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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When you read a comic strip or a graphic novel, your eyes move from one panel to the next. What happens in between the panels? Your brain filled in the gaps. You participated in a co-creation process.  An experienced author or artist knows to intentionally create these spaces in order for the reader’s brain to […] The post Writers and readers as co-creators appeared first on Herbert Lui.

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.

Is it a child’s task to study? Or is it a parent’s task to get them to study? “There is a simple way to tell whose task it is. Think, Who ultimately is going to receive the result brought about by the choice that is made?” Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi write in The Courage […] The post Whose task is this? appeared first on Herbert Lui.

One Stop Beyond: Stoneleigh 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 Stoneleigh, one stop beyond Worcester Park on the line between Wimbledon and Epsom. For positioning purposes it's wedged between the boroughs of Kingston and Sutton in a protuberance of Surrey, so close to town that it's the only zone 5 rail station beyond the Greater London boundary. In a familiar story it really was all fields 100 years ago, then trains stopped and suddenly wham, suburbia erupted in seven years flat. an austere concrete link but was replaced last year by an accessible lift-enabled span much to the delight of elderly locals attempting to go shopping. What's missing is a screen displaying when the next train goes, so you only find out it's cancelled after you've schlepped down to the platform and discovered you face a half hour wait, and I may be speaking from experience here. Shops line both sides of Stoneleigh Broadway, a broad boulevard with ample parking and two long redbrick parades of the kind they always built in the 30s. We may be only quarter of a mile from cosmopolitan London but the selection of shops is quintessentially Surrey, from a large dry cleaners to an independent travel agent with a traditional butcher in the middle. The newsagents still doubles up as a stationers so has a wall of writing implements at the far end. There's no gym but one unit does art classes, one sells cub and scout uniforms and another's a dance school. Eating options are a tad timewarped with an Oriental Takeaway, a chippie called the Pisces Fish Kitchen, a bistro that stretches to tapas On Selected Nights Only and just the one pub in a rustic gabled mansion called The Station. If you enjoyed shopping in the 1990s you'd feel right at home here. Radio 2 while I was doing my research and mentioned retrieving her EastEnders costumes from a small museum in Stoneleigh, which I then totally had to visit. Hopefully a board on the high street would have nudged me had I not been listening - "You ain't seen London till you've been to the Cockney Museum". Let's be fair, it's large yellow lockup with plexiglass windows, plasterboard walls and a doorbell to press. But inside is an Aladdin's Cave of throwback treasures collected by the Pearly King of Peckham, George Major, who made it his lockdown project to display his extensive collection of memorabilia here in Stoneleigh. Sometimes he's here to guide you round but I was told he was out so got to explore by myself, for a good 45 minutes. Poverty Street, is the least successful. George has plastered the walls with photos of old London and the poorer folk who inhabited it, but then decided to display them in near darkness lit only by flickering lanterns. "Probably best to illuminate them with your phone," I was told, but accepted the offer of a poundshop torch instead and squinted my way round. The photos are fascinating and George's captions perhaps more so... No Health And Safety In Them Days, Do You Remember Liptons Tea And Grocery Shops, Note That Everyone Wore A Hat, We Led The World In Them Days. Market Square, not least because it's properly illuminated. George used to be a costermonger so the display includes a big barrow piled with fake fruit, and also the original frontage of a former Manze's pie shop (Meat Pies 1d, Fruit Pies 1d, Eel Pies 2d). The museum's teensy cafe can serve up proper pie & mash and apple pie & custard, but I understand you have to book ahead. King and Queen Square where pearly heritage comes to the fore and this was the best bit of the lot. 27 button-splattered costumes are on display, each with George's notes on who wore them where and the adversities they overcame. Pearly royalty grew up all over the capital from Shepherds Bush to Dagenham and Wood Green to Walworth, many of whom appear in the multitude of photographs or on the screen in the little cinema. The Pearly Queen of Hampstead was the smartest, apparently, and Bill from West Ham the poorest. website due to the rising price of electricity. Best bring a torch. Four other places to see in Stoneleigh Nonsuch Park: This open space was the location of Henry VIII's finest palace, previously blogged, of which nothing remains because a subsequent owner had it demolished to pay off gambling debts. One of the last leftovers was Queen Elizabeth's Elm, a hollow tree of great girth which grew in front of the kitchen court and under which it's said the Tudor Queen stood to shoot at deer. Alas it was burnt down in 1902 because vandalism is nothing new, and I looked in vain by the footpath in the dog-free field for a trace of the slight mound archaeologists claim to have found in 1995. The source of the Beverley Brook: This nine mile river flows into the Thames at Putney but rises here at the top end of Cuddington Recreation Ground, marginally inside London. A thin treelined strip snakes downslope fed from a brick culvert, although at present it's a stagnant milky trickle which takes several metres before it de-opaques. Step within the leafy curtain and you can follow the ditch unseen by neighbouring dog-walkers, meeting instead fallen branches, crisp packets and the odd disturbed squirrel. 68 Stoneleigh Park Road: This was the childhood home of the playwright John Osborne, the Angry Young Man who wrote Look Back In Anger and other kitchen sink dramas. His family moved here in 1936 when he was five, just round the corner from Station Approach, growing up in what he'd later describe as a 'cultural desert' he couldn't wait to escape from. Ewell Court: This large Victorian house with a Jacobean core was bought by the council in the 1930s and has since been used as a clinic, decontamination unit, care home, library and wedding venue. A nasty arson attack in 2013 has required considerable renovation but the lakeside setting attracts many locally, as do the tearoom and ice cream parlour. Note to the cafe, you cannot erect a sign saying 'Secret Garden This Way' and expect to be taken seriously. I particularly liked the Fernery/Grotto under the arch out back, originally part of an Edwardian conservatory and whose many rocky crannies are actually made of Pulhamite. And yes technically this is in Ewell, just off the river Hogsmill, but it's closer to Stoneleigh station than to Ewell West so I'm counting it as one stop beyond.