Yesterday was St Swithin's Day. n.b. It may not have rained for you but it rained where I was and that's what counts. I had to hide in a hedge near Heathrow to avoid getting drenched, and I thought ah well, rain every day until August 24th. disproved as rubbish, obviously, because dead Saxon bishops don't affect our weather. back in 2022, so won't trawl over my four decades of personal data again. I'm calling it a SWITHINOMETER.  15     WET1617181920     21222324252627     28293031123     45678910     11121314151617     18192021222324     n.b. This table will only be completed by the August bank holiday, before that it's just a work in progress. n.b. I have a particular interest in St Swithin being wrong because my niece is getting married in the bottom right hand corner. n.b. Expect to see this table on the blog again in late August, hopefully while I'm still nursing a mild hangover.

TfL sometimes struggle to get the media to notice a good press launch, but I got lucky yesterday and stumbled upon their latest project at Waterloo station while travelling home from riding a duff bus. I knew something was up when I noticed an art workshop at the top of the Jubilee line escalators and a stash of luxurious-looking leaflets in the rack by the ticket machines. And I confirmed my suspicions at the foot of the escalators when I walked straight into a full-on bash celebrating the launch of the latest Art on the Underground project. Imagine there are a couple of dozen leaflet-clutchers milling around to the left of this swirly songbird artwork, all looking important and admiring their handiwork, because there were and I've cropped them out. Go Find Miracles by Rory Pilgrim, a new sound installation that'll be played out along the moving walkway at Waterloo station for the next couple of weeks. It was inspired by something unexpectedly tangential - the connections between London's architecture and the Isle of Portland - and combines choral music and spoken word in a looping ten minute presentation. Recording took place at two underground locations, one the disused Jubilee line platforms at Charing Cross and the other a Portland stone mine, with singers including alumni of the Prison Choir Project and following a creative workshop at a feminist library. There are so many surprising layers to this project that you'll only fully unpick them if you read the dense text on the Art On The Underground page or pick up a leaflet, which hardly anyone passing through will. It is a top-quality leaflet on posh paper in six-part gatefold which opens out to reveal a colourful songbird poster, this because Art on the Underground still has a proper budget. a photo but the passageway remains lined by dozens of distracting adverts for alibaba.com, not swirly songbirds, because marketing always trumps art. My passage was accompanied by forceful poetry with a musical soundscape, also a whole new crowd of arty guests who looked like they might have contributed to the project. But just as I was getting into the sequence of call and response a male voice interrupted with a long announcement about CCTV, looking after your belongings and ended with See It Say It Sorted, which is about as far from poetry as you can get. By the time the philistine intrusion ended we'd skipped 20 seconds of the sound installation, because health and safety always trumps art, and nobody's ever going to hear the full 10 minutes anyway. Soundcloud without fear of interruption, but Rory and TfL would rather you came and heard it for yourself this week and next, 10am to 5pm only, along an ad-strewn travelator. It's enchanting but if it causes one single traveller to go beneath the surface to imagine new structures of repair and possibility, or to muse on breaking cycles of harm to find space for miracles, it'll be a miracle.

Route 700: Colliers Wood to Phipps Bridge Estate Location: London southwest Length of bus journey: 1½ miles, 7 minutes new temporary bus route with a high number. The latest is the 700, a number chosen because it replaces part of route 200, a lowly twiddler in the borough of Merton. It's needed because there are joint gas and water main works on the edge of Mitcham Cricket Green, which incidentally are causing havoc with other buses being diverted round jammed-up roads but that's a different story. What's important is that the 200 is normally the only route down Church Road and that's now blocked for two months, so a special route was needed to reach the Phipps Bridge Estate which would otherwise be bus-less. And that's the 700. multiple reels and videos available if you want to see what shenanigans occurred aboard the 700, or instead to watch several minutes of the journey viewed from not quite the front seat. I'll thus merely summarise for the old school contingent who still like text. map, courtesy of TfL's We Only Make Maps For New Routes Department. In bad news the map's wrong, also the timings on it don't seem to be right, also I saw no timetables at bus stops round the route, also route 700 is much less frequent than the 200 it replaces, also the iBus system inside the bus thought we were on route 57, so let's go for a ride and I'll point out all the duff bits. The 700 starts outside Colliers Wood station, which you can tell because the stop has a special tile saying '700 Shuttle bus'. Indeed The Blokes Who Swap The Tiles have done a fine job all along the route, apart that is from adding '700 Shuttle bus' tiles at four stops where the 700 isn't stopping. The Blokes Who Change The Timetables have done less well, adding timetables to precisely zero of the stops I looked at, although apparently they have added them at some stops because I saw it on YouTube. I did whip out an app to see if that could tell me when the next bus was coming but the live arrivals thing wasn't working... or maybe I just got unlucky. not true. The 20 minute frequency is only before 9am and between 3.30pm and 7pm, and only on weekdays, otherwise it's every 30 minutes. I turned up late morning and believed the map, which was foolish because technically I could have walked to the far end of the route before the bus even turned up. route listing shown on the TfL website, also according to the app I flipped open. But in real life they're not being served, four stops in total, because the bus isn't doing what the map says it is. It is amazing how much of a mess you can make of a 7 minute bus route, but turning a 'there-and-back' into a loop without telling anyone certainly managed that. Perhaps these were just Day One wrinkles but who's to say, and fortunately unless you live on the Phipps Bridge Estate these two months of inconvenience will just pass you by.

