If you ever fancy a cheap excursion into Surrey by train, all without travelling beyond zone 6, try the Banstead Loop. It's not technically a loop, you have to get off and walk in the middle, also that's not an official name (it just passes through what used to be Banstead Urban District). But the Banstead Loop does spin by the finest racecourse near London, also it only takes an hour and ten minutes from Purley to Sutton, like so. Purley: This zone 6 metropolis needs no further introduction. Reedham: One of London's 10 least used stations (being quite near Purley). Coulsdon Town: Used to be called Smitham prior to 2011. Even fewer passengers than Reedham. Woodmansterne: Still in London, just, by 500m. Not in the village of Woodmansterne, more Coulsdon West. I blogged about the station and its hinterland in some depth in 2018. Chipstead:: Full bloggage two months ago. In short, the railway arrived in 1897 and a commuter village grew up in the valley. It's just the right side of posh, thus sadly no chip shop. Its finest feature is Banstead Woods, an expansive ancient woodland on the chalk escarpment. If you have the time it's probably the nicest place on the loop to stop off, but best carry on. Kingswood Kingswood is a sprawling non-nucleated village of ancient origin which was transformed by the railway. It's also almost relentlessly posh, with swirls of arcadian housing on large plots behind mighty hedges. The man who sold the local manorial estate to the housing developers was Cosmo Bonsor, a brewery manager turned Conservative MP who moved fast. He bought Kingston Warren in 1885, joined the South Eastern Railway Board in 1894, encouraged the development of a railway to Kingswood (arriving 1897) and then disposed of 640 acres of land in 1906. The turreted manor house was eventually bought by the BBC to house its Research & Design department, making Kingswood Warren the birthplace of stereo radio and Ceefax, but they evacuated in 2010 and the big house now does luxury nuptials full time. You'll see none of this from the station. impressively large 'kiss and ride' loop, a turnaround where cars can drop off stockbrokers on the way to the office, or wait to pick them up again on the way back. For a village where most houses own multiple vehicles there's no decent-sized car park, only a recognition that nobody wants to walk home if they can possibly avoid it. The sole watering hole hereabouts is The Kingswood Arms, another sturdy Tudorbethan mock-up, and beyond that a short parade where hair and beauty solutions proliferate. Until 2017 the biggest local employer by far was Legal and General, a short hike up Furze Hill, but their building's currently being turned into "a vibrant later living community with 270 specialist age-appropriate apartments", or old-people's home in the old vernacular. Money talks in Kingswood, always has. Tadworth Tadworth, once a hamlet on the Reigate Road, now a substantial suburban village for all the usual railway-related reasons. It's also the furthest you can live outside London and still travel in from zone 6, at least south of the river, such are the historic vagaries of the fare system. It feels like a proper community as soon as you step outside the station, or at least after you've schlepped up the ramp, with a couple of short shopping parades to either side of the cutting. The smallest outlet does repairs and alterations in a delightfully retro cubbyhole, and the largest is an actual travel agent with two staff ready at their desks to coax pension overspill into funding a short hop to the Channel Islands or the safari of a lifetime. Most notably the old station building has been taken over in its entirety by a meze bar called The Bridge, this being its location, with live crooning from Martin on offer every Friday night. We still have one more stop to go. Tattenham Corner Tattenham Corner, less than 200m from the grass that horses thunder round, where once seven platforms were needed to cope with passenger traffic on race days. Today there are only three, much of the surplus having been replaced by a long cul-de-sac called Emily Davison Drive, she being the Suffragette who threw herself under the King's horse at the adjacent bend. The austere terminus would have been rammed last Saturday for the Derby but is otherwise anything but, so heaven knows how the member of staff in the modern ticket office fills their time from (gosh) before 6am to (blimey) after 10pm. Just outside the station the main road actually crosses the racecourse, or at least the starting spur for the five furlong dash. It's amazing to stand there looking down across the entire course, the grandstand and the Mole Valley beyond, plus all the downland in the centre has public access should you fancy a wander. A huge pub called Tattenham Corner is elevated alongside, a true moneyspinner last week and with plenty of room on the front terrace otherwise. If you've ever been to the races here you'll know how glorious the location is, and if not be reassured you don't need a top hat or fascinator to soak in this scenic corner of the North Downs. Epsom Downs nine-platform terminus was needed to meet peak demand. Even the opening of Tattenham Corner didn't initially lead to a slimming down, and only in 1969 did British Rail finally cut the number of platforms to two, then in 1989 to one. What exists today is a runty platform with minimal facilities, the 1980s station building having since been converted to a kindergarten. What's more the last 400m of track has been converted into a redbrick cul-de-sac of about 80 homes called Bunbury Way. As a cunning way of alleviating housing pressure it's brilliant and as an additional labyrinth which passengers now have to negotiate before catching sight of a train it's pure masochism, indeed I only reached my departing train with two minutes to spare. Much more about the Epsom Downs branch here. Banstead: A single-platform halt beside a timber yard, accessed down glum stairs, not close enough to the centre of Banstead to be properly useful. Very nearly in London but not quite. I'm due to write about it as part of my 'One Stop Beyond' series so I won't say more now, not that there is much. Belmont: A single-platform halt with no redeeming features, essentially austerity writ large, just over the Greater London boundary. Sutton: This zone 5 metropolis needs no further introduction. It's not "the most scenic railway lines you can enjoy with an Oyster card" as MyLondon once dubiously attested. But it has its moments, the Banstead Loop, and you may never have been to any of it.

