45 45 Squared 13) THE SQUARE, UB7 Borough of Hillingdon, 40m entire village is pencilled in for demolition, every last building, because we're just outside Heathrow Airport and a Third Runway is coming. Longford, a key staging point on the old route to the West Country. It's here that the Bath Road crossed the River Colne and the Wraysbury River, initially by fording both hence the name 'Long Ford'. Stagecoaches, royal retinues and early vehicles would once have passed along the village's curving high street, at least until 1928 when the Colnbrook bypass opened and traffic was diverted a tad to the north. These days the only vehicles that can pass all the way through the village are buses, the remainder blocked by a filter at the eastern end lest the hinterland of Heathrow overwhelm the place. Beyond this barrier are a Premier Inn, a Thistle hotel and a slew of Uber drivers waiting for a hire, and close is by the austere fortress of the Colnbrook Immiration Removal Centre. Longford, however, remains very much a village. Longford, with its decrepit homes and listed cottages almost nextdoor, but that's the curse of Heathrow expansion for you. village green, incontrovertibly triangular in shape so The Triangle would have been a much more appropriate name. Two cottages were later built in the centre disguising things somewhat, and these days The Square is merely one side of the old green so not even polygonal. It won't take long to walk along, not least because nobody officially lives here. 520 Bath Road so we can disregard it. Instead I'm afraid we're going to have to focus on items of street furniture, kicking off with a BT callbox that's currently displaying an advert for a Katsu Chicken Wrap. A McDonalds exists at the Shell garage less than half a mile up the road, which it has to be said is one of the benefits of an international airport erupting beside your village. The payphone alas is doomed according to a poster inside dated 22/1/25, the reason being "it just isn't used enough", which in terms of Ofcom criteria means it must have been used for fewer than 52 calls a year. Villagers have 90 days to save it, i.e. until next Tuesday, although I doubt many of them have even noticed. The Square ends abruptly at a bridge over a weedy braid of the River Colne, beyond which lies The Island. This genuinely is an island and has has been a residential hideaway for centuries, now slightly denser since certain cottage plots got sold off for flats. Officially it's private property overseen by The Island Road Residents Ass Ltd, although it's not attractive or elusive like Eel Pie Island so nowhere particularly worth trespassing. More delightful at this time of year is the lawn by the river's edge where a patch of bluebells and dandelions has burst forth on the edge of some straggly woodland. Stepping into the trees soon bursts the illusion, however, the undergrowth scattered with takeaway tubs, vodka bottles, two old boots and a discarded For Sale sign. The quaint row of buildings along the third side of the triangle includes Willow Tree Cottage and Queen River Cottage, both built in 1739. Both are white-rendered with dormer windows, both are grade II listed and only one has an ambulance parked out front. Much more impressive and welcoming is the White Horse pub, a wonky timber-framed building that's fundamentally Tudor and has very low ceilings. Its long-term landlords have gone to particular effort to bedeck the place with windowboxes and flowering tubs, and also to waft out the smell of gravy as Sunday lunchtime approaches. If you're ever stuck overnight at Heathrow you could do worse than drop in for a pint and maybe a plate of Nanny Marge's Fish Pie, assuming Longford's still here next time you fly. Longford has two bus stops, one of which is called The Square and the other of which is called Heathrow Close. And Heathrow really is close, the T5 car park that's accessed by self-driving pods being less than 200m from this scene of pastoral pleasantry. You can't walk there because the airport's security perimeter is fierce and additionally backed up by the intermediate Duke of Northumberland's River. Indeed it's so close that Heathrow recently put in a planning application to erect a 7m-high sound barrier between the end of the runway and the beleaguered village of Longford. This is because the government recently agreed to allow alternating runway operation when the wind is from the east, a move outlawed for decades by the Cranford Agreement which protects airspace over Hounslow. This change requires the construction of an additional main taxiway at the western end of the northern runway and this'll bring ground noise much closer to the airport perimeter. Only live in Longford if your need for convenience and cheap property outweighs your need for silence and security of tenure. Intriguingly the borough of Hillingdon has one more thoroughfare called The Square which has a bus stop named after it and which isn't square. It's in the artificial business zone of Stockley Park, where all VAR decisions are made, just off the Grand Union Canal near Hayes. The Square is the easternmost segment and is actually a long oblong, surrounded by six huge buildings suitable as corporate HQs half of which are currently empty. This The Square would have been more interesting to write about but I blogged it back when I explored the teensy postcode district of UB11 so you got the doomed village backwater instead. Its destiny is to become part of the apron surrounding T5's new northern satellite terminal, just south of the extra runway, so you may one day end up taxiing across The Square oblivious to its past charms.

