Again?

The photos above - click on either to see a larger version - were taken on Tuesday night. They show yet another serious fire that took place in the Erith yard of EMR Metal Recycling. This is the same company that I have recently written about, as they are in the process of scrapping the historic World War One warship - HMS President, which I have covered over the last couple of weeks in some detail. It is an unfortunate truth that the Erith branch of EMR has been plagued by serious fires for the last few years. One local from Manor Road in Erith commented to me that there is an incident involving the attendance of multiple units from the Fire Brigade approximately once every three months. Locals are increasingly concerned about both their properties and their vehicles in case any of these fires spread. I am also aware that the ward Councillors from Slade Green and Northend (the ward under which the EMR is based) are aware of the undesirable situation. The problem is not restricted to one business. Manor Road in Erith is somewhat unusual in that it is one of the longest roads in the borough, but it currently is divided into two rather distinct regions. The first is the Western end of the road, which is exclusively residential, and the Eastern end, towards Slade Green is predominantly industrial. I am aware that the medium to long-term plans by Bexley Council are to gradually migrate the entire road to become exclusively residential. If this plan comes to pass it will take many years - if it happens at all. Manor Road residents have for decades at to endure levels of noise, air pollution and industrial traffic which many find unacceptable. The recent spate of fires at EMR has merely highlighted these issues. One resident contacted me to ask if the Health and Safety Executive was aware of the fires seemingly repeatedly occurring within the EMR scrap yard, and if so were they doing anything about it? Unfortunately at the time of writing I am unaware of this. Under normal conditions I would arrange a meeting with a representative of EMR to ask these questions, but due to my health issues at present this is not possible. I would imagine local councillors may well be doing something similar. If the situation is not addressed, then it would appear that over time a future fire may involve casualties rather than just damage to equipment. Local residents living in proximity to EMR are worried that a future fire may spread to their own properties, And at present they have no confidence that EMR management is doing anything concrete to prevent this. Personally, I am of the opinion that this particular story is very likely to run and run, unless some fairly drastic action is taken. More on this in the future. Comments and feedback as usual to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com. 

Regular readers would have followed my various articles in the past about local and community radio stations. In my opinion, one of the best ones was called Time 107.5 FM, which although it broadcast from studios based in Romford, and had a very large and loyal listener ship in the London Borough of Bexley. It carried a lot of local news, traffic information and interviews with local politicians and other public figures. Unfortunately the owners of the radio station, the mobile phone company Lyca Mobile sold the station, and forced it to close down on the 1st of August last year. As I wrote back then - "Since its launch in 2003, Time 107.5 has been far more than just another station on the FM dial. It has been one of Havering’s loudest voices – covering the stories, events, and people that mattered most to local residents. From Romford’s Christmas light switch-ons to school fundraisers, charity drives, and urgent community appeals, Time 107.5 was there. The station championed local causes, including the Give a Child a Christmas appeal, supported grassroots campaigns, highlighted small businesses, and gave airtime to local heroes whose stories would otherwise never have reached the public. It was a constant source of hyper-local news, road closure updates, and even vital safety announcements – the kind of information larger London-wide stations rarely touched. The community impact was huge. Time 107.5’s presenters became trusted voices in local households, known for their warmth and familiarity. The station worked hand-in-hand with schools, charities, and residents to amplify events and initiatives that brought people together. But from this afternoon, that local focus will vanish. The station has been bought by Nation Broadcasting and will re-brand as Nation Radio London, shifting its programming to a broader, London-wide audience. While the FM frequency will remain, the uniquely Havering-centred interviews, event coverage, and news bulletins are not expected to continue. This change reflects a wider national trend where small, independent local stations are being swallowed by larger networks". All but one of the staff were sacked, leaving only the station manager to transfer across to the radio station that replaced it. Within days the new station that replaced it had lost around 80% of its dedicated listener ship. According to independently audited figures, the original Time 107.5 FM had the most dedicated and long listening audience of any radio station in the UK, and as such were an invaluable resource to potential advertisers. At the time, I was of the opinion that there was no way for former staff of Time 107.5 to continue. Fortunately I was in error. The breakfast DJ Neil Andrews had a side project with a second radio station he had been involved with for some years. This station is called All Hit Radio, and astonishingly almost every single waged and volunteer staff member of the former Time 107.5 FM has now defected to All Hit Radio. They broadcast on DAB plus and on line. You can listen through your smart speaker, internet radio, or through your computer as well as through a DAB radio. All Hit Radio is basically Time 107.5 FM in exile, with all the of the same presenters, similar programming and the same focus on community matters. I am strongly of the feeling that the previous owners Lyca Mobile are now realising that they have shot themselves in the foot. 