It's Indie News Week, which I know because I picked up a copy of this month's Enfield Dispatch and it's on the back page. The Public Interest News Foundation have thus launched an awareness-raising/crowdfunding campaign for independent news - slogan No New Is Bad News - and 30 local outlets have signed up. Maybe one of them's near you, so I thought it wouldn't hurt to divide up their list by region to help you click through. Northern Ireland Newry.ie The Detail VIEWdigitalScotland Bylines Scotland Glenkens Gazette Greater Govanhill Shetland News The Edinburgh Reporter The Ferret The Scottish BeaconNorth East Bishop Press Ferryhill & Chilton Chapter Shildon Town Crier Spennymoor News The Bridge Wales Bro360 Bylines Cymru Caerphilly Observer Carmarthenshire     News OnlineNorth West Blog Preston The MeteorYorkshire/Humber The Northern Eco↑ West Leeds Dispatch West Midlands Lichfield LiveEast Midlands Great Central Gazette News Journal NNJournalEast Anglia Bedford Independent HIHub Network Norwich South West Pulman's Weekly The Bristol CableSouth East Eastbourne Reporter Meon Valley Times News OnTheWightLondon Enfield Dispatch Hackney Citizen Newham Voices The Greenwich Wire Waltham Forest Echo London Centric), Azeez Anasudhin (London Daily Digital), Dorothy Stein (Salamander News), Marco Marcelline (Waltham Forest Echo), Tabitha Stapely (Tower Hamlets Slice), so be aware several more events are planned in London, across the country and online. And remember to support independent local news because you'll miss it when it's gone, as in many parts of the country it already has.

45 45 Squared 21) NORTHAMPTON SQUARE, EC1 Borough of Islington, 70m×60m square at the quieter end of Clerkenwell, half of it old and half new, and all a bit on the wonk. It's tucked away in the slice of streets between St John's Road and Goswell Road, somewhere between Angel and Barbican stations but not especially near either, which can make it a bit of a walk to lectures. Northampton Square was laid out in 1803 on peripheral fields near New River Head. It was was aligned on the skew so fits awkwardly into the grid that followed, with roads radiating out from the corners and the middle of two sides. A rim of fine Georgian terraces followed, each house tall and thin with arched sash windows and an entirely ornamental balcony. Some were shops, one irregular wedge became a pub and several were occupied by craftsmen working on clocks, watches and jewellery. Such was the concentration of clock- and watchmakers that the British Horological Institute made its headquarters in the southwest corner, their new redbrick building opened by Sir Edmund Beckett, the grumpy sod who designed the clock mechanism that triggers Big Ben. The BHI finally moved out in 1978 and number 35 is now occupied by the National Centre for Social Research, home of the British Social Attitudes survey. Fanny Wilkinson of the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association. It includes a Victorian bandstand, a feature more usually found in a park, with a rustic tiled roof and a dance-friendly wooden floor. I was intrigued by a council notice that says "We have been informed that groups have been falsely claiming that they have hired the bandstand and telling people they must leave". Users are reassured that "if anyone not in possession of a valid permit asks you to leave the bandstand, then you are able to refuse to do so", and I can only imagine the backstory there. Fanny also built a gardener's shed which has since been repurposed as a tiny cafe, its stated preoccupation being that external tables and chairs are for customers only and must not be moved. If you've brought a refillable cup you might have more luck with the 1885 drinking fountain and its very-much-not-1885 metal tap. What very much jars is the lack of lovely Georgian terraces across the northern half of the square. Instead hulking institutional buildings proliferate, a warren of learning stacked on many levels, this being the Clerkenwell campus of a major university. It started out as the Northampton Institute in 1894, a body dedicated to promoting industrial skills including engineering, artistic crafts and (inevitably) horology. The first building occupied one of the six wedges round the square and as time's gone by two more have fully succumbed including the snuffing out of two entire streets. The demolition of multiple terraces was rubberstamped in 1962 by the LCC's Historic Buildings SubCommittee who concluded that Northampton Square had always been geometrically unsatisfactory, its six side-streets making 'the proportion of void to solid excessive'. Hence the flood of students. City University, or rather City St George's, University of London as it now styles itself having swallowed up St George's medical school last summer. The institution has a long habit of swallowing vocational minnows, having previously absorbed St Bartholomew School of Nursing & Midwifery (1995), Charterhouse College of Radiography (1995) and the Inns of Court School of Law (2001). This latter acquisition