Engineering rules!

Underground is where the dead people are so London’s subterranean railway has more than its fairshare of folk tales and urban myths.

I visited the London Transport Museum Depot last Friday, with other Blue Badge tourist guides. This visit helped debunk many urban myths about the tube.

No, there isn’t an automatic slow switch just outside Mansion House station, so trains have to brake reverentially for the Lord Mayor of London.

No, the reason they stopped guided visits to the abandoned Down Street station isn't because of the Down Street station ghost. It's because the last tour they organised, everyone duly signed the Health and Safety doc regarding physical ability to descend and climb dozens of stairs. At the last minute someone got themselves squeezed onto the list, who didn't sign, and who couldn't climb the stairs back to the surface; a passing tube train had to be hailed for ambulance duties.

No, the elegant Bethnal Green art deco platform clock won't be removed to the Museum, unless it gets vandalised – the preference is always to leave equipment ‘out there on the system’ wherever possible.

And no, there aren’t enough engineers coming through education these days – so there’s an initiative called TfLInspire, to encourage more kids to get out of media studies and into heavy engineering.

What more inspirational than the tantalising fragments of a 'spiral escalator', possibly from the 1920s - no-one knows! - found at the bottom of a lift-shaft at Holloway Road station.

The Museum Depot is the reserve collection for the Covent Garden Transport Museum. It is opposite Acton Town tube and is bookable for specialist guided tours. It is open weekly to school groups and has 2 – 3 Open Days a year. Check the website if you would like to ride one of the vintage tube trains which are occasionally sent out onto the system as a treat for the cognoscenti.

Some of whom must be the Volunteers - retired ticket masters, switch engineers and system designers, who just won’t let go, and donate their free time to restoration projects.

The Depot is packed with treats . Check out station paraphernalia from destinations you use every day in the modern city – how about the Victorian wrought iron entrance to High Street Kensington station. Where was that exactly?

As you approach the main entrance to the Museum, on the right of the drive way is cradled in a wooden frame a stretch of intricate wrought iron gates and railings, bearing City of London livery: how elegant London must have been in the 1930s!

It’s not all about tubes – buses and trams are well represented. One reason London trams died in 1956 was because they used the centre of the street – people got killed crossing the road to catch the tram.

By the way, the famous tube roundel wasn’t designed as such but rather evolved over the years, growing out of a bullseye device designed to draw the eye to the name of the station. Recently an Arsenal station tin sign sold for £10k at auction – the value is enhanced if the sign has actually been on the station.

If London has a corporate look, then here it is in Acton in the 1930s work of Frank Pick. The 2012 Games will of course sparkle up London’s attractiveness, but this city is increasingly being seen as a ‘mature destination’ – meaning London will need to work harder to sell itself in the years ahead, and a valuable part of the marketing should be the re-instatement across London of the Frank Pick ‘look’.

I had to leave early, leaving the tour of question-firing Blue Badge guides. So I was thwarted of my chance to have my favourite tube-myth debunked. That weird S bend you detect when travelling between South Ken and Knightsbridge. It doesn't feature on any of the Museum's maps of the true tube routes printed prior to 1933 when Harry Beck's famous systematic version arrived - I looked! Is it (as I was told as a gullible new comer to London in 1975), because of the need to avoid a Medieval plague pit?

So (peaked) hats off to Richard Bench, Depot Manager ‘I’m not a curator!’). The poor man must have been knackered sharing the afternoon with a troop of anecdote laden London Blue Badge tourist guides.

What a London treasure house the Museum Depot is!

A piece of local history dies

There is a pedestrian underpass under the A40 at White City, just at the top of Durando Close, just beyond the BBC Media Village (site of the White City Stadium and the 1908 Shepherds Bush Olympics).

Since 1988 the walls of the underpass have been decorated with murals produced by the Remchem Company, who specialise in cleaning graffiti amongst other things. Their mural cheered up a pretty unsavoury underpass. The theme - the long history of BBC TV with images of Tony Blackburn and the Top Of the Pops crew, Daleks, Basil and Sybil, Porridge, The Ministry of Silly Walks, Postman Pat, as well as other memories from the long history of the the White City Stadium - the dodgems, the greyhounds, the speedway, and the momentous IV Olympiad - the 1908 Olympics aka 'The Battle Of Shepherds Bush'.

