At the weekend, JTA and I – along with our eldest child – explored the Clapham South Deep Shelter as part of one of Hidden London‘s
underground tours, and it was pretty great!
Anybody else get Fallout vibes from this place?
I’ve done a couple of bits of exploration of subterranean London before: in the service tunnels around Euston, and into the abandoned station on the Aldwych branch line. But I was especially impressed by the care and attention that had gone into making this
particular tour fun and engaging.
Had this deep shelter gained a second life as a new tube station, as was originally hoped, this staircase would have connected it to the Northern Line platforms. Instead, it ends at a
brick wall.
The site itself is deep: trains on the Northern Line – already one of the deepest lines on the London Underground – can be heard passing above you, and any
noise from street level is completely gone (even the sounds of bombing couldn’t be heard down here, WWII residents reported). It’s also huge: long interconnected tunnels
provided space for 8,000 beds, plus canteens, offices, toilets, medical bays, and other supporting architecture.
Significant parts of the bunker contain original furniture, including the metal-frames triple-bunk-beds (some of which show signs of being temporarily repurposed as archival storage
shelves). But other bits have been restored to make them feel contemporaneous with the era of its construction.
To extend the immersion of the theme even further, there’s a “warden” on-site who – after your 179-step descent – welcomes you and checks your (replica) night admission ticket,
identifying which bed’s bed assigned to you. The warden accompanies your group around, staying in-character as you step through different eras of the history of the place! By the time
you get to the interpretative space about the final days of its use for human habitation – as a budget hotel for the “Festival of Britain” national exhibition in 1951 – he speaks fondly
of his time as its warden here and wonders about what will become of the place.
The long, long double-helix staircases that brought us deep into the earth represented only a fraction of the distance we walked on the tour, through these long networks of tunnels.
All of which is to say that this was a highly-enjoyable opportunity to explore yet another hidden place sprawling beneath London. The Hidden London folks continue to impress.
I’m glad I’ve got a bed of my own in a house of my own that’s not being bombed by the Luftwaffe, actually, thanks.
Seventy years ago, residents of this part of London would take shelter from V1 and V2 bombs in a tunnel beneath my feet. And today, I’m going down there to take a look!
Girl on the Net is a popular sex blogger, so this is a link to a SFW page on an otherwise NSFW site. If your only concern is seeing or
hearing sexy things or somebody looking over your shoulder and thinking that’s what you’re doing, go ahead and read
it. But if you’re connected through the monitored corporate firewall of a sex-negative employer, you might want to read on a different device…
25 different forms of London transport in a day
Hello! My name is Sarah and I love London transport. Because I am a very cool and interesting person, for a long time I’ve thought it might be fun to see how many different types of
London transport I can take in a 24-hour period: bus, tram, tube, train, ferry, etc. The trip outlined below took me (and the lucky man I invited on this date) on 25 different
forms of London transport in one single day. It criss-crossed the city from East through North to West, then South, Central, South East and back to where we started. I’m
sharing the itinerary because this turned out to be a phenomenal adventure, and I thought others might like to give it a go.
…
The rules
The rules for the challenge were:
Transport must be transport, not a ride, i.e. it must take me from A to B. So the London Eye doesn’t count, but the cable car definitely does.
Each form of transport must continue the journey. So no going from A to B then immediately back again. The journey can meander, but it must keep moving forwards.
No form of transport can be taken more than once. Changes on a single line are OK (for instance, if traveling on the DLR from Greenwich to Bank requires a change
at Canary Wharf, that’s fine, or if you’re on a bus that gets taken out of service you can get on the next one) but repeated trips on the same form of transport aren’t allowed
(you can’t take one double-decker bus in the morning then another in the afternoon). The exceptions to this are: walking; escalators; stairs. We’ll be using these a lot.
…
This sounds like a ludicrously fun adventure and a great use of a date for anybody who can find an even-remotely similarly-transport-obsessed partner.
The one thing this wonderful post is lacking is a map. Oh, and maybe a GPX file, but that’s a much bigger ask. Really I just want the map, to help me visualise the route. Maybe with the
different forms of transport colour-coded or something? Okay, okay, now I’m asking a lot again.
A quick morning expedition with the kids on the way to visit HMS Belfast. Took the ghost TB (didn’t see any others); we’ll find
it somewhere to live in Oxfordshire next week! TFTC.
Jay Foreman’s back with a long-awaited tenth episode of Unfinished London. This one follows up on Why does London have
32 boroughs? and looks deeper into the complexities of the partially-devolved local government of London.
