The Plumstead Ripper.

You may recall that back in July of last year I featured some CCTV footage showing some youths breaking into the Cross Keys Centre in Erith High Street. You can view the photos here. All six of the youths who broke into the building and burgled the place were captured on High Definition video. Incidentally, all six of the youths were subsequently identified and the Police took appropriate action against them. You would have thought that the message that the Cross Keys Centre has a very advanced security system would have got around, but apparently not; as you can see from the still images above, a thief recently stole a very expensive potted plant from outside of the building in broad daylight. The man, in his mid thirties is stockily built, and very distinctively dressed. If any Maggot Sandwich reader can identify him, you can contact me at the usual Email address and I can take things from there. Alternatively you can contact the Erith Safer Neighbourhood Police team by clicking here.

The tropical foods store in Pier Road has been in hot water recently. They were subject to a unannounced inspection by Bexley Trading Standards team, who during their visit discovered that a faulty band saw that was being used to cut up joints of meat; it was being used by a young employee who had not been properly trained. The company who own the shop, Zion Tropical Foods appeared last week in Bexley Magistrate’s Court where the company pleaded guilty to four health and safety charges relating to its system of work, risk assessments, and the training and protection of young people. They were fined £2,000 in respect of one charge, and £1,000 each in respect of three others. The court imposed a victim surcharge of £170 and awarded the council costs of £2,500. It would appear from comments made to the Bexley Times subsequent to the prosecution that the husband and wife team who run the shop have sacked the young employee and are now running the shop on their own. It seems pretty tough to get rid of an employee due to errors and omissions from the management. I suppose that customers are able to vote with their feet.

It seems to me that almost every week I am reporting another local construction project; housing in the area seems to be one of the most contentious subjects at present. It seems that there is both a large requirement for new housing, and also a level of resistance to new building from existing residents. Another new development has been announced, this time to be constructed in Bexleyheath. Some retirement apartments are being constructed – the development is to be called Cardamom Court, and it will be located on Albion Road, just behind Bexleyheath Broadway. The development is most definitely not going to be affordable housing – the retirement apartments start at £318,950 for a small one bedroom apartment, to a still not really very big two bedroom apartment costing £469, 950. The service charges which will come on top of this are really quite eye watering. A one bedroom flat will have a service charge of £47.06 a week (£188.24 a month), and charges for a two bedroom flat will come to £67.75 a week (£271 a month). According to the property developer’s website, they have already sold around sixty percent of the apartments “off – plan” – that is before they have even been built. Personally I would not want to live on a busy main road – Avenue Road is a busy, and noisy thoroughfare with 24/7 traffic, and the nearby pedestrianised Broadway gets lots of rowdy passers by at night. It would seem that Cardamom Court is going to be a success – but how many of the units are being bought by property speculators is currently unclear. You can see more about the future development by clicking here.

