One Stop Beyond: Stoneleigh 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 Stoneleigh, one stop beyond Worcester Park on the line between Wimbledon and Epsom. For positioning purposes it's wedged between the boroughs of Kingston and Sutton in a protuberance of Surrey, so close to town that it's the only zone 5 rail station beyond the Greater London boundary. In a familiar story it really was all fields 100 years ago, then trains stopped and suddenly wham, suburbia erupted in seven years flat. an austere concrete link but was replaced last year by an accessible lift-enabled span much to the delight of elderly locals attempting to go shopping. What's missing is a screen displaying when the next train goes, so you only find out it's cancelled after you've schlepped down to the platform and discovered you face a half hour wait, and I may be speaking from experience here. Shops line both sides of Stoneleigh Broadway, a broad boulevard with ample parking and two long redbrick parades of the kind they always built in the 30s. We may be only quarter of a mile from cosmopolitan London but the selection of shops is quintessentially Surrey, from a large dry cleaners to an independent travel agent with a traditional butcher in the middle. The newsagents still doubles up as a stationers so has a wall of writing implements at the far end. There's no gym but one unit does art classes, one sells cub and scout uniforms and another's a dance school. Eating options are a tad timewarped with an Oriental Takeaway, a chippie called the Pisces Fish Kitchen, a bistro that stretches to tapas On Selected Nights Only and just the one pub in a rustic gabled mansion called The Station. If you enjoyed shopping in the 1990s you'd feel right at home here. Radio 2 while I was doing my research and mentioned retrieving her EastEnders costumes from a small museum in Stoneleigh, which I then totally had to visit. Hopefully a board on the high street would have nudged me had I not been listening - "You ain't seen London till you've been to the Cockney Museum". Let's be fair, it's large yellow lockup with plexiglass windows, plasterboard walls and a doorbell to press. But inside is an Aladdin's Cave of throwback treasures collected by the Pearly King of Peckham, George Major, who made it his lockdown project to display his extensive collection of memorabilia here in Stoneleigh. Sometimes he's here to guide you round but I was told he was out so got to explore by myself, for a good 45 minutes. Poverty Street, is the least successful. George has plastered the walls with photos of old London and the poorer folk who inhabited it, but then decided to display them in near darkness lit only by flickering lanterns. "Probably best to illuminate them with your phone," I was told, but accepted the offer of a poundshop torch instead and squinted my way round. The photos are fascinating and George's captions perhaps more so... No Health And Safety In Them Days, Do You Remember Liptons Tea And Grocery Shops, Note That Everyone Wore A Hat, We Led The World In Them Days. Market Square, not least because it's properly illuminated. George used to be a costermonger so the display includes a big barrow piled with fake fruit, and also the original frontage of a former Manze's pie shop (Meat Pies 1d, Fruit Pies 1d, Eel Pies 2d). The museum's teensy cafe can serve up proper pie & mash and apple pie & custard, but I understand you have to book ahead. King and Queen Square where pearly heritage comes to the fore and this was the best bit of the lot. 27 button-splattered costumes are on display, each with George's notes on who wore them where and the adversities they overcame. Pearly royalty grew up all over the capital from Shepherds Bush to Dagenham and Wood Green to Walworth, many of whom appear in the multitude of photographs or on the screen in the little cinema. The Pearly Queen of Hampstead was the smartest, apparently, and Bill from West Ham the poorest. website due to the rising price of electricity. Best bring a torch. Four other places to see in Stoneleigh Nonsuch Park: This open space was the location of Henry VIII's finest palace, previously blogged, of which nothing remains because a subsequent owner had it demolished to pay off gambling debts. One of the last leftovers was Queen Elizabeth's Elm, a hollow tree of great girth which grew in front of the kitchen court and under which it's said the Tudor Queen stood to shoot at deer. Alas it was burnt down in 1902 because vandalism is nothing new, and I looked in vain by the footpath in the dog-free field for a trace of the slight mound archaeologists claim to have found in 1995. The source of the Beverley Brook: This nine mile river flows into the Thames at Putney but rises here at the top end of Cuddington Recreation Ground, marginally inside London. A thin treelined strip snakes downslope fed from a brick culvert, although at present it's a stagnant milky trickle which takes several metres before it de-opaques. Step within the leafy curtain and you can follow the ditch unseen by neighbouring dog-walkers, meeting instead fallen branches, crisp packets and the odd disturbed squirrel. 