just one sheep at Spitalfields City Farm did you? There are several more hiding away in the byre, this time Castlemilk Moorits, a rare breed with brownish wool originally from Scotland. They're 37% Shetland, 28% Soay, 18% Manx and 17% Wiltshire Horn and all descended from a single ram on Sir Jock Buchanan-Jardine's estate, apparently. The information board also confirms there are nine of them here altogether with names like Twiglet, Lavender, Samphire and Rolo. Rolo is occasionally London's seventeenth most central sheep when he stands over by the polytunnels. London's most central donkeys are two pens away, one of whom is called Derek, but that's another story.
Thursday update: Due to errors in this post, I've published an apology here.