I normally write about the positive aspects of living in the local area, along with pointing out where things could be done better; I have come across a story from the relatively recent past which a far darker side – it concerns an individual who the press at the time called “The Plumstead Ripper”. Robert Napper was the eldest child of Brian Napper, a driving instructor, and his wife Pauline. He was born in Erith in February 1966, Napper was brought up on the Abbey Road Estate in Plumstead. His background was troubled and dysfunctional. The marriage of his parents was violent and Napper witnessed violent attacks on his mother. His parents divorced when he was nine, and he and his siblings (two brothers and a sister) were placed in foster care and underwent psychiatric treatment. The psychiatric counselling Napper had at the Maudsley Hospital in Camberwell lasted for six years. At age of thirteen, Napper underwent a personality change after a family friend sexually assaulted him on a camping holiday. The offender was jailed, but Napper became introverted, obsessively tidy and reclusive, according to his mother. His Asperger's Syndrome was worsened by his experiences, and he began to develop Paranoid Schizophrenia. He attended Abbey Wood Comprehensive School, where classmates said he was “despised”. One said: “No one wanted to sit next to him in class. He did not have any friends and he was teased a lot about his spots. In a game of football once, when he headed the ball, the game stopped because no other boy would go near the boy after it had touched his forehead". Napper left school at 16 with qualifications in seven subjects, lived at home until the age of 21 and took a variety of manual jobs, including work as a warehouse man in the publications and forms store for the Ministry of Defence. His workmates considered him dull and boring: he turned up on time and did not speak much. But undetected by his colleagues and later, the police, his sexual deviancy became ever more extreme. It started with flashing and voyeurism, then it escalated into rape and finally into murder. Before he killed Rachel Nickell, Napper was suspected of four rapes, and he has since been convicted of three of them. Those rapes were part of a series of 106 sexual assaults known as the Green Chain rapes, in south London in the early 1990s near where he lived. While Napper has admitted his involvement in four of them (one never got to trial), it is suspected, although has never been proved, that he committed all of them. In 1986, Napper first came to police attention after being convicted of an offence with a loaded air gun in a public place. In October 1989, police had rejected information conveyed in a phone call from Napper's mother that her son had admitted to perpetrating a rape on Plumstead Common. No case apparently matched the evidence. However, a month earlier a man armed with a knife had attacked a 30-year-old mother of two young children at her house in Plumstead. Police now believe that man was Robert Napper. He let himself in through a rear door which had been opened to let out the family cat after watching the property for some time. He gagged and raped the woman before making his escape. The investigating officers had not looked very hard. Some eight weeks earlier, a 31-year-old mother reported to police that she had been raped in her home in front of her children. The intruder entered the house through the rear door, armed with a Stanley knife and wearing a mask. The woman's house backed on to Plumstead Common. Police had taken DNA from the woman, which had they bothered to interview Napper and take a blood test, they might well have matched to him. It was after this that Napper's mother broke off all contact with him, and she burned all of the photos she had of him. Still in his early twenties, he moved into a bedsit, holding down a string of menial jobs but using his spare time to stalk and choose his victims. A major inquiry was set up after the 1992 attacks. Officers were hunting a perpetrator who showed extreme violence towards his victims, using a knife, and on more than one occasion attacking a woman with her children present. Throughout the inquiry, 106 crimes were identified involving 86 women. And it was in the middle of this inquiry that Rachel Nickell was attacked. Despite similarities between the cases, no one appeared to be joining up the dots. Paul Britton – the well-known criminal profiler a leading influence on the Nickell murder inquiry, was also working on the Green Chain rapes case. Professor Laurence Alison, the chair of forensic psychology at Liverpool University and the author of a new book on Napper, told the Guardian: "Frenzied random motiveless knife attacks on women are rare. Even more unusual are frenzied, random knife attacks on women with their young children present. Here was Britton with two of them under his nose and no one noticed." If the police were not drawing the threads together, others were attempting to point them in the right direction and bring Napper out of the darkness. In August 1992, one of his neighbours in Plumstead rang the police to say he looked like the photo fit of the Green Chain rapist. Detectives went to his house, questioned him and asked him to give a blood sample at the local police station. He failed to turn up. On 15 July 1992 on Wimbledon Common, Napper had stabbed the young mother Rachel Nickell forty-nine times in front of her son Alex, then aged two, who clung on to his mother's body begging her to wake up. Napper was questioned about unsolved attacks on other women during the year, but was eliminated from inquiries, as his false alibi that he had been at work at the time of the murder was not sufficiently investigated by detectives. Officers asked him to visit to a police station on 2 September 1992 and give a DNA sample, but he never turned up. The following day, he was again identified as the man in the E-fit by a caller who identified him as "Bob Napper". Again police visited and asked him to attend a police station to give a sample. An appointment was scheduled for 8 September 1992, but again he failed to turn up. Despite his unwillingness to provide the police with DNA, knowing it would match samples found on the three rape victims, Napper was then ruled out of the rape inquiry simply because he was 6ft 2in and police believed the man they were looking for was 5ft 9in. Three months later in October 1992, Napper was flagged up to the police again when he was arrested over suggestions that he had been stalking a civilian employee at Plumstead police station. Officers searched his bedsit and found a .22 pistol, 244 rounds of ammunition, two knives, a crossbow and six crossbow bolts. Police files from the inquiry show they also found pocket diaries, hand-drawn maps, notes written on the borders of newspapers, and a London A-Z.  Part of his fixation appeared to be to target mothers while they were with their young children. He preyed particularly upon women in parks and commons, but would also stalk them at their homes, watching them for days before choosing his moment to attack. In his rented a room at a house on Plumstead High Street, detectives found a padlocked red toolbox, inside of which were his darkest secrets. They discovered a torch, a restraining cord, and medical notes on how to torture people. There was an illustration of the neck showing how the various human muscles work and interact. Another showed the anatomy of the human torso. One hand-written note said “Mengele’s way” – an apparent reference to the Nazi doctor who practised surgical and psychological experiments on living and dead victims. In the notes were references to methods of restraining someone, including the phrase "cling film on the legs". Another note named particular streets and gave map references for them on the A-Z. Pages had been marked with black dots highlighting certain areas; other locations were marked with dashes. They were concentrated in the Plumstead, Eltham and Woolwich areas of South-East London. Three days later he was arrested for possession of a firearm and sentenced to two months in prison.  Napper pleaded guilty to possessing a firearm and ammunition. In court, references were made to his disturbed mental state and a psychiatric report was produced saying he was "without doubt an immediate threat to himself and the public". Napper was given an eight-week custodial sentence and no further inquiries were carried out into the disturbing evidence found at his flat. In April 1993, Napper's fingerprints were found on a tin box discovered buried on Winns Common, neighbouring Plumstead Common. Inside the box was a Mauser handgun. Despite the fingerprint link, Napper was never questioned about the find. In July of the same year, according to police files, Napper's name was logged on an intelligence report after a couple phoned the police to say they had seen a man spying on their neighbour, a young blonde woman who often walked in her flat semi-naked. The husband followed the man, and when police arrived they spoke to Napper, who gave his name and address. The officers' notes read: "Subject strange, abnormal, should be considered as a possible rapist, indecency type suspect." Shortly thereafter,  in November 1993, in a house in Plumstead, Napper stabbed 27-year-old Samantha Bisset in her neck and chest, killing her, and then sexually assaulted and smothered her four-year-old daughter, Jazmine Jemima Bisset.  In her sitting room, the 6' 2" Napper mutilated Samantha's body, taking away parts of her body as a trophy. The crime scene was reportedly so grisly that the police photographer assigned to the case was forced to take two years' leave after witnessing it. After a fingerprint belonging to Napper was recovered from Samantha's flat, he was arrested, and charged with the murders of Samantha and Jazmine Bisset, in May 1994. Napper was convicted at The Old Bailey in October 1995. He also admitted two rapes and two attempted rapes at this time. From the time of the first Old Bailey trial, he has been held at Broadmoor. In December 1995 he was questioned about Nickell's death but denied any involvement. Napper is also believed to be the "Green Chain Rapist", who carried out at least 70 savage attacks across south-east London over a four-year period ending in 1994. The earliest of the 'Green Chain' rapes have been linked to Napper, and were those he admitted to in 1995. Napper is known to have kept detailed records of the sites of potential and actual attacks on women. As if this was not bad enough, Colin Stagg, an entirely innocent man was initially charged with the murder of Rachel Nickell until, in 2004, advances in DNA profiling revealed Napper's connection to the case. On 18 December 2008, Napper was convicted of the manslaughter of Rachel Nickell on the grounds of diminished responsibility. He also admitted to four other attacks on women. Napper was to be held indefinitely at Broadmoor Hospital. At the same time, Colin Stagg received a public apology from the police, and an unprecedented compensation payment from the Home Office which exceeded £735,000. As he progressed from peeping tom to stalker, then to multiple rapist and finally serial killer, Napper came on to the police radar at least seven times, on at least two occasions displaying behaviour that marked him out as a danger to women. But he was never pursued. Had the links been investigated, the connections would have led detectives to Napper earlier, preventing Colin Stagg from being made a pariah and saving another young mother and her child from murder and depraved mutilation. Now Robert Napper is spending the rest of his life in Broadmoor Hospital; recent accounts state that he is still highly delusional;  he believes he has a Master’s degree in Maths, had won the Nobel Peace Prize, been awarded medals for fighting in Angola and had millions stashed in a bank in Sidcup. He also believes that his fingers had been blown off by an IRA parcel bomb but had miraculously grown back. The only good news to come out of this sad and disturbing tale is that Napper will never be released, and cannot further threaten the public. 

