In due course I will be using this walk in a piece about St Albans on my London transport themed website, www.londontu.be but for now, enjoy…
St Alban’s is first recorded as a Celtic British Iron Age settlement, known as Verlamion. After the Roman conquest of Britain in AD 43, it grew into Verlamium, the third largest town in Roma…
As it’s title says, this post is a mixture of all sorts of things – enjoy!
I have a wide range of stuff for you, including pictures and links.
In the second of my series of posts about “Buildings of King’s Lynn”, I put up some pictures of Greyfriars Tower. Tucked away in one corner of the grounds is a scale model of the friary as it would have been back in the 14th century…
For more about what this company does click here.
More details about the company that this second survey boat belongs to cna be found by clicking here.
For the opera lovers among you.
I have a plethora of links for you today. I start with a subsection dealing with…
Two petitions today:
On the Government’s own petitions website, is this call to protect academic freedom. The government have new legislation in the pipeline to include an ‘anti-lobbying’ clause in all government grants, and this petition seeks to exempt academic research from this law.
My second petition is on a matter of local interest. A new factory farm is planned for Sedgeford, Norfolk and if you find the notion as repellent as I do please click here to sign and share the petition against it.
Appropriate because the MP about whom this piece was written, the dishonourable Julian Lewis, is in a club of one as a British MP who will not accept communication by email.
The website cosmos up has been in fine form recently, and here (two of them accompanied by images) are three crackers they have produced in less than two full days…
First up, details of a method by which we could get to Mars in three days.
Second, with no images, this about the brightest and darkest objects in our universe.
Thirdly, is this examination of the question of what life would be like on a donut shaped planet.
This picture shows the orbital path of a donut planet’s moon should it have one.
A reminder of the existence of my London Transport themed website. Today’s new post focusses on London Bridge, partially inspired by this picture…
This will be taking place on April 15th at the Dukes Head Hotel, Tiesday Market Place, King’s Lynn, starting at 9:30. It has proved very popular – my latest information is that just 13 tickets are yet to be bought.
This is the latest post in a series I have been running giving a station by station guide to London. Today’s post will feature a measure of London Underground history, a bit of tennis and some music…
Barons Court opened in 1906, as part of the original Piccadilly line section from Finsbury Park to Hammersmith. District line trains had been travelling the route since 1874 but there was no station at Barons Court before the Piccadilly line opened. The Piccadilly when it opened was either a compromise involving elements of three different plans or if you prefer a bodge job trying to combine elements of three different plans. Desmond F Croome’s “The Piccadilly Line: An Illustrated History” gives full details. Of relevance to our post, one of the roles that was subsumed into the making of the Piccadilly line was that of ‘deep level district’, easing congestion on the older subsurface level route. Thus, from South Kensington to Earls Court the Piccadilly follows the district, and from Barons Court, where the Piccadilly surfaces, it shares a set of four tracks with the district as far as Acton Town, and on the Heathrow branch as far as Hounslow West and the whole of the Uxbridge branch the platforms are at the compromise height used for platforms shared by ‘tube’ and ‘surface’ stock, as the district used to run these routes as well. A couple of pics between subsections…
Barons Court is the home of the Queens Club, host of the best known of all the Wimbledon warm up tournaments. For most of the year tennis is played on a variety of surface other than grass, and Queens gives men (it has no women’s section) a chance to get to used to both grass and London before the big one,
Barons Court’s musical connection comes by way of St Pauls Girls School, just across the A4 from the station. For some years the Director of Music at that establishment was Gustav Holst, famous both as a composer and for collecting folk stories to serve as an inspiration for his composition. His best known work today is The Planets, which focuses on the attributes of the gods whose names the planets bear (yes I would wish for the focus to be astronomical rather than astrological/ mythological – but it is still excellent music).
I hope you have enjoyed this post and that you will be encouraged to share it. My final picture is of a Piccadilly line promotional poster…
Taking an evening stroll yesterday I reached the lower Purfleet, near the end of my journey, and saw something being projected off the Custom House. I had arrived just as that show was ending, but moments later another started, and I watched transfixed from beginning to end. The photographs which follow reveal as much of the experience as I could capture…
aspiblog 