I saw this poster outside a bar in Hackney. I can do a very rough check of beer prices in London by scrolling back through this blog. • At the 2012 Olympics a pint of lager cost £4.80. 2016 I cringed when a bottle of Becks cost £5.25. 2019 a pint of lager cost £5.95 and I chose not to buy a second. 2021 I bought a round which topped £6 a pint. Also if you step out of the London bubble then pints are significantly cheaper. the average price of a pint of draught lager nationwide every month. latest data the UK average price of a pint is £4.80, way less than Londoners pay. And here are the years various pint/pound thresholds were crossed. » £1 a pint in September 1988 probably That last pound took just three years, so beer inflation's certainly ramping up. Obviously other factors play an important part like energy prices, taxation and staff costs. But it is increasingly hard to justify a long evening in a London pub. Just don't stop, else there'll be fewer and fewer of them left.

A couple of weeks ago when e-bikes were banned from TfL services, we mused on what TfL's announcement might be. • All types of e-bike, e-scooter and e-unicycle are banned except foldable e-bikes. We now have TfL's wording which you can see on this poster. Big letters: No e-scooters, e-unicycles or non-foldable e-bikes Smaller letters: allowed on TfL services.* Small letters: Failure to comply may result in prosecution. Tiny letters: * E-bikes are permitted on the Silvertown Tunnel cycle shuttle service and on the Woolwich Ferry "No e-scooters, e-unicycles or non-foldable e-bikes" is probably the optimum wording. In terms of importance e-bikes should be at the beginning, but the use of "non-foldable" would then be ambiguous so it's best at the end. Non-foldable is a much better word than unfolded which I'm glad has been summarily dumped. That was the poster. "Non-foldable e-bikes are prohibited on TfL services except for the Silvertown Tunnel cycle shuttle and the Woolwich Ferry." This starts well and then gets bogged down in exceptions. Over half of the announcement is about where e-bikes aren't banned - two services used by maybe a few hundred cyclists weekly so of minimal relevance. Alas over a loudspeaker you have to say the asterisk out loud and this gives it undue prominence, lest some e-bike warrior be fooled into thinking they can't cross the Thames downstream of Tower Bridge. The announcement's also a triple negative with "non-foldable", "prohibited" and "except for" to try to get your head around. "Customer information. All folded and unfolded e-scooters and e-unicycles are prohibited on TfL services. Non-foldable e-bikes are also prohibited on TfL services except for the Silvertown Tunnel cycle shuttle and the Woolwich Ferry. For more information speak to a member of staff. Thank you." The "no e-bikes" message is utterly buried here because someone's felt the need to incorporate e-scooters and e-unicycles too. I don't know about you but I hardly ever see e-unicyclists around London, let alone sneaking onto the tube with their single wheel steeds. Sure they're banned but no way do we need to be reminded about this every five minutes, it's total overkill. What we've got here is a brand new no e-bikes policy the public needs to be told about, but dressed up in faff so that the campaign makes far less impact than it might. This is what happens when you plump for precision over simplicity. And all because words are difficult, however they unfold.

