The photo above - click on it to see a larger view - was taken recently. It shows two pieces of car body shell lying in the road outside of a block of residential houses in Manor Road, Erith. The two body panels were originally blocking the highway and causing a danger to other road users, until some public spirited person moved them into the gutter. The issue was reported to the police using the 101 phone number, and the police acknowledged this. They advised that the cause of the matter was probably down to one of two reasons. Firstly, it could be that that the panels were being taken on the back of a lorry to one of the several legitimate scrap yards at the Eastern end of Manor Road, or in their opinion it was more likely that because the panels appeared to be in good condition that they were probably the result of an illegal car theft and chop shop, something which the police advise is becoming increasingly common. In either case, they must have fallen off the vehicle that was transporting them. There are several reasons behind situations such as this, and after I did some research, I discovered the following. The automotive landscape in the UK is currently witnessing a tactical shift. In the past high-end luxury SUV's such as the Range Rover and the Toyota Land Cruiser among others, used to be the primary targets for theft and international smuggling, nowadays, a new more clinical trend has taken over the rise of the chop shop. In 2025 and 2026 car theft is increasingly being driven by a desperate demand for spare parts turning everyday family hatchbacks into high-value targets for organised criminal networks. Since the end of the Covid-19 lock down and the start of the cost of living crisis, members of the public are keeping their privately owned cars for far longer than in the past due to economic pressures, basically having little disposable income to spend on a new or newer vehicle. Because of this, older vehicles often need more maintenance, and thus an increased number of spare parts. In some cases where the vehicle is particularly old, spares are either exceedingly rare, or almost impossible to locate as main car dealers do not wish to burden themselves with large amounts of spare parts stock which they may have to retain for many years, and thus tie up a lot of their working capital. This means that motorists in such circumstances often have to use either legitimate licenced car breakers yards in order to locate spares for their particular model of vehicle, or to take a gamble and use online retailers such as, but not limited to Facebook Marketplace or eBay. Unfortunately, although both of these specific websites are completely legitimate, there are unscrupulous and in fact downright crooked actors who use the sites for their own criminal purposes. Readers might think that an old vehicle such as an 8-year-old Ford Fiesta would be safe because it isn't a flashy super car. In reality, this is what makes it a prime target. The parts paradox explains that cars produced in high volumes have the highest demand for affordable second-hand spares. According to the 2025 DVLA and insurance data, the most stolen vehicles for parts include the Ford Fiesta, which is consistently the number one target even now years after production of the car ended. The Volkswagen Golf and Ford Focus which are both considered to be high volume workhorse cars with massive parts markets. The Toyota C - HR and RAV4 are increasingly targeted for high-value hybrid components and their catalytic converters. Criminals aren't looking for to resell these cars as a whole. Instead, they want the big five components - engines, gearboxes, airbags, infotainment systems, and catalytic converters. The chop shop is an illicit garage, often hidden in plain sight within an industrial estate or remote farm buildings. The speed of these criminal operations can be frighteningly efficient. The crooks use a process which consists of the following procedures. 1) The theft - using relay attacks which are intercepting key-less entry signals using special electronic equipment. This can take thieves under 60 seconds to break into a car and start the ignition without causing any excess noise or damage to the vehicle. 2) The breakdown - once inside a chop shop a team of strippers can dismantle a vehicle into its component parts in under 2 hours. 3) The disappearance - the chassis the only part with the identifying VIN is often crushed for scrap or dumped in a river, effectively destroying the car's identity. 4) The sale - parts are listed on online marketplaces as previously mentioned or sold to unscrupulous backstreet repair shops within 24 hours of the theft. The Metropolitan Police are urging members of the public to report suspicious activity. Common signs of a local chop shop include people working odd hours in normally quiet industrial units with grinding, cutting or heavy machinery noise late into the night. Secondly, vehicles entering a unit but never being seen to be leaving. Thirdly, large quantities of car doors, bumpers or engines stored outside or moved in and out of vans. The surge in car theft for spares is a symptom of a global supply chain that makes new parts expensive and slow to arrive. Public awareness of the issue of car thefts for spares is currently relatively low, and it will require people to be alert to potential criminal activity and to report it to law enforcement as soon as it is noticed. Many of the chop shops are operated by serious and organised crime, and the people stealing and breaking the vehicles are at the bottom of the pyramid. The ones making huge amounts of money are never seen, but they are exploiting others, including the victims of theft. Please leave your feedback and comments as usual - email me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.