68 Stoneleigh Park Road: This was the childhood home of the playwright John Osborne, the Angry Young Man who wrote Look Back In Anger and other kitchen sink dramas. His family moved here in 1936 when he was five, just round the corner from Station Approach, growing up in what he'd later describe as a 'cultural desert' he couldn't wait to escape from. Ewell Court: This large Victorian house with a Jacobean core was bought by the council in the 1930s and has since been used as a clinic, decontamination unit, care home, library and wedding venue. A nasty arson attack in 2013 has required considerable renovation but the lakeside setting attracts many locally, as do the tearoom and ice cream parlour. Note to the cafe, you cannot erect a sign saying 'Secret Garden This Way' and expect to be taken seriously. I particularly liked the Fernery/Grotto under the arch out back, originally part of an Edwardian conservatory and whose many rocky crannies are actually made of Pulhamite. And yes technically this is in Ewell, just off the river Hogsmill, but it's closer to Stoneleigh station than to Ewell West so I'm counting it as one stop beyond.

45 45 Squared 12) TRINITY CHURCH SQUARE, SE1 Borough of Southwark, 75m×60m garden square fronted by Georgian terraces, although you can't go in the garden unless you're a resident because it's one of those. Trinity Church Square lies just off Borough High Street, and is accessed via broad leafy Trinity Street so you might have ridden past along Cycleway 10. Everything's called Trinity round here, partly because land locally was gifted to Trinity House in 1661 by merchant seaman Christopher Merrick for the benefit of destitute mariners, and partly because the church in the middle of the square was Holy Trinity. Originally it was called Trinity Square - the same as the City corner where Trinity House is based - but later a distinction was made and the word Church got inserted. This is thus one of London's rare streets whose sign additionally announces what it used to be called, despite the name change being over 70 years ago. tells us. The glaringly obvious presence here is the church, built in 1824 in Greek Revival style by Francis Octavius Bedford who's also responsible for St John's in Waterloo. The belltower has a stopped clock and a twiddly octagonal lantern on top; the portico has six columns and three pesky steps up to the main doors. However Holy Trinity stopped being a church in 1968 because there were far too many round here to support the postwar population, after which the interior was repurposed as an open hall for orchestral use. It's now Henry Wood Hall, a rehearsal and recording space for orchestras and smaller groups of classical musicians, so don't expect to get inside for a concert but if you fiddle or blow you might get lucky. As for the garden that's currently gorgeous with pink and white blossom bursting forth and the last of the daffodils making way for later blooms. At its heart is an eight-foot-high statue of King Alfred with a frankly astonishing pedigree, the top half being about 200 years old and the bottom half being Roman. It's believed the lower chunk formed part of a colossal sculpture dedicated to Minerva in a temple on nearby Watling Street, and was carved from Cotswold limestone during the reign of Trajan or Hadrian. It is thus, at least in part, arguably London's oldest statue. You can only see it from beyond the railings, however, unless you're a resident or their guest and willing to abide by the list of rules posted by the gate. No exercising with kettle bells, no bicycles, no entry before 7am and no children's parties without permission. Other sights around the square include a rare K2 telephone box, the arms of Trinity House atop a wall and several patent self-locking manhole covers by Hayward's of Borough. More temporary manifestations include workmen repointing the stonework round the church, a brown trailer that's sometimes used to sell salt beef and the second-hand book stall that manifests outside number 57 on a Sunday. I note we're also approaching the AGM of the Trinity Newington Residents' Association at the end of the month, which last year was held at Henry Wood Hall but this year's venue is a wine bar round the back of Borough station so a bit of a climbdown. Watch out for Trinity Church Square next time you're cycling through, and when you reach the ornamental barrier where you have to get off feel free to shake a fist at the TNRA because that's one of theirs.

