POTY.

I took the photo above on Wednesday afternoon whilst in Erith town centre. An Arriva 229 bus had broken down yet again, and was being worked on by a fitter from the bus company. I went over and asked him what the problem was; he told me that the bus had run completely out of fuel. He surmised that the reason for this was either that the fuel level sender unit in the bus fuel tank was faulty, or the fuel level indicator on the driver's dashboard had stopped working.  Either way, the 229 bus had run completely out of diesel when it reached Erith. Fortunately the 229 is one of he bus routes that will be replaced with fully electric buses when Arriva lose their contract in a few months. I suspect that due to this, Arriva are running their existing bus stock "into the ground" as they now have little to nothing to lose. Some time ago I reported that I overheard a conversation between two bus drivers that seemed to indicate that the bus operating company - Arriva - has recently reduced the frequency of mechanical servicing on its buses from once every week to once a month in an effort to reduce operating costs. It would seem that this seems to be a false economy, as the number of bus breakdowns appears to have substantially increased. I would not be surprised if the cost of recovering a broken down bus and subsequently repairing it far exceeds the bill for a weekly mechanical service. Have you witnessed a broken down bus in the local area recently? Email me at hugh.neal@gmail.com. 

Inaugurated by Queen Elizabeth II 40 years ago in 1984, the Thames Barrier was a response to the devastating floods that had plagued London throughout history.  A surge barrier, it is one of the largest in the world, with nine steel gates that can be raised to shield the city from high tides and storm surges. The barrier's importance cannot be overstated. In its 40 years of service, it has closed a staggering 221 times to prevent flooding.  Without this protection, storm surges and frequent tidal flooding would inundate buildings and infrastructure along the river, causing billions of pounds in damage and disrupting countless lives.  The barrier's construction arose from a growing concern about the threat of flooding in London.  The tidal surges of the River Thames, coupled with rising sea levels, posed a significant risk to the capital's low-lying areas. The Great Flood of 1953, which devastated coastal regions across the North Sea, served as a stark reminder of the potential damage. The Thames Barrier's success is a testament to the foresight of its designers and builders. Originally intended to last until 2030, meticulous maintenance and exceptional construction have extended its operational life to 2070. However, the challenges of protecting London from flooding are not over. Climate change and rising sea levels pose a growing threat.  The UK government is already taking steps to address this. The Thames Estuary 2100 plan, updated in 2023, outlines strategies for long-term flood defence, which may include additional upstream defences within London itself.

The long rumoured extension of the Elizabeth Line from Abbey Wood down into North Kent via Belvedere and Erith may possibly become a reality. Thomas Turrell, the newly-elected Conservative London Assembly member for Bexley and Bromley raised a question regarding the possible line extension.  In a written question to mayor Sadiq Khan last month, Mr Turrell asked what work Transport for London (TfL) has done on extending the Elizabeth line to Ebbsfleet via Erith. Mr Khan has previously expressed support for the project, writing in his 2018 transport strategy that it “could support the 55,000 new homes and 50,000 new jobs planned along the route in Bexley and North Kent”. But he also said the scheme should be “Government-led”. In his reply to Mr Turrell, Mr Khan said an extension from Abbey Wood to Gravesend and Hoo Junction, including a station at Erith, “was safeguarded as part of the Crossrail Act 2008”. He added that local authorities in London and north Kent conducted a Government-funded study to look at the options. TfL provided “technical support” to that study, he said. The details of this consultation work were submitted to the Government in the form of a business case for extending the line in 2021. Mayor Sadiq Khan did also add, disappointingly that "There are currently no plans by TfL to extend the railway beyond Abbey Wood. Should sufficient growth in north Bexley and north Kent be promoted by Government and sufficient funding be made available, an extension to Ebbsfleet could deliver benefits by supporting this growth. However, many technical, operational and financial challenges would need to be resolved, including the need to demonstrate that such an extension would not impact on the operability of the Elizabeth line.” On another note, Thomas Turrell also enquired as to whether the proposed DLR extension from Beckton to Thamesmead via a new tunnel under the River Thames could be extended to Belvedere. Turrell requested a meeting with either Khan or Seb Dance, deputy mayor for transport, to discuss it further.  Sadiq Khan responded: ‘I'm more than happy to arrange for the deputy mayor to meet with you and the leader of the council as well. You'll be aware of the difference it could make to your community. I'm also well aware of the paucity of TfL services currently to your borough. So I'm really keen to do whatever we can to assist.’ Currently, the DLR is planned to reach Thamesmead via Beckton Riverside, which would mean building a new tunnel under the river Thames. A public consultation for the project closed in March and officials are now reviewing contributions. In the near future, The DLR is expecting 11 extra trains. These will be new and improved with walk-through designs, real time audio and visual travel information, charging points and air conditioning. Testing has already begun. This mostly occurs during overnight engineering hours and planned closures, but later this year there will be day trials in between real trips. Not to worry though, the glamorous trains will be ‘colour wrapped’ so you will not mistake them for your usual. The endeavour was funded by the Government Housing Infrastructure Fund with the hope of increasing housing and job opportunities for the connected areas. The DLR is already the busiest light railway in the UK and this will only increase, the network capacity will be enhanced by 60 percent.  All new trains will be operating by 2026.

