Madness At Hackney Wick
This story is beyond belief. Here’s the first bit.
A young woman was in a serious condition in hospital today after leaping on to a freight train in London and being burnt by live overhead cables.
The 22-year-old sparked an explosion by touching the 25,000-volt wires and was thrown 20ft on to the platform where her friends had stood watching, the London Evening Standard reported.
The only good news is that she wasn’t killed. It probably shows that if say the 25,000 volt cables are dragged down in an accident, you might just about get away with being hit. But I certainly wouldn’t recommend any experiments.
Hackney On The Rise
BBC Radio 5 asks this morning about views on the economy. I sent them this text.
Three years ago, I retired to Dalston after a stroke stopped me driving. Every month the area gets better and a lot is down to the London Overground, which takes people to jobs, shopping and leisure activities. It shows how investment in transport can improve the lot for us all! Next year Tottenham gets the overground. We live in interesting times.
So has the Overground really improved things?
I first rode the Overground towards the Olympic Park in July 2010, before I moved here in December of that year. Since that first short run, the system has expanded. but gone are the dingy stationsa, dirty trains and lack of staff of the pre-Overground era. The Class 378 trains, started as three cars, but as they couldn’t handle the demand, they were lengthened to four cars and now they’re going to five. Have we ever built a railway, for which much-need extra capacity can be provided so easily?
But the capacity is needed, as more and more people use the line contributing to the affluence and well-being of the areas it serves, like Hackney.
You could call the Overground a rebranding exercise, but that would be unfair. Give a railway line, better clean stations, reliable frequent trains, visible staff and a simple ticketing system and the passengers will arrive. Visitors will also come and bring prosperity to an area.
London will use the Overground to run trains on the Lea Valley Lines to Tottenham, Enfield, Cheshunt and Chingford. North East London will surely be on the up.
One of the great things about the way the Overground is implemented, as effectively a rebuilt, resignalled and fully-staffed train line first with a deep clear of trains and stations and Oyster ticketing, means that the concept can be brought in, in affordable stages.
I suspect that the Lea Valley lines have a good enough line and signalling for a few years, so it’ll be the grotty and unstaffed stations, and the ticketing, that get the most attention at first. As new Cl;ass 378 trains are delivered, they can of course be run in combination with the ageing Class 315 trains on the lines at present, as their bigger brother, the Class 379 does already. Dripping new trains in surely gives passengers hope that something is happening to improve their dismal line.
With a grand project like Crossrail, you only see the improvement, when the line opens. With the Overground, the upgrade is continuous and now the London boroughs seem to be getting involved in the development of the stations, many of which are on prime sites.
I suspect that the way the Overground has been implemented could be applied to various train lines around the country. The Cambridge to Ipswich line, which I know well could benefit, especially if the main line was electrified for freight and the various councils got involved, to facilitate the development of the stations. Bury St. Edmunds station, is a classic, where a good architect could create a mixed housing and commercial development that did justice to the town.
I believe that if you get the railway right, then the investment and development around stations will follow.
An Unusual Sight On Boxing Day Morning
I was surprised to see the binmen at work in the dark on Boxing Day.
An Unusual Sight On Boxing Day Morning
I didn’t put my rubbish out, as there was virtually nothing.
A Sad, Lonely Lith On The Regent’s Canal
I encountered this sad and lonely lith surrounded by rubbish on the Regents Canal today.
I was walking the canal to try to see if I could find anything to raise at the De Beauvoir Ward Forum in the evening.
We need more of these at every entrance to the tow-path and I hope the rubbish is cleared up soon.
It’s the first lith, I’ve seen that has been vandalised.
Londoners Still Love The Hackney Eight
I was coming home from the Angel last night, when one of the Hackney Eight showed its distinctive shape coming from the direction of Saddlers Wells.
As it approached the stop, prospective passengers walked past the 56 that many of them, like me, could have taken and waited for a few seconds for the New Bus for London to arrive.
Why don’t Transport for London do the right thing and convert route 38 to the new buses?
But then us plebs in Hackney don’t count for much, as BT have shown by their non-delivery of fibre-optic broadband.
If the 38 went to Archway in Islington, it would have been converted by now!
The Fake House Is Coming On
I walked past the new house they’re building round the corner today.
The Fake House Is Coming On
It’s all looking good.
Going Back With Recycling
Most councils use large trucks to collect rubbish and do the recycling. But I was surprised to see this truck outside my house this morning.
Going Back With Recycling
Today, is recycling day and I suspect it was doing a bit of specialist work, before the main collection later in the morning.
Years ago, there used to be a lot more smaller refuse collection vehicles, made by companies like Shelvoke and Drewry. Wood Green used an innovative solution to the collection of rubbish around the High Road, where moving the trucks into the back of the shops was very difficult. They used to use a single Shire horse and a series of trailers for the rubbish. When they retired the horses, they started using Scammel Mechanical Horses. This extract from Wikipedia, explains the logic behind these innovative vehicles.
The London and North Eastern Railway had approached Napier’s, the quality car and aero-engine makers for an answer to the problem of replacing horses for local haulage purposes, while retaining the flexibility of changing the wagons and the manoeuvrability of the horse and wagon.
You do wonder if this concept is one that will be reinvented and put forward as a wonderful new idea. Imagine say on a large leisure site like the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, where for a large event, you might get tens of thousands of visitors. You could have a series of trailers, that had sections for the various types of rubbish and small electric tugs could move them to and from a central collection point, where they were automatically emptied. Hopefully modern technology could be used to make the trailers able to withstand a small bomb and thus get round one of the problems with traditional litter bins.
The Tallest Timber Residential Structure In The World
You’d have thought that this would be somewhere like Japan, Scandinavia or perhaps Canada, but despite it’s name, the Stadthaus is in Murray Grove in the London Borough of Hackney.
Wikipedia says this about the building.
It is thought to be the tallest timber residential structure in the world.It was designed in collaboration between architects Waugh Thistleton, structural engineers Techniker, and timber panel manufacturer KLH.
Stadthaus is the first high-density housing building to be built from pre-fabricated cross-laminated timber panels. It is the first building in the world of this height to construct not only load-bearing walls and floor slabs but also stair and lift cores entirely from timber.
I like it and it shows how modern buildings don’t have to be constructed using traditional methods. It was also constructed in just 49 weeks and residents moved in ahead of schedule.
So as we need more housing and we need it quickly, perhaps we should build more houses and flats using these methods.
An Excellent Brand Name
I was walking up the Narrow Way in Hackney and this coffee van was parked by St. Augustine’s Tower.
An Excellent Brand Name
I hope the coffee is as good as the name.
There surely is scope for CoffeeE17 etc.
Incidentally, the tower has a working 16th century clock. There can’t be many that are older.
De Beauvoir Town’s Cycle Superhighway
De Beauvoir Town is flat and good cycling terrain. I took these pictures this morning in Lawford Road.
I must get back on my bike, as it’s an easy way to get around and we have a couple of roads like this with little vehicular traffic, as they are blocked by iron posts, which are just visible in some of the pictures.
In some ways because the roads are wide and parked cars aren’t a problem, they can use this approach of putting the cyclists down the middle of the road.
Wouldn’t it have been nice if all of London had been built with wide streets like this part of Hackney.
The Anonymous Widower 