Welcome to my first blog post about Marxism 2015, a five day political festival taking place in Central London. In this post I will be covering the journey down, and the very start of the event. The way the event works (at present) is that there are two sessions on the Thursday afternoon before the Opening Rally on Thursday evening (which will have a post to itself), then three full days (Fri, Sat, Sun), before two sessions on Monday morning and the final rally at 2PM on Monday.
GETTING THERE
Following the advice contained in Sutcliffe’s first law of travelling by public transport I selected the 10:56 train, which arrived at King’s Cross bang on time at 12:38, giving me oodles of time to walk to the Institute of Education (where the event is happening), deposit my larger bag in the left luggage room, eat my sandwich and locate the venue of my first meeting.
THE FIRST MEETING: GENDER AND SEXUALITY
This meeting which took place in Clarke Hall was bedevilled by technical problems but nevertheless a very fine meeting. Just some of the things covered were Istanbul Pride (over 100,000 last year, attacked by riot police this year), the votes for gay marriage in Ireland and the USA, and two high profile transgender cases, Kelly Maloney (who was formerly boxing promoter Frank Maloney) and Caitlyn Jenner (formerly 1976 Olympic gold medal decathlon winner Bruce Jenner).
It also introduced me to an acronym: TERF which stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. The example cited was Janice Raymond.
Before moving on to the second meeting, here are some photos from these early stages of the event…
Our main speaker at this meeting, Laura Miles.
MEETING 2: ECONOMIC RECOVERY AND SECULAR STAGNATION
i went to this meeting after a last minute change of heart, and regretted the decision. Although there were some points of interest, it was the one meeting I have been at so far (near the end of Saturday) that I did not particularly enjoy. However, I have some photographs…
Andrew Kliman, main speaker at the second meeting I attended.
A personal account of Balham Station, with some photographs and a link to an important petition about photography.
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to the latest post in my series “London Station by Station“. I hope that you will enjoy this post and be encouraged to hare it.
BAL-HAM: GATEWAY TO THE SOUTH
This is one of the stations designed by Charles Holden and opened in 1926 when the Northern line was extended south to Morden (the southernmost point on the system, a mere 10 miles south of the centre of London – by comparison, Amersham, the most far flung station on the current network is 27 miles out, and Brill, the furthest ever outpost of any line is 51 miles out).
I can provide pictures of both surface buildings and some blurb about the station itself in the form of two photos of stuff in the book Bright Underground Spaces…
The pictures of the surface buildings.
I do not usually share extraneous links in this series of posts, but connected with the photographs above is a petition that I signed and shared earlier, and which now has over 200,000 signatures – lets keep building it!
Although there are only five stations south of Balham on the Northern line, it is also a main-line railway station, and connects southwards to a number of destinations via three distinct routes, through Streatham Common, Streatham Hill and Hackbridge.
I made extensive use of Balham at one time, when I lived at Parklands Road and worked in New Malden, and it was easier to take a longer walk than strictly necessary and get a train to Clapham Junction, where I could change to another train for New Malden than to do anything else.
Also, given the the majority of it was through commons, the walk though long was quite a pleasant one.
Welcome the second of three posts I shall be producing about The Railway Detective. The previous post covered four of the books and can be viewed here. As I warned in the introduction to that post, this is laden with spoilers. I hope you will all enjoy this post and be encouraged to share it.
THE RAILWAY DETECTIVE
BOOK 5: THE IRON HORSE
The Iron Horse refers to locomotives, but this story is also deeply concerned with flesh and blood horses, since it involves a crime that occurred during the Derby. Colbeck, operating with his usual flair and persistence, and with the assistance of the inevitable Leeming is able to bring a series of horrible crimes home to Lord Hendry.
BOOK 6: MURDER ON THE BRIGHTON EXPRESS
A derailment near Balcombe is the initial incident that opens this story. The railway police in the person of Captain Harvey Ridgeon reckon that the accident was caused by driver error. However, unlike Ridgeon was has formed an opinion and bends every new fact to fit that opinion, Colbeck notes that the driver of that particular train was known for caution, that he managed to instruct his fireman to jump off before the disaster struck, and that a section of track had been deliberately loosened. Colbeck also identifies two passengers on that train who had enemies, although it turns out that there was a third passenger on that train whose behaviour had caused one particular individual to want revenge on both him and the train that he regularly used. The book ends with Ridgeon, his errors cruelly exposed, apologising to Colbeck.