Following the story that Bexley Council have agreed outline planning permission on part of Old Farm Park in Sidcup, and the widely held public belief that Bexley Council are relentless in their desire to sell off as much public land for commercial development as housing, a strong rumour has been forwarded to me by two separate and respected sources. The rumour (and it is only that at this stage) is that the owners of The Europa Industrial Estate in Fraser Road are having problems finding suitable tenants for much of the extensive site; the former Europa Gym is now converted into a House of Multiple Occupation (HMO), but many of the other industrial units especially at the Eastern end of the site lay empty. Consultation with an industrial estate agent suggests that around twenty units on the Europa Estate have been empty for some considerable time, with little interest from local businesses in occupying them. My information is that the owners of the Europa Estate are currently considering relocating the few businesses in the Eastern, Erith end of the estate into the Western end, nearer to the BATT Cables site; they would then sell the Eastern side of the estate to a property developer. I can see the thinking in this; the Erith Quarry site, only a couple of hundred metres further along Fraser Road is seeing exceedingly good business, with many units already sold "off plan". The owners of the Europa Estate may well wish to copy this - after all, if they can get the necessary planning permissions from Bexley Council (surely a formality with the track record of this local administration) then the land would be worth a king's ransom, situated as it is adjacent to Erith Station, Erith town centre and road links to the M25, the South Circular and the A2. I stress that what I have heard are merely rumours; if you have any concrete information confirming or denying this story, please drop me a line to hugh.neal@gmail.com in complete confidence.