Broadband update Abbreviated version: Hurrah, my broadband finally started working again yesterday afternoon. I had eleven days without. What happened: A couple of Saturdays ago a fibre optic cabre somewhere in Mile End failed. Before dawn on Monday Openreach sent an engineer round who confirmed someone needed to come back in daylight. On Tuesday someone came back in daylight, opened up a manhole and found flooding down there. Faffing around in the water proved ineffective so Openreach realised they'd need to source hydraulic pumps. Several attempts were pencilled in but the issue was not solved, hence the protracted delay. How I found this out: On Tuesday I finally managed to speak to a human on a BT helpline. I think they could hear the surprise in my voice. They did some digging into my broadbandlessness and confirmed it was infrastructural damage so an Openreach issue, not a BT problem. They didn't know when pumps might tame the flooding allowing the cable to be repaired, but it was reassuring to know this was a real problem and they were trying to solve it. I will eventually receive some daily compensation. How it ended: Yesterday I spotted an Openreach engineer fiddling with a cabinet beside an open manhole at the end of Fairfield Road. This looks hopeful, I thought, but when I got home I still had no broadband. I checked online and they were hoping for a fix by 10am this morning. But a few minutes later the red ring on my BT Hub turned blue and I had broadband again. Oh the relief of being able to do everything online again. How Joni Mitchell summed it up: Don't it always seem to go, you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone. Flickr update fewest views. I hope to update this list several times during the day. 1) Dover to Deal (25 photos, 0 views): Uploaded yesterday, four days after I wrote about my clifftop walk. Please have a look :) 2) Redditch (20 photos, 75 views): Nobody gave a damn about this West Midlands new town last year. 3) Cheltenham & Gloucester (25 photos, 79 views): The lovely spa and cathedral towns, not the building society. 4) Slough (30 photos, 98 views): I should have guessed my Slough collection (Mars, Herschel, Thunderbirds) would underperform. 5) Welwyn Hatfield (26 photos, 107 views): Perhaps it's new towns that don't generally attract attention. 6) Wensum bridges (12 photos, 113 views): Bridges in Norwich proved a bit niche last year. 7) Ironbridge (30 photos, 128 views): What's wrong with you? Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale are fabulous. 8) Prime Meridian (40 photos, 146 views): From the Thames to the Humber (skipping from Stratford to Cleethorpes). 9) Poole (40 photos, 148 views): Perhaps if I'd mentioned Brownsea Island it'd've performed better. 10) Dartford (25 photos, 160 views): Yeah I get that. 11) Foro/Palatino (30 photos, 188 views): The astonishing classical treasures in the centre of Rome. Bow Roundabout update Silvertown Tunnel webpage explains why. All physical mitigation works are now complete. The link under the flyover at Bow will remain closed until we complete more works to protect the structure later in 2025. I suspect they've realised it'll take more than a small low headroom sign to protect the underside of the flyover from potential damage so will be adding more signs or some other kind of protection. A lorry hitting the concrete structure could be incredibly disruptive. Superloop update Every 8 minutes: SL4 (Canary Wharf → Grove Park) Every 10 minutes: SL8 (Shepherds Bush → Uxbridge) Every 12 minutes: SL1, SL2, SL3, SL5, SL9, SL10 Every 15 minutes: SL6, SL7 London Loop update section 18, i.e. Chingford to Enfield Lock. This is another section that can be ridiculously muddy even in normal weather, indeed at the end of February the Inner London Ramblers warned of "slippery mud" and "extensive flooding" and strongly recommended the wearing of "good boots". I can confirm that after six weeks with no rain it was merely a very pleasant ramble and unusually solid underfoot. Here, in addition to the absence of mud, are the ten things which most surprised us along the way. 1) A seafood takeway on a boat at Enfield Lock selling tiger prawns, calamari and octopus. 