BOOK 7: THE SILVER LOCOMOTIVE
A silver coffee pot in the shape of a locomotive, commissioned by a wealthy family in Cardiff goes missing, and the man entrusted with delivering it from London to Cardiff is found murdered. The young man identified as the murder victim is Hugh Kellow, apprentice to the silversmith Leonard Voke, and the original suspect is Voke’s disinherited son Stephen. Colbeck traces Voke junior and soon establishes that he is not the murderer. Having to rethink the entire case, Colbeck arrives at the notion the murder victim was not Kellow, but someone who looked similar and could be used to send the police down a blind alley. A trip to Birmingham’s jewellery quarter ensues, for which Colbeck enlists both the official assistance of Leeming and the unofficial assistance of Madeleine Andrews. The trip to Birmingham yields Kellow and his accomplice Bridget Haggs, a.k.a Effie, a.k.a Mrs Vernon. Additionally, Madeleine Andrews and Robert Colbeck become engaged. This book also introduces us to actor-manager Nigel Buckmaster, subsequently to provide Colbeck with valuable assistance in at least two further cases.
BOOK 8: BLOOD ON THE LINE
Unlike almost every other book and story in the series there is no element of ‘who done it?’ about this story – it is a case of ‘will they get away with it?’. The action opens with Jeremy Exley being conveyed from Wolverhampton to Birmingham to be imprisoned. A young lady named Irene Adnam, his lover and accomplice, kills one of the two policemen guarding him, assists in the killing of the other and the disposal of the two bodies. The crimes having been committed on the railway, Colbeck is involved from the start. Colbeck has an extra reason to bring this case to a successful conclusion, since it was Exley who was responsible for him becoming a policeman in the first place. Colbeck had been a barrister, and in that role persuaded a young women who witnessed a robbery carried out by Exley to give evidence in court. Exley responded by murdering the young woman in a particularly horrible way.
Eventually, after a chase that leads all the way to America, the villains are run to earth, and Colbeck succeeds in dividing them by telling Irene the story of the earlier murder in full detail.
Welcome to the latest installment in my series “London Station by Station“. I am treating these two together because they are so close to one another that it makes no sense to split them up.
EUSTON AND EUSTON SQUARE
Euston Square, served nowadays by the Circle, Hammersmith & City and Metropolitan lines is one of the 1863 originals, and as with Baker Street has been restored to look as it would have done when first opened. The City and South London Railway station at Euston was opened on May 12th 1907 and the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway on June 22nd 1907. These two together are now the Northern line, and occupy four platforms here – although widely separated – to change between the two branches you would be well advised to continue northwards to Camden Town where the interchange is cross-platform. The Victoria line station opened on December 1st 1968.
The southbound platform on the Bank branch of the Northern line is very wide at this station because when it was opened as the City and South London Railway station there were two tracks either side of an island platform (an arrangement still in evidence at Clapham Common and Clapham North), and the extra width of that platform comes from the reorginastion when this arrangement was deemed unsuitable for such a busy station.
INTRODUCING THE RAILWAY DETECTIVE
Euston was the first of London’s railway terminals to open, serving the London and North Western Railway, and it was on that route that Edward Marston’s greatest creation, The Railway Detective (a.k.a Inspector Robert Colbeck) investigated the case that first earned him that title (and introduced him to his future wife). These stories are set thus far) in the 1850s, before the opening of the Metropolitan Railway in 1863, but I could see Colbeck still being in business when that momentous event occurs. He would undoubtedly embrace the underground railway wholeheartedly, although his colleague Sergeant Leeming would take some persuading of its virtues!
CONCLUSION AND PICS
I hope that you have enjoyed this post and will be inspired to share it. Here are a couple of pictures to finish…
A close up of the key areaThe Diagrammatic History
Welcome to the next installment in my station by station guide to London. Following the success of my piece on Paddington I have gone for the other main line terminus among the original seven stations on the Metropolitan Railway…
HISTORY
King’s Cross and St Pancras are next door neighbours to one another, and therefore served by the same Underground Station. Although this was one of the 1863 originals, the platforms that now serve the Hammersmith and City, Circle and Metropolitan lines have been resited – the present ‘surafce’ level station dates only from 1941. The Piccadilly line station was part of the original section of that line which opened in 1906, while the City and South London Railway (now the Bank branch of the Northern line) got there in 1907. Finally, it was part of the second section of the Victoria line to come on stream in December 1968.
ST PANCRAS
Although King’s Cross (of which more later) is by some way the larger of the two main line rail terminals here, St Pancras is an extraordinary building, resembling an outsized fairy castle. St Pancras is now an international terminus, running trains to the continent, and meaning that over a century after he just failed to make it happen the dream of Edward Watkin, who guided the Metropolitan in its great era of expansion, of being able to travel by rail from Paris to Manchester by way of London is now a reality.
