Helicopters.

I took the photo above recently. It shows three army Chinook helicopters flying Eastwards, following the course of the River Thames. Click on the photograph to see a larger view. It is quite common for Chinook helicopters belonging to the army to fly across Belvedere, Erith and Slade Green on their way to the Royal Engineers base just outside of Chatham. Normally it is common to see one at a time, and the photo shows three helicopters flying in close formation. This concerns me, as the over flights occur commonly at the same time of day and with the same predictable regularity. I am sure that I'm not alone in worrying that a terrorist with a shoulder-launched MANPAD anti-aircraft missile could shoot a helicopter down. This would endanger not only the crew and passengers on board the aircraft, but civilians on the ground below. What do you think? Comments to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

Whilst researching this weeks' Blog update, I came across something unexpected. If you click here you will see the original website for the long closed Erith Museum. The website is still up and running, although I doubt that it has been visited many times in the last couple of decades. Why it is still operating is something of a mystery. If you have any insight, then please let me know. 

As I have previously - and extensively written, in my opinion, the Morrison's supermarket chain appears to be in its' death throes. Last week this to be confirmed, as the store published its accounts, and the figures look extremely gloomy, to say the least. The report stated that Morrisons' parent company revealed that its net debt increased to £7.5 billion in the year to October 2025, amid a rise in store rental commitments, up from £7 billion. The supermarket group also lost of £926 million before tax on the back of a cyber attack and write-downs. Morrison's, which has around 500 larger stores and thousands of convenience shops, has also been seeking to raise cash from its property portfolio, holding talks over a potential £600 million deal to sell stores and then rent them back. The supermarket chain announced plans this year to close 100 former McColl's stores, since re-branded as Morrison's Daily. On top of this, the supermarket chain announced that it was in the process of making nearly 5,000 staff redundant, to further try to cut operating costs. The majority of the reduction was in its stores, where staff numbers dropped by more than 4,200, while food manufacturing and distribution jobs also fell. Cuts are also being made at management level, and at its UK headquarters in Bradford. Morrison's is attempting to compete (so far, unsuccessfully) with German discount supermarket chains Aldi and Lidl. Morrisons is now only the 6th largest UK supermarket chain, down from 5th. The chain has been under pressure since it was bought for £7 billion by American private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice in 2021, a deal that left it carrying billions of pounds of debt. How much longer the losses can be sustained is currently unclear, but in my opinion it cannot go on indefinitely. I am of the opinion that if Morrison's do not make a swift turn around, then the supermarket chain will either be sold off to a rival piecemeal, or more likely it will be broken up and individual stores will be sold to its' rivals. More on this subject in the end video this week.

As regular readers will be aware, I have written in the past about how the Radio Caroline ship the MV Ross Revenge is now on the historic ships register. This is the maritime equivalent of being a historic listed building. Fundraising has been going on for well over a year to get the ship dry docked, and much essential repair work carried out to refit and refurbish the vessel for the future. Many may be aware, the whole Caroline organisation is run by unpaid volunteers, and the Ross Revenge itself is now a registered charity. It has a board of trustees, which include some long-term supporters, and musicians, including the singer-songwriter Chris Dr Burgh And Frances Rossi of Status Quo. The following article was written and published by Radio Caroline station manager and charity trustee Peter Moore on the progress of fundraising, and the next steps in getting the ship refurbished:- "I would like to express my most sincere thanks, on behalf of everyone at Radio Caroline, for your tremendous support of our Annual Fundraiser 2026. After taking into account additional generous cheque donations and direct bank transfers, the total raised during last weekend's event is now in excess of £85,000. Many supporters took advantage of our offer of limited edition Fundraiser incentives – 1,007 t-shirts, 336 posters and 335 sweatshirts were ordered. The cost of producing and shipping these items has been deducted from the total raised, and the remaining funds added to our Ross Revenge Charity Dry Dock Appeal. I am very pleased to announce that the new total for our charity is now £615,000 – an incredible amount raised by our amazing listeners. We are in the lengthy process of liaising with the Lottery Heritage Fund, which has expressed an interest in providing additional funding for our project to get Ross Revenge into dry dock in Hull for major structural repairs. This involves providing complex and detailed documentation in support of our application. Lottery funding would enable us to get more work done in dry dock. When we have confirmation that the Lottery will provide funding, the Marine & Coastguard Agency will make a second visit to see that we have completed all the tasks previously specified. The MCA takes no responsibility, even after saying that Ross Revenge is fit to tow, and the voyage to and from the dockyard must be insured by us. The MCA will want to know that we have 'wreck recovery' insurance of course. We are talking to our insurers who want an independent survey, that we pay for. We have found a good surveyor who the insurers have approved and when we have also completed all that he wants there will be a Towage Approval Certificate - then things start to happen. The insurers want to see our schedule of planned work, which now has of course expanded after the Fundraiser income. Then they will know that the return journey will not have as much risk as the delivery journey. This is a far cry from the days when we would just hire a tug and head off where we wanted without asking anyone. Those days are gone and never will return. We cannot give accurate dry dock timescales at this time, there are lots of things to consider involving numerous agencies. But it is safe to say our Fundraiser result and possible Lottery funding will take us an enormous leap forward and enable us to get as much work done as possible on our historic radio ship when she is out of the water". You can read more about the station by clicking here.

