Yesterday's forecast was for clear skies and temperatures nudging 30 degrees, so I slapped on the suncream and steeled myself for a sweaty seaside promenade. Instead a sheet of high cloud spanned the Thames estuary, thickening later to bring showers, but everyone who'd come to enjoy a summer's day carried on regardless. So here are 16 postcards from Southend. Nearest station: Southend East ✉ Southchurch Hall is an extraordinary survivor, just five minutes south of Southend East station. This unlikely medieval manor house finds itself set adrift amid a grid of uncompromising suburban terraces, surrounded by ornamental gardens and a square moat. It looks wonky because it's from 1354 and pristine because it was substantially rebuilt in 1930 when the council first got their hands on it. It now forms a key part of Southend's heritage portfolio and is free to pop in, so long as you don't arrive too early in the day or in the week. Inside is an unexpectedly large timbered hall, the illusion only ruined by the fire extinguishers by the stairwell, which I guessed correctly is often hired out by the council for weddings. Other rooms nod to different eras - a Tudor Kitchen, a Stuart solar, a Victorian bedroom - and are bedecked with wooden artefacts of dubious intrinsic provenance. It's all very brown. A small gift shop provides a selection of pocket money souvenirs, also a panelled backhistory, and if you thought Southend was all bawdy beach fun then at least these fifteen minutes aren't. ✉ The Kursaal remains closed while its current owner works out what to do with it. The seafront entertainment complex had been hanging on as a bowling alley and casino but they closed in 2019 and 2020 respectively. Several shonky amusement arcades remain nearby. ✉ Behind the Kursaal, on land once occupied by on its outdoor entertainments, is the surprisingly enormous Woodgrange estate. Its blocks of terraced flats were knocked up in the 1970s and given unlikely names reflecting the site's provenance including Coaster Steps, Ferris Steps, Skelter Steps and Swingboat Terrace. They're from the "oh, bung all the car parking in a pillared space under the flats" school of architecture and have a poor social reputation locally. Calling one of the blocks Crystal Steps probably doesn't help. Nearest station: Southend Central ✉ Adventure Island continues to pack them in, partly because it's free to enter but also because we've reached the increasingly desperate second half of the summer holidays. The sunken garden is rammed with rides and attractions, many of them textbook examples of vertical rides within a minimal footprint. A day wristband costs £25 but an annual pass is currently available for £50 which seems excellent value if you're local and like screaming in midair. Yesterday's influx included scouts from Stanford-le-Hope and guides from Wickford, while the youngsters in blue Love Fun t-shirts turned out to be summer staff keeping the funfair ticking over. ✉ It's never too early to be thinking about Remembrance, so the people of Southend are being invited to knit poppies and pop them in a box ready for November. The plan is to line the 1.3-mile long pier with red handmade poppies (crocheting is also acceptable) to create a poignant yarnbomb tribute. So far they've received 17974 poppies, and I guess they can always space them out more if numbers fall short. Postal donations are also accepted. ✉ Southend's Edwardian cliff lift is now free and has been since August 2023. Donations are welcomed. While I was watching it a family nipped inside for a descent to beach level while a pair of pensioners puffed up the steps alongside, and I don't think either of them realised the true benefits are in an upward direction. ✉ The town's floral clock sits atop the cliffs near the Queen Victoria statue. The flowers are pristine but the clock presents a problem because it's flat and numberless so it's not possible to work out where the 12 is. All I can say is that the angle between the two hands was totally wrong for twenty past twelve so I assume it's broken. Nearest station: Westcliff ✉ The famous Cliffs Pavilion, the epitome of 60s leisure chic, is currently undergoing major refurbishment. The hexagonal sunken forecourt has been replaced by a worksite, what used to be the main upper entrance is now closed and finding a way in involves thinking "hang on, seriously, round here?" A slew of crowd-pleasing tribute acts are lined up over the coming months, also the actual Jack Dee, Tim Peake and Level 42, while Rylan returns to play the part of the Fairy Godfather in Cinderella this Christmas. Where else would he go? ✉ It's nigh impossible to walk past a Rossi's ice cream kiosk without buying two scoops of lemon ice, or maybe that's just me. BestMate instead plumped for one scoop of Creme Egg and one of Biscoff, which the menu outside felt it necessary to explain with the footnote 'Taste Like The Biscuit'. ✉ Southend's open-topped buses are running again, linking Leigh-on-Sea to Shoeburyness until mid-September. The route number is 99 so they've