When the Woolwich foot tunnel closed for repairs in 2011, it should have been a routine job. The pathway had been providing pedestrians with a quick route beneath the Thames since
1912. A century o…
When the Woolwich foot tunnel closed for repairs in 2011, it should have been a routine job. The pathway had been providing pedestrians with a quick route beneath the Thames since
1912. A century on, a few minor improvements were necessary. Contractors were hired to plug holes, improve access and bring communications capabilities into the 21st Century: swapping
leaky tiles for a leaky feeder.
But Woolwich residents will recall that the refurb of this much loved and much used walkway did not go according to
plan. When it finally re-opened it was 8 months behind schedule, having been closed for more than a year and a half. What the average Woolwich dweller doesn’t know, however,
are the unusual circumstances behind this delay.
Despite being only a short journey away (made even shorter by the new railway station that appeared near by house
last year), I rarely find myself in London. But once in a while a week comes along when I feel like I’m there all the time.
TODO: funny caption
On Friday of last week, Ruth, JTA and I took one of the London Transport Museum‘s Hidden London tours. Back in 2011 we took a tour of Aldwych Tube Station, probably the most well-known of the London Underground’s disused stations, and it was fantastic, so we
were very excited to be returning for another of their events. This time around, we were visiting Euston Station.
Stylish hi-vis jackets for everybody!
But wait, you might-well say: Euston station isn’t hidden nor disused! And you’d be right. But Euston’s got a long and convoluted history, and it used to consist of not one but
three stations: the mainline station and two independent underground stations run by competing operators. The stations all gradually got connected with tunnels, and then with a
whole different set of tunnels as part of the redevelopment in advance of the station’s reopening in 1968. But to this day, there’s still a whole network of tunnels underneath
Euston station, inaccessible to the public, that are either disused or else used only as storage, air vents, or cable runs.
This lift shaft used to transport passengers between what are now the Northern and Victoria lines. Now it’s just a big hole.
A particular highlight was getting to walk through the ventilation shaft that draws all of the hot air out of the Victoria Line platforms. When you stand and wait for your train you
don’t tend to think about the network of tunnels that snake around the one you’re in, hidden just beyond the grills in the ceiling or through the doors at the end of the platforms.
I shot a video (below) from the shaft, periodically looking down on the trains pulling in and out below us.
No sooner were we back than I was away again. Last Saturday, I made my way back to London to visit Twitter’s UK headquarters in Soho to help the fantastic Code First: Girls team to make some improvements to the way they organise and deliver their Javascript, Python and Ruby curricula. I first came
across Code First: Girls through Beverley, one of Three Rings‘ volunteers who happens to work for them, and I’ve become a fan of their work.
Unfortunatley my calendar’s too packed to be able to volunteer as one of their instructors (which I totally would if it weren’t for work, and study, and existing volunteering, and
things), but I thought this would be a good opportunity to be helpful while I had a nominally-“spare” day.
Twitter’s offices, by the way, are exactly as beautiful as you’d hope that they might be.
Our host tried to win me over on the merits of working for Twitter (they’re recruiting heavily in the UK, right now), and you know what – if I were inclined towards a commute as far as
London (and I didn’t love the work I do so much) – I’d totally give that a go. And not just because I enjoyed telling an iPad what I wanted to drink and then having it dispensed minutes
later by a magical automated hot-and-cold-running-drinks tap nearby.
I’m not sure I ‘get’ the idea of a sculpture of tweets, though. Wouldn’t a “live display” have been more-thematic?
And that’s not even all of it. This coming Thursday, I’m back in London again, this time to meet representatives from a couple of charities who’re looking at rolling out Three
Rings. In short: having a direct line to London on my doorstep turns out to be pretty useful.
The Great Smog of London, or Great Smog of 1952, was a severe air-pollution event that affected the British capital of London in
early December 1952. A period of cold weather, combined with an anticyclone and windless conditions,
collected airborne pollutants—mostly arising from the use of coal—to form a thick layer of smog over the city. It lasted
from Friday, 5 December to Tuesday, 9 December 1952 and then dispersed quickly when the weather changed.
This is the second in a series of four blog posts which ought to have been published during January
2013, but ran late because I didn’t want to publish any of them before the first one.
I spent the weekend of my birthday working in London, alongside the Squiz team, who make the CMS that forms the foundation of most of the public-facing websites of the Bodleian Libraries. We’d originally scheduled this visit for a different
week, but – in that way that projects sometimes do – the project got juggled about a bit and so I found myself spending the week of my birthday away from home.