2) Wondering why all the ducks along the Lea were in groups of three, in each case two males pursuing one female. 3) Crossing the Greenwich Meridian in the middle of a car boot sale. 4) A songbird in a tree on Sewardstone Marsh belting out a ridiculously wide range of chirpy songs, as if working through the preset tunes on an old Casio keyboard. 5) An Islamic cemetery that definitely wasn't on the hillside last time I walked this. 6) A girl dangling her feet in a freshly dug grave and laughing while on the phone to a friend. 7) Noticing that all the graves were pointing in a southwesterly direction that definitely wasn't southeast towards Mecca (then using Google to confirm that Muslim graves are always aligned at right angles). 8) The Leopard Gates outside the Scouts National HQ at Gilwell Park, where one of the leopards got damaged so the 97 year-old sculptor came out of retirement to carve a new one. 9) The absolutely excellent view across London from the top of Yates Meadow, which the official Loop route inexplicably bypasses. 10) Walking round a corner and suddenly passing two young men coming the other way, one wearing a straightjacket and looking immensely embarrassed at being spotted in what they'd hoped was the middle of nowhere. 60+ card update E-bike update xxx I think we can agree this is not the best possible announcement. It draws more attention to two obscure cross-river services than to the e-bikes themselves. It's like saying the asterisk out loud. But as we discussed and discovered, it's hard to do better.-->

Twenty years ago today I posted my first photo to Flickr. I'd been to Lewisham for the day as part of my Random Borough project and thought you deserved to see 13 of the better pictures in greater-than-microscopic size. For my inaugural upload I picked the ever-photogenic Laban Centre on Deptford Creek in cobalt sunshine, and invited you to take a peek. (more tomorrow - in the meantime you might enjoy my new Flickr photostream with more shots of gorgeous Lewisham) seven-digit ID number. By contrast my latest photos are eleven-digiters, confirming an explosion of digital imagery over the last two decades. Sticking photos online was relatively new back in 2005, hindered by retro-mobile technology and substandard transfer speeds. Today we think nothing of uploading photos and videos for immediate consumption, so much so that the visual has overtaken the written in our digital communication. Flickr - for some reason I'd signed up over a year previously. They were a cute fortnight-old start-up at the time, complete with an occasional inability to spell. Welcome to Flickr, diamond geezer! Please note: ln the initial weeks of the beta period reliability may be sporadic while we optimize the system and new servers. Outage start times and anticipated lengths wiltbe posted to the news page with as much notice as possible. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience thls may cause. Flickr is that it's still going. Twenty years is forever online, plenty long enough for your premise to collapse or for the big company who bought you to let you wither and then pull the plug. In this case Yahoo proved poor masters and eventually got rid, which would have meant oblivion had not a smaller company called SmugMug stepped in. Thus the site is still here, thank God, and so are hundreds of millions of images representing a phenomenal social record. the next one, a Tellytubbyesque landscape from the front of the same building, a total high enough to place it in my Top 200 Most Viewed Flickr photos of all time. Alas this is an increasingly meaningless ranking after a fortnight of statistical blips in October 2022 gifted entirely random photos massive viewing totals. But if I strip out those annoying interlopers these are my Flickr Top Five, my photo-sharing greatest hits. 1) Entrance to nudist beach, Telscombe Cliffs (44,296 views): It's the phrase 'nudist beach' that keeps punters coming back, alas missing the key word 'entrance' (because there's nothing to see here). 2) Met No 1 (26,343 views): In 2013 a 'Learning English' website used my photo of a steam train at Farringdon to illustrate a podcast, and attributed it properly, which has brought a steady stream of visitors ever since. 