Basic.

In a somewhat surprising move, it was announced during the budget speech last week that the Docklands Light Railway would indeed be extended through Beckton and on to Thamesmead. There are still questions to be answered regarding this project, including who exactly is going to foot the bill for this extremely expensive extension to the light railway line, which will include a tunnel under the River Thames. The government announcement did say that:-“The government will continue to work with London to finalise funding details and will continue to work with the GLA to look at options for innovative financing to support the delivery of infrastructure projects in the capital.” Thamesmead is the only major area of Greater London which does not have an overland rail link. At present travellers to the town have to get a train on the Dartford via Greenwich overland line or the Elizabeth line to Abbey Wood, and then travel onward to Thamesmead by bus or taxi. This has led to a lack of business investment in the town along with a reluctance for a majority of people to live there. This has not helped with the ongoing poor reputation of Thamesmead as a place that is rife with drugs and all sorts of antisocial behaviour. Historically, when the town was built the creators assumed that most or all of the residents would have a car, when in reality I understand that only around 1/3 of Thamesmead residents own a vehicle. Much of the original part of Thamesmead was built on a flood plain, and because of this the architects constructed housing with car garages on the ground floor and the residential part of the house or flat built on the first floor upwards. Because of this fact, and along with a majority of residents not owning a car, the garages were reputed to became hangouts for drug dealers, muggers and other criminals, which gave the whole area a very poor image, deserved or not. Along with this, very few private buyers purchased properties in the original part of Thamesmead as the developers had done things on the cheap, and built the houses and flats mainly out of concrete. As you are probably aware, most lenders will not give a mortgage on a concrete property, as concrete has a reputation for disintegrating over time and causing very large repair bills, or the need for demolition in extreme cases. This has historically meant that much of the property estate in the town has been owned and operated by housing associations or private landlords. Now that the DLR will apparently be coming to Thamesmead, it may well attract new residents from outside the area who wish to find a place in relative proximity to central London, but with more affordable housing. Thamesmead has also had a lack of leisure resources with no cinema, no swimming baths or sports centre and relatively few shops - bearing in mind the size of the population. Hopefully this situation will change once the DLR extension project actually gets under way. I, along with others still have some doubts about whether the project will actually happen despite the government announcement. It is likely to cost several billion pounds, and at present it would appear that nobody has that kind of money available. I would imagine that the housing association Peabody which owns a large number of properties within Thamesmead may be asked to contribute a substantial quantity of the construction costs of the DLR extension. None of this is currently clear however. If it does go ahead, it will be very good news for the town and local people in general, but I'm not holding my breath at this stage. Comments and feedback to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com. 

The Basic computer programming language has recently celebrated its sixty first birthday. Whilst not the first computer language designed to be used by non – professional programmers (Cobol and Fortran could both claim that title) it was the language that gained massive popularity in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s when it started to be taught in secondary schools and further education colleges, first on Commodore Pet and Research Machines 380Z computers, and slightly later on the massively popular and ubiquitous in education BBC Micro, among many other entry level computers, Kids of the time, myself included also had early 8 – bit home computers, and learned to program them by a mixture of trial and error, and by laboriously copying game Basic source code by hand from magazines such as Computer and Video Games. One soon learned to save the input code on a very regular basis, as having the computer crash after spending three hours typing in code was a quick way to learn the benefits of a backup. Basic was relatively easy to learn, though different computers often employed slightly different versions, usually to accommodate special features that they had, which meant one could not expect a Basic program from say a Sinclair ZX Spectrum to work on a Commodore 64 without some fairly extensive rewrites to the code. One thing Basic did allow you to do which cannot be done with modern programming languages is it enabled you to read and write data to areas of the computers’ memory which would normally not be permitted. The PEEK command enabled a programmer to see the value that was stored at a specific memory location, and the POKE command enabled you to write a value into a specified memory location. This might sound pretty dull and boring, but in reality it enabled you to get the computer to do all sorts of things that it was really not meant to. For example, there was a bug in the chip which controlled the video display in the very early versions of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The bug meant that the clock rate of the chip (how many instructions it could obey per second) could be radically altered by inputting a certain numerical value to a very specific address in the video memory. The increase in the clock rate caused the video chip to suddenly heat up, to the point where it would begin to melt the rubber keys and thin plastic case of the Spectrum. Once this trick was discovered, there were numerous little oiks around the country who would go into Boots or Rumbelows (remember them?) and type in a short program to the Spectrums on display. The program had a FOR: NEXT loop in it, which acted as a timer to allow the perpetrator to make a stealthy exit. At the end of the loop, the POKE which over clocked the video chip would be executed. About ten minutes later, the shops’ fire alarm would sound as smoke poured out of the hapless Spectrum. Oh how we laughed. Not that I would condone this kind of behaviour of course (apologies to Boots in Bexleyheath Broadway Shopping Centre) –in the current era, shops are covered by CCTV, and in any case this direct control of a computer via software is just not possible. Nowadays the operating system and firmware act as a barrier to such tricks, and thankfully so.

Unfortunately, this year will be the first time in a decade when I will not be able to attend the Christmas tree festival at Christ Church Erith. I have volunteered at this event every year for the last 10. It raises money not only for the church, but also for Bexley and Greenwich Hospice, and is enjoyed by parents and children from all around the area. In fact, I have known in the past people to travel from as far away as Milton Keynes to visit the spectacle of around 100 fully decorated and lit Christmas trees within the historic church. As a member of the board of the friends of Christ Church Erith, I have always helped out at this tremendous event just before Christmas. As I know that most of you are aware that I am somewhat unwell, and I have been housebound since January this year, I have had to make the decision that as my lack of mobility and poor health means I cannot attend this very worthwhile event, which I will miss greatly. I would urge readers to visit the church and see the wonderful sight of the decorated trees and to donate whatever they can afford to a couple of very worthwhile local causes. I sincerely hope that normal service will be resumed by me next year, when hopefully I will be back to myself instead of housebound and very much under the weather as I  currently am. Comments and feedback to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com. 

