Time Out are liars - official blogpost highlighting Time Out's tendency to lift research from dubious sources and then claim the information is 'official'. They did it again yesterday in a piece called "It’s official: 6 of the UK’s dirtiest beaches for water quality are near London", which it turned out was based on a press release from commercial website Holiday Park Guru. And last week they did it to me. There is now a new cheaper and greener way to get to London Stansted Airport. This would be via coach company Flibco who are indeed new and their coaches are indeed green. So far so good. The piece was plainly lifted from what I'd written, and fair enough they'd credited me and linked through - no complaints there. My issue was this line which was wilfully false. "Flibco joins National Express and First Essex in offering a bus service to the northeast-of-London airport, and, according to research from London blogger Diamond Geezer, it’s officially the cheapest way to get from the centre of the capital to Stansted." I never claimed Flibco was the cheapest, I merely presented all kinds of scenarios which showed it often was. Book well in advance and the Stansted Express is actually the cheapest, whereas Flibco never reduce their fares up front. But that wasn't the aspect which concerned me, it was their claim that what I'd said was somehow 'official'. Specifically it sounded like I'd said it was officially cheapest, which I hadn't, this was merely the Time Out journalist's false interpretation. I did email the journalist in question to express my displeasure, politely, but have heard nothing back. I therefore hope that writing about it in on my blog will bring the matter to the attention of those who work there. I know Time Out read this blog because they appropriated another of my posts last month, again with due accreditation, the very day after I last slagged them off for overuse of the word officially. not official, although if Time Out are happy to assume it is then I am happy to call them liars - official.

TfL are chopping and changing two more buses in central London, specifically the 30 and 205, according to the results of a consultation released on Friday. This is despite their proposals receiving the support of less than 5% of respondents and widespread disapproval from all 22 stakeholders who responded. Stuff public opinion, let's save money. The prime driver is a two mile curtailment of route 30 which'll now only run from Hackney Wick to Euston rather than to Marble Arch. This means the service can be operated with fewer vehicles and fewer drivers, saving a goodly few millions which can be redeployed elsewhere. Passenger numbers are down, apparently, plus both Euston Road and Baker Street are overbussed. Old 30:   Hackney Wick → Dalston → Islington → King's Cross → Euston → Marble Arch New 30: Hackney Wick → Dalston → Islington → King's Cross → Euston Old 205:   Bow Church → Whitechapel → Liverpool St → King's Cross → Euston → Paddington New 205: Bow Church → Whitechapel → Liverpool St → King's Cross → Euston → Marble Arch The 205 replaced two Stationlink services, one clockwise and one anticlockwise, along with short-lived 705 which was introduced to connect south of the river. Not everyone wants to take the tube between mainline stations, indeed some can't, so a step-free alternative which operates even during engineering works is always welcome. The leaflet also made play of the 205's links to four major London hospitals, not because patients need to travel between them but because inner London residents need to get there and back. The new diversion annoyingly chops off both Paddington station and St Mary's Hospital and that's why it's been doubly opposed. 27 instead. These trips can be made in the future via same-stop interchange at pairs of stops changing between bus routes 205 and 27 at stops between Hampstead Road and Baker Street, all of which have shelters. There are six stops on the 205/27 overlap, where 'all you have to do' is get off, wait and get on your next bus. But some people find getting on and off buses difficult, especially those who go to hospitals, so that's not ideal. Also route 205 runs every 10 minutes and route 27 every 12, so it could be a bit of a wait. Also the consultation recognises that route 27 doesn't currently meet reliability targets so you might end up waiting even longer than that. And it might be raining, and you might not get a seat on your next bus, and your Hopper fare might have expired if you boarded in Tower Hamlets so you could end up paying double. No wonder 66% of respondents said they believed the change to route 205 would have a negative impact. Although journey times are anticipated to become somewhat longer for some passengers, including older, disabled, and vulnerable passengers, and some passengers may have to change buses once, it will not prevent passengers from making their journeys. ...and this is the most honest. The proposals provide a significant net financial saving to us and meet our objective of providing a reliable and efficient London bus service which enables us to reinvest bus services where they are needed more. The changes to routes 30 and 205 are due to be implemented on some as yet unannounced date next month. Neither is good, more a response to reduced budgets than a desire to better serve the customer. What's particularly poor in this case is that the 205 didn't need to change, that was merely TfL's chosen mitigation for cutting route 30, and it's a great shame they didn't select a less contentious alternative tweak instead.