allows City to claim four former Prime Ministers as alumni - Asquith and Attlee direct, and Thatcher and Blair as former lawyers. Perhaps my favourite Northampton Institute fact is that it's an official Olympic venue having hosted the boxing in 1908, a suspiciously partisan tournament in which Great Britain took 14 of the 15 medals. It's also where George Baxter pioneered the world's first commercially viable colour printing process, although the site of his Victorian workshop is now the student cafe if the location of his blue plaque is anything to go by. Northampton Square is thus a peculiar hybrid of elegance and utility, one side a screen of privacy and the other a magnet for backpacks, lanyards and scurrying labgoers. Look one way and it could still be a tradesmen's terrace, look the other and the skills we need for the future are being honed in countless classrooms, because Northampton Square has always been technically-minded.

In April 2024 Sadiq Khan proposed introducing an express 'Bakerloop' bus route in lieu of a Bakerloo line extension. It was part of a proposed doubling of the Superloop network. BL1: Waterloo → Elephant & Castle → Burgess Park → Old Kent Road → New Cross Gate → Lewisham January 2025 TfL launched a consultation for the Bakerloop route and also covered a double decker with brown vinyl to promote the occasion. Yesterday TfL revealed the consultation results and confirmed that the BL1 will start in the autumn. • The northbound stop outside Lewisham station has been removed to help speed up the route. This leaves three stops in central Lewisham, one at Loampit Vale which is 150m away from Lewisham station, so it's no great loss. • Route 453, which shadows the BL1 between Elephant & Castle and New Cross, will have its frequency reduced. We don't know by how much. It currently runs 8 times an hour for most of the day. The press release doesn't mention a start date, only "the autumn", but it's almost certainly going to be Saturday 27th September because a separate announcement yesterday confirmed that's the day the contract to operate the BL1 begins. Subject to consultation, the next phase of the expansion would include a new SL13 service, travelling between Ealing Broadway and Hendon; a new SL14 service, travelling between Stratford bus station and Chingford Hatch; and a new SL15 service travelling between Clapham Junction and Eltham station. This is the map of 'Superloop 2' that the Mayor tweeted in April last year as part of his election campaign, but I've recoloured it. In grey are the ten existing Superloop routes, SL1-SL10. brown is the new Bakerloop route, BL1. (I've had to extend it to Waterloo because that wasn't the original plan) blue are the five proposed Superloop routes that now have a number, SL11-SL15. SL11: North Greenwich → Woolwich → Thamesmead → Abbey Wood 472. It will in fact replace route 472 but only stop in select locations, with other routes picking up the slack at unserved stops inbetween. Introducing it will actually save TfL some money. The consultation for the SL11 closed in April. SL12: Gants Hill → Romford → Elm Park → Rainham 66, which from experience is already pretty speedy as it hurtles along the A12. The eastern end will be a very welcome north-south link in a borough whose railways run west-east and where existing bus routes have a tendency to meander rather than run direct. Most innovatively the Rainham terminus will be at the remote estuarine Ferry Lane industrial estate. The consultation for the SL12 closed in May. SL13: Ealing Broadway → Hanger Lane → Brent Cross → Hendon 112, and quite what it means for the frequency of that route remains to be seen. SL14: Stratford → Walthamstow → Chingford Hatch 69/97 corridor out of Stratford and then entirely replace the 357, but only the consultation will tell us that. SL15: Clapham Junction → Eltham I see we've abandoned all pretence that Superloop routes are numbered in a logical way. The first ten were supposedly numbered clockwise starting in the north, whereas these five are numbered all over the place in order of introduction. yellow routes, notionally SL16-SL20, which could/should follow on later. • Harrow to Barnet (via Edgware): There are many possible routes from Harrow to Edgware so the chosen path is hard to call but I suspect it'll follow the 186, then the 384 from Edgware to Barnet. • Barnet to Chingford (via Enfield): This outer orbital will probably shadow the 307 to Enfield, then 313 to Chingford, maybe. • Richmond to Wimbledon (via Roehampton): This'll head round the east side of Richmond Park and Wimbledon Common, most likely shadowing the 493 and then the 93. • Ealing Broadway to Kingston (via Richmond): This is plainly an express 65, a busy frequent route on roads often clogged and slow, so it's not clear how it'd be much faster. • Hounslow to Hammersmith (via Great West Road): The clue here is 'via Great West Road' which strongly suggests an express H91, potentially also using the A4 to skip the traffic in Chiswick. maybe twenty, and even less of a Loop than it ever was.

