I had another submission accepted to Curious Cones last month; it remains one of my favourite silly niche
blogs. This time around, it was this traffic cone seemingly about to take a dive from the low board at an outdoor pool (at which the younger kid and I were taking a respite from the
heat!).
Not-accepted, but shared here for your enjoyment, was a photo I took while at West End Live in London the other week. I spotted a
traffic cone on a shelf in the left luggage room at our hotel! I took the pic quickly and the room was dark and the photo came out blurry, so it’s fair that it didn’t make it onto the
blog, but it’ll remind me to keep an eye out for cones in the most-curious of places!
I may have been dragged to MegaConLive London by my multi-fandom loving 12-year-old, but I at least managed to find somebody worth getting a selfie with.
My 12-year-old’s persuaded me to take her to MegaConLive London this weekend.
As somebody who doesn’t pay much attention to the pop culture circles represented by such an event (and hasn’t for 15+ years, or whenever it was that Asdfbook came out?)…
have you got any advice for me, Internet?
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.