Twenty five years ago this week, Microsoft released Windows 2000 in the UK. A rock-solid, 32-bit business-oriented alternative to Windows 98 and Windows Millennium Edition, it paved the way for future consumer versions, including Windows 10 and 11. If you used a PC in the late ’90s, you were quite familiar with the frequent crashes, lockups, and reboots that were common on MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95 / 98. The DOS-based PC ecosystem was a house of cards built on an ancient patchwork of code that ran on endless variations of hardware. As DOS-based Windows became more complex and feature-laden, more people began to rely on their PCs for serious work, and the instability issues came to a head. Windows 98 frequently required reboots and re-installation to fix puzzling, recurrent issues with applications that conflicted with each other and the operating system. Critics widely panned the utterly terrible Windows Me (released in September 2000), the last in the line of MS-DOS-based Windows, for being bloated and extremely unstable. Enter Windows 2000, which ran with rock-solid stability on the very same hardware most people used with Windows 98. At the time, being able to leave a computer running without it crashing, and not having to reboot after installing software seemed like a miracle. In fact, Microsoft included “Dramatically Reduced Reboot Scenarios” as one of the primary selling features of Windows 2000 on its website back in 2000. Although intended as a business desktop operating system, Windows 2000 Professional also found its way to many home PCs. This was due to both its reputation for stability and, of course, rampant piracy thanks to CD-R drives and the relative leniency of the serial-number-based copy protection Microsoft used at the time. Since it didn’t ship on consumer-level PCs, if you wanted it on a home machine, you either had to buy it or get a copy from someone who had a copy sitting around at work. After years of Windows 98 and Windows Me crashes, Windows 2000 was a revelation on consumer machines. Windows 2000 also served as an alternative to its successor, Windows XP, for several years. XP included some features that were controversial at the time. These included an Internet-based product activation system that complained if you changed your PC hardware such as changing your video or sound card, and a colourful new shell interface some derided as “Fisher-Price”. The more professional, grey appearance of Windows 2000 was preferable to some, and it could also run most XP programs just fine. Within Microsoft, Windows 2000 represented a crucial step for bringing the much more stable, technologically mature Windows NT platform to the masses. It proved that a technically advanced Windows OS could also have a consumer-friendly interface and multimedia-friendly features. Windows 2000 was an essential link in an unbroken chain that started with Windows NT 3.1 in 1993 and continues to this day with Windows 10 and 11.

A campaign has been launched to try and preserve some of the UK's telephone boxes; not as you might suppose the iconic red telephone boxes so beloved of tourists to the country, but instead the model shown in the photo above - click on it to see a larger version. The Twentieth Century Society, which champions outstanding examples of modern design, has applied for listed status for one KX 100 phone box each in England, Scotland and Wales before they are removed next year. At the time, the boxes were promoted as vandal-proof, airy and wheelchair accessible. As the glass door did not extend to the ground, they were easier to clean and less likely to smell of urine – which had become a feature of the red boxes. BT later conceded that the new boxes were unpopular with the public. In a 2010 account of a history of telecommunications in the UK, BT said: “Popular opinion was that the square shape seemed clinical and that something softer and more rounded would be preferable.” In an interview with The Guardian, a spokesperson for The Twentieth Century Society said:- “C20 Society has been the guardian of Britain’s telephone boxes for 40 years, and we’re now reviving our famous campaign in an attempt to preserve a handful of the underappreciated KX 100s – the last in the line of the public payphone. It may be viewed as the ‘ugly duckling’ in comparison with the iconic red phone boxes, but with these three kiosks, we’ve identified the very best exemplars across the country that deserve their place in the history books". At their peak in the early 1990s, there were just over 100,000 public payphones in the UK. There are now fewer than 20,000. Comments to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com. 

Back in November of last year, I wrote an article about how Wetherspoon's were having great difficulty in selling the leasehold of their pub, The Wrong 'Un in Bexleyheath Broadway, which has been up for sale for the best part of two years. Estate Agent details above - click on the image for a larger view. News reaches me that Wetherspoons have taken the pub off the market and it will continue to operate as before. I pass the pub on foot on a regular basis, and the place always seems to be busy, so I surmise that the bean counters at the pub chain have looked at their profit and loss spreadsheets and decided that the Wrong 'Un is a viable business after all. I also hear that the nearby Robin Hood and Little John in Lion Road, Bexleyheath has won Bexley CAMRA Pub of the Year award (POTY) once again. The place is absolutely amazing and very much worth a visit - the real ale on tap is superbly kept, and the home cooked food is excellent. 

Erith has been the location for an astonishing number of world changing inventions. It is unfortunate that prime amongst these is one that will forever be associated with the carnage in the trenches of the First World War. Hiram Maxim, the American born, naturalised Briton who invented the eponymous Maxim machine gun had his factory at Erith; later it merged with the larger Vickers company to become Vickers Maxim and went on to produce the most heavily used machine gun of WW1, and which is still used in the Ukraine war today. It was responsible for more deaths in combat than any other weapon at the time. What a lot of people don’t realise is that the biggest killer of World War One was not a weapon at all, it was a disease. More people died during the great flu pandemic of 1918 than died as part of the conflict itself. Figures are somewhat vague, but it is estimated that five hundred million people around the world  became infected with the H1N1 influenza virus, of these, between fifty to one hundred million ended up dying; at the time this was between three and five percent of the world population, making it the deadliest natural disaster in recorded history, and far worse than the recent Covid-19 pandemic. What was especially unusual about the outbreak was that the victims were mainly young, normally fit people, rather than the elderly and infirm. The reason for this was that the H1N1 virus caused a massive over – reaction in the body’s auto immune system. The strong immune systems in healthy people were thus far worse affected than those in elderly people or infants, and consequently more people at the prime of their lives ended up dying. To maintain wartime morale, British and allied censors removed almost all references to the horrendous flu outbreak in newspaper stories featuring the UK, Germany, France and the USA, and instead focused on flu stories in the then neutral Spain. Consequently the outbreak nowadays gets called the Spanish Flu, when in fact the terrible effects were felt all around the world.

The end video this week is the latest in a series of aerial drone shot videos of prominent local landmarks. This time the footage shows Danson House - also known as Danson Mansion, and its surroundings in Danson Park. Comments and feedback to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.