This week marks the 15th anniversary of the UK launch of a social network set up by one of the world's largest technology companies, that due to a number of key reasons failed pretty spectacularly, and is now almost totally forgotten. In the summer of 2011, Silicon Valley was gripped by an existential fear. Facebook was rapidly expanding, commanding vast amounts of user attention and collecting granular personal data that threatened Google’s core advertising revenue. In response, Google launched Google+ on June 28, 2011 in the USA, and in August 2011 in the UK—not just as another product, but as an all-hands-on-deck effort to re-architect Google’s entire ecosystem around social identity. Google+ was designed to solve the "one-size-fits-all" problem of Facebook. On Facebook, a post was broadcast to high school friends, family, and co-workers alike. Google+ introduced Circles—an intuitive drag-and-drop feature allowing users to categorize connections into distinct groups (e.g., Friends, Work, Family) and share updates selectively.  Google initially launched the service as an invite-only test. The artificial scarcity sparked massive hype, leading tech enthusiasts to scramble for invites. Within just weeks, millions signed up, making it one of the fastest-growing platforms in internet history at the time. Along with Circles, Google+ launched breakout standalone innovations: Hangouts: Multi-person video chat that was years ahead of its time, laying the groundwork for modern video conferencing. Photos: High-resolution backup and auto-enhance features that later spun off into Google Photos. Despite impressive registration numbers, active engagement lagged far behind Facebook. Users found the circle management tedious and saw little reason to migrate away from their existing social graphs on Facebook or Twitter. To boost metrics, Google shifted from organic attraction to institutional force:Search Integration: In 2012, Google introduced "Search, plus Your World," embedding Google+ content directly into Google search results. The YouTube Mandate: In late 2013, Google required a Google+ account to comment on YouTube videos. This move triggered massive backlash from creators and users alike, polluting Google+ with artificial accounts and protest comments.  Cross-Product Universal Profile: A Google+ account became the unified sign-in identity across Gmail, Google Drive, and the Google Play Store.While these tactics inflated the headline user count to hundreds of millions, they created a "ghost town" effect: millions of accounts existed on paper, but user time spent on the actual platform remained exceptionally low. By 2015, Google quietly began un-bundling Google+. Photos and Hangouts became standalone apps, and the mandatory YouTube link was severed. Google+ was redesigned to focus primarily on interest-based Communities.  The final nail in the coffin arrived in late 2018. Google disclosed that software bugs exposed profile details of over 500,000 users to third-party developers between 2015 and 2018. Citing low consumer usage (90% of user sessions lasted under five seconds) alongside the cost of maintaining security patch standards, Google announced the full sunset of the consumer service.  On April 2, 2019, Google+ was officially shut down for consumer and brand accounts.  Though Google+ failed as a social network rival to Facebook, its legacy lives on: Google Photos and Google Meet both trace their engineering roots directly back to features built for Google+.