gone big on ice cream cornet imagery, hence this particular vehicle is called the Bubblegum Beachcomber. £5.50 return, £3.50 single. Nearest station: Chalkwell ✉ There's a fine sewage-tinged scum at present in the water lapping against the edge of Chalkwell beach. I was surprised to see so many families gambolling on the mudflats as the tide bubbled in, but I don't think the worst of the detritus makes it as far as the sandy patch artificially delivered to the edge of the esplanade. ✉ The biggest change since I was last in Southend is that a bronze statue of murdered MP Sir David Amess has been added to the shoreline near the Lifeguards base, overlooking the promenade where he used to walk his dogs. It's not a convincing likeness - his grin is insufficiently broad - but close enough and a touching tribute to the unwitting harbinger of city status. ✉ The new house facing the railway at 88 Undercliff Gardens is a jarringly modern townhouse, all curves and bright white surfaces. A flat roof replaced a pitched roof, and in a bold architectural statement a glazed teardrop now faces the estuary. Because I've subsequently read the planning application I know there's also a zen pebble garden up top, and that the council initially rejected it then swiftly relented. I suspect the neighbours hate it. Nearest station: Leigh-on-Sea ✉ Is there a fibreglass animal parade in Southend this summer? Yes of course, it's called Waddle-on-Sea and it's all about penguins. To think, people used to get excited about this kind of thing. ✉ Leigh-on-Sea's Old Town is a proper watering hole these days, with a chain of traditional fishermen's pubs along the narrow High Street. The largest is The Peterboat whose outdoor beer terrace crams them in, seemingly with space for half of Essex, although the tables weren't fully occupied after a recent cloudburst. For the more discerning drinker, a waiter will scuttle across the road carrying a rosé and a white wine from The Crooked Billet. ✉ For fresh seafood you want Osborne's but pick your outlet carefully. Their cafe in the old town does sit-down king prawns, pints of cockles and crab sandwiches (add £2 for salad leaves, coleslaw and tortilla chips on a soft white roll). But for slightly more wholesale prices try the fishmongery shed on the way to the back way to the station - still not cheap but BestMate was pleased to be heading home with a pack of octopus arms, thankfully not locally caught.

Bus Route Of The Day 138: Bromley North to Coney Hall Location: Outer London south Length of journey: 5 miles, 30 minutes Because it's 13th August I've been out riding the 138, because that's the Bus Route Of The Day. The 138 is one of several buses that serve the Bromley hinterland, funnelling suburbanfolk towards the shops and meatier transport options. It exists chiefly to serve an interwar estate to the south of Hayes, performing a loop around the back-avenues before returning to Bromley, and has been doing this mostly-uninterrupted since 1940. And because Coney Hall is an unseen mystery for the vast majority of Londoners I thought I'd spend half today's post on the bus and half exploring the near-rural hideaway at the far end. The 138 is operated by a fleet of single-door single-deckers and has recently been logistically shafted. It used to run every 20 minutes, or rather every 21-22 minutes because timetabling is a messy business, but in March was suddenly reduced to a half-hourly service. TfL argued this allowed them to run a more reliable service with the same number of vehicles, this because traffic conditions in Bromley are often somewhat congested. Local councillors argued the frequency reduction meant residents were concerned and angry yadda yadda ULEZ yadda yadda imposed without warning yadda yadda fundamental sense of unfairness yadda yadda but their petition had no effect so people now wait longer. I waited patiently. The weaving run through central Bromley always seems to take an age, this the inevitable consequence of high street pedestrianisation. All this manouvring did however provide optimum conditions for admiring the flower beds down the centre of Kentish Way, the blast of geraniums sponsored by local business Coutts (the electrical contractors not the bank). Our first true passengers board in the High Street, the early vanguard of shoppers returning home with bulging carriers, a bouquet of flowers and in one case a single bicycle tyre inside a bag for life. One lady grabs a Metro, not for the journey but for proper perusal when she gets home. And once we have a dozen on board we set off via Westmoreland Road, a gentle climb into instant suburbia. Superloop route SL5 also runs this way, now finally operated by double deckers, and it's noticeable that the first six passengers to alight our bus do so only at stops the express service skips. blogged), also the roundabout ahead is doubly special because the Greenwich meridian crosses it (as previously blogged) and it's the start of the A2022 (ditto). And so we reach Coney Hall. Coney Hall Farm, whose tenant had sole rights to