On my way to work on Thursday morning, I saw a total of four, three piece suites dumped by the roadside – all of which were in Erith. One of the three was dumped by a post box, and the other three were left adjacent to the Sikh temple at the Pom Pom. The level of fly tipping seems to be increasing at an exponential rate. I know that this is a UK wide problem, and I have been doing some research into what may be the causes. Six of the ten worst hot spots for fly tipping in the UK are within the boundaries of Greater London. Haringey in North London tops the list, with about 25,000 cases of fly-tipping reported in the last year – the equivalent of one offence for every ten people who live there. Westminster comes in second, while Greenwich, Croydon, Hammersmith and Fulham and Kensington and Chelsea also appear in the top 10. Brent, also in Nhorth London, saw the biggest year-on-year rise in fly-tipping incidents – an 84 per cent hike between 2014/15 and 2016/17. A number of councils have mounted campaigns to discourage people from fly-tipping, and to encourage residents to report it. The London Borough of Bexley appears very low down on the list, something which surprises me greatly. How accurately the statistics have been compiled is not clear. As regular readers may be aware, I have been involved in a couple of successful prosecutions for fly tipping in the past, one of which led to the perpetrator getting an eight month prison sentence, on top of a heavy fine and the confiscation of his van. These however seem to be the exception rather than the rule – most fly tippers do so safe in the knowledge their chances of being caught and subsequently prosecuted are vanishingly slim.

The Penny Farthing micro pub in Crayford has done astonishingly well for itself; since it opened in September 2014. The Bexley Times have reported that the Penny Farthing sold its one thousandth cask of real ale on Thursday evening. The micro pub is located in the riverside at Crayford, cleverly located right next door to the Crayford Tandoori – a match made in heaven. In a very nice touch, the 1000th cask was of a locally produced  Motueka Pale Ale from the Bexley Brewery, which is located only up  the road in Erith. The Penny Farthing is a great success – when you hear of so many pubs closing and often being converted into flats, or just being demolished completely, it is a very good feeling that Micro Pubs are very much bucking this trend.

Radio Caroline will broadcast on the former BBC World Service medium wave frequency of 648 kHz, after being awarded a community radio licence for East Anglia. The station was given the go-ahead by Ofcom last month, and now says the regulator has also agreed to its request for a 1000-watt ERP (Effective Radiated Power). In a statement on the Radio Caroline website, the station said: “We can now announce that our AM frequency will be 648 kHz with a power of 1000 watts. This is ERP or simply the power radiated by the aerial. A transmitter was imported from the Continent a few days ago and is now being modified to suit the frequency. There are further hurdles, but as you can see progress is being made. Watch this space.” The new Radio Caroline will play album tracks and had proposed a coverage area from Ipswich to Diss and Bury St Edmunds to Saxmundham. Some programmes will be broadcast from studios in Kent, and others via a link to the Ross Revenge ship. The station has previously said that, if practical, it aims to get on air in time for the 50th anniversary of the Marine Offences Act on 14th August. Caroline already runs a service online and via a number of DAB multiplexes around the country. What is both surprising and welcome is the choice of frequency 648 kHz is the old BBC World Service channel that was in use by that station until March 2011. 648 kHz is what is known as a “clear channel” – one that is shared with no others in the transmission area. The nearest other broadcasters using 648 kHz are Murski Val located in Northern Slovenia, and RNE Radio Nacional in Bajadoz in Spain. Both of those stations use a transmission power of 10 kW – which should hopefully not interfere with the 1kW signal from Radio Caroline to the Eastern parts of the UK. I actually suspect that the forthcoming Caroline radio transmissions will be a big target for Medium Wave DXers (the radio equivalent of train spotters) – I think it will be only hours from launch before the first long range reception reports start coming in from parts of Scandinavia and well beyond.  There will be plenty of people getting their anoraks dry cleaned just waiting for the day. The amount of power granted by Ofcom to Radio Caroline is a bit of an eye opener; an ERP of a kilowatt is a lot of power for a local station. Good news all round.

