The photo above shows the Erith Mural - click on it to see a larger version. It is located next to the Kassiopi Cove children's soft play centre (what used to be the Blockbuster video hire store quite some years ago) in Erith Riverside Shopping Centre in Colebrook Street. The mural has nine panels depicting scenes inspired by the history of Erith, including the murder of Thomas A Beckett and the reign of Henry the VIII. The mural was designed and built by the artist William Mitchell in 1968. The mural is constructed using an artistic technique called "Cloisonne" - which is similar to the production of stained glass windows. The mural was originally located on the side wall of the old Riverside Swimming Pool in Erith High Street, but was moved to its current location in the centre of the town just before the old pool site was demolished, and flats built.
There has been much coverage in the popular press over the last few weeks in respect of heat pumps. These devices, which are designed to replace conventional gas or electric central heating boilers have been promoted as a way for green conscious householders to both help the environment and also to save money on heating bills in the longer term. This is despite the fact that an average sized heat pump retails for approximately £14,000, compared with approximately £3,800 for a conventional central heating boiler. Heat pump retailers suggest in promotional material that this very high upfront cost will be offset by lower heating bills in the long term. This does not appear to be the experience found by many users unfortunately. The rise of the adoption of heat pumps has been pretty dramatic. 58, 000 were apparently installed in 2024 which increased to 61,000 in 2025. In a census published by the Sunday Times last weekend, a survey of 1,000 heat pump owners by the census company found that 66% of users found that their homes had become more expensive to heat after having a heat pump installed. From the research that I have carried out, it is not necessarily that the heat pumps are in themselves inefficient compared with a conventional boiler, but according to feedback from the heating industry and end users, a significant percentage of heat pumps are installed incorrectly, which causes them to waste fuel. Many companies have been set up specifically to install heat pumps, as there is apparently a high profit margin, and they tend to be installed on behalf of wealthy middle class families who want to be seen to be ecologically friendly. The issue is that there is no mandatory individual technical training for heat pump installers. They merely need a water regulation certificate - which all general plumbers must have. Anyway, they also then have to complete two courses on heat pump installation, but these can be done partly online and partly in person over a period of only 6 days. The other issue is not every individual heat pump installation engineer needs to complete the training. It is only mandatory for one member of the company to have the completed the training, which is a major loophole in the regulations. There are other heat pump installation training schemes available, but they are only voluntary and not mandatory. It is also alleged by Scottish trading standards and industry insiders that there are occasions when a heat pump is not a viable central heating solution for certain kinds of property, and that the devices have been mis-sold. The government is putting a huge amount of money into heat pump installation companies in an indirect fashion. They offer large grants to households that have heat pumps installed, and this money goes straight to the installation company who usually also supply the hardware. As previously mentioned, it would appear that there are very large profit margins in this business, and it is alleged that some rogue organisations are exploiting this. In the investigative article published in the Sunday Times, it includes an interview with reputable heat pump installation training platform HeatGeek who state that in their opinion, up to 50% of the heat pumps installed in the UK over the last 20 years are in some way defective and mis-configured, causing unreliability and inefficiency. This causes much damage to the reputation of heat pumps in general, when the actual blame should be laid at the feet of rogue traders exploiting the increasing trend for the deployment of such devices. What do you think? Email me with your thoughts to hugh.neal@gmail.com.