catch rabbits (coneys) on a neighbouring patch of West Wickham Common. The estate was finally sold for housing in 1928 after the last owner died and was purchased by Morrell Brothers, housebuilders whose portfolio also included most of Petts Wood. They built avenues of white-fronted houses, also a single flat-roofed Art Deco house that's now part of the local health centre. Construction quality wasn't always great and in 1937 a Coney Hall resident called Elsy Borders led a mortgage strike citing 'slapdash workmanship', her default ultimately leading to an appeal heard in the House of Lords. If you have an hour spare, this Radio 4 drama tells the full story. London Transport initially refused to send buses onto the estate so a private 'luxury' coach service was provided to the nearest station at Hayes, but an ill-judged flotation on the stock market saw Morrells enter bankruptcy and the 138 arrived soon after. The Rabbit Hole Tavern. The loudest voice in Coney Hall belongs to the busybody who's slapped a huge banner opposite the Co-Op bemoaning a potential phone mast on the Green. Where is the integrity here, it screams, before urging everyone to fire off complaints to three separate email addresses because "4G is already adequate in our area". Perhaps if everyone had shouted louder, the public toilets the banner's attached to wouldn't have been closed forever. lumpen Greenwich Meridian marker by the changing rooms, although you won't remember the new bijou multi-use games area because the mayor of Bromley opened that just last month. The Loop also passes through the churchyard of St John The Baptist, by far the oldest church in West Wickham, now unhelpfully located on the brow of a steep paddock a mile out of town. The last bus stop before the Hail and Ride section is at Chestnut Avenue, this the 'hesitation point' where the driver always stops to flip the blind back to Bromley North even if nobody's waiting. And nobody was. Coney Hall's final houses butt up against Well Wood, a sizeable woodland left over from the original farmscape and opened up to the public in 1948. The paucity of public footpaths hereabouts mean it gets used to walk every dog in the district, and the provision of a small car park off Layhams Road makes getting here all too easy. The woods are lovely, just large enough to weave through and thick with oak, larch and holly, plus a slew of bluebells if you'd been here three months ago. Hunt carefully and you might find the plantation of Douglas fir planted for timber production in the war. And if you continue down the lane it suddenly gets really rural, a sheet of fields around the tiny hamlet of Nash which somehow is part of Greater London but where TfL have never sent a bus. The route that gets closest is the 138, but best alight the Bus of the Day in Coney Hall as intended. • Route 138: route map Route 138: live route map Route 138: route history Route 138: timetable Route 138: The Ladies Who Bus

A walk around the block can take a few minutes or quite a lot of minutes depending on where you live. For me it takes ten minutes, where I grew up it took 30 minutes and for my brother it takes over an hour, such is the paucity of rights of way in Norfolk. Attempted definition: a 'ride around the block' brings you back to where you started on a circuit with no other railways inside the enclosed space. Important clarification: interchanges must be at stations - no walking inbetween. Example: Green Park → Victoria → Westminster → Green Park is a ride around the block via the Victoria, Circle and Jubilee lines. The circuit is 4km long and encloses an area of about 180 acres. The shortest 'ride around the block' on the tube teensy sliver of the West End with the National Gallery in the middle. Charing Cross → Leicester Square: I started on the edge of Trafalgar Square by the top of the steps down to the tube station. Admittedly all these entrances are closed at present because the Bakerloo ticket hall is shut, but that's only temporary. I walked north past St Martin-in-the-Fields and the National Portrait Gallery to the entrance to Leicester Square station. It took me 5 minutes. Leicester Square → Piccadilly Circus: I headed west along the edge of Leicester Square past the Lego store and all the cinemas. Coventry Street was full of tourists and tat and got even busier as I reached Piccadilly Circus. It took me 5 minutes. Piccadilly Circus → Charing Cross: This was harder to walk direct because the grid of streets doesn't align and the National Gallery gets in the way. It's thus the longest of the three sides of the triangle, weaving back towards Trafalgar Square. It took me 7 minutes. Total walk: 17 minutes Charing Cross → Leicester Square: It was a 2 minute hike down to the Northern line platform because this station is seriously spread out, having been optimised for a tube line that no longer stops here. I got unlucky because I just missed a train and the next was 3 minutes away. After all that faff and waiting, the tube journey only took a minute. So far that's 6 minutes. Leicester Square → Piccadilly Circus: It took a minute and a half to follow the side passage to the Piccadilly line. I got unlucky because I just missed a train and the next was 3½ minutes away. After all that faff and waiting, the tube journey only took a minute. So far that's 12 minutes. Piccadilly Circus → Charing Cross: It took a minute and a half to follow the side passage to the Bakerloo line. I got unlucky because I just missed a train and the next was 4½ minutes away. After all that faff and waiting, the tube journey only took a minute. Total ride: 19 minutes The shortest tube rides around the block just shows the tube with no additional extra lines. First I looked for small gaps with stations at all the corners. These were almost all in central London. Then I measured the length of all the circuits. These are the ten smallest blocks I found. 1) 1.4km Charing Cross/Leicester Square/Piccadilly Circus 2) 1.6km Moorgate/Liverpool Street/Bank 3) 2.2km Tottenham Court Road/Holborn/Leicester Square 4) 2.4km Bond Street/Oxford Circus/Green Park 5) 2.5km Oxford Circus/Green Park/Piccadilly Circus 6) 2.6km Liverpool Street/Tower Hill/Aldgate East 7) 2.7km Oxford Circus/Tottenham Court Road/Piccadilly Circus 8) 2.8km Camden Town/Mornington Crescent/Euston 9) 2.9km Oxford Circus/Tottenham Court Road/Warren Street 10) 3.2km Baker Street/Bond Street/Oxford Circus area inside the block, not the distance round the edge, the smallest block changes. It's now Liverpool Street → Tower Hill → Aldgate East because the only gap in the middle is the Aldgate Triangle with an area of about 2 acres. But this is quite complicated to measure and throws up all kinds of anomalies so let's stick with distances instead. The longest ride around the block There are several huge loops in west London but they're all inadmissible because they don't have stations at the corners. The loop from Victoria south to Stockwell used to count but no longer does because the Battersea extension cuts across it. So we need to look to east London instead. The longest ride around the block on the tube turns out to be the Hainault Loop on the Central line. This is 20km from Leytonstone round to Hainault and Woodford, then back to Leytonstone again. That nudges into Essex, so if you want the longest ride around the block entirely within London it's Bank/London Bridge/West Ham/Monument at 18km long, which is just over 12 miles. all rail services, not just the tube. huge circuit from Clapham Junction to Richmond and Kingston and back again, all aboard one train, which is 30km long. However the District line intrudes inside this loop so I'm not allowing it. Instead the longest ride around the block is this loop in Greenwich and Bexley. The Blackheath/Slade Green circuit encloses 35 square kilometres - that's 14 square miles. That's a very large central area with no other rail services, this because the rail network across Bexley is rather thin and the local population isn't well served by London standards. The loop round Richmond and Kingston encloses a larger area at 56 square kilometres, but a lot of what's in the middle is Richmond Park and deer don't catch trains. Perth/Inverness/Aberdeen: 512km (318 miles), enclosing 4300 square miles Carlisle/Newcastle/York/Leeds: 472km (293 miles), enclosing 3000 square miles Carlisle/Newcastle/Edinburgh: 463km (288 miles), enclosing 4000 square miles The shortest ride around the block: Charing Cross/Leicester Square/Piccadilly Circus (1.4km) The longest ride around the block on the tube: the Hainault Loop (18km) The longest ride around the block within London: Blackheath/Slade Green/Blackheath (29km) Useful resources for checking all this: Google maps, Google MyMaps, tube map, tube map showing just the tube, geographical map of the London rail network, maps of the British rail network, Network Rail mileage lists

Fleeting CAMDEN TOWN The two branches of the river Fleet that rise on Hampstead Heath merge two miles lower down in the vicinity of Kentish Town. For my second visit to the river I'm skipping down to the confluence and attempting to follow its path onward through Camden Town. That means I won't be returning to Fleet Road in Hampstead to check if Fleet News still sells confectionery and bus passes (it does), nor going back to Tufnell Park where the river briefly pokes above ground to cross the Suffragette line in a rusty pipe (though I have fresh photographic evidence that it does). Instead let's revisit a backstreet off Kentish Town Road whose name nods back to a time before Victorian house builders covered the lot. This is Anglers Lane, once a haunt of freshwater fisherfolk, indeed 20 years ago the back of this Nando's featured a painted quote from an old Edwardian man who remembered catching fish and bathing here in his youth. That's long painted over and the sylvan river is also long buried, tamed into an arched culvert because it had the occasional habit of flooding on a grand scale. This specific area was residentialised in the 1850s, hence the streets have Crimean names like Inkerman Road, Alma Street and Cathcart