The 1908 Olympics alerted the world to the newly re-invented Olympic Games, partly because of the bias of British Umpires who gave the nod as often as not to the home team during official disputes. Especially incensed was the US team, largely made up of Irish Americans, who in 1908 had no great love of Mother Britain.

It was finally the mishandling of the Marathon that drew the world's media attention to West London. Durando Pietri (hence 'Durando Close') was helped across the finishing line after he had collapsed, and so was promptly disqualified!

It all made for a jolly walking tour through a part of West London that tourists are now starting to visit. There have been back packers here for the past ten years, but now there is also the 'Mallers', drawn by the vastness of Westfield.

Last Saturday afternoon I took a group on a 1908 Olympics walking tour down to the old underpass, only to be assailed by the ominous smell of fresh paint - the mural was gone, now covered in bright new white tiles!

Shame! Shame! I think that underpass celebrated a rich piece of Shepherds Bush history of which London should be rightly proud and I just feel that Highways Department have made a big mistake in obliterating it.

The picture is nearly all that's left - a 1970s relay runner, complete with mutton chops and damp damage.

Granted the mural was decayed but it had not been attacked by graffiti!

We must, must always preserve local history. It enhances our sense of belonging to our localities - very psychologically, environmentally and socially sound!

Not knowing, nags

LONDON’S OLYMPICS is a Blue Badge guided walking tour celebrating London’s long involvement with the Olympics.

 

It is a day long wander across West, North and East London, visiting each of the three stadia from which London has hosted three Olympiads – White City 1908, Wembley 1948, and Stratford 2012. Walk, tube, walk tube, tube walk.

 

The Brits put the revived Olympic Games on the world map, during the IV Olympiad in White City Shepherds Bush. The first three Games had all been tacked onto World Fairs and frankly, no one had taken much notice. But in 1908 they noticed, all right!

 

The White City stadium disappeared when the neighbouring BBC TV Centre bought the site for their BBC Media Village, but the finishing line of the notorious 1908 Marathon is preserved on the flag stones. The name of the road next to the Media Village – Durando Close – gives another clue.

 

Then onto Wembley for the 1948 so-called ‘Austerity Olympics’, the Games when the athletes had to bring their own towels and Australia sent food parcels.

 

Finally, to East London where the biggest urban park in Europe for 150 years is being carved out of 500 acres of redundant shunting yards.

 

Now, here’s the rub. Could I for the life of me remember the name of the Aussie outfit that built the new Wembley Stadium? None of us, that Saturday could remember. I can tell you who built White City Stadium – George Wimpey. – and who’s building the Olympic Stadium at Stratford, Robert MacAlpine. But Wembley? Not knowing, nags, especially as the best I could do was remember that it was a rather non descriptive name and ended in – ex.

 

Meanwhile, the Stratford stadium shoulders its way into the East London skyline and will leave Britain with a cutting edge urban sports park once the Olympic flame is extinguished. The work will also have revitalised an ancient river system, the River Lee which has been diverted and re-channeled since the days when Cistercian monks owned the area, so that its tidal surges could be maximised to power water mills.  Decades of weed and debris are being cleared, choked canals will be reborn as fresh flowing water. But plenty will remain to remind us of the Lee’s vast industrial past, not least Joseph Bazalgette’s Victorian sewage pumping station, decked out as an ex-medieval monastery.

 

That’s it! Multiplex! 

Should the Elgin Marbles return to Athens?

I am a London Blue Badge tourist guide, and I would be very disappointed if the Elgins went back to Athens. One of  the great joys of my job is taking groups into the British Museum to show them the Parthenon sculptures. I point out the skill of the stone carvers and then walk them to the pediment explaining the moment of Athena's birth, showing the horse's head of the moon goddess, its nostrils blown with the night-long effort of drawing the chariot containing the moon across the sky. 

Everyone on my tours goes away understanding exactly how important Greece is in world history.