Sorry, couldn't resist. 45 45 Squared 17) DORSET SQUARE, NW1 Borough of Westminster, 100m×60m Dorset Square is the greenspace you pass if you walk the backroads between Marylebone and Baker Street stations. It's rectangular, Georgian, semi-private and generally unsung, yet boasts a ridiculously important role in sporting history... Thomas Lord leased some land and laid the first of three cricket pitches to bear his name. In 1787 this was the very edge of London where Marylebone melted into fields, thus the ideal spot for seven acres to be used by a cricket team looking to escape from rowdy Islington. The first match was against the newly formed Middlesex Cricket Club, better known these days as the MCC. However the price of land shot up with the building of the New Road, now Euston Road, so in 1810 Thomas was forced to move their games further out to a goods yard in St John's Wood. This was almost immediately acquired for the construction of the Regent's Canal, encouraging a final shift a short distance north to what's now Lord's Cricket Ground. The original pitch inevitably became housing, completed in 1830, and Dorset Square is believed to be named after the Duke of Dorset who was a big cricket fan at the time. Colin Cowdrey unveiled a plaque on the back of the gardener's shed to celebrate the site's bicentenary. Dodie Smith, author of The Hundred and One Dalmatians. A few houses further round is the former home of George Grossmith who co-wrote The Diary of a Nobody while living on Dorset Square, although its mundane protagonist lived in a plainer home in Holloway. The most incestuous plaque is that of Sir Laurence Gomme, the historian who persuaded the London County Council to instigate the blue plaque scheme in the first place and was rewarded with his own a century later. access to the central gardens, including organising a recent switch from physical keys to digital fobs for an £80 deposit. No pets, no barbecues, no roller blades, no smoking and strictly residents of numbers 1-40 only. A pristine hedge conceals most of the inner sanctum, but what can be squinted at through the gates looks splendid and can usually be experienced by mere plebs when London Open Gardens weekend comes round in June. The most prestigious address in Dorset Square is currently number 8 which is home to the Embassy of El Salvador, although they only occupy the upper floors. The most cultural address is number 1 which belongs to the Alliance Française, the organisation charged with promoting the French language around the world, for whom this is their UK HQ. During WW2 it became their international HQ and also housed a branch of the Special Operations Executive. The square additionally boasts two hotels, one of which is the Dorset Square Hotel where Tim and Kit will do you a cooked breakfast in The Potting Shed for £30, so maybe not. But mostly this is a square for passing obliviously through, which I suspect is how the residents like it. 45 45 Squared 18) DEVONSHIRE SQUARE, EC2 City of London, 40m×30m hidden away between Houndsditch and Petticoat Lane market. This time the closest mainline terminus is Liverpool Street, indeed tube trains between Liverpool Street and Aldgate pass directly under Devonshire Square. The name comes from the Duke of Devonshire who owned a Tudor townhouse on this site, demolished for redevelopment in 1675 although remains of its wall exist round the back where you can't see them. The oldest surviving houses on the square are the neoclassical pair at numbers 12 and 13, one of which is the smallest livery hall in the City of London, although The Worshipful Company of Coopers only bought it in 1957. They opened their doors for Open House for the first time last year so I have already seen their courtroom, mallet cabinet and ornamental barrel store. The centre of the square is covered by a very low dense canopy of trees, below which are benches where you can vape safely without the any risk of sunburn. It all looks terribly characterless. More striking are the linear gardens which stretch down towards Cutler Street, this officially a 70m extension to Devonshire Square and seemingly keeping a top topiary team in business. The most extraordinary feature is a metal statue of a knight on horseback representing the Cnihtengild, a mythical band supposedly granted this land by King Edgar in return for a series of unlikely duels. You can read that tale on the board underneath, and read the story of how a Scottish blacksmith assembled it for Standard Life in 1990 here. The statue wasn't originally here but the insurers moved out shortly afterwards so it was relocated from their courtyard to some lawn. And then there's modern Devonshire Square, a massive and highly irregular office campus bumping up against the very edge of the City. Their marketing team describe it as "a vibrant multi-use site" and a "an eclectic 24-hour destination", but to me it feels like a misjudged commercial warren brimming with unlet co-working space and half-empty refreshment options. I bumped into more people laying tables for an alfresco wedding in the main courtyard than I did punters taking advantage of the other facilities, but that's Saturdays for you. Also it's not a street so even though it's branded Devonshire Square it's not officially Devonshire Square which is the peculiar combination of throwback Stuart quadrangle plus service road out front.

