Fish.

The once controversial Erith fish roundabout - more properly known as the De Luci sculpture by artist Gary Drostle is a local landmark. The photo above shows it not long after its original installation and prior to its current damage. It has caused local discussion since its original appearance on the roundabout, but even those who initially resisted it have mostly come round to it as some local colour. Unfortunately, it is located in a vulnerable position in the centre of the second busiest roundabout in the London Borough of Bexley. At the junction of Bexley Road and Bronze Age Way. The roundabout is the subject of numerous traffic clashes including historically some very serious road traffic accidents involving the emergency services and unfortunately in a few occasions there have been fatalities. The sculpture itself was damaged at Christmas time last year by being hit by a car which seriously smashed the delicate mosaic outer layer of the design and also crushed parts of the interior supporting polymer structure. There were statements by Bexley Council that the sculpture was going to be taken down at the beginning of September for remedial work including articles in local newspapers and on social media. At the time of writing this has not happened, and the structure of the fish sculpture is still showing its large areas of damage caused by the vehicle impact. It is unclear if the repair work has been delayed or even cancelled, but it is not a good advert for the local area when visitors from elsewhere arrive and see this hugely damaged and seemingly uncared for sculpture at the middle of one of the most important road junctions in the whole of the London Borough of Bexley. Locals may recall that the traveller Cob sculpture at the other end of Bronze Age Way was also damaged by a vehicle some time ago, but that was repaired relatively speedily in comparison to the fish sculpture. Your thoughts on this contentious subject would be welcomed at the usual email address - hugh.neal@gmail.com.