Last week I wrote a historical piece about local fish monger and shrimper, William Gilder, as a result of which I got quite a bit of positive feedback. This week I was sent a follow - up story by another local person, whose father was a shrimp fisherman on the River Thames. The person writes:-"Regarding your post today about Shrimping from Erith  - there were many shrimping boats operating from Erith and Gravesend right up until the 1970s. The boats were called “Bawleys” .... a name derived from the fact that they had a “boiler” on board . As soon as the shrimps were caught – they were boiled in the salt water  - and were ready to be sold as soon as landed. I can recall eating brown shrimp in Gravesend in the 70s – they are small and very tasty compared to prawns. My dad worked on a Bawley out of Erith in the 50s  - the boat was called “Providence”. He said that in the 50s the river was as black as ink – completely dead , but Shrimps thrived in the filthy water and nobody ever got sick from eating the shrimp". 

I would like to express yet another thank you to two more people who have been in contact with me regarding congratulations about my recent 20th anniversary of the Blog. One thing I used to do back when the Maggot Sandwich was far younger, was to review the occasional television show, and sometimes a full cinema film. I realise I've not done this for many years now. One of the side effects of being housebound due to illness is that I have more time for things that previously I did not. This includes watching movies on both subscription streaming channels and Freeview. One I watched last Monday evening prompted me to write the following appraisal of it. Hold on to your hats, as it is not going to be good. Back in 1996 I saw the film Independence Day at the cinema with a group of friends. At the time I regarded it as a bit of mindless fun. Technically well made but with an appalling script, including what I think is one of the worst lines ever committed to celluloid. The line, which was spoken to Will Smith's character was - "you'll never get to fly the space shuttle if you marry a stripper". Personally, I found this particular line completely clumsy and cloth eared. To balance this, the film for its time had very high quality special effects, although it was extremely cheesy and had numerous plot holes and script inconsistencies. Last Monday night, I finally watched its sequel, which is entitled Independence Day: Resurgence. The film was originally released back in 2016, but I firmly decided to give it a miss at the time, bearing in mind the original. Instead I then watched it on TV. That is a couple of hours I'm never going to get back. The film has more cheese than a kilo of Gorgonzola, and absolutely terrible script with numerous glaring plot holes that you could drive a double decker bus through, acting by several major stars that look like it came from the Formica school, and a mixture of quite good CGI, and some absolutely awful green screen work that should never have escaped the studio. On the plus side, the recurring character played by Jeff Goldblum is always worth watching, as is the scientist character played by Brent Spiner, who will forever be known as Data from Star Trek - the Next Generation. The film had so many cliches one could pick them out at leisure. Small American children in a yellow school bus in peril. A pet dog being rescued from malicious aliens. A central character nobly sacrificing themselves for the good of the planet. and many of the recurring themes from the first film. It felt extremely lazy. As if the producers had just thrown money at the project rather than any kind of thought. One minor example that jarred with me was towards the climax of the film, one of the characters who is flying a fighter jet gets their plane damaged by the alien Queen - more of her in a moment. The pilot ejects from the aircraft and comes down to land in a parachute whilst still sitting in her ejector seat. As anybody who knows even a little about military aviation, if one is forced to eject in an emergency after you have exited the cockpit, the seat falls away automatically, as if you come down sitting in it, you will very likely break your spine. This is just one of many examples of a lack of attention to detail. The alien Queen I previously mentioned is a fairly unashamed copy of that design that was used in the classic movie Aliens, which is far and away superior to Independence Day: Resurgence. I think I will leave it at that. I know that the movie is not meant to be taken too seriously, but to me it seems just like an exploitative way to generate cash from an uncritical audience. Avoid.

The saga of the potential redevelopment of the large Victorian property located at number 106 Bexley Road, between Erith and Northumberland Heath seems to be continuing. Over the last few years there have been a series of planning applications to Bexley Council to demolish the existing house and replace it with a block of flats. At the time of writing, all of the applications have been rejected for a number of different reasons. Nevertheless, I have been informed by a regular reader that a new application has been made by a company that has not previously been involved, and hopes to get approval after studying the reasons for previous planning rejections and tuning their new application accordingly. The person who sent me the information prefers to remain anonymous. They write:- "I thought you might be interested in this project for your blog. I know you’ve written about it before - it’s the large Victorian villa at 106 Bexley Road, which has been the subject of several planning applications in the past, all refused. I went past it the other day and noticed it’s completely surrounded by blue hoarding. A search revealed that this very swish-looking company are in charge of a planning application to convert it into a number of apartments. What will remain of the original structure is unclear".

