Yeah, good steps. Suicide bridge is well fenced up now. I went in the Queens sometimes, but you could tell it was better in the heyday, when the Kinks used to drink in there.

I am not sure my head is quite right. It is stressful to watch your life go up an intellectual cul-de-sac, and your mother have about a hundred staples in her head. My sister invited us both up to Yorkshire for Xmas, but they will have a better time without me. I am no fun to be around and we don’t have much in common, even at the best of times. She is high-energy, competitive and corporate, and being around her is like being on an episode of The Apprentice. Something that becomes apparent is that people don’t change. They carry on with their mad reality and eventual self-parody, and it does not occur to them for one second to wake up to yours.

just because you have the same bloodline as someone, it is no reason to have to like them or want to be around them, or be obligated to.

The open space of Hyde Park (including Kensington Gardens) is deceptive. It is not flat, and there are pleasing views from the Round Pond, and from north of the Serpentine. The general slope is towards the river, about a mile away. A good view of this topography continuing through Knightsbridge can be obtained at the cafe at Peter Jones department store on Sloane Square.

There are also some corners I had never seen before. The Epstein frieze in the Hudson Memorial Bird Sanctuary, and the Holocaust Memorial.

Christmas Day seems like weeks ago. Putting it on at the last minute made it easier. No time to deliberate. It was Christmas, which is all you can ask for.

I enjoy your vignettes of London very much.

Thanks. For incomparably better (oxymoron alert) vignettes, I recommend Nairn's London, which is easily the best London guide I've read. Nairn had a real eye for obscure items of interest, which I came to appreciate more and more while doing the Knowledge. He was also a drinker, which I think led him to an early grave, and had IMO exquisite taste in London pubs.

Thanks, I've just ordered it now.

In the 80s through the 90s I and a pal spent many, many evenings wandering across London (esp. pubs), covering quite a stretch from West (Maida Vale) to East to South (where he lived), uncovering a few gems on the way.

I'll be interested to see how many of Nairn's items of interest survived the decades following the book's publication.

Sometimes it's the little things. Arnos Grove tube station is obvious modernist quality, and we walk around Arnos and Broomfield parks for the first and second time, and they are nice enough. Imagine building a viaduct out of bricks. Real craftmanship. I don't really know this part of Enfield, but I think it was Grovelands Road, N13, or certainly some parallel road, that I lived in for a couple of months. Weird youth time, I don't remember much about it. But they have the original Art Nouveau stained glass in some of the front doors, and that is real Art Nouveau.

I have used Oakwood tube station a number of times, but had only once set foot into its hinterland. Unless you live there or are visiting someone who does, or like me have somehow acquired the habit of mentally cataloguing unseen parts of London, there is no reason to do so. Built from scratch in the 1930s, out of semi-detacheds of above average quality, there is no through traffic, and no shops, pubs, cafes or commercial premises of any kind. The residents have always lived there, and that’s how they like it. Nobody ever moves in or out. Suburban equilibrium has been reached.

It has a good 1930s church, and neighbouring Grange Park has two more such. I had wondered if the same architect had designed all three, because they are good, but apparently not.

The one time I went there before was as a youth, visiting a fellow member of the Alcazar chess club in Edmonton, to have a go on his then state-of-the-art chess computer. His wife was there, listening to Billie Jo Spears. It’s funny the details that stick in the mind.

You will be assimilated, Lastcard. Resistance is Futile.

Keep this in your back pocket, for future reference.

You will be assimilated, Lastcard. Resistance is Futile.

Keep this in your back pocket, for future reference.

I always like reading your stuff, Charlie.

Awesome. I wasn't happy with merely describing the churches as "good", but my knowledge of architecture is poor. I like buildings to be of their time, and not made to look like they're from the 18th century or something. Grange Park Methodist Church, built in the art deco style:



Regardless of what the atheists say, it is a building of quality and merit. There might be more on this topic to follow...

I like its design and I like its brickwork.

St. Thomas's Church, Oakwood, designed by Romilly Craze.

I will be worrying about television? Campaigning against global warming? Joining the Methodists?

The theme of today’s walk will not untangle. It was going to be snobbery and class warfare. I grew up on sink estates but was educated alongside the middle classes. Then some public information near the beginning, in an open space between two golf courses, explained that this had been converted into a flood catchment area, to prevent water flooding down Salmons Brook onto those at the lower and poorer end of the Lea Valley. There has been a ton of rain recently, but I can’t see any catched water. Maybe that means it’s working. From then on, the detours that naturally present themselves to the enthusiastic walker were all water. Public footpath stretches of the New River and then more of the brook. And then, suddenly, the back streets of Lower Edmonton, which have a subtly unique and timeless ambience, perceptible only to those who are from there. These are my people. And then, in the unlikeliest of places, a bona fide Blue Plaque, for one Charles Coward. A hero.

https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/...harles-coward/

charlie,

Subbed. I'd seen some of your posts in other threads, and thought, "here's a good, smart poster." Then, surfing around, saw you had a blog.

Only through page 3, and enjoying it. Some reminders of my one trip to London, just before the millennium parties (over American Thanksgiving).

Really enjoyable city. Someday I'll get back for more.

Likewise. Thanks a lot.

Hell, I like golf as much as the next person. Close back nines of majors are compelling. Nicklaus at the Masters in 86? Are you kidding? I don’t even want them to do anything with their vast tracts of private, exclusive, Green Belt land, one after another. Keep it as it is, I say. But it is just golf and there is something deeply wrong with it all.

That's a cool story about Charles Coward. There was a similar plaque in my home town about a guy named Varian Fry. When I was a kid I'd marvel that people could be so tough and resourceful when the chips were down.

without the internet stories of people from past history would be lost in the back of libraries in old books and mostly forgotten except for the most prominent.

London 1665: DNA confirms cause of 1665 London's Great Plague-


The plague of 1665-1666 was the last major outbreak of bubonic plague in Britain, killing nearly a quarter of London's population. It's taken a year to confirm initial findings from a suspected Great Plague burial pit during excavation work on the Crossrail site at Liverpool Street. About 3,500 burials have been uncovered during excavation of the site.

Testing in Germany confirmed the presence of DNA from the Yersinia pestis bacterium - the agent that causes bubonic plague - rather than another pathogen. Some authors have previously questioned the identity of microbes behind historical outbreaks attributed to plague.

Full story in link below:

.bbc/science

I hope they do a better job than in the mid 80s, when it was turned into a plastic shopping mall. Criminal.

My dad once met Stevie Smith at a party, or so I thought. Did I dream it long ago? Was it somehow necessary for me to believe it in order to make sense of the world? In any case, here is her Blue Plaque in Palmers Green, and there is some more of the New River, along which his ashes flow.

To the East it is mostly recreation grounds and low-rise, prole housing estates. All traces of 1960s philosophy and design have been obliterated, offending no one but me. Another dream, or might as well be. And a bitterly cold day, almost too cold for walking.



Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

The small row houses have a good feel in that they seem domestic and livable at least. Those tower monsters should be blown to bits.