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of another media format that should have made it big, but due to a number of factors, it ended up being consigned to the parts bin of history. Back before streaming, all-digital music, back before the Digital Compact Cassette, back before even the Digital Audio Tape existed, there was a strange audio device that, briefly captured the imagination of Hi-Fi enthusiasts across the world, and which was sold by a now long gone specialist Hi-Fi dealer in Bexleyheath. The Elcaset, as it was called, was an enlarged cassette that started in Japan, wove its hidden, spinning spools round the world and then finished, appropriately enough, in Finland. The humble Compact Cassette was already more than a decade old in 1975, and its pros and cons had by then become fairly clear to most listeners. It wasn’t a huge reel-to-reel deck as used by pro studios, and was thus portable by the standards of the day—even though Sony's cassette Walkman was still a few years away. The sound was generally acceptable for a generation raised on crackly mono Dansette record players. But the small tape size—two sets of stereo tracks squeezed onto a strip of tape just 3.81mm wide—and the slow playback speed of 4.76cm (1⅞ inches) per second rendered the device incapable of really capturing and playing anything near the full sonic range that music ultimately requires. What's more, there was often plenty of hiss that couldn’t easily be masked. So 50 years ago, a trio of rising Japanese electronics giants decided to inject some quality into the game, something that they hoped would hit the Hi-Fi market as well as aspiring consumers and indie studios. Thus Panasonic, Sony, and Teac came up with the Elcaset, a larger small format. It was virtually twice the size of the old cassette—more like a paperback book in size, at a hefty 15cm wide, 10cm tall and 2cm deep. It contained quarter-inch tape running at double the speed of regular cassettes, which naturally gave the format greater frequency response and a wider dynamic range, as well as much less hiss. It also had six tracks, despite still playing back in stereo—the third track on each side was for a cue function that was designed as an additional facility that studios could use, but never fully implemented. The other big difference was that the Elcaset’s tape was gently pulled away from the body shell when it was played, so that even the most scuffed—or crudely-made—frame wouldn’t effect the audio signal. To put it in technical terms, the cassette had a high-frequency bandwidth that hardly got over 16,000Hz, whereas Elcaset exceeded 25,000Hz, and had a fine mid-band (the region in which most vocals and guitars live). It made a better noise, basically. The best Elcaset decks had three motors, three heads for playback, recording, and erasure, closed-loop dual capstan, VU meters, and remote control. All-in-all, they sounded pretty damn good. Sony, Teac, and Panasonic had their own top-of-the-range versions as well as more reasonably priced decks, and there was even a hand-bag sized "portable" version, the EL-D8, which looked like, and essentially was, a piece of mobile pro-audio kit. With a "big four" PR launch—input from Panasonic, Sony, Teac, and then Hitachi—for their "revolutionary Elcaset system," the format should have become a big seller. There were some good reviews, and certain pundits still claim today that Elcaset's overall performance was virtually as good as leading mid-range reel-to-reels at the time, such as the Revox B77. So with the cassette already battling the newish 8-track cartridge, the manufacturers believed Elcaset would apply the killer blow to the older format, leaving it to struggle with the 8-track for market supremacy. Unfortunately, Elcaset's arrival in 1975 (though it did not reach the UK until the following year) coincided with the year that sales of several other innovations took off. One of these was the Chromium Oxide (CrO2) cassette which, while not quite matching the finesse of the Elcaset, did greatly improve cassette sound and could crucially be used in any existing cassette player. The CrO2 cassette cost 40 percent more than a normal tape, but for the audiophile or the discerning pop fan, there was now a premium recording-cassette that didn’t require a whole new deck. The leading tape manufacturer Sansui eventually started to make Elcaset tapes after Sony belatedly brought out a chrome tape of its own for the new decks. But this was already too late. For the compact cassette player there was also Dolby B, which looked and sound fairly fresh on the scene. Dolby B (which funnily enough followed after Dolby A) took out the hiss, reducing noise without overly affecting the sound, again adding value to the existing, cheaper, format. Another innovation, aimed purely at the Hi-Fi market, was a superb range of cassette players from Japanese firm Nakamichi, which had been making them since the autumn of 1973. These slowly gained a great reputation as they squeezed every last drop of sound from a compact tape and, when used with a chrome cassette, almost gave vinyl a run for its money. Decent examples of the legendary Nakamichi Dragon player still command three and four-figure sums today. And, speaking of money, one minus point amid a splash of mainly good reviews was the Elcaset’s exorbitant initial price—coming in at over £1,200 in today’s money. So when indie sound studios realised that the sound was going to be, in some cases, a little worse than a cheaper, used, reel-to-reel deck, that market started to shy away. The convenience of Elcaset would have saved a little studio time, but not enough to warrant the outlay. On top of this, reel-to-reel was comparatively easy to splice—to edit with, literally, razor blades and sticky tape - a technique I was taught back in the late 1980's when I was an intern at what was then BBC Radio London. Elcaset on the other hand could only be dubbed, and recording drop-ins could never be as accurate even if the cue system were ever completed. As for domestic sales, Hi-Fi was costlier back then anyway, but such a price was a big leap for all but the most dedicated audiophile. No way was the average person going to spend such an amount on what many just saw as a glorified cassette. The last straw, domestically speaking, was the failure of Sony and the others to provide pre-recorded tapes. Many people, even Hi-Fi enthusiasts, didn’t always want to have to record their own material. Some just wanted to buy Top 40 albums off the shelf of their nearest music store—but they couldn’t with Elcaset. This would prove to be an error that Sony barely noticed, and repeated with the Betamax video format—their last such content mistake; subsequently they bought up CBS Records as well as shares in various film companies. Elcaset technology was undoubtedly ahead of its time though, and the extra-shell tape handling that it featured would go on to dominate the video market for the following 25 years with VHS and S-VHS. The people behind the "biggest, bestest" cassette just hadn’t considered the public’s price limits, their love of prerecorded material, or even the possibility that existing rival formats could still develop their own innovations. In 1980 the Elcaset itself officially died, the last few thousand unsold players auctioned off at a fraction of their worth to the highest bidder. Incredibly, there were virtually no serious bids from the US, Japan, or even Western Europe, and the highest bid actually came from a Scandinavian distributor. So the last Elcaset players ended up in bargain basements in Finland, blasting out at the snowy forests while the rest of the music world began to forget about their beloved cassette’s short-lived big brother. There’s also no denying that these machines were built for the ages; there’s many a tale of Elcaset players being found in attics this century, after 45 or 50 years in storage, and still playing perfectly. Analogue audio fans still swap "elcassy" tips on sites such as tapeheads.net, and if you ever need to lube your belt and two spools—and you probably will with the older Sony tapes—this is definitely the place to find out how. There is now a niche but steady market in secondhand Elcaset players and unused Elcaset tapes, not just on eBay, but in Finland, the UK, US, and Poland. Former Bexleyheath hifi dealer Whomes used to sell Elcaset machines - especially the very high end models - I recall visiting the shop with my late Dad and being given a demonstration - though Dad was never going to buy a machine - but a free look was something else altogether.