I think everyone who uses the web has come across all sorts of pop ups and warning pages that tell you that your computer has been infected by malware and all sorts of nasties. Most people realise that these are scams; fraudulent pages trying to get you to part you with your money. The enterprising chap in the short video below has taken it upon himself to investigate exactly who is behind one range of these fraudulent web page pop ups. It makes for very enlightening, not to mention entertaining viewing. Have a look and see what you think. Feel free to leave a comment below, or Email me at  hugh.neal@gmail.com.

Erith - then and now.

I have written in the past about the traveller pony that lives on the small patch of land between the end of James Watt Way, and the riverside walk adjacent to Erith Morrison’s supermarket. That particular animal gets spoiled by the parents who take small children around there to see it – they usually ply it with carrots and apples, and in summer it can end up getting pretty fat. This is most definitely not the case with most horses and ponies that are left to “fly graze” on both public and private land without the landowners permission. This is a problem all over the country, but seems to be particularly bad in South East London and North Kent – possibly because of the high population concentration making the issue appear more visible than elsewhere. I have seen signs posted on trees and other structures located near pieces of open grassland in Abbey Wood and Thamesmead with messages such as “do not leave your pony here” and “no fly grazing” – which periodically get ignored. I saw an interview on Sky News earlier in the week, in which RSPCA Superintendent John Grant said “The equine market has dropped. When there used to be a bit of a meat trade, people could move them on, but at the moment people are giving colts to each other. It means there's nowhere for them to go so they just dump them on whatever grazing's available”. Vicky Alford, from the Blue Cross animal charity, said that many fly grazing horses are severely neglected, and some have to be put down."We see them in pretty poor conditions, in some cases, really quite emaciated. We see worm burdens on these horses, lice, and if horses are quite skinny then the rain can pool and puddle on their backs which can lead to some really nasty sores." Much of this can be attributed to the British people  having an aversion to eating horsemeat. If there was a local market for the excess horses, then the overgrazing and illegal use of open land would cease. Many of the animals involved currently have no intrinsic value whatsoever, and instead potentially cost the owners for upkeep. Some, like the family that own the pony on the land adjacent to the riverfront at Erith are responsible and ensure that the beast is always kept with a large amount of feed and plenty of fresh water. Many are less careful, and the horses they own suffer accordingly. I think we should be encouraging the consumption of horsemeat in the UK. I have eaten roast horse, and very good it was too – quite similar to venison. It is unfortunate that the recent horse meat scandal (which involved horsemeat being substituted for other meat, mainly in chilled or frozen ready meals) was mainly about the fact that the horsemeat was of unknown provenance, and the health of the animal prior to slaughter could not be determined, rather than there being a problem with eating horse meat at all. This does not seem to have registered with the general public, who thanks to some lazy press reporting, associate any horse meat as somehow suspect. If this attitude could be changed, it could actually make the overall welfare of British horses and ponies better, as once they had a status where they had monetary value, it would be in the owners interest to look after the animal. This is on a far larger scale than my recent story on the value of rat meat (the infamous, slightly tongue in cheek “Kentucky Fried Rat” story from a few weeks ago) but the message is broadly the same. What do you think? Leave a comment below, or Email me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