With all of the debate going on at present about improving road and rail connections across the River Thames, and the potential extension of the DLR to Thamesmead, it is interesting to see enterprises that instead of viewing the river as a barrier, they used it as a means of transport in itself. Back in 1963, a unique experiment was carried out. A hovercraft ferry service on the Thames was set up. The Denny D2 Hovercraft could carry seventy passengers at speeds of up to 21 knots, and the service was launched in early July 1963. It was operated by Thames Launches, who planned to operate a service every day until that October with a schedule of three trips per hour. The fare was £1 for adults and 10 shillings for children – a very substantial amount by the standards of the time. Built in Dumbarton by Denny Hovercraft - a subsidiary of Denny Ship Building, the company that built the Cutty Sark, the hovercraft travelled under its own power along the east-coast, which was at the time the longest trip ever made by a hovercraft. The hovercraft also required a permit to fly along the Thames, as they were officially classed as aircraft, under the Air Navigation Order 1960. As such, a Times newspaper report into the new service was written by the Aeronautical correspondent, not their shipping one. The first passenger carrying “flight” took place on 1st July, with some five hundred customers on the first day. Initially the hovercraft service was limited to running three trips per hour between Tower Bridge and Westminster, but a series of experimental flights were also made down river, at least one of which was to Anchor Bay, Erith, to the area that is now the site of Erith Construction Ltd’s six and a half acre logistics and materials treatment facility in Manor Road. A key advantage of the hovercraft over conventional ships was that it would race along the Thames at much higher speeds - around 21 Knots, as it caused minimal disturbance to the river as it passed over the water, a problem which limits speeds on the Thames to this day. Sadly, the experiment was a failure, and the builders were forced into bankruptcy the following year. The hovercraft was eventually sold in 1970 to begin life on a new route in the Caribbean linking Kingston, Jamaica, with the island’s Palisades Airport. If things had turned out differently, it could have been that Erith residents took the hovercraft to work in the morning. It would have certainly been a somewhat more interesting commute than using Southeastern trains!
The photo was sent to me by regular reader and occasional contributor Lincoln. It shows a Routemaster *Correction* - Route Trooper double decker bus (thanks to reader and occasional contributor Peter) on the old 480 bus route. The photo was apparently taken in the early 1960's. The original 480 route operated daily between Erith (Wheatley Arms) and Denton (Milton Ale Shades), passing through Slade Green, Crayford, Dartford, Horns Cross, Swanscombe, Northfleet, and Gravesend. The route was famously served by buses often operating out of the Northfleet garage. It was a "workhorse" route, primarily serving the heavy industry that lined the Thames, including - paper mills and printing factories. The massive cement works of Swanscombe and Northfleet, and the riverside docks. Following the deregulation of bus services in 1986, the route passed through various hands as the National Bus Company was dismantled. It became part of Kentish Bus, a company known for its distinctive maroon and cream (and later yellow and blue) livery. During this period, the route began to adapt to the shifting economic landscape of Kent. As the heavy riverside industries began to close, the bus service started focusing more on the growing residential estates and the emerging retail centres. The most significant turning point in the route's modern history came in 1999 with the opening of Bluewater Shopping Centre. The 480 was restructured to serve this new "retail cathedral," becoming a key component of the "Bluewater Experience." Today, the 480 is operated by Arriva Kent Thameside and remains one of the most frequent services in the region. The service now runs roughly every 10–12 minutes during peak hours between Dartford and Gravesend.