While I've been preoccupied on the south coast, London has continued unabated. Monday 5th May Red Arrows didn't arrive until 2pm. Tuesday 6th May ceramic poppies are back at the Tower of London to commemorate the 80th anniversary of VE Day. However this time there are only 30,000 of them whereas back in 2014 there were 880,000, plus the flowers aren't filling the moat, merely dribbling off the White Tower so you won't see them unless you pay to go inside. As a Tower Hamlets resident it only costs £1 to go inside, but quite frankly I was happier to be in Lyme Regis. Wednesday 7th May here. Thursday 8th May Friday 9th May now says he's keen to explore building on the Green Belt. To be clear that's some of the Green Belt, not all of the Green Belt, specifically certain so-called 'low-quality' bits, not your favourite woodland and its happy squirrels so stop your frothing. The thought is that new affordable neighbourhoods with excellent transport connections would enormously improve Londoners' quality of life, especially if coupled with greening initiatives, which is what the Mayor hopes to write into the new London Plan. I might have gone out and blogged about a few possible locations, places you totally wouldn't miss, whereas instead I was in West Bay where they don't have Green Belt but it still looks really pretty. Saturday 10th May Hot Sauce Festival in Peckham or attending my nephew's wedding, and I'm afraid paying £5 for the chance to buy spicy bottles from 42 independent traders lost out. If any of you attended, do please tell us what we missed. Sunday 11th May Maman, which is back in predatory position on the Turbine Hall mezzanine. I remember admiring her last time, also climbing one of Louise's mighty steel towers, and the eight-legged monster is just as wonderfully impactful as ever. Monday 12th May ("Hey we need to promote grassroots music venues." "Shall we do a tube map?" "Well obviously!" "Great let's take the afternoon off."). What surprised me about the media coverage is that nobody seemed to be linking to the map, merely displaying a blurry snippet and telling you to go view it at Outernet. I went to Outernet to have a look but it wasn't on display because the Arcade was on a different part of its marketing cycle so I came home unsatisfied. I've since sourced the full-sized jpg here, so well done Jon but can we please do something other than a rejigged tube map next time, thanks. Tuesday 13th May footbridge at Canary Wharf is now open. It was lowered into place last month but has just been debarriered and you now can walk across. Bankers at Morgan Stanley heading for a booze-up at The Henry Addington may find it most useful, but it's already proving a popular cut-through avoiding having to walk all the way round the dock past the tube station. According to the brandmonkeys it's "a major milestone in our vision to make Eden Dock a thriving, accessible green space" and "completes the final phase of our award-winning waterfront oasis", but in reality it's just a really nice quite useful footbridge. The South Dock bridge, if it's ever built, will be more of a gamechanger. Wednesday 14th May RIBA London Building of the Year 2025, which is good because it's the only one of the 38-strong shortlist that I've been taken round by the chief architect. Hurrah for London Open House, which means I can see why it won rather than wondering why the publicly accessible ground floor is so vacuously empty. The RIBA winner in the South West & Wessex region will be announced in July. Thursday 15th May Friday 16th May High Court decision on planning consent for Brockwell Park mean for Mighty Hoopla and the future of the Lambeth Country Show, and indeed festivals across council-owned spaces across London, and indeed council tax bill increases, and indeed horribly churned up turf, and indeed smug Nimbys? Prepare to read all kind of discordant opinion pieces. ...and we're back on track again.