3) Fatboys Diner (20,527 views): This Fifties trailer alas no longer serves burgers at Trinity Buoy Wharf but my wonky 2008 photo still has traction. I saw its empty silver shell recently from a train, awaiting rebirth. 4) American Embassy, Nine Elms (19,731 views): Very occasionally one of my photos is embraced by Explore, Flickr's global daily Top 500 feature, which loved this photo of Nine Elms' defensive cube. It's rather easier to get into Explore now than it used to be. 5) Shivering Sands sea forts (18,145 views): I got lucky with a level horizon on a rocking boat off Herne Bay, garnering multiple Flickr favourites and a long shelf life as a "go-to" photo for this rusting offshore marvel. eleven photos in my online portfolio have had fewer than 200 views over the years, which if you're on Flickr yourself you'll know is a phenomenal strike rate. They're all from a particularly dull set I uploaded in 2006 so it serves me right. Of the dozen other photos that never mustered 300 views, what barely interested anyone are a trip to Rome, a Paralympic tennis match and a week in San Francisco, which I've never quite understood. I suspect photos of my recent trip to Dover would be in these doldrums had I actually managed to upload them, but I haven't yet which is annoying - an anniversary opportunity lost. Flickr albums where appropriate, especially if I go to a far-flung place and want to make it easy to showcase my visit. Here are my five most-viewed albums ever, and perhaps you can see why they are. 1) Olympic Stadium site (10,406 views): I stood on the same bridge over Marshgate Lane and took a monthly photo of the Olympic Stadium arising, so this is a unique record of inexorable change and rightly my most-viewed album. 2) Metroland Revisited (9,324 views): For John Betjeman's centenary I followed in his documentary footsteps up the Metropolitan line, and it was 2006 so photo quality wasn't great but nostalgia won out. 3) Fleet River (NE branch) (9,255 views): My month-long bloggery down the River Fleet was much shared at the time and brought diamond geezer to a wider audience. I compiled five albums of Fleet photographs, geographically focused, and if I extended this list to a Top 10 the other albums would be 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th. 4) Inside the Gherkin (9,164 views): For Open House 2006 I queued for hours to see London from the top of the Gherkin, and thousands of people have subsequently wanted to know what that view looked like. 5) My Most Interesting Photos (8,481 views): Flickr's algorithm nebulously combines views, comments and favourites to create a ranking by 'Interestingness', which for years had the Maunsell Forts at the top of the list. This album alas no longer automatically updates, otherwise it'd show that my Most Interesting photo is now of icy boats at Richmond Bridge. Early Flickr had some mighty cunning coding under the bonnet, including a naming convention so forward-looking it still works today. My first photo is still www.flickr.com/photos/dgeezer/8919372, my first set of Parisian photos is still www.flickr.com/photos/dgeezer/albums/263401 and (I don't know if this works for you) a list of all the photos I uploaded in 2008 in order of Interestingness is still www.flickr.com/search/?w=36101699310%40N01&s=int&d=taken-20080101-20081231. otherwise have lost when my hard drive died in 2006. But the potential danger works both ways. I've invested hours of my time curating an online portfolio, currently 18852 photos in total, complete with captions, tags and geographical locations. But there's no guarantee whatsoever that Flickr will maintain functionality in the future, or indeed continue to function at all, so all that effort may one day be wiped out. Flickr can survive another decade without something going wrong, be that degeneration of functionality or withdrawal of service. But I said exactly that in 2015, and yet here it is still going strong. I hope you enjoy looking at the photos I stick on there, be that for artistic, geographical or purely inquisitive reasons. And I hope they'll still be there to look at in 2035, even if the things I've taken photographs of are by then long gone.

