A Plea For Peckham Rye
Tristram Hunt wrote a thoughtful article for the Standard yesterday about Peckham Rye station. He says this of the station.
Sadly, British Rail didn’t care for this station as it should have done. Its features rotted and beauty ebbed. The Old Waiting Room closed and the windows were bricked up.
It’s not just Peckham Rye station, that has been treated like this.
Some have been treated badly, whilst others have even been built as eyesores or impractical buildings like Brixton. Those architects of the 1960s, who worked for British Rail and London Underground should hang their heads in shame.
The saviour for these buildings could be proper property development in conjunction with good architecture. I have seen what is proposed for some sites and liked what I have seen. Surely similar schemes should be proposed for other stations to both improve the lot of both passengers and local residents.
Fracking In The Times
The Times yesterday also had an article in favour of fracking from Alice Thomson.
As an engineer and a scientist, I tend to dismiss emotional arguments about anything, when the science and technology says otherwise. In this article, I outlined a few thoughts on the subject. I stated this in the article.
The technologies employed are still very much under development and have been used mainly in the very underpopulated parts of the United States and Canada. The extraction is now moving towards more populous states, like Pennsylvania, and only when it is totally accepted by the inhabitants there, will it be time to use it in Europe.
My views haven’t changed and as I said we should keep a watching brief.
We should also do more research, as I said here.
One point that we forget about onshore energy extraction, is that in Wytch Farm, we have one of the largest onshore oil fields in Europe. It’s also slap bang in beautiful countryside. Do we here a massive movement to close it? To me, it proves that in the UK, the oil and gas industry can be good neighbours.
If we can use fracking safely, I believe that the economics say that our energy bills will drop.
The Dead Can’t Enter A Plea Of Not Guilty
The media has already found Jimmy Savile and Cyril Smith guilty, but under British law and in fact in a lot of countries, defendants are not guilty until proven to be guilty. Daniel Finkelstein had a long and measured opinion about this in The Times yesterday. He finishes with a plea that everybody has a fair trial and as he says, not being taken to court in their coffin.
But we all tend to be hard on the dead and their perceived crimes.
In a post yesterday, I was being very hard on the man, who decided to electrify the trains south from London using a third rail. I know design faults are not as serious as child abuse, but I’m not alone in condemning the dead.
The Anonymous Widower 