Jurassic Coast (part 1) The Jurassic Coast is the umbrella name for the shoreline between Exmouth and Swanage, renowned for undulating hills, pebble beaches and crumbling cliffs. It's partly in Devon but mostly in Dorset, and famed for its fossils as the wave-lapped rocks relentlessly recede. In 2001 it became the UK's first geological UNESCO World Heritage Site, and rightly so. And I've just spent a week exploring it, or at least the 30 mile section in the middle, so this three-part series will just take in the highlights between Seaton and Portland. [75 photos] Seaton (50.70°N, 3.07°W) Seaton is the southeasternmost town in Devon, a fishing port turned seaside resort at the mouth of the river Axe. These days it's more of a retirement bolthole, the local holiday camp having closed in 2005, and is conveniently located in a dip between chalk and sandstone cliffs. The esplanade fronts a pebbly beach with a defensive sea wall, guarded by a recent pair of sculpted gates designed to protect against the stormiest tides. If ornamental gardens, clocktowers and ice cream kiosks incapable of squirting a 99 are your thing, Seaton may only marginally disappoint. Second place in the town's tourist trail goes to the recently-rebranded Jurassic Discovery centre, a collection of fossils, animatronic dinosaurs and soft play facilities targeted firmly at a younger family audience. Top of the list is the famous Seaton Tramway, a three mile track which follows the floodable end of the Axe estuary, its service only of practical use for a handful of Colyton residents who want to go shopping at Aldi. But as the only tram system in the southwest it draws all the afficionados, plus who doesn't enjoy hopping aboard a heritage throwback to a bird hide in the middle of nowhere then riding back again? With trams running every 20 minutes it's a better service than many London suburbs. Geoff made a 20 minute video about the Seaton Tramway last year if you want to see what you're missing, like we did. There isn't time to cram everything into a week's holiday so other places we didn't visit include the town's museum, the quarry caves further round the bay in Beer and the model-railway-focused oddity at Pecorama. They know how to appeal to Men Who Like Trains in Seaton. I really wanted to visit The Undercliffs, site of a massive landslip on Christmas Day 1839 when 800 million tons of rock collapsed replacing coastal farmland with a gaping chasm behind a long slumped slope. Even Queen Victoria came down to view that. A challenging footpath now follows the subtropical weirdness which has grown up since, but it's seven miles long with no access except at either end so we drove to Lyme Regis instead. Lyme Regis (50.72°N, 2.93°W) Lyme Regis is fossil central, and also a very pretty seaside town thus a key stop on the Dorset tourist trail. It's very nearly in Devon, indeed a half-mile hike up the cliffs from the harbour will see you across the boundary. That harbour is The Cobb, once a premier south coast port but now a picturesque refuge for bobbing boats. It's shielded by a broad sinuous breakwater of ancient providence whose upper level slopes seaward in contravention of all modern health and safety legislation so is wildly attractive. You'll have seen Meryl Streep standing on it in The French Lieutenant's Woman and also imagined it in Jane Austen's Persuasion because she loved a bit of Lyme too. For fossils you need the other side of town, specifically the sweep of exposed shale beyond Church Cliffs where any slide or tumble could reveal a sheaf of ammonites or the skeleton of another enormous lizard. Many of the earliest dinosaur discoveries were made here, most notably by local fossil hunter Mary Anning who uncovered the first known ichthyosaur and plesiosaurs, the former in 1813 when she was just 12. Had the Geological Society of London accepted women members she might have been more famous in her own lifetime but instead male professors wrote up most of her discoveries and Mary had to rely on flogging fossil curios to make a living. Pleasingly she now has a crowdsourced statue overlooking the east bay, accompanied by her dog Tray who was lost to a landslide. If you fancy hunting fossils yourself, follow her gaze. The heart of the town is a squish of old buildings at the mouth of the River Lym, rapidly sloping inland. The ancient bend between Bridge Street and