The major roadworks at the Bow Roundabout are complete, indeed were completed five weeks ago apart from the opening of the contraflow beneath the flyover. Now it seems this filter lane won't be opening until later in 2025 while TfL "complete more works to protect the structure," so let's not delay my in-depth report into all the changes at my local roundabout. The Bow Roundabout is a significant split-level interchange which opened in 1967 where the A11 and A12 meet. The former took the flyover and the latter the underpass, so it's only those switching between the two (and local traffic) who need to use the roundabout. With the opening of the Silvertown Tunnel TfL decided physical mitigation works were needed - smoothing a few curves, improving kerbs, widening a couple of carriageways and diverting the aforementioned contraflow lane. It's amazing that this somehow took five months given how little fundamentally changed, but the location of the roundabout above the River Lea brought with it additional challenges. Traffic on the roundabout It's still a bit early to decide if the extra lane has eased the traffic. I haven't seen any bad jams recently but I may just not have been looking at the right time. Also the Silvertown Tunnel's only been open for a week, plus that tunnel doesn't lead here anyway so goodness knows why TfL thought this roundabout needed modifying. If anything you'd expect the new toll on the Blackwall Tunnel to have reduced the traffic here all by itself. contraflow lane from Marshgate Lane which no longer has its own separate access point. Instead it diverts under the flyover, or will do when it opens, which should be a safer prospect all round. Many's the time I've forgotten the contraflow lane exists and stepped out to cross without looking both ways, so it should be harder for local pedestrians to walk in front of traffic now it's been diverted. longer than it did when I first moved here. Traffic lights on the roundabout Previously every arm got 16 seconds, regular as clockwork. From Bow Road: 4 seconds for bikes then 12 seconds for vehicles From A12 northbound: 16 seconds From Stratford High St: 4 seconds for bikes then 12 seconds for vehicles From A12 southbound: 16 seconds But that's now changed, with traffic emerging from Bow Road the major beneficiary. From Bow Road: 4 seconds for bikes then 18 seconds for vehicles From A12 northbound: 18 seconds From Stratford High St: 4 seconds for bikes then 10 seconds for vehicles From A12 southbound: 18 seconds One complete cycle still takes 64 seconds because these intervals overlap a little. But traffic coming off Bow Road now has 50% longer to enter on green which is excellent, helping to reduce queues and often meaning every vehicle waiting slips through. If the traffic backs up less often that also means fewer vehicles idling and belching fumes outside my front door so I'm all in favour. Meanwhile traffic coming off Stratford High Street now has 17% less time, which I thought was bad until I realised there are now three lanes instead of two, and that's why they've been able to reduce the time while increasing throughput. Pedestrians And this matters because pedestrians don't always wait patiently on the pavement for the man to go green. Often they'll launch out across a gap in the traffic thinking it looks safe, whereas the Bow Roundabout is in fact a dangerous maelstrom where traffic is capable of appearing suddenly and without signalling. Make that gap 50% wider and the chance of a very nasty accident increases. Also I believe one of the countdown timings is incorrect, being a few seconds too short, so even those who've crossed properly could find themselves midway when the lights change. Start of Bow Road: 1 lane (5m), countdown starts at 3 End of Bow Road: 2 lanes (8m), countdown starts at 5 Start of Stratford High St: 2 lanes (9m), countdown starts at 5 Stratford to centre of roundabout: 2 lanes (9m), countdown starts at 5 Bow to centre of roundabout: 3 lanes (12m), countdown starts at 5 End of Stratford High St: 3 lanes (12m), countdown starts at 8 I wonder if you can see the dodgy countdown in that list. Mostly as the number of lanes increases the length of the countdown gets longer, which is what you'd expect. One lane 3 seconds, two lanes 5 seconds, three lanes 8 seconds. But one of the 3-lane crossings only has a 5 second countdown - the crossing between Bow and the centre of the roundabout - and that's not long enough at all. Cyclists cycle racks have been provided under the flyover, but no sane cyclist would leave a bike there. Things thus aren't particularly worse for cyclists but neither are they any better. first junction in London where they were introduced as a response to two fatal accidents after the blue paint first went down. A ghost bike memorial to one of those deaths is still chained to the railings above the river. So what's intriguing is how many cyclists continue to jump the lights and ride onto the roundabout anyway. The synchronisation of those lights is annoying because they're deliberately set up to stop you - if the first set isn't red the second always will be. But I did some counting for ten minutes and I reckon only half the cyclists waited and the other half made the choice to launch off past red, which is a lot more than I expected. All that effort to improve the junction for cars but little for pedestrians and nothing extra for cyclists - let's just say it doesn't help. 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It was nearly Easter Sunday today. Easter, as you may know, is the first Sunday after the full moon after the spring equinox. First Council of Nicaea set the rules for determining the date of Easter. spring equinox was always on 21st March, even when it wasn't. 2019 it made four weeks difference. same thing will happen in 2038 when Easter will be kicked ahead from 28th March to 25th April, the latest possible date. 19 year cycle of full moon dates and used that instead. complicated cycle involving epacts, golden numbers and leap years so let's not get into that here. ecclesiastical full moon in the period 21st March to 18th April inclusive. new moons rather than full moons. ecclesiastical new moon on or after 8th March. 1st Jan, 31st Jan, 1st Mar, 31st Mar, 29th Apr, 29th May, 27th Jun, 27th Jul, 25th Aug, 24th Sep, 23th Oct, 22nd Nov Officially speaking, Easter is the first Sunday after the ecclesiastical full moon after the ecclesiastical equinox. This year that's 20th April, the Sunday after the imaginary full moon on 13th April. It doesn't always match up like that. But most years it does, including this year. So it wasn't nearly Easter Sunday today, sorry. But a few tiny tweaks to the rules and it could have been.