Less than a day after I had written about Southeastern Trains getting an extension on their franchise to serve South East London and North Kent, despite having a service that was judged to be the second worst in the country, they excel themselves. On Monday morning I arrived at Erith Station at a couple of minutes before 7am as usual. The London – bound platform was already packed – a worrying sign. It turned out that there had been no trains for some time, and after waiting an additional twenty minutes or so, a much delayed train turned up, already very well occupied. I was just able to get a seat, but by the time the train arrived at Belvedere, it was standing room only.  Bearing in mind that the train normally continues to gain passengers at every station until it reaches Greenwich, where quite a number, myself included, exit the train to transfer to the DLR to Canary Wharf. This means that in such a situation, the Southeastern train carriages become uncomfortably full of irritated and tetchy commuters. As I am sure you can appreciate, Southeastern Trains are not exactly flavour of the moment with their regular customers, most of whom have no alternative method of travelling to and from London, and who are effectively held to ransom by the train company. Having sad that I have doubts as to whether any other of the train operators eligible could actually do any better – as mentioned last week, it may be a case of “better the devil you know”.

The photo above shows Erith Town Forum members and friends who organised a cakes tombola stall to support Riverside Shopping Centre raising funds for MacMillan Cancer Support Coffee Morning on Friday 26th September.

The News Shopper has reported two negative stories about the two local Wetherspoon’s owned pubs. The first story involves a young mother who had met with a small group of friends for a late breakfast in the Furze Wren in Bexleyheath. She was accompanied by her young son who needed breast feeding. A member of staff then approached her and asked her to cover up. Understandably she was upset by this, and complained. The story has caused quite a stir on the News Shopper site, with a huge number of comments being posted, and on Thursday there was a "Breast Feed - In". Whatever one’s personal opinion, the woman is covered by the 2010 Equality Act; what gets me is not so much that she was breast feeding, but that someone actually saw her doing it. From my own experience in the Furze Wren, it is so dimly lit and murky that one is hard pressed to see anything much at all! In the second incident, a chap tripped over a piece of loose trim on the bottom of a toilet door in a Wetherspoon’s pub in Deptford. He was seriously bruised and suffered from internal bleeding. To compound matters, the man was already suffering from brain and lung cancer. In both cases Wetherspoon’s are in negotiation with the injured parties. This contrasts with the opening of The Penny Farthing micro pub in Crayford, which looks to have been a resounding success. As I have previously written, Micro pubs differ from mainstream pubs in that they tend to have shorter opening hours, they don’t serve spirits and they don’t sell lager. They concentrate on high quality real ales, and usually a local cider. Most also have restrictions on the use of mobile phones on the premises as well. The Penny Farthing is the second micro pub to open in the London Borough of Bexley, after The Door Hinge in Welling. A third micro pub – the Broken Drum is due to open in Blackfen within the next few months. This is certainly a cause for celebration, as the micro pub philosophy is to encourage strangers  to talk together and to foster a sense of community, and to turn back the clock to create pubs as they once used to be. The Penny Farthing is open noon to 3pm from Tuesday to Sunday; 5pm to 9.30pm from Tuesday to Thursday; 5pm to 10.30pm Friday and Saturday and closed Sunday evening and all day Monday. Incidentally the other current local micro pub The Door Hinge has just been voted Greater London pub of the year by members of CAMRA. It is now one of the sixteen finalists going forward to compete for UK pub of the year - an amazing achievement for a micro pub that has been open for less than two years. Congratulations Ray! My personal feeling is that the pub business in the UK is going to split into three distinct categories over the next few years; indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that this is already happening. The categories will include the large corporate chain pubs such as the aforementioned Wetherspoon’s, and others such as the Slug and Lettuce brand; the second category will include the high end “destination” pubs such as the Robin Hood and Little John in Lion Road, Bexleyheath (which I love), and (*Shudder*) gastro pubs - which I personally detest. The third category will be micro pubs, which are currently expanding at a fast rate. You may notice that I don’t mention the classic back street boozer. This is because I feel that these kind of pubs will die out, and in many cases have already done so. The role  of the traditional pub in local communities is now much reduced – cheap supermarket booze and large screen televisions keep people in their homes, and the high level of beer taxation, along with (to a lesser extent) the smoking ban have meant that rather than just popping round the corner for a quick pint, many people stay at home, and only go out to a pub as a special occasion / meal or similar. What do you think? What should be done? Are micro pubs the way forward? Either leave a comment below, or Email me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

The photo above (click on it for a larger view) shows the view looking North along Erith High Street. I can confidently state that the photograph was taken in the spring of 1938 at ten past eleven in the morning. The (then not long opened) Odeon cinema is showing a poster for the John Ford directed film "The Hurricane" starring Dorothy Lamour and Jon Hall prominently on the side wall. The film was released in the USA during November 1937, but it would have been a few months until prints reached the UK, and looking at the state of dress and the weather in the photo, it must have been mid to late spring when the photograph was taken. The time can easily be determined from the clock outside the row of shops to the left of the photograph.

