Records.

In the middle of last week, residents in Slade Green and parts of Erith received an envelope personally addressed to them through their letter box. The envelope had a House of Commons crest on the outside and contained a letter from local MP Daniel Francis with some news which was frankly both quite astonishing and extremely welcome. As regular readers may well be aware, the Maggot Sandwich does not engage in party politics on either a national or local scale. I try and keep the contents of the blog impartial and neutral. In this case, that policy may prove somewhat challenging, as the news contained within the letter was both unexpected, and extremely good for many residents in the North East of the London Borough of Bexley. The government is currently running a programme called Pride in Place, which aims to provide funding for communities in areas that have historically been overlooked. The letter from Daniel Francis MP states that he has negotiated an investment of a total of £20 million over the next 10 years. The £2 million per year for the next decade will be used for improvements in parts of Slade Green such as increasing the clinical space at Slade Green Medical Centre, to remove the shockingly bad criminal fly tipping from the Slade Green Marshes, to reinstate and improve the lighting on the footbridge at Slade Green Railway Station, and to identify a new home for Slade Green Knights Football Club. These are just examples of where some of the funding will be allocated, but Daniel Francis MP is requesting that local residents suggest other projects of community benefit that could have financial investment from the Pride in Place funding programme. It has been suggested that it could include supporting projects that create jobs and opportunities locally, improving community facilities, youth services, and green spaces, making improvements to the public realm such as creating safer streets, and making sure that they are cleaner and more welcoming. It was also suggested in the letter that funding could be allocated to strengthen volunteer organisations and groups that increase community cohesion in the Slade Green area. In addition to the local MP, local Councillors for both Slade Green and North End wards have been heavily involved in this enterprise. Bearing in mind that Slade Green has historically been treated by Bexley Council in the same way as much of the North of the London Borough of Bexley, as a backwater of which they have little interest and minimal if any investment, this huge level of community funding changes the situation markedly. It is unfortunately a common situation for me to have to write about negative things happening locally, due to cutbacks and apparent lack of interest, and a real positive change to be able to report extremely good news for both the local area infrastructure and community. Comments to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

Did you know that Gmail in the UK is twenty two years old this month? Google announced the (then) revolutionary web 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 two years, and it is a cornerstone of many people’s lives. Happy Birthday Gmail.

Saturday the 18th of April marks Record Store Day 2026. Record Store Day is the one day of the year when over 200 independent record shops all across the UK come together to celebrate their unique culture. Special vinyl releases are made exclusively for the day and many shops and cities host artist performances and events to mark the occasion. Thousands more shops celebrate the day around the globe in what’s become one of the biggest annual events on the music calendar. Record Store Day is the annual event that celebrates the unique culture of independent record stores and the art of vinyl. Now in its 19th year, it is often described as the catalyst behind the vinyl revival. When Record Store Day first began in 2007, only 75,000 vinyl albums were sold in the UK, but jump ahead to 2025, that number had rocketed to over 5m units and over £110 million in value. Vinyl continues to enjoy it 16th consecutive year of growth in the UK with sales in January to May of this year alone topping more than 1.8m vinyl albums and surpassing a spend of over £50 million – that is up over 46 percent compared with 2023. This surge is most likely being driven by a nation being locked inside and having more time than ever before to reconnect with the art and music they loved during the Covid pandemic lock down, and the increase has continued since then. The trend is looking likely to continue too – as more and more people are investing in turntables and more advanced audio equipment at home. Locally we still have long established independent record dealer Cruisin’ Records in Welling. - photos above. I recall visiting the shop in the 1980’s – it held a bewildering variety of stock, from pretty much every musical genre; at the time it leaned towards jazz funk and soul, and I can recall hearing adverts for the shop on several dance themed pirate radio stations at the time. 

The photo above (click on it for a larger version) was taken some time in the early 1990's. It shows the flower beds in Erith Riverside Gardens in full bloom - and very impressive they look too. One can clearly see the Erith Riverside Swimming Baths in the background, whilst it was still open to the public. The baths are now long gone, and replaced by apartment blocks and houses. The Riverside Gardens date back to 1937, when they were created to replace a former Cannon and Gaze flour mill, which was built on the site in 1903. Another firm that was established on the river front at Erith was Herbert W. Clarke and Sons, which was set up in 1890. They started out as barge owners and lightermen, but by 1911 they took over Anchor Bay Wharf, which until then had been owned by Easton and Anderson. As soon as Herbert W. Clarke and Sons took possession of the wharf, they formed a new import and export business, which mainly exported coal to Holland and Belgium. Nearby was a company called Mayer Newman and Co. who were engaged in the scrap metal business – the scrap yard still exists today. It is now called European Metal Recycling, but is still in the same location in Manor Road. Further East along Manor Road was a truly massive factory and works owned by Turner’s Asbestos Cement Co. Ltd. The site covered a little over forty three acres; by 1912 the company pioneered the development of asbestos roofing material, and also produced a wide range of guttering, piping and fireproof insulation material, as well as a lot of other components for the building industry. We are still living with the legacy of this today; many old buildings need to have specialist demolition contractors to remove Turner’s asbestos building products, as the dust asbestos produces when cut or abraded is severely poisonous. I think if the company was still around today, they would have been sued into bankruptcy – but of course, around a century ago, nobody was any the wiser. Another world renowned company that had a base in Erith were Royal Doulton, who had an extensive factory located just off Church Manorway. They made salt glazed piping and tiling. Royal Doulton also made their fine china in Erith, when experimental designs were produced that depicted local scenes as their decoration. These pieces are now rare and extremely collectible. I recall seeing one piece featured on “Antiques Roadshow” some years ago.  Erith has been the historical home to many other manufacturers over the years, some of which are still in existence. One such company is ADM Oils, which has a huge processing facility in Church Manorway, which employs nearly 1,200 local people. It originally started up in 1908, when it was known as Erith Oil Works – the business then was similar to now; they crush and process all kinds of seeds, to extract their natural oils, which are used in foodstuffs, cooking oils and animal feeds. The seeds, then as now are brought upriver in large bulk freighter ships. The distinctive huge concrete silos that are still present on the ADM Oils site were constructed in 1916, where they were some of the earliest surviving examples of reinforced concrete construction in the UK. They were constructed by Danish structural engineering company Christiani and Neilsen, who invented reinforced concrete construction techniques. The earliest recorded industrial company established in Erith was a timber importing business called W.R Crow and Son, which was set up way back in 1795! I will feature more on the history of Erith and the surrounding area in the future. The best reference work on the local history of the town was the four part “A History of Erith”, written by John A. Pritchard, which is now out of print. It was originally written in 1965, and substantially updated and revised in 1989, when it was reprinted. I have not seen a work since which is a patch on this venerable publication.

The end video this week is from transport and  history YouTuber Jago Hazzard, and it features a visit to  the amazing Victorian pumping station at Crossness. Comments to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.