Empty.

Mystery surrounds the now empty and unused former Erith Town Hall. It has been up for rent and / or possible sale for over a year. Initially it was offered as a location for TV and film companies. but at the time of writing nothing appears to have come of this. The building originally housed a number of key departments of Bexley Council, but in the last few years the only administrative activities on the site were around local housing, until in a cost saving move they were merged with those of Bromley Council. Since then the rather imposing (and locally listed) Art Deco building has been empty. There has been speculation that the landmark building may eventually be converted into flats, but it would seem that at this time Bexley Council are happy to "land bank" the location. if you have any up to date information or detailed background to this ongoing local issue, then please email me in complete confidence to  hugh.neal@gmail.com. 

I must say a thank you to all of my readers who have been in contact over the last couple of weeks while have been unwell - I really appreciate all of the offers of help and support. As you may know I had a very nasty case of Covid, although I have been fully vaccinated. I am now over the original infection, although subsequently to the main illness I have developed a lesser-known condition called Post Covid Fatigue, which in my personal experience is far worse than Covid itself. I have been housebound for over 3 weeks with shatteringly extreme tiredness, diarrhoea and nausea. To illustrate how ill I have been feeling, there was one point where to walk from my bedroom to my bathroom and back, which is a distance of about 40 feet. This meant that when I got back into bed I was shaking with exhaustion and feeling faint. I have been sleeping 12 to 14 hours a day. The condition is recognised by the NHS and other health authorities, although it is less well known than Covid. I think that I'm now over the worst of it, but it has been a real ordeal and something I would not wish on anybody. 

