Reopening.

It is nearly a year since the Bookstore Cafe at The Exchange in Walnut Tree Road, Erith closed. You can read the story behind this by clicking here. Some good news; the cafe is to reopen shortly under a new catering team from The Greenwich Pantry, a local organisation who describe themselves thus:- "At Greenwich Pantry cooking school, we are passionate about cooking, eating and living well. We believe in doing good business and partner with responsible businesses. We are on a Net Zero journey with other small businesses". The cafe will now be known as Greenwich Pantry at The Exchange. There will be a soft launch of the new venture, open to members and community shareholders of The Exchange, followed by a full public opening on Wednesday the 31st of July. Initial opening hours will be Wednesday to Friday - 10.30 am to 5 pm, and on Super Saturdays (the 10th of August, and the 14th of September), 10.30 am to 5 pm. It is anticipated that these opening hours will be extended shortly thereafter. I for one am looking forward to the cafe reopening. 

There was a Police incident in Erith town centre on Monday afternoon at around 4.30. Two Police motor cycles, a car and two Police vans were initially seen patrolling around James Watt Way and Morrison's car park; later they congregated in Pier Road, an a few minutes later in the Pier Road car park, as can be seen in the photos above - click on any one to see a larger version. It is not known what the cause of the Police activity was, and any civilians in the photos are presumed to be innocent of any wrong doing.  Comments to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

I have written extensively in the past about the problem of vehicle number plate theft, plate cloning and other methods of illegally disguising a vehicle's identity. A relatively new method has recently come to light; drivers are exploiting a loophole by purchasing cheap, fake number plates online to evade enforcement cameras. These tampered plates, costing as little as £10, can trick Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) systems used to monitor traffic violations, congestion charges, and even track uninsured vehicles. Experts estimate that these deceptive tactics lead to millions of misreadings daily.  Drivers are resorting to various methods, including:- Tinted plates: These appear normal to the human eye but block camera's infrared technology. Font manipulation:- Using incorrect fonts or altered letter spacing confuses the character recognition software. Stolen or counterfeit plates:- Completely replacing the real plate is another tactic. Low-tech methods:- Simple tools like black tape over certain characters can also disrupt ANPR. This widespread problem undermines the effectiveness of ANPR, a crucial tool for law enforcement and traffic management.  The ease of obtaining these illegal plates, often through unregulated online sellers, further exacerbates the issue. Whilst authorities have issued penalties for using fake plates, the number (around 2,200 in the last 18 months) seems insignificant compared to the estimated scale of the problem. Public tip-offs have played a role in catching offenders, but a more robust enforcement strategy is likely needed.

Back in October 2012 I originally wrote that London Resort Company Holdings (LRCH) proposed to build the World’s fourth largest theme park for Paramount Entertainment on the site of the derelict quarry site at Swanscombe.  Much has happened in the intervening years. The proposed site  was to feature Europe’s largest indoor water park, theatres, hotels, restaurants and all manner of themed rides, all in a site spread over approximately 872 acres. The bill  was estimated to be in the region of £2.5 billion, and the park was to employ 27,000 people, many of them from the local area. The plans for the park, initially introduced as London Paramount Park, were first unveiled in 2012, with an intended opening six years later. It now looks like the entire project has been cancelled. It has been reported that the current company which owns the site of the proposed park - Swanscombe Development LLP - a 50/50 joint venture between Aggregate Industries and Anglo American International Holdings - is up for sale, including the freehold of the land. Property firm Savills is managing the sale for an undisclosed amount. In April 2021, the proposed site of the park was declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest by Natural England. Their opposition to the park development centred around a critically endangered jumping spider only found in one other place in the UK. The Distinguished Jumping Spider is incredibly rare. The species is a conservation priority, and has been placed on the UK list of Biodiversity Action Plan species. In the UK, the spider's only other habitat is the West Thurrock Marshes in Essex. It would appear that the reclassification of the theme park site was the final nail in the coffin of the project. Comments to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

The photo above shows the old Cannon and Gaze flour mill on Erith High Street; it was taken in (I think) around 1934, as the mill was demolished shortly thereafter in 1936, and in time the Erith Riverside Gardens were constructed on the site. The mill ground flour mainly from imported American wheat, which arrived by freighter - having a river side mill made a lot of sense at the time. I don't think any part of Erith has changed more over the years. Whilst the general feeling is that the 1960's concrete town centre redevelopment was a step backwards from the Victorian old town, I think that nobody would argue that the modern Erith Riverside Gardens is a vast improvement to the heavy industrial scene in the photo above.  More on the Riverside Gardens next week.