I must admit that had I been less unwell and had more time, energy and a larger garden, I would have loved to keep chickens (though I doubt my neighbours would be as keen). The thought of fresh eggs on a regular basis is something that a lot of people would like, but for most it remains an unfulfilled aspiration. The wholesomeness of garden produced chicken eggs is now being put into question; scientists in the USA have been studying the chemical composition of chicken eggs produced in urban gardens; they have discovered that in many suburban areas, the eggs contain a relatively high quantity of lead. Chickens love to root around in the ground, looking for worms and grubs which form part of their natural diet. In so doing, they ingest soil, and this soil in many occasions contains microscopic quantities of metallic lead, and lead salts. This comes from old buried lead water pipes, industrial waste and even from decades old car exhaust fumes – although lead additives in petrol has been banned for many years, the microscopic exhaust particulates still exist in the environment, as lead is a persistent pollutant that does not biodegrade. Interestingly, chicken eggs from commercial producers do not suffer this lead pollution, as they are farmed in a controlled environment, often in the countryside and further away from any potential source of pollution. The scientific study proved that the level of lead contamination in urban eggs closely tracked the level of lead found in the local environment. There is no accepted internationally agreed standard regarding contaminant levels in chicken eggs, but the researchers did discover that in the worst cases of contamination, the garden kept hens produced eggs with lead levels of 167 parts per billion, which roughly equates to the loss of one IQ point in a growing child who regularly consumes contaminated eggs. Cooking the eggs, or incorporating them in a recipe such as a cake will do nothing to remove lead contamination, unlike bugs like salmonella, which are killed by a couple of minutes of temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Celsius. The lead is always there; the only way to ensure that domestic chickens don’t ingest any environmental lead is to ensure that their run is filled with clean and uncontaminated earth and gravel, along with additional calcium supplements to encourage strong shell growth. It will be interesting to see if any UK or European study will be undertaken; I suspect that any results would be comparable to the American study.

Bexley Council has published plans to sell off for redevelopment the children's nursery located adjacent to the Asda and B&Q stores and Belvedere railway station in Lower Belvedere. It is anticipated that this nursery building will be demolished and replaced with yet more flats. I believe this is proposed to be the first part of a redevelopment of parts of the Station Road and Picardy Street development which includes a number of shops, a vets, a doctor's surgery and a dentists. The current buildings on the site have a very interesting origin and history. Despite the development of the surrounding new housing estates in the years between the wars, Belvedere retained its essentially Victorian appearance until the Second World War, when German bombs started a clearance of 19th century buildings. The greatest damage to Belvedere was done in the air raid of the night of the 19th and 20th April 1941 when a heavy bomb blasted the shops and houses in Albert Road in Upper Belvedere facing the recreation ground, and a parachute mine blasted a massive clearance in Picardy Street in Lower Belvedere. Both areas were rebuilt by the Borough Council after the war with blocks of flats at Picardy Street, there was a comprehensive redevelopment. The road was straight and widened. The co-operative stores which dated from 1899 were replaced by new shops and some blocks of flats under branch library were erected. The whole scheme was completed in 1962.

The following historic video clip I have featured some years ago, but I am  re - showing it after a WhatsApp conversation I had last week, and a request from a reader. This is a TV news report on the large warehouse fire that took place in Fraser Road, Erith. I recall, back on the 16th of May 1984, not very long before the Erith deep water wharf (on the site of what is now Morrison's supermarket) finally closed down, that the warehouse that stored the giant rolls of newsprint brought in by ship from Scandinavia caught fire. Once the paper was alight, it proved impossible for the fire brigade to put out. Fraser Road was blocked for nearly two weeks, as the emergency services contained the blaze, but left it to burn itself out. I can remember standing in the back garden of my parents’ house in  Upper Belvedere on a bright and sunny day, and being amazed by what appeared to be snowflakes falling from a cloudless sky. The flakes were actually specks of ash from the raging paper warehouse blaze a couple of miles away. The smell of burning pervaded the area for nearly a month, well after the fire burned itself out naturally – and left the warehouse building a burned out shell. From my recollections of the fire, nobody was seriously hurt, and there was a substantial insurance settlement to the owners of the Europa Industrial Estate. Watch the contemporary news coverage below. you can Email me with any comments and feedback at the usual address - hugh.neal@gmail.com.