Back in March of 2015 almost ten years ago, I wrote extensively about a potential new form of energy generation. After this, everything seemingly went quiet until quite recently. Developments seem to now have happened. I know that my readership is quite divided between those who really enjoy my more technical articles and those who are less enthusiastic, but please bear with me:- Back in 1989 Martin Fleischmann (then one of the world's leading electro chemists) and Stanley Pons reported that their experimental cold fusion apparatus had produced anomalous heat ("excess heat"), of a magnitude they asserted would defy explanation except in terms of nuclear processes. They further reported measuring small amounts of nuclear reaction by products, including neutrons and tritium. The small table top experiment involved electrolysis of heavy water on the surface of a metallic palladium electrode. The reported results received world - wide media attention, and raised hopes of a cheap and abundant source of energy. Many scientists tried to replicate the experiment with the few details available. Hopes fell with the large number of negative replications, the withdrawal of many positive replications, the discovery of flaws and sources of experimental error in the original experiment, and finally the discovery that Fleischmann and Pons had not actually detected nuclear reaction by products. By late 1989, most scientists considered cold fusion claims dead, and the popular press rained derision on the two scientists. At this point pretty much all third party experimentation and external funding ceased, and the whole thing was deemed to be little more than a hopeless quest for a perpetual motion machine. LENR - Low Energy Nuclear Reaction used to be called “Cold Fusion” in the late 1980’s / early 1990’s, and the public perception is now that it was a discredited field, and basically all of the claims made by researchers about LENR and the ability to generate boundless amounts of clean, cheap energy were little more than outright fraud. The court of public opinion – fuelled mainly by the tabloid press – was keen to expose the researchers as confidence tricksters. More sober minds have revisited the experiments carried out all of those years ago, and the results astonished them. Over the last five or so years, LENR technology has gone from being regarded as at best a fringe area of esoteric science to now developing slowly in the mainstream. A few independent scientists and engineers did continue with research and for many years this was considered to be a “garden shed” business, with little hope of anything concrete resulting from it. The tinkerers continued their experiments, away from press attention, and the general public forgot all about the subject. Nowadays there is renewed interest in what has been re – branded as Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (the proponents are aware that the term “cold fusion” may not only be technically inaccurate, but that the term is now poisoned). LENR is a phenomenon where unexplained amounts of heat are created in specific conditions when certain metals (for example, nickel and palladium) interact with hydrogen or deuterium, and an external stimulus such as heat or an electric current is applied. During these reactions it has also been observed that the atomic mass is altered as energy is released. These reactions can take place at relatively low temperatures, and in many cases far more energy is produced in LENR reactions than is input into reactors. At the moment the most promising forms of LENR are those that are able to operate using nickel and hydrogen — both plentiful and inexpensive natural resources. In LENR reactions no pollutants or emissions are produced, neither are harmful radiation or radioactive waste. This makes LENR a clean and sustainable form of energy. We are in the very early days of research and development in this field, and much about this phenomenon is poorly understood. There are competing theories proposed that try to describe the exact mechanism by which this anomalous heat is generated, but none has as yet been accepted as authoritative. There are many researchers and companies studying LENR at the moment, many of whom are competing to patent a viable commercial power plant based on this little understood phenomenon. Understandably many in the established scientific community are intensely sceptical about LENR, and view it as being a gigantic scam. Personally I think it is certainly not a con – too many respectable scientists and engineers have been able to successfully replicate the reaction under controlled laboratory conditions. Indeed, only last month Professor Alexander Parkhomov of Lomonosov Moscow State University has published a paper describing his successful replication of the experiments, and was able to generate an output of 2.78 times the energy input. In a recent visit to Italy, billionaire Bill Gates said that for several years he has been a believer in the idea of LENR, and is a sponsor of companies developing the technology. Gates is not only the Chairman of TerraPower, a company developing a “new class of nuclear reactors using innovative core physics.” He is also a member of the American Energy Innovation Council and supporter of new technologies through the Gates Foundation, which Bill Gates founded in 2000. Other mega corporations such as Mitsubishi, Sony and Hitachi are investing heavily in LENR research, but they are keeping very quiet indeed about it. This is not surprising, if the technology does indeed work as described, and can be up – scaled to commercially viable levels, it could be a breakthrough in clean, cheap and renewable energy production. Potentially there are fortunes to be made and lost. It will be interesting to watch this story develop. Last week, in a letter to The Guardian, a group of renowned international scientists wrote a joint letter which said:- "Luca Garzotti observes (Letters, 22 January) that serious challenges face the production of energy from processes based on thermonuclear fusion, but failed to mention a crucially important alternative, low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), commonly known as cold fusion. Readers of the Guardian’s 2012 obituary of Martin Fleischmann will know that the situation regarding cold fusion is more complicated than that commonly assumed: that the claims of Fleischmann and Stanley Pons for the process were discredited. The reality is that subsequent research showed that it was the critics who were wrong, something not widely known because editors of the main journals, under the impression that the claims were false, blocked the publication of papers suggesting otherwise. For a long time, difficulties with making the process work reliably, or in making useful amounts of energy using cold fusion, meant that LENR had no practical value, but now the situation is very different. In the time since the original discovery there has been much progress, a number of companies having been able to make these reactions work quite reliably, one at least confirming claims of genuineness by powering a device from its output. Apart from removing the current reliance on fossil fuels, together with processes requiring the large-scale disposal of radioactive material, such devices would have the advantage of being small in size, and usable in any location. Some companies are now working on making such devices commercially viable, and recently there has been support from governmental organisations such as APRA-E in the US and Horizon 2020 in the EU. More needs to be done, however, to accelerate the roll out of such devices, thereby ameliorating the damaging effects of climate change.

Brian Josephson Emeritus professor of physics, University of Cambridge

David J Nagel Research professor, George Washington University

Alan Smith International Society for Condensed Matter Nuclear Science

Dr Jean-Paul Biberian Honorary professor, Aix-Marseille Université

Yasuhiro Iwamura Research professor, Tohoku University".

I have  no idea if anything further will come of this, though the concept is intriguing. I will be keeping tabs on future progress to see what happens. 