Did you know that Gmail in the UK is twenty years old this month? Google announced the (then) revolutionary browser based Email client in the USA on April 1st 2004, and released it in the UK later in July. Many industry pundits at the time thought the whole thing was an elaborate April Fool’s Day hoax – who would ever offer each and every user an online message storage capacity of 1 Gigabyte – five hundred times the capacity of the then market leader, Microsoft’s Hotmail? As history shows, it was anything but a trick – it was the single most important release Google had made to date since it launched its search engine in 1998. Gmail was revolutionary for a number of important reasons: It has vast storage, a very zippy and responsive user interface that was well thought out, user friendly and intuitive. It also had a very powerful message search function, which other browser based Email solutions were not able to replicate. On top of this, it was the first major cloud based application that was feature complete and capable of replacing conventional PC software, rather than complimenting it. Gmail was started by a chap called Paul Buchheit – a (then) young software engineer, who was Google’s 23rd employee. He wanted a tool that would search through his archived Email messages, and realising nothing suitable was available, decided to write a search function himself. Initially the Email search engine was running on an old PC on his desk; then other Google engineers asked if they could use Paul Buchheit’s search engine to search their own emails. At the time, the likes of Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail had little or no inbuilt search functionality – but then, it was not really a priority when users were limited to twenty megabytes of storage, and were having to continually delete messages in order to keep under their storage limit. Messages were hard to lose when the limits were so small.  Gmail gave users a Gigabyte of storage – all for free. Initially the web based Gmail was a product only used within Google itself. The company managed much of its business via Email, and having an in – house solution made a lot of sense to them. A decision was made to offer the web application (a first – previous web based Email clients from other vendors had been clunky and dog – slow efforts written in HTML – every time something changed on screen, the whole page needed to be reloaded, which was slow and flickery and gave a very poor user experience – something Google were keen to avoid). Instead Google wanted Gmail to feel like an installed application that one merely happened to be accessing via a web browser – something revolutionary at the time, and not that common nowadays. With Gmail, Paul Buchheit worked around HTML’s limitations by using highly interactive JavaScript code. That made it feel more like software than a sequence of web pages. Before long, the approach would get the moniker AJAX, which stood for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML; today, it is how all web applications like FaceBook and Google Workspace are built. But when Gmail was pioneering the technique, it was not clear that it was going to work. The fundamental issue was that back in 2002/3, when Gmail was being developed, web browsers were far less sophisticated than nowadays. The problem with using large chunks of JavaScript programming code to make a slick, quick web experience was that Internet Explorer 6 (by far the most widely used web browser at the time) was pretty poor at handling JavaScript, (actually IE6 was pretty poor at everything, but that is another story). Google were worried that by making a sophisticated, cutting edge product, they would end up crashing Internet Explorer 6 every so often, which would annoy and alienate their key user base. Eventually the quirks and shortcomings of Internet Explorer 6 were tamed, and Gmail was ready for release. Initially it was going to be offered to a limited number of public Beta testers (I was one of these people – I have one of the first 1,500 UK Gmail user accounts ever created). Google were so unsure of how Gmail would be received that they initially hosted the entire service on three hundred old Pentium III computers that nobody else at Google wanted, and were otherwise going into the recycling skip. The initial limited run of accounts was soon boosted, as a Gmail address became the new, fashionable thing to have – the scarcity made it cool. Not everything was going Google’s way though. The Gmail business model, which was (and still is) based on scanning the message text, and serving up discreet, context sensitive adverts was not universally well received. A U.S politician, California State Senator Liz Figueroa  sent Google a letter of her own, calling Gmail a “disaster of enormous proportions, for yourself, and for all of your customers.” She went on to draft a bill requiring, among other things, that any company that wanted to scan an email message for advertising purposes get the consent of the person who sent it. (By the time the California Senate passed the law, cooler heads prevailed and that obligation had been eliminated.) Nevertheless, if ultimate privacy is a concern of yours, Gmail is not for you. As of 2024, there are more than 1.8 billion active users of Gmail. Gmail accounts for 29.5% of the global market share for email clients - which suggests to me that discomfort with Google’s approach to online advertising is a minority concern (either that, or many people know no better, which is a possibility). Compared with Hotmail (now Outlook.com) the look and feel of Gmail has changed little – any updates and changes are incremental and subtly performed; Google realise that a substantial portion of their customers value the familiarity of the application, and don’t want change for change’s sake. Whatever your views, Gmail has come a hell of a long way in the last twenty years, and it is a cornerstone of many people’s lives. Happy Birthday Gmail.

The end video this week will please my transport enthusiast readers, maybe not so much for other readers. The video features trains coming and going at Slade Green railway station, and also trains exiting the large depot situated adjacent to the main station. Comments to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.