When June comes round a heck of a lot of events happen. Temperatures are up, daylight's almost at its max, the sun should be out and it pays to make the most of these optimum conditions. Some pencil in July or August, but an awful lot of diary organisers flick no further than June and schedule their big event there. Be it major festival, community show, stadium gig or local arts event they come thick and fast at this time of year because the optimum outdoor window in the UK is restrictively brief. I didn't feel the need to go to the Lambeth Country Show this year because Saturday was a washout so I thought Sunday might be over-busy, also it's never been the same since they erected the perimeter wall, also I've seen the owls and sheep shearing before, also Chucklehead didn't come this year, but the atmosphere's always great and the horticultural show vegetable displays are consistently brilliant even if it's got harder and harder to actually see them, and no other borough council puts on anything even vaguely approaching this so it would be best to take advantage while it lasts. If you did go, we'd welcome a 50 word review of what you thought. Theydon Bois Open Gardens. Things To Do This Weekend. But there was a great big banner on the fence outside The Bull where local folk couldn't have missed it, and I eventually found a poster in the window of the Theydon Bois Bakery opposite the giant gingerbread man. Tickets were £5 from the Village Hall with refreshments served in the Church Hall nextdoor, all proceeds to St Clare Hospice and the Air Ambulance and sorry no dogs. I was however too early for the 12 noon start and didn't fancy hanging around the village's unlikely branch of the Brick Lane Bagel Co with the grey haired men for the best part of an hour so moved on. I suspect the TBHS Annual Show is better because it has tortoise races, but that's not until July. Epping Signalling Museum. To be fair it only opened two years ago and is tucked away at the end of the station car park. That said you can't miss the L11 locomotive they're repairing as your train pulls into Epping station, it's bright yellow and really stands out. It's an electric shunting loco created by welding 1931 two haulage cars together and is one of the exhibits you can look around if the front gate's unlocked. The other treasure here is a proper signal cabin full of levers to pull with a room full of railway ephemera underneath, mostly signalling related. Obviously it's not another 'start of June' one-off, but it does only open on Saturdays (from 10am) so I was never going to get inside and indeed I didn't. If you have been, we'd welcome a 50 word review of what you thought. South Woodford Jumble Trail. Google map because promoting a multi-location community event is easier than it once was. I mention the SWJT solely to confirm that not every one-off June event is a big-hitter, indeed there might well be one round your way if you think to look. Broxbourne Big Green Fest. I did go and see where Tesco Head Office used to be. HQ and relocated to Welwyn Garden City. The concrete bulwark I remembered had of course been demolished and replaced by housing, but somehow still under construction after the developers went bust and had to be rescued by a big name company. The first phase is as typically anodyne as you'd expect, though plainly meeting a need, and the shared ownership shoeboxes coming soon are yours for under £75k. Strangely the development's called Cheshunt Lakeside despite absolutely not being beside a lake, and ironically there's a new Tesco Express round the corner just before the level crossing. I did wonder, as I stood on a former industrial estate looking at nothing much, what the hell I was doing here rather than attending a brilliant start-of-June one-off event. They did seem to be everywhere yesterday, packs of folk intent on crossing the capital to attend that event they'd saved up for and were damned well going to enjoy. They tottered off trains in their high heels and crocheted stetsons, they gulped down their pre-festival canned cocktails and they moved with intent towards the entertainment of their dreams. Outside Barking station a steward in a blue tabard shepherded excitable lads with partying on their mind towards the park where Dr Banana, Sweely and Rich NxT would provide the pulsing soundtrack on an outdoor dancefloor, all yours for £72, and for god's sake don't lose your photo ID in the funky melee. You work all winter and in the summer you splash out to live your best life for one glorious afternoon, hopefully two or three. Some things you can do any day and some things you can only do once, or once a year, often in the jam-packed month of June. Seize the day, or rather seize the Sunday... carpe Solis.