The Blind Beggar and His Dog
After the cemetery, I crossed under the railway and made my way to Globe Town, intending to photograph the Blind Beggar and His Dog by Elisabeth Frink.
Elisabeth Frink's Blind Beggar and His Dog
Elisabeth Frink was born in the same village where I used to live in Suffolk.
I know times are hard, but surely this important sculpture by a world-famous artist can be displayed better.
An Abandoned Jewish Cemetery
Walking around London, I get amazed and sometimes very sad.
An Abandoned Jewish Cemetery
This picture was taken at a virtually abandoned Jewish Cemetery in Bancroft Road behind the Mile End Hospital.
Yesterday, I was amazed at finding this cemetery without any information on either my map or the fence and saddened at its state.
In Search of Jack Nissenthal
In the web site on the BBC relating the story of Jack Nissenthal, it says that he was born in Cottage Row in Bow.
Yesterday, I decided to find out more. searching the Internet, showed no trace of Cottage Row in Bow, so I took the bus to my nearest big library; the City of London, library in the Barbican Centre. There displayed in a cabinet was a map of poverty for London and a Cottage Grove could be easily seen in Bow Neighbourhood, but not a Cottage Row. My up-to-date A-Z didn’t show Cottage Grove at all. So the librarian and myself concluded that development had taken place and the street pattern had been changed. Rhondda Grove seemed to occupy the same place as Cottage Grove.
So it was a tube ride to Mile End station via Bethnal Green to see what I could find.
Rhondda Grove/Cottage Grove in Bow
This picture shows the end of Rhondda Grove. Note the Cottage Grove sign with a date of 1823.
It is a pleasant street now with most of the terrace and other houses now fully modernised.
Rhondda Grove, Bow
There appeared to be not too many spaces or new properties, that would be typical of bomb damage.
So was this the street where Jack Nissenthal grew up?
I then went to Tower Hamlets Archive Centre in Bancroft Road just around the corner.
They did confirm from a 1920s London Street Atlas, that there was only one Cottage Row in London at the time of Jack’s birth and that was in South East London. Cottage Grove had not yet been renamed. On searching the large scale maps of the area, I did find that the street seemed to have been renamed in the late nineteenth century. There were also a few mews houses behind the street. So could one of these been known locally as Cottage Row?
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.
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.
Yesterday’s Person of the Day was a Woman
With all the elections and the referendum going on in the UK and Obama’s trimphalist vengeance in the United States it fell to a woman to add some sanity to the world.
Lady Justice Hallett’s handling of the inquests into the London bombings of the 7th July 2005 has been exemplary and shows how justice can be seen to be done and closure can be brought to a tragic part of British history.
There will always be some who call for more enquiries to apportion blame, but in my view it is time for everybody to move on. I have lost two members of my close family to vicious cancers and can sympathise with those who have lost someone dear to them. Who do I have to blame?
Life is a perilous and risky business and it is only by means of luck that we live as long as we do!
The Future Worldwide Public Transport Ticketing is Almost Here
I read last month, that Transport for London would be aiming to introduce ticketing using contactless bank cards before the Olympics next year. They would work instead of or alongside the Oyster card.
So after some of the comments with regard to public transport in the Aston Martin post, I thought I’d look up the progress.
I myself have a Freedom Pass, so you might ask why I would need to pay in other way. I usually keep it in the back pocket of my trousers, so I have forgotten it a couple of times, when I’ve changed in the middle of the day. I also keep an emergency Oyster card in my wallet, in case I lose the Freedom Pass or I meet someone from outside London, who doesn’t have an Oyster.
So how is it all progressing? Read about it here.
This is an extract.
Hany Fam, President of MasterCard UK & Ireland, said: ‘We’ve been working closely with TfL since 2006 to make this shared vision a reality and recently announced a deal for the exclusive branding of TfL’s Oyster card wallet for 2011.
‘MasterCard was the first to introduce contactless bankcard payments on UK public transport in 2009 and we’re delighted that from 2012 consumers with a PayPass card issued anywhere in the world can use it to access London’s transport system.
‘We believe that London’s leadership will pave the way for adoption of contactless payments in other major cities across the world.’
What is this worldwide universal ticketing, going to do for worldwide tourism?
So perhaps the banks, helped by lots of clever engineers and computer programmers are going to do something worthwhile for a change.
You might ask what’s in it for them?
These contactless transactions are much cheaper to process than one with a pin. I suspect too that as your bank card will be able to buy your travel, your paper and your lunch, you’ll only carry one card much of the time and hence theft and the associated fraud will be a lot less.
The Shape of Things To Come
BBC London has just reported live from a party in Canning Town. Some may think that the royal wedding is a waste of space, but not the East End.
Roll on the Olympics!
Olympic Ticket Problems
I had no problems with getting my places in the Olympic auction for tickets. But then I reserved them three weeks ago.
When will people learn, that the deadline is not the day you actually do something? With the Internet, you can set transactions up early, so they happen at the right time!
London Is Heaving
There must be something going on in London later in the week.
I was trying to locate some lights for my hall, so I decided to take the Underground to Warren Street and then walk to Selfridges by way of Habitat, Heals, John Lewis and Marks and Spencer.
A couple of years ago I bought some bedside lights from John Lewis, that are touch on and touch off. I would show you a link to their web site, but they are not there, although they were in the Oxford Street store. Here’s a picture of the bedside light.
John Lewis Touchable Table Lamp
They work well and what I want is three tall ones, so that I can place them at strategic points in my hall. And as I walk past in the dark, they will automatically switch on, when I touch them.
In fact, you can play lots of games with this type of concept. Perhaps, when you are out or it is pitch dark, they should switch on and they could text my mobile phone to say that someone was about.
The possibilities of this sort of technology are endless. The text message facility could even be used to locate where you have put your mobile phone. I once had an e-mail from a friend, asking to call his mobile phone, as he’d left it somewhere in his house and couldn’t find it. Like many these days he didn’t have a landline. He does now!
I finally found an elegant tall lamp in Selfridges, but why are there so few?
I can’t be the only person, who when they enter their house in the dark, doesn’t have a light in the hall, that is close to hand. But I have a space between the door and the wall, where I could put such a light.
A Space for a Tall Lamp
Ideally it would be touchable, but a foot switch would be an alternative. Note the switches on the wall. They are for the outside lights, or at least I can’t get them to work any others. At least, I’ve got a suitable powerpoint, but note the cracked plaster above it. Jerry’s electrician didn’t have a clue.
You might argue, why I don’t have a light in the hall? Jerry didn’t put one in to save money and to put one in would mean trunking all over the place as the ceiling is a concrete slab. Wall lights are so naff! And yes, I’ve got lots of really hideous ones, probably bought in some bastion of good design like Fred’s El-Cheapo Lighting Emporium in Dalston Market. Don’t knock that market, as I think, Lord Sugar started his business careeer there.
The trip wasn’t helped by the fact that London seemed to have many more people about than normal. To make matters worse there were lots of smokers lining up outside the shops having a cough and a drag. Some were even sitting on the floor, creating more unseen hazards for people with limited vision. I did think about deliberately falling over a particular well-upholstered couple dragging away with one hand and eating a burger with the other but I decided against it, as I would have hated to have contact with such an awful pair of individuals.
Let’s hope that London gets a little bit less busy as the week goes on. I have a lot of shopping to do!
The Anonymous Widower 