Rome recently returned a column to Ethiopia, looted in the 1930s by Mussolini, accompanied by a letter of apology. Not good for Ethiopia, I would argue. The world goes to Rome and sees the Ethiopian column. No-one goes to Addis Abeba. 

Athens is a national museum. The British Museum is a global museum.

Surveillance London

I have a walking tour, a local one, near where I live in West London. It follows a Blitz bombing raid in 1944. I call it 'Blast! It's the Blitz! 

Somehow Adolf got to hear that General Montgomery was planned an invasion of Normandy from the headmaster's house in the grounds of his old school, St Pauls Boys School in Hammersmith. 

On the night of 20th February the Nazis sent two waves of bombers over Fulham and Hammersmith, at 21.15 and 20.12, roughly, hoping at the very least to disrupt the planning. 

The nearest the Germans got to the house, a wonderful red brick monstrosity currently getting knocked about by the Borough's Child Housing Offices, was two streets away, the Auriol Road bomb, where high explosive took out both sides of the street, with many deaths. 

Anyway, the point of the story is that the last time I ran this walk I lead my group past a gate pier of the old school grounds. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted a piece of World War II grafitti - telling fire crews that a reservoir of water lay waiting in the grounds of the school. 

The London Fire Brigade had hose trucks that could unreel dozens of yards of fire hose in seconds, to fight the devastating effects of fire bombs. I determined to return later, photograph that sign and upload it onto my website. 

The next day, I head out of the house with the camera thinking that I will detour onto the high street and take the shot, en route to collect my copy of the Guardian from the newsagent. 

St Pauls Boys School has long since departed Hammersmith for the Surrey side of the River Thames at Barnes. They moved in 1970. The school was demolished apart for the Headmaster's House ('Highmaster's' House, to be completely correct). The rest of the site is now a small park for kids plus blocks of fairly disastrous 1970s flats.

So I photograph the sign, as you see above, and depart satisfied. 

Only to hear some one calling 'Excuse me! Excuse me!' and to see a London Community Support policeman crossing the road to head me off.

Now don't get me wrong. Community Support police were set up - albeit with only a fraction of the training of a London bobby - to walk the streets and deal with the small everyday stuff. To be the eyes and ears of the police. To apprehend weirdos photographing kids playgrounds.

He wants to know what I was doing photographing a public park. I tell him I wasn't and take him to the pier and explain the sign: 'EWS" - Emergency Water Supply 5000 gallons in yard.

I tell him about Adolf trying to nail Monty in West London, in that very building over there, the crazy one that looks like a red brick Gothic castle. "Wow," he says, "That's amazing. Got any ID?"

Of course I hadn't - I've dived out to the shops. So he writes it all down - "It will go no further, but it's just to prove I've spoken to you."

I stand there while he writes. Holding my camera, on Hammersmith Road. Number 9 buses trundle up to the adjacent bus stop, full of gawpers. Still he writes. I say how I admire the police etc. He thanks me. He says it is often a thankless task. The buses pull away. Talk about Guilt by Association. 

Idiot. I never asked to see what he'd written.

More competition for Silvercane tours!

London tourist sites are being approached by educational institutions, to help write courses that give graduating students a qualification to guide tourists in the immediate areas of those sites. 

London, of course, is knee deep in history so you have to struggle to find an area without fascination. But here is my problem. These graduates will not have done the full Blue Badge tourist guiding course - a grueling two years of lectures and practical touring, that teaches you to be accurate and entertaining with your knowledge, to be inclusive so that no-one loses interest, and deliver them at the end, safe and sound and entertained. In other words, they have had a really good time.

Knowledge is one thing, how you deliver it is quite another.

The latest site is Southwark Cathedral, besides London Bridge. The result will be, even more competition for London's hard pressed Blue Badge tourist guides because Southwark is a big earner for us what with lively Borough Market nearby and all the local Shakespeare connections. We bring our groups past Southwark Cathedral and our tourists ask 'What's in there?' and so we tell them what's in there. How well we do this makes all the difference whether or not they go in.

My point is, we Blue Badge guides look after Southwark Cathedral. Southwark Cathedral should look after us!