I toured London yesterday. Barking and Dagenham I thought OK that's quite enough, I should probably go home now. Barnet the hotel was still heavily promoting a wedding fair they held in March 2022. Bexley I admired the two Empathy Revolution elephants placed there by Elephantman. Brent I noted that a Full Leg Wax only costs 50% more than a Half Leg Wax. Camden an elderly lady in a floppy floral hat outshone the hollyhocks behind her. City I picked up a copy of The Standard and it was only borderline toxic this week. Ealing we pulled up alongside a throbbing blue and yellow Yvonne Bradley. Greenwich the Next Train arrow at Abbey Wood switched to point at the wrong train 1 minute before departure. Hackney an angry man in a bucket hat ranted until someone gave him a bottle of water. Hammersmith and Fulham the American family were not enjoying the mechanical savagery of their UK trip. Haringey the three topless sunbathers in the park were vastly outnumbered by nearby pigeons. Hounslow I was looking at the lobsters when it started raining. Islington the pawnbroker's £/$ exchange rate was given to five decimal places. Kensington and Chelsea five chunks of melon had been left on a bench. Kingston the surveyor broke off from using his digital level and hid in a storeroom. Lambeth I was given a free pack of 'zingy' German wet wipes. Lewisham I was surprised by the emergence of four twisty signature ventilation columns. Merton the Wimbledon branding is already everywhere but the cycle park is now suspended. Newham we finished Squid Game 2 two hours before they released Squid Game 3, annoyingly. Redbridge the grass is looking terribly yellow (and the football car park sign is new). Richmond all the cakes and pastries had been reduced to £2, somewhat desperately. Southwark I realised that if I'd planned this better I could probably have gone to all of them. Sutton Fiko supposedly offers a skin fade for €16, and even if it's £16 it's still good value. Tower Hamlets I took four books out of the library but they don't have the Stevenson. Waltham Forest the ranty vaping woman blamed everyone except herself. Wandsworth a man in a blue conical party hat walked past Pizza Village carrying an umbrella. Westminster I picked up a copy of City AM magazine and it had four features about watches. I did not go to Havering again. I didn't go to Bromley, Croydon, Enfield, Harrow or Hillingdon either. I also went to Surrey but I didn't see anything interesting there.

The news from Havering (black holes, Schrodinger's bus and thatched rabbits) roundabout in north Havering has closed to traffic for 12 weeks. It is an almighty constriction. Gallows Corner flyover can be strengthened, even made safe for HGVs, safeguarding it for the next 60 years. But this requires sensationally savage road closures because the A12 arterial is already such a barrier that there's essentially no other way to cross from one side to the other. Through traffic is being diverted via the M25, which is miles and miles, and local traffic faces lengthy tortuous detours via insufficient roads increasingly choked with cars. From the south it makes a trip to the mega-Tesco basically unattainable and from the north it makes a quick nip into Romford most unwise. The only traffic permitted through the junction is public transport (and taxis and emergency vehicles) so the smart way across is by bus, but routes have reduced frequencies and anything trying to get through has to wait at temporary traffic lights (a 3-way junction with an approximate four-minute cycle time). I watched a suspicious number of vehicles trying to get through anyway, then struggling to reverse when they discovered their exit was blocked, blocking everyone else. Pedestrians can still cross but it's poorly signed, and basically stay the hell away unless you live here, in which case my deepest summer commiserations. A highly unexpected casualty of the Gallows Corner closure is the 375, one of London's least frequent buses which normally pootles out of Romford to serve the village of Havering-atte-Bower. For the duration of the closure it will instead terminate at Chase Cross, i.e. the urban 3 miles will be chopped off and only the rural lunge into Essex will remain. This is particularly rubbish for residents of H-a-B because it means their only bus won't even reach some shops, let alone a station, the intention being that they switch to/from the 175 to complete their journey. I went to ride this embarrassment of a stunted bus yesterday. A huge poster outside Romford Station warned potential passengers that the 375 wouldn't be stopping anywhere near here until September... so it was a bit of a surprise when a 375 rolled in at the bus stop opposite and disgorged several passengers. It was even more of a surprise when the supposedly non-existent bus reappeared and took a dozen of us out of central Romford. We passed at least six bus stops with a yellow