The photo above was taken by me yesterday afternoon from as close as physically possible to the site where the photograph from Spring 1938 was taken, subject to the limitations of the changed road layout and the different camera image aspect ratio.  As you can clearly see, nothing of the original photograph has survived. The Odeon cinema should have still been in place, as it was a grade 2* listed building (a 2* is half way to grade 1 listed status, and is very rarely awarded - the reason for the award was that the architect of the cinema Sir Giles Gilbert Scott was also the man who designed the iconic K6 red telephone box that has become a symbol of Britain). Back in the late 1990's the cinema building was empty and in pretty poor shape. It had been originally proposed to convert it into a Wetherspoon's outlet, but the developers realised that restoring the original structure was going to be prohibitively expensive, and it was demolished - something that should really never have been allowed to happen. Instead a rather anodyne block of flats was constructed on the site. 

A further train related story has been raised by Darryl Chamberlain, who writes the popular 853 Blog, which mainly covers the Charlton and Greenwich areas. The name of his blog comes from the old dialing code for the area. I hesitate to call Darryl a blogger, as he is actually a "proper" journalist who writes for a number of publications. He has been highlighting a campaign that has recently been started to get the London Overground train line, which currently terminates at Barking Riverside, and to extend it under the River Thames to both Thamesmead and to Abbey Wood, where it would link up with both the North Kent rail line and the Crossrail railway currently being constructed. This would bring the first railway station into Thamesmead proper - the only large town in South East London currently with no form of railway connection. It would give Thamesmead the rail service it was first promised forty years ago. A new rail link across the Thames would open up jobs and new opportunities on both sides of the river. New connections would be opened up to Bluewater, Lakeside, Southend Airport and the Olympic Park at Stratford. Residents on both side of the Thames could do all this without having to take a car or enduring long bus rides. Hopefully something concrete will come of this, but I am not holding my breath.

Actor Karl Howman, who most famously played Jacko in the popular late 80's / early 90's BBC TV sitcom "Brush Strokes" has been cast in a role in Eastenders. I don't know much more than that, as I never watched Brush Strokes, and I don't watch TV soap operas. The only reason I mention it is because Karl Howman is a local lad. He went to Picardy School (now Trinity) in Belvedere, and I have it on good authority from his former head of year that the only reason Howman was not expelled for bad behaviour was because he was the captain of the very successful school football team! I don't know where he lives nowadays, but in the late 80's he and his wife lived in a big house in The View, off Woolwich Road. I used to sometimes see him parking his Ferrari 328 GTS in Nuxley Road, as he went to buy fish and chips for supper. 

Fellow local Blogger The Thamesmead Grump has been very busy of late; he’s been carrying out his own investigations into the state of food outlets policed by Greenwich health inspectors; the results have been pretty impressive – when he checked the fast food shops in and around Thamesmead, he found that most had a five star rating, or a good four. He did notice that some outlets don’t show their sticker very well, a surprise when the results have found to be so good overall. It definitely feels that things are well on the up with regard to the cleanliness and proper preparation of food when one is out and about in the local area. There are still disappointments, however, including one that I have to say really surprised me. A local outlet has scored an overall two star rating; the inspectors commented that the food hygiene and safety standard was Poor, the Structural Compliance was Fair, and the Confidence in Management was Some. What shop do you think this rating applies to? Erith Morrison’s supermarket! How the “big five” supermarket can rate only a two star Scores on the Scores on the Doors rating makes my mind boggle. It sounds like the management of the huge store really need a fundamental shake-up. I will be monitoring the Scores on the Doors website for the next inspection of Morrison’s, as the rating should be radically improved. It is doubly worrying as Morrison’s is one of the town’s biggest employers, having around 550 staff in both full and part time work. I would have thought that any sufficiently large company would have processes and procedures in place to ensure a high standard of food hygiene. I would be interested if anyone knows what caused the very poor food hygiene rating. If you are a Morrison’s employee and can enlighten me as to the problems which the store appears to be suffering from in respect of hygiene inspections, please drop me a line to hugh.neal@gmail.com and I will treat any information that you can give me with the utmost confidence and discretion.