Long time readers May no doubt recall that some time ago, well before I became ill, I wrote at some extent about my displeasure with the self-service salad bar in Erith Morrisons. I commented on how early in the evening it was closed down, and if you went into the store at any time after approximately 7:00 p.m the salad bar would be unavailable. Bearing in mind, the store itself did not close until 10:00 p.m, this seemed somewhat unpopular in my opinion. Secondly, I complained that both the quality of the salad ingredients and the high cost of a small box of fresh salad was putting off a lot of potential shoppers. In fact, I found it preferable to go to my local kebab shop (photo is the lower of the two above - click on it for a larger view), and just purchase a large salad from them, which was freshly made in front of me, with better quality ingredients and a greater variety of salad vegetables and flavours. The kebab shop salad would last over 2 days, where as the small Morrison's salad was both more expensive and would only be sufficient to go with one meal. It seems that my observations were more correct than I could have anticipated. In a recent interview with the Kent online website, a former member of Morrison's salad bar staff member has gone on record to explain how things worked behind the scenes, and it does not make for appetising reading. As a bit of background, the single operator of the salad bar was also expected to run the custom-made pizza point and to to keep both positions stocked. Something that could be extremely demanding during busy times. In the online interview, the former Morrisons staff member, who chose to remain nameless, said the following:-"A lot is actually premixed. A few years back the salad bar changed to pre-mixed things to keep up with the pizza demand when there's only one staff member on. Most of the pasta, couscous and noodle mixes are shipped in, in two litre tubs. The stuff you do have to mix is disgusting. That weird celery, apple and mayonnaise combo is vile. You mix it up in a giant tub and only have gloves to protect you from its oddness. It was bizarrely one of the first things to sell out though. Nothing can compare to the feeling of despair when you open the giant tray only to see that just dregs are left, meaning you have to mix it up all over again. The stuff we run out of we just pinch from the shop floor. Ever wondered why your salad was better than usual one time? It was probably because we picked the fancy mayonnaise, sweet chilli sauce or mozzarella. Every thing is jumbo size. Mayonnaise comes in two litre buckets. Tuna is vacuum packed into a massive slab - and it absolutely stinks when it's opened. Carrots, red onion and peppers are pre-cut and come in huge bags. The fresh pasta is also pre-packed in big, slimy bags. The boiled eggs will change you. Everyone loves the boiled eggs at the salad bar, but if you knew the truth you might change your mind. They come in a huge blue bag full of brine water. Poking a hole at the end of the bag and squeezing them out one by one was sickening, but satisfying. Those limited edition things are never coming back. Up until recently Morrisons did lime and coconut noodles which were life changing. They did them long enough to get loads of customers hooked and now what's left is just so disappointing. The amount of times we were asked if they were coming back. And no, we can't just make up a batch just for you. What's left over, we flog. God knows why people buy industrial size bags of grated carrot or two litre boxes of fresh Singapore noodles going out of date that day. But they flock to our reduced section like any other, weirdly. People who hover are annoying. Stop staring at me, it won't make me top up the chicken and bacon pasta any quicker. And I will just hide in the fridge for a bit if you don't go away". More on Morrisons and their fall from grace in the end video below.
IPO Top 10 iconic British trademarks poll results:
1) Rolls-Royce
2) Radio Caroline
3) Twinings
4) Cadbury
5) Bass
6) Burberry
7) Transport for London (TfL) roundel
8) Calpol
9) Mini
10) BBC"
Commercially viable (rather than just experimental) magnetic tape recording had its eightieth birthday last week - an event which has not been covered in the press. Thanks to the good fortune of suffering from insomnia, a curious observation by John T. "Jack" Mullin led to the introduction of tape recording and, by extension, the entire home media business. Mullin, a slight and surprisingly humble man, considering his future status in the recording business, graduated from the University of Santa Clara with a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1937, then worked for Pacific Telephone and Telegraph in San Francisco until the war started. By 1944, he had attained the rank of major in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, and was attached to the RAF's radar research labs in Farnborough, England. While working late that spring night, Mullin was happy to find something pleasing playing on the radio — the Berlin Philharmonic playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on Radio Berlin's international Shortwave service. But Mullin was mystified: The performance's fidelity was far too fine to be a 16-inch wax disc recording, the prevailing radio recording technology at the time. And since there were no breaks every 15 minutes to change discs, Mullin figured it had to be a live broadcast. But it couldn't be — if it was 2 am in London, it was 3 am in Berlin. Mullin was right — the orchestra wasn’t up late, and it was a recording. Just not the usual kind, which is why Mullin was confused. After the war, Mullin was assigned to the Technical Liaison Division of the Signal Corp in Paris. "Our task, amongst other things, was