Whilst there has been a marked resurgence in the popularity of vinyl records, many other forms of physical media are very much on the decline since the advent of streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+ amongst others. Sony has announced that it has ceased production of Blu-ray discs in the US in March 2024, and in Europe last month. Blu-ray was an optical media format designed to replace DVDs by providing higher storage capacity and the ability to play back high-definition video. When the format launched there was a competition between Blu-ray and a rival format called HD DVD that took place in the late 2000s. Both formats were vying to become the successor to the DVD as the dominant format for high-definition video. Blu-ray was backed by a number of major electronics companies, including Sony, Panasonic, and Samsung. HD DVD was backed by Toshiba, Microsoft, and Intel. Both formats offered similar picture and audio quality, but Blu-ray had a key advantage: it could hold more data than HD DVD. This meant that Blu-ray discs could hold longer movies and more bonus features. In the end, Blu-ray won the format war. This was due in part to the support of major movie studios, such as Disney and Warner Bros. Blu-ray also benefited from the popularity of the PlayStation 3, which came with a built-in Blu-ray player. The war between Blu-ray and HD DVD was a major event in the history of home video. It marked the transition from standard definition to high definition, and it helped to pave the way for the rise of streaming video. Blu-ray discs have been used for distributing HD films and television shows, as well as video games for the PlayStation 4 / 5 and Xbox One / Series X consoles. A Blu-ray disc is the same physical size as a CD or DVD (120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick) but can store significantly more data — up to 100 GB on a triple-layer disc. A standard Blu-ray disc contains HD (1080p) video compressed using the H.264 codec, which is more efficient than the MPEG-2 format used by DVD video. Like DVDs, Blu-ray discs can incorporate interactive menus, multiple language options, and bonus material. An enhanced version of the Blu-ray format, Ultra HD Blu-ray, supports 4K HDR video through a combination of high-capacity dual- and triple-layer discs and the more efficient H.265 video codec. Ultra HD Blu-ray requires a compatible Blu-ray player that supports the newer codec but is physically the same format.This decision to discontinue production follows a similar announcement from Samsung in 2019, which cited declining demand as the primary reason for their exit from the Blu-ray market. Sony's departure from Blu-ray production marks the end of an era for the format, which was once hailed as the successor to DVD. However, the rise of streaming services like Netflix and Disney+ has led to a sharp decline in the popularity of physical media, making it increasingly difficult for companies to justify the cost of production. While Sony's decision may come as a disappointment to some, it is not entirely unexpected. The company has been gradually reducing its involvement in the Blu-ray market for several years, and its decision to cease production altogether is simply the logical next step. It remains to be seen whether other companies will follow suit and exit the Blu-ray market. However, given the declining demand for physical media, it seems likely that Blu-ray's days are numbered. For consumers, the end of Blu-ray production means that it will become increasingly difficult to find new releases on physical media. While some retailers may continue to stock Blu-ray discs for a while, the selection is likely to dwindle over time. In the long term, consumers will need to rely on streaming services to access the latest movies and TV shows. While this may be a convenient option for some, others may miss the experience of owning physical copies of their favourite films. The demise of Blu-ray is a clear indication that the future of physical media is bleak. With streaming services becoming increasingly dominant, it is only a matter of time before other formats, such as DVDs and CDs, also become obsolete. While some may lament the loss of physical media, others will welcome the convenience and accessibility of streaming services. Ultimately, the market will decide the fate of physical media, and it seems clear that the future lies in digital distribution.

The photo above shows the old Cannon and Gaze flour mill on Erith High Street; it was taken in (I think) around 1934, as the mill was demolished shortly thereafter in 1936, and in time the Erith Riverside Gardens were constructed on the site. The mill ground flour mainly from imported American wheat, which arrived by freighter - having a river side mill made a lot of sense at the time. I don't think any part of Erith has changed more over the years. Whilst the general feeling is that the 1960's concrete town centre redevelopment was a step backwards from the Victorian old town. The old flour mill was located where the open grass area in the Gardens is now. The road layout has changed slightly, and of course the row of shops to the right of the photo are no longer there, but nevertheless it gives you a pretty good impression of the changes that have taken place over the years. 

The end video this week features the The Erith Model Railway Society exhibition which was hosted by the Erith Model Railway Society on the weekend of 25th and 26th January 2025 at the Harris Garrard Academy in Thamesmead. All comments and feedback should be sent to me at the usual email address - hugh.neal@gmail.com.