Regular readers will be aware that I have recently featured health and safety issues with the European Metal Recycling (EMR) facility located in Manor Road, Erith. Over the past couple of years there have been multiple serious fires in the scrapyard, and local residents have been in contact with their elected representatives with their concerns. The issue is currently still ongoing, but a story involving one of the previous companies to operate the scrap recycling business in the same location does spring to mind. Some years ago I published a true story - something that might seem more at home in an episode of vintage TV comedy drama series "Lovejoy". Several tabloid newspapers reported back in 2016 that a military tank enthusiast got rather more than he bargained for when he examined his latest purchase - a former Iraqi Republican Guard T-54 main battle tank. The Sun recounted the story thus:- "A TANK fanatic got a new model in a £30,000 trade-in — and found more than £2 million of gold bullion hidden in the fuel tank. Nick Mead, 55, discovered the five gold bars in the Russian T54/69 while restoring it to add to his collection of 150 military vehicles. He and mechanic Todd Chamberlain were filming themselves prising open the diesel tank in case they found munitions and needed to show it to bomb disposal crews. Instead, they pulled out the bars, weighing up to 12lb — 5kg — apiece. Todd, 50, said a quick calculation suggested they were worth in excess of £2 million. He added: “We didn’t know what to do. You can’t exactly take five gold bullion bars down to Cash Converters without questions being asked, so we called the police.” Nick runs Tanks-Alot, giving petrol heads the chance to drive any of his tanks on his farm in Helmdon, Northants. What makes the story so much more interesting is how the tank came to be in the UK in the first place; The Manor Road, Erith based recycling company at the time was known as Mayer Newman, later as Mayer Parry (and now European Metal Recycling). They were - as far as I have been able to determine, exclusively contracted by the Ministry of Defence in the early 90's to import, break and recycle tanks and other captured military equipment after the defeat of Saddam Hussein's army in the first Gulf War. The company experimentally brought three or four (the precise number is uncertain, but it was very low) T-54 Russian produced main battle tanks over to explore the logistics of breaking them for their component metals. The story goes that all but one of them were cut up, but the process took far longer and was far more complex and expensive than had been anticipated, and as the price of the various metals which made up the tanks had dropped in the intervening period, further potential breaking of hundreds of captured and imported T-54's became uneconomic, and the project was then shelved. For this reason the remaining T-54 – the one in almost mint condition (though minus ammunition and without firing mechanisms for the guns) was retained as a mascot for the company. I can recall that before I lived in Erith, I would occasionally see the T-54 when I drove past the yard. The thing became a bit of a minor local landmark for quite a few years. On one occasion it needed to be moved around the yard; one of the staff was an ex tank driver in the British Army – he was tasked with the job. What he did not know was that the controls for Warsaw Pact tanks were an exact mirror of those from NATO countries. He ended up driving the tank clean through the brick wall surrounding the yard, and across the road – it only stopped a couple of feet short of the industrial units on the corner of Frobisher Road. You used to be able to see the patch of fresh bricks which were used to repair the tank shaped hole, though nowadays these have faded and it is now invisible. The tank was none the worse for the accident, and later was used in several music videos, and also was the central vehicle in the awful movie “Tank Girl”. It would appear then to have been sold on an unknown number of times before it got to Nick Mead. It would seem that for all of those years the tank sat in the yard in Manor Road, nobody was any the wiser that the fuel tank was stuffed with gold bars! As has been said, you could not make the story up.

Ten years ago last week, Harriet Harper, the then Project Manager for Regeneration and Assets for Bexley Council sent the following message to members of (the now defunct) Erith Town Forum:- "I am emailing to update you on Erith Market; unfortunately a number of stall holders are unable to attend the market tomorrow and it has therefore had to be cancelled. As you are aware, the market launched as a trial in March and it has proved difficult to establish it as a weekly event in Erith due to a number of reasons. We feel this gives us a good opportunity to evaluate the lessons learned from the trial period and assess it in light of the feedback received. We will be instigating a temporary break for the market and will be working with key partners to re-launch a market later in the year. I trust the above is if assistance and we will continue to keep you informed. Please get in touch with erith@bexley.gov.uk with any feedback on the market that you would like us to consider". Unfortunately this marked the end for the very short - lived revival of Erith Market. From the outset, it felt to me that the market had been "set up to fail" - on one of the first market days, there was an artisan bakers stall, who was selling small loaves of bread for £3.60 - and this price was a decade ago. This might have been feasible at Hall Place farmer's market, but it was never going to work in a less affluent part of the borough such as Erith. One local resident commented at the time that:-"I hear are giving Erith Market a trial go. When they know it will fail before they start. They only seem to be catering for the unemployed and the elderly. Because they are the only one that can go to the market. The market should have been bigger and on Wednesdays and Saturdays like it used to be. Saturdays for the people that go to work all week". The comment sadly proved to be prophetic, and no further attempt was made by the council to relaunch the market. Ten years on, nothing has changed.

The end video below for this week returns to my earlier article on the Morrison's supermarket chain, and their decline. It is a short documentary explaining what has happened and why, including insight from a number of former and current Morrison's employees. It makes for quite shocking viewing. It also reinforces my previously stated opinion that Morrison's is doomed, unless drastic changes are made very soon - although I feel it is probably too late. As always, comments and feedback to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.