Thirty four years ago, in 1992, Apple announced its most groundbreaking and revolutionary product yet, the Newton MessagePad. It was released to great fanfare a year later, but as a product, it could only be described as a flop. Widely mocked in popular culture at the time, the Newton became a poster child for expensive but useless high-tech gadgets. Even though the device improved dramatically over time, it failed to gain market share, and it was discontinued in 1997. Yet while the Newton was a failure, it galvanized Apple engineers to create something better—and in some ways led to the creation of the iPad and the iPhone. Apple described their plans for Newton as being “the smartest piece of paper you ever wrote on.” The idea was that you could draw anything on the tablet in free-form but that the system would be smart enough to translate your sketches into both data and commands. Handwriting recognition was a key part of the plan. Apple found help with this software in an unusual place. An unconfirmed story says that Apple marketing VP Al Eisenstat was visiting Moscow when he heard a knock on his hotel door. A nervous Russian engineer handed him a floppy disk and ran off. The disk contained a demo of handwriting recognition software. In any case, Apple inked a deal with the creator, Stepan Pachikov, who had formed a company called ParaGraph International. The Newton was demonstrated to the public at the Consumer Electronics Show on May 29th, 1992, although the product was still far from shipping. John Sculley referred to the Newton as a “personal digital assistant,” or PDA, a term he coined at his announcement speech. While the Newton was not the first compact digital organiser to be released, it would end up being the first PDA, simply because the name stuck. The product demonstration excited the crowd, and the press went into full hype mode. Some of the features shown at CES, like the ability to draw rough shapes that turned into solid ones that could be dragged around and deleted by scribbling over them, showcased Capps’ vision of being the “smartest piece of paper." But the demo was carefully staged to only show the parts of Newton that worked and to avoid the features that had massive bugs and would cause crashes. The pressure to deliver the Newton reached a boiling point, and Apple engineers were routinely working 15 to 20-hour days. One engineer, 30-year-old Ko Isono, died by suicide on December 1992. Apple instituted mental health checks and support programmes for its employees after the incident. Finally, after a long and painful development process, Apple announced that the Newton was officially shipping on August 2, 1993. To interact with the device, you used the included plastic stylus to write on the non-backlit, black-and-white LCD screen. The display was approximately 4.5 inches by 3.5 inches and had a resolution of 240 by 320 pixels. The primary feature of the device, the handwriting recognition, did not work well out of the box. It had to be trained on a user’s unique writing, and it failed to recognize many words. This flaw led to a massive backlash in public opinion, and the Newton became the go-to reference for expensive but flawed high-tech gadgets.The handwriting problems wouldn’t have been fatal by themselves, but the rest of the product failed to live up to the massive media hype and public expectations. With the original Newton, you could take notes, use the calculator, run some simple formulas, update and search contacts in an address book, and keep track of appointments in a calendar. And that was about it. Some features were ahead of their time. For example, the Newton came with support for reading ebooks a full fourteen years before the launch of Amazon’s Kindle store. Other features would have been amazing, if only the wireless infrastructure had existed to use them. The first 802.11 WiFi standard for computers would not appear until 1997, and cellular mobile phones were still using analogue signals. (An optional accessory card did allow messages to be sent via pager.) The Newton came with an infrared port, like those in remote controls, that you could use to “beam” messages and other information from one Newton to another, assuming both owners were in the same room. The primary way to sync your data with your computer was using a wired cable. The Newton ran its own custom operating system, Newton OS, which was written in C++. It also had its own custom development language, NewtonScript, which allowed third-party developers to create their own applications. These apps didn’t need to be “installed” but could just be copied or beamed onto the Newton, and they would work instantly. Third-party software added many new features to the Newton. There were word processors, spreadsheets, billing software, email applications, validated form entry applications, music composition apps, and games. Over a decade before the iPhone, Apple had a portable device with its own application ecosystem. The best-selling software on the Newton was Graffiti, a simplified handwriting system written by the company Palm, which would go on to make its own PDAs. Today, the Newton is barely remembered. It is considered a failed project, as it only lasted a few years before being shut down. But the truth isn't so simple. Many people who worked on the Newton went on to become key players on the iPhone team; Mike Culbert, Greg Christie, and even Briton Sir Jony Ive worked on Newton. Many of the ideas that originated in the Newton made their way into the iPhone and iPad. Some of these are minor, like the “puff of smoke” animation when you delete something, which eventually found its way to the MacOS dock, or the live-updating clock icon that Steve Capps challenged the iPhone team to recreate. Other influences went far deeper. The Newton had an “intelligent assistant” feature that let you perform tasks using natural language. This showed up again in the form of Siri and Google’s voice assistant - and later AI tools. It had a universal search across all data and applications, which was recreated in Spotlight and Google’s own device-searching features. It pioneered the use of validated form-based input, which ended up becoming a huge part of websites and web-based applications.