poster claiming the bus we were on wasn't running, then drove straight past the stop where the journey had been due to start. I rode the bus all the way into Essex, way out beyond Stapleford Abbotts almost to the M25, and at Passingford Bridge the driver swung round and took a growing cargo of passengers all the way back to central Romford again. So is the 375 buggered or not? • According to TfL's bespoke Gallows Corner webpage, the 375 definitely isn't serving Romford. • According to TfL's Bus Changes webpage, the 375 is not mentioned so must be running normally. • According to a poster outside Romford station, the 375 won't be back until September. • According to the Countdown display it's due in 3 minutes. • According to the 375 webpage and various apps, all's normal. • According to every ounce of pre-publicity, Chase Cross only. restored, not a moment too soon, by a public body intent on carving up the borough. That building is Upminster Tithe Barn, built in the mid 15th century on the orders of the Abbot of Waltham Abbey. At 44m it's not quite as long as Harmondsworth's but it is believed to be London's oldest thatched building. It was also in an increasingly poor state, so much so that it was added to Historic England's Heritage At Risk list in 2023, and with its damaged timbers and leaky roof could simply have decayed away. Financial rescue came from a most unlikely place, namely National Highways who contributed £650,000 towards full restoration. A team of master thatchers and other craftspeople started in January and were done by June, and the resulting finish does indeed look splendid. 11,000 bundles of water reed were used to rethatch the roof and it looks properly crisp, like a recently barbered cut. Up top are a particularly striking pair of thatched hares named Willow and Hunter by local schoolchildren, added as a final decorative flourish. Three lightning conductors have been added in the hope that the new fire alarms will never be needed. The intention is to retain the barn for public use, indeed the superbly quirky Museum of Nostalgia is due to be back inside and offering Open Days again next year. As yet nobody's found the cash to install toilets, and if you go along today all you'll see is a smart locked building beside a dusty car park, but this fine survivor is indeed back on the map. Lower Thames Crossing. This is the new road tunnel between Essex and Kent which will scythe off through fields around North Ockendon and help declog the QE2 Bridge, and which was given the financial go-ahead just last week. Grants from the Lower Thames Crossing Designated Funds have been offered to over 50 community projects including Purfleet Heritage Centre, a local Scout Group, a bike skills area in Gravesend and Thurrock LGBTQ+ Network. It may seem perverse to be donating cash allocated to road building to rethatch a barn nowhere near the proposed dual carriageway, indeed a cynic might suggest National Highways are only doing this to take some of the eco-heat out of their hugely controversial tunnel project. But wouldn't it be nice to be able to drive under Gravesend Reach, and aren't those boxing hares superb?

One Stop Beyond: Thames Ditton 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 Thames Ditton, one stop beyond Surbiton on the Hampton Court line. Obviously it's beside the Thames, in this case on the south bank (in Surrey) opposite the broad sweep of Hampton Court Park (which is in London). Thames Ditton is historic, well-off and quaint, but also post-industrial, over-private and lacking in river. If you live here, well done. Long Ditton to the east, but the two have inexorably coalesced over the years. Thames Ditton got the station which is why you're more likely to have heard of it. That's where I arrived yesterday morning to complete my challenge of visiting every station in London and its outer zones, this being zone 6 which keeps local commuters' fares down. A white-haired lady from Thames Ditton In Bloom was watering the flowerboxes and flowerwheelbarrows on the up platform, whipping open her portable stepladder as necessary, and also being thanked by passing passengers for all the work she was doing. She has horticultural competition from Thames Ditton Men In Sheds who've knocked up three wooden habitats called Bug Halt, Bug Central and Bug Junction in an elevated garden above the ramp opposite. Even before nipping into the cosy waiting room with its small mornings-only cafe and stack of local leaflets, I could tell this was a community that looks after itself with pride. The heart of Thames Ditton is its snaking high street, a cottage-lined thoroughfare that wiggles down to where the ferry used to be. A lot of weatherboarded frontage is still evident, also a couple of old pubs of which Ye Olde Swan is the real deal with a waterfront terrace and a backstory as the site of a Tudor hunting lodge, what with Henry VIII's palace being