Route 129: Lewisham to Gallions Reach Location: London southeast, crossriver Length of bus journey: 9 miles, 70 minutes 129 has been searching for a purpose ever since it was introduced as a stumpy three mile route in 2006. The original idea was to connect the new Millennium Village on the peninsula to the centre of Greenwich, a double decker shuttle which was one of the ten shortest bus routes in London. Planners intended it would one day be extended to new developments on Surrey Canal Road and thence to Peckham, but New Bermondsey Overground station remains a mirage two decades later so that never happened. Jump ahead to 2022 and the 129 was extended instead to Lewisham, this to make up for route 180 being diverted for Crossrail reasons, although that didn't bring a huge rush of punters either. Now it's become one of three cross-river buses in east London, striking out through the Silvertown Tunnel to connect Lewisham to City Airport and Beckton, and we wait to see if this is a link anyone genuinely needs. 129's first stop ought to be outside the Lewisham Centre but it's closed due to 'Urban Realm development works', which according to a poster were supposed to finish last week but evidently haven't. At least it tells you where to go instead. The second stop alas has no poster, just a Countdown screen insisting several 129s are due in the next few minutes when in fact bugger all are coming. Here I meet a flustered old lady trying to get to Canary Wharf with the aid of some scribbled instructions her nephew gave her. Alas her intended chain of buses fails at square one, causing instant confusion, and trying to persuade her to give up waiting and catch the DLR instead falls on deaf ears. displaced 400 much-peeved residents. Then finally we're back on line of route, where I can confirm nobody has bothered to put up a new 129 timetable at the Lewisham Station stop because of TfL's usual uncoordinated backroom inefficiencies. Things have started badly. We've reached the start of the original runty 129 outside the Old Royal Naval College, suddenly with so many more miles to go. Potential passengers are asking the driver if he's going to North Greenwich, because last week that was the key destination on the front of the bus but it's now vanished in favour of a less helpful housing estate in Newham. For a direct bus they really should have taken the 188 which takes a shortcut whereas we're doing the full length of constricted Trafalgar Road before heading north. "Are you going under the tunnel?" asks one keen old lady, and technically the answer's no but the driver helpfully says yes. We exit the bus station novelly by turning right at the roundabout, then right again down a special canyon-like bus lane. Three hi-vis-ed stewards wave us on, just this once. In no time we're turning into the main flow of traffic almost immediately before the tunnel portal, and then we're in. A double decker in a Thames tunnel is a proper novelty for London. We stick to the left lane along with the HGVs while everything else sticks to the right, all proceeding at just under 30mph and all contributing to the Mayoral coffers. It's less straight than I was expecting but not as wonky as the Blackwall Tunnel. As sightseeing trips go it's not especially incredible, although if you stop and think precisely what we're ducking under maybe it is. One final bend and then daylight appears in the distance and then we're out - just under a mile, fractionally under two minutes. The first stop is a good half mile beyond the tunnel outside West Silvertown station, or technically just past. Here the pile-off begins as we lose the passengers who merely wanted to ride through the tunnel, which is the vast majority. The 129 then begins its new life threading through the Newham hinterland, an estuarine strip initially bursting with fresh flats. It can't currently stop at the next bus stop because extensive cycleway works are in progress but 'Thames Barrier' is announced anyway. Nobody is inconvenienced. The announcements then glitch into overdrive and start mentioning future stops, repeated stops and especially Connaught Bridge, perhaps because we're stopping there twice but more likely teething troubles. When Crossrail started in 2022 TfL entirely rejigged bus stopping patterns in this corner of Beckton, mysteriously rerouting the 300 and leaving Royal Albert Way unbussed. The 129 now follows its former path, making sense of the former subtraction as if this were the plan all along. We pass a few parks, a closed city farm and not many houses before lining up on Tollgate Road where potential passengers are far more plentiful. None oblige. One of the remaining enthusiasts in the front seat lifts his sleeve to reveal the bus-related tattoo he just got, and the other is perhaps less impressed than he'd hoped. We've now been going over an hour, and as a blessing the driver doesn't deviate into Beckton bus station but stops outside. I have no interest in riding the 129 back the other way because it's pretty mundane apart from the two magic subterranean minutes in the middle. Let's hope other people find it useful and it doesn't prove a wasted connection.