We are now rapidly approaching TRP (Tweed Retirement Point), the time of year when my tweed sports jackets get put away in the wardrobe, to be replaced with somewhat warmer garb. For me, along with the first switching on of the central heating, this marks the first steps towards winter. This year has been a mixed bag weather - wise. Not sure if this is a good thing from a personal viewpoint (I really don't do heat well - anything over around 22 degrees Celsius is too much for me), but it should at least temporarily shut up that group who every year trot out the same mantra "we don't get seasons like we used to" and blame it on global warming. As I featured some time ago, all of the data used to model potential climate change is inaccurate, and the predictions made by both the pro and the anti global warming theorists are now worthless. The reason for this is that nearly all weather stations that are used to collect temperature, precipitation, sunlight and wind data are located in towns and cities - wherever in the world you care to check. Some of these weather stations have been in continuous use for many years; quite often for more than a century. When the weather stations were first set up, they were often on farms and smallholdings in what were then the suburbs. Urban sprawl has now happened, and what were the suburbs are now in many cases a part of the city. Cities suffer from a condition known as Urban Heat Island - the concrete and metal that make up city tower blocks, and the tarmac that covers the ground acts like a giant storage heater, keeping the overnight air temperature artificially higher than it would otherwise actually be. When climate analysts compare the heat data, say from 1913 with 2013 they then see a marked hike in the overall temperature, which immediately gets blamed on increased Carbon Dioxide levels, due to pollution. Indeed this may also be happening, but the vast majority of the temperature increase is actually due to the heat leakage from air conditioning units and the buildings which house them. The overnight temperatures stay higher than expected, as the fabric of the buildings slowly leak the heat that they had built up during the day. What this means is that the historical meteorological records bear no relation to contemporary ones - it is a classic case of comparing apples and oranges. Both camps in the climate change discussion really need to go away and re - evaluate their computer models, as they are all based on fundamentally faulty data. You can see the practical results of this if you spend any time in Canary Wharf; the temperature in the wharf is always a couple of degrees higher than across the river in Greenwich, and the wharf is both windier and subject to its own microclimate. All because of a bunch of closely spaced skyscrapers which emit a large amount of heat. the fact that the air temperature within Canary Wharf is usually around two degrees warmer than the area outside at any time of the year, supports the urban heat island theory quite neatly. Whatever ones' personal views in respect of climate change, I feel that it is important to be aware of accurate findings, and at present it would seem that the numbers just don't add up. It may be time for the climate scientists to start again from scratch.

Bexley Brewery have now released their first two brews to pubs and clubs around the local area; if you would like to sample Red House Best Bitter or BOB Pale Ale, you can do so at the following locations:-

Dartfordians Rugby Club, Bourne Road, Bexley

The Penny Farthing, Waterside, Crayford

The Robin Hood & Little John, Lion Road, Bexleyheath

Old Bexley Ex-Servicemen’s Club, Bexley

The Volunteer, Bexleyheath

The Orpington Liberal Club, Orpington

Bexley Brewery hope to have their licence for off - sales approved pretty soon; as soon as this has been granted, they will be able to sell to the general public. I will keep you informed. 

I had the following article sent to me by Caroline Field, the Project Manager for the Erith Park development:-  "Lions and rhinoceroses at Erith Park! Last week the core group met people from the London Geological Diversity Project who came to explain why our site is so geologically interesting. When it was a brick quarry the work wasn't mechanised so the workers used to spot the fossils and keep them for ome local gentlemen who used to pay for them. Some of these are now in the Natural History museum and ...are important speciments - including the skull of a lion and a rhinoceros jawbone. Their research has also uncovered a 19th century brick catalogue from the site. They produced ornate decorated bricks and have printed photos of buildings where they've been used - including Bromley Town Hall and New Scotland Yard. So there are buildings you can still go to and say 'that brick came from Erith Park'. Francois is going to be working with local people to produce an interpretive panel at Erith Park to make sure everyone knows this fascinating history". Thanks Caroline, a really fascinating account that I have forwarded to local historian Ken Chamberlain.

The end video this week is a review of the first ever portable (or should that be luggable?) Computer - the Osborne One from back in 1981. The story of Osborne computers is still taught at business schools around the world as an example as to how not to run your company. Watch and learn.