Church Street is particularly tight so a real challenge for double deckers, indeed a ridiculous constriction to have to negotiate on Lyme Regis's sole A road. By driving carefully you can avoid damage to the Guildhall and to the town's museum, a multi-storey £9 attraction packed with history and, obviously, a heck of a lot of fossils. A separate £5 museum focuses solely on fossils and dinosaurs while for twice that you can hand hold a starfish or feed some mullet at the aquarium. And then there are the elephants. Animal-themed sculpture trails are a big thing in many towns and cities, and currently in West Dorset it's elephants. A herd of almost 60 have been scattered across Lyme Regis, Bridport and West Bay, with a couple of outliers at Hive Beach to make finding them all even harder. You can't miss their jolly decorated fibreglass at all kinds of key locations, although to discover the full list of locations you'll need to download the Stampede-by-the-Sea app or pay £2 for a map, all proceeds to the local hospice. We reached the westernmost elephant just as a local retired couple finally completed the gargantuan task of seeing them all and felt the need to outpour all their anecdotes. After several minutes they were still griping about the shop that's only open on Wednesdays ("and she wouldn't let us in"), until we finally extricated ourselves with another "well done" and backed away. We didn't have the wherewithal to find our way to the craft nexus at the Town Mill, nor the energy to climb the high street in search of fossil shops, nor the urge for a sit-down meal at The French Lieutenant's Bistro. Where we did ultimately end up was The Beach House Cafe with its bright red tables, evocative 1970s Letraset typeface and mighty bacon and sausage baguette. I really wanted to sample the 'Bread Pudding and Custard' advertised on the chalkboard outside but there were alas other places to see. Golden Cap (50.73°N, 2.84°W) Golden Cap is another 30m above sea level, and at 191m the highest point on the entire south coast of England. It's located amid the rollercoaster cliffs between Charmouth and Bridport, a wedge-shaped projection loftier than the rest and visible for miles around. The lower slopes of Jurassic clay support a layer of weathered Upper Greensand on top, characteristically yellow in colour hence the name Golden Cap. It used to be yellower but over the last 100 years the seaward slopes have been increasingly covered with gorse and other vegetation, thus it looks more like Green Cap... at least until the next landslide. My photo was taken from Lyme Regis without a decent zoom, sorry, but closer photos give a better idea. The coastal hamlet of Seatown is only a mile away but it's a whopping ascent, which is why you should never rely on Google Maps for hillclimbing. The approach from Charmouth is longer and more up and down so equally challenging, thus we took the easier route and drove to Langdon Woods where the ticket machine at the top of the National Trust car park is already at 160m. It was then a shady loop round a bluebelled forest, a brief earthen descent, a saunter across a buttercup meadow and finally 70 steps up the prismatic cap. I was barely out of breath. The summit is a broad grass plateau with sandy patches and yes, the views from either side are spectacular. That's the view across Lyme Bay back to Lyme Regis, a sand-rimmed sweep beyond a fringe of gorse. The National Trust memorial stone is also on this side, remembering its chairman the Earl of Antrim in whose memory this gorgeous upland was purchased for the nation. Meanwhile the trig point is located on the eastern side overlooking Seatown and a distant Chesil Beach, plus further bush-covered slump. It was a lovely place to linger, and also a delight to finally visit a location I'd long lusted after on a map. It was great to know nobody along the entire south coast was higher, but it's perhaps worth saying that the Waitrose in Biggin Hill is 10m higher still, just not with such a cracking view. CHIDEOCK (50.73°N, 2.82°W) village. What's special about this sign, it asked, above a graphic of CHIDEOCK written in block capitals. I think I had to look up the answer but it tickled me, and it tickled me even more as we drove down a hill on the A35 and there was the village sign for real. My Jurassic Coast Flickr album: There are 75 photos altogether! (newest first)