This week marks another technology birthday. It is the 55th anniversary of the launch of the computer floppy disk. In August 1971, IBM introduced the first-ever floppy disk drive, the IBM 23FD, and the first floppy disks. Floppies made punched cards obsolete, and its successors ruled software distribution for the next 20 years. Throughout the 1960's, IBM shipped many mainframes with magnetic core memory, which could retain its contents when powered off. As the mainframe computer industry began to use solid-state transistor memory that lost its contents when powered down, IBM found itself needing a way to quickly load system software into these new machines at boot to get them going. The conventional solution required loading data from stacks of punched cards or spools of magnetic tape, which could be slow and bulky. That led to a search, beginning in 1967, for a new removable storage medium that could retain information without power and could be transported easily to remote computer installation sites. Soon, an IBM engineering team came up with a rotating flexible plastic disc impregnated with iron oxide that could hold a magnetic charge similar to magnetic tape. To improve reliability, the team placed the disc inside a plastic sleeve surrounded by fabric that could sweep away dust as the disc rotated. In 1971, IBM introduced the world’s first commercial floppy disk drive, the 23FD Floppy Disk Drive System. It used 8″ square disks that held about 80 kilobytes. In a notable limitation, the drive could only read data, not write it. A special drive at IBM wrote the disks that would then be distributed to remote computer systems for loading system updates. Initially, IBM referred to its first floppy disk media as a “Magnetic Recording Disk” or a “Magnetic Disk Cartridge.” IBM called its new disk a “floppy disk” because it was flexible, unlike the rigid aluminium platter hard disks that came before it. The idea for a floppy rotating disk was so novel that ComputerWorld magazine described a competing floppy diskette technology developed by Innovex as a “sheet of magnetic tape” in 1972. In 1973, IBM released a refined version of the 8″ floppy disk called the “IBM Diskette” (“Diskette” meaning a small disk—and also potentially referring to its secondary position relative to hard disks in a computer system.). With the IBM Diskette’s matching 33FD floppy drive, users could write data to the disk as well as read from it, so IBM hailed it as a new medium. The floppy diskette represented a substantial breakthrough in computer data storage, with each diskette equivalent to about 3,000 punched cards in data capacity. Compared to huge stacks of punched cards, the floppy disk was small, portable, light, inexpensive, and re-writable. Competing firms soon began creating 8″ floppy drives that could read and write IBM’s floppy disk format, and a new standard was born. While initially used for mainframe computer systems, floppy disks quickly played a key part in the personal computer revolution of the mid-1970s. While initially, the high expense of 8″ floppy drives and controllers made many early PC hobbyists stick to paper tape or cassette drives for storage, floppy technology kept pushing forward. In 1976, Shugart Associates invented the 5.25″ floppy drive, which allowed for smaller, less expensive media and drives. Consumer PC breakthroughs, such as Steve Wozniak’s Disk II system for the Apple II, brought floppy disk storage to the masses in the late 1970s. Although some inexpensive home computers still regularly used cassette tape drives for storage until the mid-late 1980's, floppy drives became standard equipment for early business-oriented personal computers by the late 1970's. In 1981, the IBM PC 5150 shipped with bays for two 5.25″ internal floppy drives, further cementing their use in the industry. With so many people using floppy disks to store computer data on personal computers in the 1980's and 1990's, software programs in the GUI era began to represent the act of saving data to disk with an icon of a physical floppy disk. Decades later, the trend persists in programs such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Paint. This has led to some criticism due to the fact that many computer users today didn’t grow up using floppy disks, so they might not know what they are. Apple made a decisive move against the floppy disk in 1998 with the release of the iMac, which controversially omitted any kind of floppy drive for the first time in Macintosh history. By that time, Apple assumed that people could transfer files through local area networks, CD-ROM, and over the internet—and the company was largely right. Without the legacy reliance on BIOS upgrades by floppy, the Mac was free to cut its floppy ties earlier than most. While some people still used floppies for quick data transfers by the late 2000's, the floppy’s commercial end had finally come, amid the rise in popularity, and storage capacity of USB memory sticks. In 2010, Sony announced that it would cease production of floppy disks in March of 2011 due to dwindling demand, and today, no one manufactures floppy disks or floppy drives. Still, after a useful life stretching into decades, the floppy disk has done much to promote data storage. 

It would seem that the battle between a group of residents of the Lesnes housing estate in Thamesmead with Bexley Council and the Peabody Housing Association has now stepped up a notch. The residents group, which represents a mixture of tenants and owner occupiers have won the first round of a legal battle to prevent their homes from being demolished and a new housing estate built on it. On Wednesday last week, the residents group, led by a man called Adam Turk won a judicial review into the fact that Bexley Council approved planning permission for the redevelopment, allegedly without considering all of the available facts regarding the move. The judicial review will take place in October or November this year. The Lesnes residents group argue that their properties are an important local community, and demolishing it will destroy this. They also argue that it will be economically and ecologically far more sensible to refurbish and refit the existing properties, rather than demolish them. There are also claims that Bexley Council did not fully understand the effects of greenhouse gas emissions that would be generated if all of the Lesnes estate was demolished and then rebuilt from scratch. The judicial review was granted partly because the judge agreed that according to the facts supplied, the planning permission had been granted whilst using incomplete evidence. Many of the properties on the Lesnes estate are already empty, but a stalwart group of around 20 people have taken on the might of both Bexley Council and the Peabody Housing Association. It is unclear what the conclusion of the judicial review will be, and as this is an ongoing legal matter, I will not comment further.

The end video this week features an analysis of possible ways that the Elizabeth Line - which currently terminates at Abbey Wood - could be extended through to Dartford and Ebbsfleet. Comments and feedback should be sent to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.