45 45 Squared 25) MARKET SQUARE, N9 Borough of Enfield, 70m×50m Market Square in Edmonton. New not old, enclosed not open, basic not aspirational, blouses not yogawear, also you can't drive a vehicle into it which I think is a first in this year-long series. Come with me to the heart of Edmonton Green Shopping Centre, N9's sinuous concrete stripmall. fairly typical town centre until the late 1960s when the newly-formed Enfield council decided to bulldoze the majority in favour of full-on retail redevelopment. Frederick Gibberd & Co (of Harlow fame) came up with an innovative brutalist concoction mixing tower blocks with shopping opportunities and car parks, while Edmonton Green was substantially remodelled for through traffic. A new bus station replaced the old marketplace and all the stalls were moved into a large covered square at the core of the new development. North Mall bears off from one corner, South Mall from the opposite corner and a lowlit connector to the outside world from one side, all feeding shoppers into Market Square. Five parallel bands of glass let the light in. The original stalls are long gone, replaced by brighter permanent units with standard fascias. Some are small with space for key-cutting, engraving or a nail bar, a few are substantially larger and the majority appropriate for medium-sized traders in luggage, Caribbean groceries or dried nuts. The three prime corner units are all occupied by greengrocers, such is the demand for low-priced fruit and veg hereabouts, all neatly arrayed in bands of red, orange and green across hundreds of plastic bowls. Why walk all the way to Asda or Lidl when Letherbarrow's has all the loose tomatoes, peppers and grapes any family could need? Then there's Crystal Meats who are from the shrinkwrapped tray school of butchery, any three for £10, also Fashion Express who sell those huge checked bags ideal for taking washing to the launderette. It's all impressively tidy. outer edge of the square, the remaining beacons including JD Sports and William Hill, although the draw was considerably higher when Superdrug was still a Tesco. As for the Railway Tavern this claims to be a traditional pub, and indeed the original did stand by the level crossing on the Green for years, but this glum replacement has all the character of a dingy unit in the corner of a postwar market. Oh and there's also an upstairs, assuming you can get there. For some impractical reason it's only accessible up a single tissue-strewn staircase, or an adjacent lift, so first floor businesses must suffer terribly from low footfall. That said if you want the Turkish accountants, the special needs theatre or the local MP's office, you're more likely to be on a mission than just ambling by. What's unexpected is that after you've walked round the balcony a separate passage heads out onto the open roof... and into a street in the sky. A lot of councils tried mall-top living in the 70s, notably in Wood Green, but it's still surprising to see a row of eight townhouses on top of Clarks and Cardfactory, complete with washing hanging on the line and a lady sipping coffee in her front garden. My initial conclusion was that Edmonton Green Shopping Centre was a postwar success, still very well used and with a minimum of empty units. Then I remembered that there is essentially nowhere else for Edmonton's shoppers to go, the exterior retail offering having been so comprehensively extinguished, so of course tumbleweed has been held at bay. At least Market Square itself remains a cut above what most towns of this size offer, still appealingly blessed with everyday essentials, so long as you don't look round the edge or go upstairs.

45 45 Squared 24) THE SQUARE, TW9 Borough of Richmond, 60m come together beneath a zinc-scaled dome. One of the main streets is The Quadrant, one of the passageways is The Passage and stretching briefly to the east is The Square. This isn't square, just as The Quadrant isn't part-circular, although it may once have been more rectangular than it now looks, perhaps. Sorry, I thought the centre of a historic town would be easier to research, but rest assured there is a history behind all this somewhere. the Old Fire Station and the Dome, and I believe once passed behind the former and now loops round the latter. The Dome is everything a prominent Victorian building should be, especially if you need activewear for your next yoga session because the lower storey is now a branch of Lululemon. Excitingly the top floor is currently up for lease as open plan office accommodation, including a boardroom inside the dome itself offering 360 degree views in case your meeting content is particularly tedious. Saffron with a reassuringly dense menu pinned up outside, should you fancy an al fresco skewering. Even smarter is Major Son & Phipps alongside, a thin estate agents with a chic Parisian feel to its signage, one of whose staff is a dog called Scooby who merits his own page on the company website. Across the road a plaque above the Nationwide Building Society references The Imperial 1890, this being the pub that once occupied the building before a pizza chain moved in in the 1980s. The bubble tea shop isn't original either, ditto the Argentinian steakhouse and pizzeria in what is now The Square but used to be The Passage. Do try to keep up. The final standout building is the Old Fire Station, an overtwiddly redbrick number from 1870 with a distinctive clock tower that would have looked right at home in the centre of Trumpton. Look out for the carved heads of two moustachioed Victorian firefighters above the ex-entrance. When fire engines grew too big the main body became a shop and is currently yet another estate agents with a solicitors' office perched above. Meanwhile the front end became public conveniences, but Richmond council don't believe in those any more so it's now a coffee shop whose slogan is "Every single step is artisanal", so still very much taking the piss. only brief but everyone who heads south round Richmond's one-way system passes very briefly through half of it, and now you know what it's called even if it's hard to discern precisely where it starts and why it finishes.