The team at Squiz’s London office, debriefing over drinks at the end of a crazy week.
But on Tuesday – my second day working on-site at Squiz’s office, and coincidentally my birthday – disaster struck! Our first clue was when the lights went out. And then, a minute or so
later, when the fire alarm started going off. No big deal, we all thought, as we gathered our possessions and prepared to leave the office – it’s probably just that the fire alarm
sounds as a precaution if it’s electricity supply is disrupted… but as we started to go down the stairs and smelled the smoke, we realised that there really was a fire.
My tweet, from outside the Squiz offices.
The first two fire engines arrived within minutes. Apparently, they don’t mess about when a city centre office block catches light. The smoke was very visible from the street: thick
grey plumes pouring out from the basement windows. Theories about the cause of the fire were whispered around the assembled crowd, and the consensus seemed to be that the substation in
the basement had overheated and set alight its room.
People were still filing out of the building when the first of the fire engines arrived.
A third fire engine arrived, and – after about a quarter hour of assessing the situation and controlling the crowd – we were told that we wouldn’t be able to get back into our building
for “at least an hour, probably more.” So, being British, we therefore decamped to one of the nearby bars for networking and a round of gin & tonic. After I texted some friends to say
that I hadn’t expected to spend the afternoon of my birthday in the pub, but that it wasn’t an entirely unwelcome experience, a few of them had the cheek to ask once again how
the fire had actually started.
Before long, the fire brigade had established a cordon some distance back from the fire, and were pouring water into the basement.
By the time we were allowed to return to the building, it was already getting dark, and we quickly discovered a new problem that faced us: with the power still well and truly out, the
electronic door locks that secured the offices had become completely unusable. Not willing to abandon my laptop, keys, and other personal possessions overnight in an unfamiliar office,
I waited around until a locksmith had been summoned and had drilled his way through the cylinder and allowed us into the building.
Without power, it turns out that these things can be pretty useless. At least they “fail secure”, keeping the door locked (from the outside) in the event of a problem, rather than the
alternative…
It being my birthday, I’d arranged that Ruth would come and spend the night down in London, and that we’d go out to
Dans le Noir, a restaurant that I’d heard about from news articles and via friends some years prior, and always
wanted to try. The restaurant has a distinct and quite remarkable theme that you probably won’t find anywhere else: that theme is that you eat unidentified food in pitch blackness.
Don’t be fooled: this picture of the tip of a candle wasn’t taken at Dans le Noir, but at Squiz.
As our (blind!) waiter, Gao, led Ruth and I by touch to our table, we suddenly realised that we’d all but forgotten exactly how dark pitch blackness actually is. When you stumble over
your coffee table in the dark on a morning, that’s not truly black: there’s that sliver of light coming from underneath the curtains, or the faint glow of the LED light on the stereo.
Real, complete darkness is disorienting and confusing, and to sit around in it – not even able to see whether your eyes are open or closed – for hours at a time is quite remarkable.
Now this is more like what it looks like at Dans le Noir!
It took us a little while to learn the new skills required to survive in this environment, but Gao was incredibly helpful. We worked out mechanisms for pouring drinks, for checking
whether our plates were empty, and for communicating our relative movements (being geeks, as we are, Ruth and I quickly developed a three-dimensional coordinate-based system for
navigating relative to an agreed centre-point: the tip of the bottle of our mystery wine). We also learned that there’s something truly humbling about being dependent upon the aid of a
blind person to do something that you’d normally be quite capable of doing alone: simple things, like finding where your glass is.
My tweets after coming out of Ruth and I’s remarkable experience of Dans le Noir.
But the bigger lesson that we learned was about how darkness changes the way that we operate on a social level. Ruth and I were sat alongside another couple, and – deprived of
body language, the judgement of sight, and the scrutiny of eye contact – we quickly entered into a conversation that was far deeper and more real than I would have anticipated having
with total strangers. It was particularly strange to see Ruth, who’s usually so shy around new people, really come out as confident and open. I theorise that (in
normally-signted people) eye contact – that is, being able to see that others can see you – serves as a regulator of our willingness to be transparent. Depriving it for long enough that
its lack begins to feel natural makes us more frank and honest. Strange.
Live updates, primarily for the benefit of the people back at my usual workplace, on progress at Squiz.