Some time ago, I discovered that South East London and North Kent once suffered from a serious earthquake. On April the 12th 1884, and powerful earthquake shook an area from Woolwich to as far as Margate. Initially residents thought that one of the armament storage warehouses at Woolwich Royal Arsenal had exploded – as had happened back on Saturday the first of October 1864, when two massive gunpowder stores on the marshes in Lower Belvedere detonated – which was one of the largest non – nuclear explosions in British history. It was understandable therefore that almost twenty years later many who experienced the massive explosion would automatically assume that the earthquake was caused by another accident whilst handling explosives. You can read more about the Belvedere explosion by clicking here. The earthquake was a different beast altogether; the epicentre of the quake was in South Essex, from there the shock waves spread out causing disturbance over an area somewhat in excess of 53,000 square miles. It measured 6.9 on the Richter scale and caused buildings to sway and develop structural cracks, chimneys to collapse, slates to cascade down roofs, and several fires were caused. In North Kent, well away from the epicentre, the effects were still profound. People were understandably terrified – the ground beneath their feet was moving, and great clouds of dust rose into the air. Some people were knocked over, whilst others were sick with fright. Some even wondered if the day of judgement had come, as the motion of the earthquake caused many church bells to ring spontaneously. Eventually the earthquake passed; fortunately there were few serious injuries and no reported deaths. To date the Kent earthquake of 1884 remains one of the most serious geological events to have taken place in England. Let’s hope we are not scheduled for another, as the potential damage both to life and infrastructure would be proportionally worse nowadays – there were few gas mains, almost no electricity cables and certainly no fibre – optic lines for an earthquake to destroy back in 1884 – the same most certainly could not be said of today.

Last week I featured an end video which discussed the demise of the public telephone box in the UK. As most people now have mobile phones, and the public boxes have gone into decline as BT no longer make a profit on almost any of them. I do wonder if this could be counterproductive in the long-term as during periods of national emergency or natural disaster, a landline telephone connection may be essential. I have done some research into the subject, and my thoughts are as follows. I must also declare that in the past I did have some minor involvement in the whole issue. I had two interviews for a job with BT some years ago as a project manager to lead the removal of unused landline public phone boxes and replace them with Wi-Fi connectivity and emergency contact points. For reasons I will explain later in this article, I was told I had got the job; less than two weeks later I was contacted to say that the whole project had fallen through, and the job no longer existed. The original supplier of the specialist hardware for the contact points went out of business in October of 2018, and the only other company who expressed an interest in supplying the hardware was based in Germany, and subsequently pulled out of the deal due to uncertainty over Brexit. This part of the project, is as I currently understand it, was dead in the water for several years, although has now been restarted in a revised and reduced form. The removal of phone boxes is now still going ahead in many, but not all cases. British Telecom are saying that the number of boxes is no longer financially viable. I recall that some time ago there was a well – used payphone in Manor Road, Erith, outside of the former Royal Alfred pub. A reliable source told me that the phone box use got very much heavier, the further into the month one went. Apparently this was because local addicts would use it to phone their drug dealers when the credit on their mobile phones had run out. That all ended in the autumn of 2011 when joy riders in a stolen BMW lost control of the car and crashed into the phone box. It was thought that as the pay phone generated a fair deal of cash, that BT would replace it, but after a few days the box was removed and the hole it left in the pavement was covered with tarmac. That was the end of what I understood to have been the most profitable phone box in the area, so I am not exactly surprised that less well – earning phone boxes are, or already have been retired. I do have concerns however; mobile phone signal coverage is generally good in and around Erith, due mainly to the cell transceivers and antenna farm on the roof of Electricity House next to the Fish roundabout beside Queen's Road. Other parts of the London Borough of Bexley have far patchier coverage, not to mention what would happen in the event of a national or local disaster, or even a terrorist attack? One of the first things to go down in such an event are the mobile phone networks. The authorities have the ability to disable all mobile phones in a given cell or series of cells, with the exception of specialist mobile phones (which have to be approved by the Police and the Home Office) which are used by the disaster recovery teams in large organisations. In certain circumstances, the entire mobile phone network may go down. If this happens the only alternatives are old fashioned copper landline telephones, or the most reliable backup method of communication – two way radio. Unless, like me you are a Radio Amateur, the options for two way radio operation are very limited; CB and PMR 446 are pretty much limited to line of sight – 4 to 6 miles at sea level on average (your mileage may vary due to a number of factors I won’t go into here). This is where the organisation RAYNET steps in; RAYNET is a voluntary emergency service operated by Radio Amateurs that provide short, medium and long range voice, video and data communications in areas where there has been a total loss of mainstream communications. RAYNET volunteers train alongside the Fire Brigade, Police, Ambulance Service, Mountain Rescue and RNLI. When all other forms of communication have failed, radio will always get through. What I am really saying is, if you want to maintain reliable communications under any sort of adverse circumstances, then you really need to become a Radio Amateur – you can read all about how to apply here.

The end video this week is some aerial drone footage of the 2025 Christmas Market currently operating in the grounds of the 12th century Rochester Castle on the banks of the River Medway in Kent. All comments and feedback should be sent to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.