just across the water. The Red Lion, by contrast, is merely a fine free house with an obsession for hanging baskets. For groceries there's a smart Budgens, the bank has inevitably become an estate agent and for plump pastries it's got to be the Nice Buns Cafe. The top row of the newspaper rack goes 'Telegraph Mail Times Mirror', for what its worth. As for the very long building with the cupola that's a Georgian mansion built for riverside status, later sold for £5000 to an Anglican hospice fleeing from Deptford. For over a century it's been known as the Home of Compassion, even after being sold off as a luxury care home, until last year the owners decided to tone down the mortality angle and glibly rebranded it Thames View instead. Ferry Works, a former boat-building yard that diversified into marine engines in the 1880s. You can track the site's subsequent history through three plaques and a To Let sign... manufactured the revolutionary central valve steam engine, moved to Rugby, the amazing Auto-Carrier car made here, Character Riverside Offices To Let. AC Cars arrived in 1911 to build open 2-seaters, coupés and chuggy saloons, also the first British car ever to win the Monte-Carlo rally. The company spent 75 years in Thames Ditton with its motor works just off the high street, in its later years churning out the pale blue three-wheeled invalid cars that used to crawl the nation's streets. All of that's since become flats, as has the site of the foundry that forged the Quadriga that bestrides Hyde Park Corner - also suitably blue-plaqued. The one scrap of riverside still accessible is a narrow slipway that now doubles up as Ye Old Swan's car park. You can tell access is limited because one workman had chosen to sit amidst the hatchbacks to eat his lunch. This is also the landing point for the footbridge that joins Thames Ditton Island to the mainland, and no you will not be visiting because it's private and the gate has a black pad. The island is 300m long and consists of a single central track faced by 48 detached properties, each of which started out as a weekend bungalow and is now a desirable hideaway with its own individual mooring. Despite being much closer to the south side of the Thames the island had always been part of Middlesex, and only in 1970 did residents manage to be officially relocated to Surrey. Alongside are two much smaller eyots, Boyle Farm Island and Swan Island, whose sum total of two properties get their mail delivered to a red lockup box at the top of the slipway. The Church of St Nicholas has been here since the 12th century, the oldest part of its structure being its broad squat flinty tower. It also contains what may be the oldest font in Surrey, a sturdy stone bowl dating back to 1120 with a carving of the Lamb of God on one side. Above the chancel the oak panels are an even rarer survivor, these depictions of the Day of Judgement from 1520 having somehow escaped destruction during the Reformation. Today the church is very welcoming of visitors so the door will likely be unlocked, or maybe I just got lucky while the Bereavement Cafe was meeting in the church hall. A particularly attractive exterior feature is the path that wends quarter of a mile from here down to the station, known as Church Walk. It's too narrow for vehicles so of the 60 houses only two have parking spaces, which must be fun on removals day, but the Victorian semis and cutesy cottages are so desirable that residents are all too happy to suffer the inconvenience. Vera Fletcher Hall where the local amdrams occasionally put on shows, wove through occasional leftover shards of woodland and eventually found my progress halted by a 90 acre sports ground. This is Imber Court, purchased by the Metropolitan Police Service in 1919 with recreation in mind. Not only is it the home of Metropolitan Police FC, a team who've reached the first round of the FA Cup five times, but also the training centre for the Met's mounted police. Looking across a sea of tennis courts I could see floodlights and the Des Flanders Stand in the far distance... and I presume someone was also watching me. headquarters of the Milk Marketing Board, they of "drinka pinta milka day", until watered down by William Waldegrave in 1994. It's now a housing estate and the MMB's sole local legacy appears to be that they helped pay for Thames Ditton Cricket Club's snazzy pavilion. I should also mention the Thames Ditton Miniature Railway, a teeny straddled treat, but their next open day isn't until 6th July. tip the river was again fenced off and the slipway hidden within a modern boatyard. Instead the local populace are left to make do with City Wharf Open Space, a scrap of waterfront mostly shielded by trees with a brief opening where the full sweep of the main river is finally revealed. The main problem with living round here, it turns out, is rather too much Ditton and nowhere near enough Thames.