to discover what the Germans had been working on in communications stuff — radio, radar, wireless, telegraph, teletype," explained Mullin. Mullin ended up in Frankfurt on one such expedition. There he encountered a British officer, who told him a rumour about a new type of recorder at a Radio Frankfurt station in Bad Nauheim. Mullin didn't exactly believe the report — he had encountered dozens of low-fi magnetic recorders all over Germany. He pondered his decision of pursuing the rumour, literally, at a fork in the road. To his right lay Paris, to the left, Radio Frankfurt. Fortuitously for the future of the home media business, Mullin turned left. He found four hi-fi Magnetophons and some 50 reels of red oxide BASF tape. He tinkered with them a bit back in Paris and made a report to the Army. "We now had a number of these lying around. I packed up two of them and sent them home (to San Francisco). Souvenirs of war. "(You could take) almost anything you could find that was not of great value. (And) anything Germany had done was public domain — it was not patentable." He also sent himself the 50 reels of the red-oxide coated tape. When Mullin returned home, he started tinkering to improve the Magnetophons. On April the 23rd 1946, 80 years ago , Mullin stunned attendees at the annual Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) conference in San Francisco by switching between a live jazz combo and a recording, literally asking the question "Is it live or...?" None of the golden ears in the audience could tell. It was the world's first public demonstration of audio tape recording. Bing Crosby hated doing live radio. And he hated recording his shows on wax records because the fidelity sounded terrible to the noted aural perfectionist performer. When Crosby's engineers heard about Mullin and his Magnetophons, they quickly hired him and his machine. In August 1947, Crosby became the first performer to record a radio programme on tape; the show was broadcast on October 1st. Bing Crosby wasn't the only one interested in Mullin's Magnetophons. Up in Redwood City, California, a small company called Ampex was looking for something to replace the radar gear they'd been producing for the government. Ampex hooked up with Mullin and, in April 1948, perfected and started selling the first commercially available audio tape recorder, the Ampex Model 200. Crosby, Mullin, Ampex and American electronics giant RCA all sort of formulated the same follow-up thought at around the same time: If you could record audio on tape, why not video? Crosby and Mullin teamed up. Ampex formed a team that included a high school student named Ray Dolby. And David Sarnoff gave his engineers their marching orders. A highly-public race began to see who could invent the video tape recorder. Ampex had a leg up on its more well-heeled competition. It had a deal with a Chicago research consortium called Armour Research Institute, now the Illinois Institute of Technology. Working for Armour was none other than wire recording maven Marvin Camras, who solved the most vexing problem facing all the video tape inventor wannabees: Tape speed. Audio recording is accomplished by pulling tape past a stationary recording head. Video, however, is a far fatter signal, which meant tape had to be pulled past the recording heads at ridiculous speeds. A two-foot wide reel of tape could hold, tops, 15 minutes of video — not exactly practical. So instead of spinning the tape, Camras, who got the idea from watching vacuum cleaner brushes, he calculated that he would spin the recording heads instead. Once Ampex got a hold of this key, its engineers shot past Crosby/Mullin and RCA. Even with the spinning head secret, it took five years for Ampex's sometimes part-time six-member team to get things right. On April 14, 1956 — 70 years ago, Ampex introduced the desk-sized Mark IV, the first commercial video tape recorder, to a stunned group of TV executives and engineers at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference in Chicago. To say that this machine changed the world is an obvious understatement. It would take almost another 10 years before Philips reduced audio tape to a cassette and ignited the home audio recording craze, and another nearly 10 years before Sony introduced the Betamax and won a U.S Supreme Court case to allow users to legally record TV shows at home and create the home video business. The U.K had few such concerns - one of the reasons why Britain had the largest number of video recorders per head of population back in the 80's / 90's. Ultimately it was the introduction of Jack Mullin's rebuilt Magnetophons that were the first shots fired in the home media revolution, 80 years ago - and nothing got mentioned to commemorate the event in the popular press, more is the pity.
Over the past few weeks I have written at quite some length on my concerns regarding the future of the Morrisons supermarket chain. The end video this week is a short explanatory documentary which goes into the past, the present and potential future of Morrisons and identifies exactly why it is in such a poor state. Basically it identifies the issues that I have also highlighted, and most of it comes down to the fact that it was the subject of a leveraged buy out. The number of loyal Morrisons customers has dropped significantly due to dissatisfaction with the availability, decreased quality and increased price of its products. The film identifies three potential solutions to the problems the supermarket chain is experiencing, and none of them will be comfortable for Morrison's senior management and ownership. Please do let me know what you think by emailing me at the usual address - hugh.neal@gmail.com.
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