KING’S CROSS
King’s Cross is a station of two parts – the main concourse and platforms 1-8 which run long haul trains to the north and scotland, and off to one side platforms 9-11 from which trains to much more local destinations such as Peterborough, Cambridge and King’s Lynn depart. It is here that you will find the sign to platform 93/4 from which the Hogwarts Express departs in the Harry Potter stories. Having mentioned one literary association, King’s Cross plays a passing role in more than one of Edward Marston’s stories involving Inspector Colbeck a.ka. The Railway Detective.
MAPS
I have my usual style map images to help those of you not familiar with the area to orient yourselves:
CONCLUSION
I hope that you have enjoyed this piece and that you will be encouraged to share it.
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 – A MEETING OF TUBE AND SURFACE
HISTORY
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…
QUEENS
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,
THE MUSICAL CONNECTION
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).
CONCLUDING REMARKS AND PICTURE
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…
I have a good haul of photographs from today, and some interesting links to share with you, as well as the main story…
ELECTRODES AND FLICKERING IMAGES
Being signed up to the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge’s email alerts I get a lot of details of studies into Autistic Spectrum Conditions for which they need volunteers and being passionate about reducing the ignorance about Autistic Spectrum Conditions that continues to bedevil our world I nearly always agree to take part.
This particular project was to do with responses to visual stimulation and required me to visit Cambridge. My appointment had been arranged for 11AM today, carefully avoiding any clash with work commitments…
GETTING THERE
The train journey from King’s Lynn to Cambridge takes almost exactly an hour, which given that they leave King’s Lynn just before the hour strikes meant that I had to be on the 8:57AM. Arriving at the station in King’s Lynn in very good time, and purchasing my ticket without undue difficulty I was able to take some photos at the recently restored station…
This blackbird clearly isn’t conversant with passenger safety advice!
The train approaching.This map is inside the train doors – I took the pic en route to finding a seat.
The train journey was uneventful and (mirabile dictu) ran exactly according to schedule. Although it is far from straightforward to get good photos through a train window one or two of my attempts are worth sharing…
Ely CathedralBoats at ElyAt Cambridge, witnessing a service run by Abellio arriving (almost certainly late given their reputation)The operating company that runs service between London and King’s Lynn – no connection to the Great Northern Railway of old which ran services out of London Euston.
From the station, it was a walk through past the bus stops and on to Brooklands Avenue, which goes straight through to Trumpington Road, picking up some more photos en route…
Cambridge and its environs are served by an excellent local bus system.
AT THE AUTISM RESEARCH CENTRE
Having dallied sufficiently that I would not be crazily early I rang on the doorbell of Douglas House 15 minutes in advance of my appointment time, signed in as requested and waited. It turned out the researcher who should have been conducting the experiments was not around that day, so someone else took charge of me. The preliminaries (paperwork) attended to, it was time to set me up for the tests. This involved me donning an electrode cap (effectively a swimming hat with points for attaching electrodes), each electrode point being filled with a conducting gel before the electrodes could be attached, and then the electrodes being attached. A second set of electrodes were attached around the eyes . The purpose of this get up was to monitor electrical activity in my brain while I responded to various visual stimuli.
Everything, be it lines or proper pictures, was flickering so that I only got fleeting glimpses. There was one set of exercises that involved proper pictures, one that involved viewing arrows and then clicking a button as soon as white box appeared on the screen, and several involving flickering lines.
At the end I was quite relieved when the wires were all detached and I was able to wash the gel (which is water soluble) out of my hair and take my leave.
Although the gel feels cold when it first makes contact with you, and when all the electrodes are fitted to it the cap weighs quite a bit I feel that this set of experiments are no great imposition. If you are 18 or over, have an Autistic Spectrum Condition, feel that you could undergo this and are able to get to Cambridge you could send an email to: Sarah Kaarina Crockford” <skc48@medschl.cam.ac.uk>
GETTING BACK
A combination of the fact that I finished at the Autism Research Centre at 12:15 and that I wasted no time getting back to the station meant that I was able to catch the 12:35 train back to King’s Lynn, and was sat down to a late lunch at 2PM. A last couple of photos…
Welcome to the latest in my series “London Station by Station“, the second post in this series to feature a station to have fallen victim to the axe (see also the piece on Aldwych).
THE ONE TIME NORTHERN OUTPOST OF LONDON UNDERGROUND
Ongar became a London Underground station immediately post World War II, and was closed, along with North Weald in 1994. There had been a station between North Weald and Ongar called Blake Hall, but that was closed in 1981. I travellled out there more than once before it closed. The village of Chipping Ongar is home to a 900 year old church among other things.