Street, the latter built directly on the line of the former stream. Around the same time Europe's largest false-teeth factory was built on Anglers Lane, the premises of Claudius Ash & Co, but they departed in 1965 and the long redbrick building is now flats. Contours make it clear that the Fleet passed by at the foot of the lane via a slight dip on Prince of Wales Road. The name Kentish Town comes from an old name for the upper Fleet - the Ken Ditch, so called because it rose in Ken Wood at the top of Hampstead Heath. Minus ten points if you live locally and always assumed it was something to do with the county of Kent. Originally the heart of Kentish Town was lower down, nearer Camden, but better-off residents migrated up the valley as the Fleet there started to silt up and become more fetid. One regular visitor was Lord Nelson whose Uncle William lived in a house with a garden backing onto the river - cue hilarious anecdotes about the admiral coming to Kentish Town 'to keep an eye on the Fleet'. Nextdoor was a true local landmark, The Castle Inn, which is thought to have existed beside the stream since medieval times. The tavern gets 20 mentions in Gillian Tindall's seminal local history book The Fields Beneath, but longevity didn't save it and the Victorian incarnation only narrowly dodged demolition in 2013. Quinns is another corner pub, this time located in the sweet spot where the two main tributaries of the Fleet once merged. Its shell is a garish yellow, seemingly not repainted since I last blogged about the river in 2005, also the upper windows are in peeling disarray and half the gold lettering has fallen off. Everything about the physical building says 'closed' but everything online still says 'open', so I guess dishevelment is the disguise you need when you're the roughest pub in NW1. It's easier to research historic maps now than it was 20 years ago so I believe the actual confluence was marginally west, outside the pencil-fronted Hawley Primary School, but I'm surprised nobody's yet produced a truly accurate map tracing the Fleet across the urban landscape. Camden Road station and to the west runs Water Lane, the origin of whose name is self-evident, indeed there are reports than in 1826 the Fleet in flood was 65ft across at this point. The Regent's Canal reached Camden in 1816 and engineers faced a decision regarding how to cross the Fleet. They eventually decided that the two should share a course for a few hundred yards while weaving to the east, but with the Fleet relegated to a pipe underneath. A contemporary map shows the river meeting the canal by Kentish Town Road Lock, remaining hidden round the back of what's now the Sainsbury's superstore and re-emerging beyond the bridge at Camden Road. Follow the towpath today and you first pass Nicholas Grimshaw's arresting space-age wall of flats erected in 1989, then on the outside of the next bend the more recent and monumentally-unremarkable vernacular wedge of Regent Canalside. The end result, however you look at it, is that no local resident or tourist passing through would give the Fleet a second thought. There is however one place where the river still makes itself known and that's at the far end of Lyme Street. Stucco townhouses and smart terraces replaced the meandering Fleet here in the mid 18th century, ten of them now Grade II listed. Keep going and you reach the Prince Albert, a glaze-fronted tavern opened in 1843 with a similarly period interior. The pub is now hidden behind an enormous tree the size of a mushroom cloud, which may be why it describes itself as Camden's Best-Kept Secret on social media, although the racket coming from the screened-off beer garden suggests several people are well aware. But perhaps fewer realise that if you stand out front you can hear the sound of the culverted Fleet plain as day through a grating in the street. Look for the circular drain cover, keeping watch for bikes because it's recently been absorbed into a cycle lane junction, and if the light's right you might even see the rushing water as well as hear it. I certainly did. To follow the Fleet out of Camden cross Royal College Street and head for St Pancras Way. This is now a one-way ratrun that shadows the Regents Canal but in fact it follows the alignment of a very old packhorse track alongside the Fleet. To the right of the road the land still dips noticeably, most noticeably by the student accommodation at College Grove, while a Parcelforce depot fills much of what remains a marginal valley bottom. Elsewhere a massive regenerative blast has taken hold, from the hulking St Pancras Campus to a stripe of canalside apartments and a big hole where a life sciences cluster called Tribeca is taking shape. The developmental whirlwind only ceases at the gloomy walls of St Pancras Hospital, formerly St Pancras workhouse, and I'd best stop there before the Fleet trickles into St Pancras proper. 'Tracking the Fleet' by Mark McCarthy, an 18-page historic analysis of where the river ran through Camden 22 Fleeting photos so far (10 from round here)