Bethnal Green Tube Station
I had to go to East London today and took time out at Bethnal Green station.
Heritage Plaque at Bethnal Green Station
This plaque is the first I’ve seen in a London Underground station and gives details of the architecture.
We need a lot more.
I’d been to the station before, when my late son and his family lived nearby and knew a little about the wartime disaster at the station.
Memorial Banner and Flowers to the Bethnal Green Disaster
173 people died not from enemy action, but from a rush down the stairs to get into the station. A memorial has been designed and given planning permission. For more details of the disaster and the memorial see here.
I hope this memorial to the worst disaster on the London Underground goes ahead.
Memorial Plaque to the Bethnal Green Disaster
At least there is a plaque outlining the disaster.
Limp Handshakes, Sincerity and Hank Wangford
They are talking about handshakes on BBC Breakfast this morning, after it had been reported that Ed Milliband has rather a weak one.
C and I always used to describe the United States as the Land of the Limp Handshake, as most of the people we seemed to meet on our travels there, performed it that way and also seemed to be quite insincere.
Sincerity brings me to possibly the funniest moment on BBC Breakfast. Some years ago, the incomparable Hank Wangford spoke about a product called Sincerity. There was also an American on the program, who happened to be selling something that most notably wasn’t. C didn’t watch breakfast television after that episode, as she laughed so much, she nearly did herself some serious damage.
I’d thought that Hank had retired but apparently he’s still singing and practicing his own unique brand of medicine according to his web site.
Beware of Order.zip
I’ve got another of this nasty things this morning. This one was actually addressed to one of my main e-mails, so perhaps the spammers have modified them to make them more likely to get through. The structure of the e-mail always seems to be similar.
The title of those I have received is usually something like ORDER and a number.
All of the bodies are similar to this.
Dear customer.
Your order has been accepted. Your order reference is 94636.
Terms of delivery and the date can be found with the auto-generated msword file located at:
http://www.xxxxxxx.xxx/order2/Order.zip?to_client: zzz@zzzzzz.zzz
==
Best regards, Tel./Fax.: (168) 000 52 337.
Obviously the xxx’s and zzz’s obscure the danger. The zzz’s in one case were my e-mail address.
Note the phone number at the bottom, which doesn’t mean anything to me.
This form of the e-mail is the first I’ve seen. It will change in the future, once the anti-virus companies get their systems updated to stop these e-mails.
The last e-mail I got used a domain registered in Germany. The e-mail came from Russia.
Forty Years On!
It is almost forty years since C and myself moved into the Barbican with our young family.
Now they are building the Heron next door.
The Heron Peeks Above the Barbican
The Barbican and its three iconic towers were very much of the 1960s, just as the Heron is of today. The Barbican with its sculptured concrete is pretty much unique, but from what I’ve read and seen, the Heron will be very modern and have a very much lower carbon footprint.
All of the towers in the Barbican will share one thing with the Heron and that is superb views. But the view from the Heron won’t have the view we did of Whitbread‘s working brewery complete with its dray horses, that in the 1970s still performed some of the local deliveries in the city.
But living in the Barbican was a pleasureable experience in the 1970s and we all liked it. I still felt good as I went back to the complex to visit the library to do some research for a book.
I hope living in the Heron will be just as pleasureable. But it will probably not have the eclectic mix of people that the Barbican had when it opened. I suspect now the Barbican has changed, what with buy-to-let, second homes in the country and the changes brought by the credit crunch.
European Court Rules Against Max Mosley
It is being reported that the European Court has ruled against Max Mosley.
My late father would be pleased to have seen this judgment.
He always claimed, that he got Max’s odious father with a tomato in the 1930s. It may even have been at the Battle of Cable Street. My father was there as a Londoner of Jewish ancestry, so he hated Oswald Mosley with a passion. Interestingly, my father was very much on the left of the Tory party, and he was not the only person with that political persuasion, who was there to stop Oswald Mosley and his blackshirts marching.
Naming of the Districts of the London Olympic Site
After the Olympics in 2012, the Olympic Park will be split into five new districts of London.
There is a competition to name them.
I’ve just entered to name Area 5. I would like to call it Bazalgette City. And here’s why!
London has nothing named after the man, who probably did more to design and build the infrastructure of sewers, embankments and other public works that are still in use today. Without Bazalgette, London would have not become a modern city until much later. This area contains much of the immense Northern Outfall Sewer, which Bazalgette created that is now 150 years old and the area is also close to his Cathedral of Sewage at Abbey Mills. Hence if should be Bazalgette City and not Bazalgette Town, as every city needs a cathedral.
I’ll add other names I can think of later, but the competition closes on the 16th May.
How To Protect Your Property
I received this in an e-mail.
Several lives ago, one bloke kept having his car broken into, when parked in the University car park. Solution: put a few nuclear tri-foils over it (our University had a nuclear school). End of problem. Can’t think why.
You can get stickers here.
Rubbish Disposal a la Paddington Bear in Hackney
If I want to get rid of anything that might have a bit of value, I just put it outside my door beside the street, with a note saying something like “Please give this sofa a good home!”
It always disappears! Whoever takes it can take it to the dump, when they find out why I got rid of it.
Osama Bin Laden’s Wiring
I have just been looking at some of the eletrical wiring on the latest Osama Bin Laden’s video, where he is seen watching himself.
He certainly didn’t choose his electrician with care.