Ongar is 24 miles from the centre of London, and with no interchanges to other lines between Stratford and Ongar, and the fact that one had to change trains at Epping (now the end of the line) it took a long time to get there. This meant that few passengers actually did use the route. This graphic, taken from Danny Dorling’s “The 32 Stops”, shows how far beyond the boundary of Greater London even Epping, the current outpost is:
The solid black route is the 32 stops from West Ruislip to Woodford that Dorling covers in his book, while the grey lines show the other parts of the Central line that are still open.
11.3 miles beyond Ongar is Chelmsford, the county town of Essex, and home to a major rail station with a fairly quick route into London (this picture, extracted from google maps, illustrates):
You might notice from the above picture that there is not a great deal between Ongar and Chelmsford, and indeed my idea for an extension to integrate an otherwise very isolated branch into a wider network features just one intermediate station, at the village of Great Baddow.
An even bolder notion than the one already outlined that occurred to me when I gave such a scheme serious thought some years back was for the Central line to reopened to Ongar, running straight through rather than having the change at Epping, and for Ongar to become the Northeast node point of a London Orbital Railway (with the Ongar-Chelmsford link being a spur off this to the Northeast (well actually rather more east than north). The southeasterly node point would be at Maplescombe in Kent with a spur to Maidstone to connect with existing railways there, the southwesterly at West Byfleet, linking to the existing routes to and through Woking, with the northwesterly node at Rickmansworth, connecting with a northwesterly route to Aylesbury. The northern arm of this orbital route, from Rickmansworth to Ongar makes extensive use of existing but currently lightly used routes (reopen the connection between Rickmansworth and Watford, take over the Watford to St Albans branch, connect to St Albans (Thameslink). Between St Albans and Ongar would be new track with stops at Welwyn Garden City, Hertford North, Hertford East and Broxbourne (all offering connections to the existing network.
To finish, here are some more pictures which might help you grasp some of the detail I have covered above…
A close up of the the end of the Central line as it used to look (from The Diagrammatic History)An illustration of the Rickmansworth-Watford connection mentioned in the text.A view of the Watford-St Albans links mentioned.An old London Connections Map with the emphasis on main line railways.
I hope you have enjoyed this spectacularly speculative post and will be encouraged to share it.
Welcome to the latest installment in my “Station by Station guide to London’. Previous posts in this series are available on this link.
MUSIC, MAPS, A MARKET AND A MUSEUM
Although Covent Garden is on the original 1906 section of the Piccadilly line it did not open for business until 1907. This may be because with being only about 300 yards from Leciester Square the need for an extra station there was not immediately obvious.
That said, as the title of thsi section implies, Covent Garden is a major destination. Access from the platforms to the street is either via lift or by climbing 200 steps (I generally choose this latter option btw since I am not a big fan of lifts).
The music part of the title refers to the English National Opera, housed in a splendid building in Covent Garden. I have not been there for good while but I remember enjoying a performance of ‘Simon Boccanegra’ there.
Covent Garden Market is well worth a look around. Also, adjoining the market, is the London Transport Museum, a place I have visited several times and which I thoroughly recommend.
Finally, as a map lover, I cannot mention Covent Garden without mentioning Stanfords, THE map shop. On the subject of maps I recommnend to those with an interest in such things the blog mapsworldwide.
Before I finish with a couple of pics, a couple of last comments:
1)I hope that you have enjoyed this post and that you will be encouraged to share it.
2)A reminder that previous posts in that series are can be seen here.
Yes, another post in my series giving a station by station guide to London. I felt that it was not inappropriate for a series based on British public transport that after none yesterday there should be two in a row today!
A GOOD IDEA DEFLECTED
North Greenwich is one of the stations on the Jubilee line extension finally opened in 1999. North Greenwich serves what is now the O2 arena, having started life as the Millennium Dome. Unlike any of the other stations featured in this series (more available here) this is one that I personally have never used as destination, though I have passed through it a few times.
When the Jubilee line opened in 1979 it was intended that there should be a south eastern extension from the then southern terminus of Charing Cross. Unfortunately, a combination of obsession with the Canary Wharf development and the vanity project of the Millennium Dome caused the original plans to so warped that the new terminus of the Jubilee line is at Stratford, and it no longer serves Charing Cross.
By the way, although as a public transport user I am always keen on improvements to public transport, I do not automatically support. For example I do not consider that a high speed railway that only the wealthy will be able to afford to be something to celebrate, and neither does a cable car link between two minor stations seem especially impressive to me!
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