Back at Squiz the following day, there was still no electricity. Credit is due to the team there, though, who quickly put in to effect their emergency plans and literally “moved office”
to a handful of conference rooms and meeting spaces around Shoreditch. “Runners” were nominated to help relay messages and equipment between disparate groups of people, and virtualised
networks were established across the city. I laughed when I discovered that Squiz’s old offices had been in an old fire station.
Team members at Squiz, in their unlit, unheated office, begin to put their emergency plan into place, picking up computers and transporting them to alternative venues.
Before long, the folks I’d been working with and I were settled into a basement meeting room in a nearby café, running a stack of Mac desktops and laptops from a monumental string of
power strips, and juggling an Internet connection between the café’s WiFi and a stack of Mifi-like
devices. We were able to get on with our work, and the day was saved, all thanks to some smart emergency planning. Later in the week, a generator was deployed outside the building and
we were able to return to normal desks, but the quick-thinking of the management ensured that a minimum of disruption was caused in the meantime.
My tweet about seeing comedy with Bryn and about returning to the office (now powered by a huge generator).
Not one to waste the opportunity to make the most of being in London for a week, I spent another of my evenings out with Bryn. He and I went out to the Free
Fringe Fundraiser, which – despite a notable absence of Peter Buckley Hill, who had caught a case of the
then-dominating
norovirus – was still a great deal of fun. It was particularly pleasing to get to see Norman Lovett in the flesh: his particular brand of surrealist anti-humour tickles me mercilessly.
So what could have been “just another business trip” turned into quite the adventure, between fires and birthdays and eating-in-the-dark and comedy. If only it hadn’t taken me two
months to finish writing about it…
I gather that we’re going to be deploying
surface-to-air missiles in London during the Olympic Games this year. I can’t help but feel that this could be a really bad idea.
The CAA chart for VFR restricted airspace during the Olympic Games. Basically: don't fly over London without IFR.
Do we really want to shoot down an aircraft over one of the areas of highest population density in the country? Even if you know that AirBus is exclusively filled with
evil, nasty terrorists, I’m not sure that raining burning aircraft onto the city is necessarily an improvement.
Furthermore, is the solution to terrorism in Britain really to put even more dangerous weapons into the affected area? Isn’t there a risk that these powerful
rocket-propelled explosives could be turned against our own targets?
I’m sure that somebody must know what they’re doing. I’m just not convinced that it’s the people making the decisions.
This weekend, Ruth & I went to London for a short course in massage. After hitting up a couple of geocaches in
the beautiful Holland Park, we trotted into Notting Hill and met up with the woman
who was to show us a variety of different ways to massage a variety of different body parts. “This is going to hurt,” the instructor warned us, as we sat ourselves down alongside the
other two students – a Spanish couple about ten years older than us – and introduced ourselves. “We’re going to be experimenting with the extremes of hard and soft pressure to
understand when each are useful and to find the middle ground. If you don’t wince at least once during that process, then your partner is doing it wrong.” She wasn’t kidding. At one
point, I remember musing over whether the instructor might run an S&M dungeon on her days off. I think it was right after she said, “Come on; I want to see red marks!”
A variation on the 'S' move, common to hand and foot massage. As opposed to the 'M' move. Hang on... these moves are called 'S' and 'M'...? Seriously?
Feet, hands, shoulders, heads, backs… we took a tour of the body, swapping over from time to time to alternate who was the masseur and who was the… masseuee? Apparently I was the star
pupil and picked it up quickly, but I may have had an unfair advantage because I’ve got “just the right kind of thumbs” for massage – they’re fat and straight, which is apparently
ideal. So if the world of software goes belly-up when we someday invent computers that can program themselves, at least I now know that I could retrain as a massage therapist.
It’s a profession for which I’ve discovered a new-found respect. Massage is hard. Surprisingly harder than it looks. Despite her slender arms and shoulders, our trainer had a
hell of a grip and a lot of upper body strength: emulating the level of pressure that she was able to apply was incredibly challenging, and by the second time that we were switching
positions, I’d begun to work up a bit of a sweat. In my case, at least these bouts of exercise were punctuated by getting a nice relaxing massage (or, at worst, being used as an
experimental punching bag), but for a professional masseur there’s no such relief.
All in all, it was a fun afternoon/evening out. We learned some enjoyable skills and got the chance to practice them under expert guidance. Once I’d learned to think of the rhythm and
looseness as being similar to drumming (“What is that? 3/4 time?”), I really got a knack for loosening up back and shoulder muscles with hand-tapping. And Ruth learned to do an
awesome hand massage trick using her knuckles.
