Before Overground – Stairs Not Fit For Purpose
I’ve now visited a good proportion of the stations on the Lea Valley Lines, that will be handed over to London Overground in May next year.
One factor that is constant across many of the stations is the atrocious stairs. Look at this staircase at Bethnal Green.
Stairs At Bethnal Green
It is truly dreadful. Sadly it is not a lone example, but one of many I’ve seen.
- The stairs are steep and rather long.
- There is no second rail.
- There is no middle rail making it a double and much-safer staircase.
- The surface is probably slippery when wet.
As it costs upwards of a million to put in a pair of lifts, many stations that need improving will not get much work done.
The best that can be hoped for, is an innovative and systematic approach that reduces the cost of step-free access.
Before Overground – White Hart Lane
A Station Totally Inadequate For The Area’s Need – Rating 2/10
It’s debatable whether White Hart Lane station is worse than its neighbour Bruce Grove.
Those stairs are a disaster waiting to happen on a match day, especially, when Spurs have built their new stadium.
But if you look at the Tottenham High Road West development plans, all options envisage the station being moved towards the south and connecting it to the new stadium with a wide pedestrian route. Arsenal and Chelsea eat your hearts out!
So I suspect that improvements to the station are on hold, until the stadium is built and all the other plans are sorted.
Incidentally, if the station was to be moved south by a couple of hundred metres, it would appear that the new station might be able to use the same platforms, but accessing them at the other end. So it wouldn’t have the added problem of demolishing houses and businesses to create the station.
One subsidiary advantage of a station here, that can serve Spurs new stadium, is that it would probably be built with full step-free access. So will this take the pressure off the need to make Bruce Grove and Silver Street stations step free, if the bus routes on Tottenham High Road were improved.
I’ve always believed that the poor quality of public transport in this area of Tottenham is a factor in the crime, vandalism and general unrest. Long term residents of Hackney, including a Police Inspector, have told me they believe that the coming of the Overground and the improved buses has quietened things down in that borough and enabled more young people to get to jobs elsewhere.
Before Overground – Rectory Road
Not As Bad As Some! – Rating 3/10
Rectory Road station is a quite modern station having been built as recently as 1980.
It’s later date probably accounts for the less formidable steps, which may by the reason, why this station has a quite high usage figure of 800,000 passengers a year, which is only a bit less than Stoke Newington.
So perhaps improving access does increase a station’s footfall!
Before Overground – Bruce Grove
The Area Deserves Something A Lot Better! – Rating 1/10
Bruce Grove station is very much a minimalist station.
It’s debatable if it is as bad as Bethnal Green, as it does have the advantages it’s on a busy High Road opposite a large McDonalds and not too far from the Grade 1-Listed Bruce Castle.
But it is very lacking in facilities and has the obligatory access up and down steep stairs, with no alternative. The stairs are also open to the elements, so must be very safe in high winds and heavy rain.
Before Overground – Stamford Hill
Add Imagination Here And You Might Get A Station! – Rating 2/10
Stamford Hill station has potential, as estate agents love to say.
Although not as bad as Bethnal Green, that misery station gets twice as many as this one.
The shelter on the Up platform needs reopening, perhaps new window frames could replace the bricks, but the biggest short-term improvement could be made by doing a bit of gardening.
And also, as with many of the stations being taken over by the Overground, the step-free access is the major problem.
It will be interesting to see this particular station two or three years from now! I suspect because of its low number of passengers, not much will have been done except deep cleaning and application of some orange paint and logos.
Before Crossrail – Abbey Wood
I was at Abbey Wood station today and took these pictures.
Note the terrible stairs down from the bus stop. Certainly this is a station that shows all the worst design features of the corporate British Rail non-architecture.
If you look at the design for the new Crossrail station, you can see the new footbridge in the images.
So could this footbridge be one of the first pieces of Crossrail infrastructure that passengers will use?
A Walk Along The Thames From Erith Station To Crossness
This afternoon I enjoyed the sun and walked along the Thames Path from near Erith Station to the Victorian Pumping Station at Crossness.
When looking at these pictures, you can see some of the places that I also saw on the cruise down the Thames.
I haven’t fully annotated the pictures yet, as finding out what some of the buildings are isn’t easy.
There’s some good technology at work in Crossness and they should tell people about it.
Fracking For Freedom
In this post, I said that Iceland can help us overcome energy shortages, caused by the problem of Putin.
Today in an article in the Sunday Times, Jim Ratcliffe, the boss of chemicals giant Ineos is saying that he would pay landowners and communities £2.5billion. Here’s what the Sunday Times says.
ONE of Britain’s richest men hopes to trigger a shale gas boom by giving away billions of pounds to landowners and communities affected by fracking.
Jim Ratcliffe, the 61-year-old Lancastrian who founded chemicals giant Ineos, has promised to hand over 6% of the revenue from oil and gas wells — 4% to landowners and 2% to local communities — in an effort to jolt the moribund industry into life. The offer would equate to £375m for a typical exploration area of 36 square miles, and goes far beyond the 1% giveaway to which the industry has committed. Ratcliffe estimated the offer could be worth £2.5bn in total.
I would never be affected by fracking here in Central London.
But if we could get all our energy supplies without resorting to those basket cases of Russia and the Middle East, we wouldn’t be in bed with some of the nastiest regimes in the world.
My Worry About Islamic State
I believe that Islamic State are possibly the worst organisation I’ve seen in my lifetime. Even such as Pol Pot in Cambodia and North Korea now, are nowhere near them on a scale of evil. They are in some ways more extreme and violent than Hitler and the Nazis at their worst.
But unlike Hitler, who had virtually no supporters in this country, there are quite a few in the UK, who think that Islamic State have got the right idea.
So by voting to attack Islamic State in Iraq, have we made ourselves a target for these crackpots and religious nutters?
After all, it is really ourselves and France, of the countries against Islamic State, who have significant Muslim populations.
My worry though, is not what terrorists might do, but the reaction of the UK’s population, if another attack like those of July 7th 2005 were to happen.
Before Overground – The Step-Free Access Problem
If you look at stations on the London Overground, where a million or so has been spent on installing lifts or ramps to give step-free access, it would seem that the station needs over a million passengers a year before it is updated.
Some of the stations without step-free access on the Lea Valley Lines, like Bethnal Green, Cambridge Heath and Southbury, have nowhere near a million passengers a year.
But then we don’t have before and after usage figures for stations like Camden Road and Hampstead Heath, where lifts have recently been installed. If say lifts and new and longer trains, do raise traffic substantially, it might make the installation of lifts more likely.
One of the problems with these lines is that in many stations the train lines are way above the street, so some of the simple ramps used at stations like Hackney Wick are not possible.
In some places, London Overground might not make the station step-free. Edmonton Green station will soon be step-free and as White Hart Lane is going to be rebuilt in all of the work to create a new ground for Tottenham Hotspur, would it be possible to improve the buses, which are already step-free to serve Silver Street and the North Middlesex Hospital.
It certainly is a complicated problem, with many people not wanting to be down the queue.
The Anonymous Widower 