Bexleyheath.

A couple of weeks ago, thanks to a very kind friend, I was taken to Bexleyheath on a rare trip out of the house. Normally the only time I currently get to go out is when I have a hospital appointment and I am taken to and from it by the excellent NHS patient transport service. This time however, I needed to go to Bexleyheath in person in order to sort out an administrative issue. In essence, I needed to go in person and present photographic ID to prove who I was. My friend not only chauffeured me, but also pushed me around in my wheelchair in Bexleyheath town centre and the the Broadway Centre, which for some unfathomable reason has been renamed The Mall. I have to say that I was both surprised and shocked at how many of the shop units are now empty and abandoned. I am aware that trading conditions are extremely tough at present, and that retail rents are also very high. It seems to me that The Mall is unfortunately dying on its feet. I'm sure that this is also not helped by the exponential growth of online shopping, and the convenience of having things delivered to one's front door. My friend told me that some of the shop units have changed hands twice or even three times in the just over 18 months that I have been housebound. Apparently this is reflected all around the region if not even further afield. It would seem to me that the retail industry is suffering greatly through decreased footfall, lower takings, and greater overheads. Comments and feedback to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

As regular readers will be aware, I do occasionally write about famous people born in the local area; this time I am featuring a musician who was incredibly famous - yet his local connection is almost unknown. John Paul Jones (born John Baldwin on January 3, 1946) is an English musician, composer, and record producer who was the bassist and keyboardist for the rock band Led Zeppelin. He is considered one of the most influential and versatile musicians in rock history. Jones was born and grew up in Sidcup. He began playing the piano at the age of five and the cello at the age of seven. He studied music at the Royal Academy of Music in London. After graduating, he worked as a session musician and arranger. In 1968, he was invited to join Led Zeppelin by Jimmy Page. Jones played on all eight of Led Zeppelin's studio albums. He was a key contributor to the band's sound, playing a variety of instruments, including bass, keyboards, mandolin, and violin. He also wrote or co-wrote several of the band's songs, including "The Lemon Song" and "No Quarter." After Led Zeppelin disbanded in 1980, Jones continued to work as a musician and producer for a number of bands, including The Mission. He has released several solo albums and collaborated with a variety of artists, including Them Crooked Vultures, Foo Fighters, and The Pretenders. He has also written music for films and television. Jones is a highly respected musician and composer. He is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He has won numerous awards, including a Grammy Award and a Brit Award. He is considered one of the most important and influential musicians in rock history - and he came from Sidcup!

During last week I received the following account from a reader and occasional contributor who is by profession an investigative journalist. For reasons that will soon become abundantly clear, I am keeping their identity anonymous. It makes for somewhat worrying reading:- "I recently received a scam or con artist phone call and my efforts to report it led me to think there are problems with the system of reporting. The fraudulent call was interesting in itself. I answered a call from a mobile number. An African man with probably a Nigerian accent. I am always suspicious of callers with African or Indian type accents. Not racism just wary because these nationalities, notably Nigerians, are the source of a lot of fraud. The guy says he is calling from Sky about my package and he launched into what was going to be a scripted fraud pitch. But I interrupted the guy a few times saying the same thing “what do you want.” He carried on with his pitch but I interrupted him again by saying “if you are from Sky and you obviously have my number then obviously you know my name too - what is my name?” His rude response was “your name is mother f**ker.” I was so surprised and i thought I had misheard him so I asked him to tell my name again. He repeated the same insulting phrase. I responded with my own insult to him and I hung up. Obviously I had caught him out as a fraudster which annoyed him. I decided to report the phone number of the dodgy caller to the relevant authority. But when I called 0300 123 2040 to report it I ended up with a reason to complain about Report Fraud. When you phone you constantly get recorded announcements telling you to report it online. I thought that was unhelpful as a lot of victims of fraud are older people who may not even use the internet, When a guy eventually came on the line I decided to ask him about his but he was rude and evasive and aggressive towards me for having the cheek to ask him questions ! I persisted, by now donning my investigating journalist hat, thinking he should not refuse to answer simple questions to give me basic information about the service, he issued me with a warning which sounded very threatening and when I asked what was the warning about he issued me with two more warnings that if I asked any more questions he would end the call. Of course I repeated my earlier question seeking information, so he hung up on me. I called back to complain about him and the service. But my original concern remains about why this service which is supervised by the City Of London police invites victims of fraud to phone and report it but then when you call the recorded messages want you to report it online, Many elderly people become victims of fraud and do not use the internet. This means incidents of fraud calls will not be registered and the numbers they call from will not be recorded either! Strange that a fraud reporting service is deterring people from reporting fraud".

This week marks the 40th birthday of a distinctly low technology, un-glamorous, yet hugely important and influential computer which most people who were around at the time will have forgotten about. Whilst it was officially released in 1985, it only reached the public in large numbers - via the likes of Dixons and Currys - in 1986. The Amstrad PCW 8256 word processor - in eighteen months it did for the typewriter what the car took thirty years to do for the pony and trap. Amstrad boss Alan Sugar’s specification was simple – “A word processor so simple Joyce could use it”. Joyce Caley was his formidable personal assistant, and "Joyce" became the code name for the project – and the product name in Germany. The PCW 8256 rode on the coat-tails of the previous Amstrad computers, which had been huge successes: The CPC 464 and 664 computers that I have written about in the past - two excellently engineered and very good value machines in themselves. While the PCW 8256 is often derided as being a low-tech device – Z80-based, running the CP/M operating system when not word-processing and with a monochrome display – its key to being cheap lay in using a single chip which controlled the CPU, display and, crucially, the printer. What customers thought was a separate external printer was in fact just a printing mechanism with the electronics mounted inside the main unit. The PCW 8256 predated the widespread use of graphical interfaces and the computer mouse. Macs existed, but only in rarefied circles and its Motorola 68000 processor itself cost more than a whole PCW. Just being able to highlight text you wanted to cut and paste was revolutionary when most PC programs wanted a combination of control, secondary and tertiary keys for each step to mark the start of a block, the end of the block and the copy or cut. The PCW 8256 operating system / word processing program called LocoScript reduced nine key presses to three and made the whole process a lot more obvious. Whilst it could also play games - and indeed many Sinclair ZX Spectrum titles were ported onto the PCW 8256, word processing and spreadsheets were what it really did best. It was actually a superb bit of kit that was well engineered (down to a price) and very well thought out. Most of all, the long lasting effect of the PCW 8256 was to get people writing. If everyone back then had a book in them, it was often the PCW 8256 which got it out. Significant businesses can trace their roots back to early work on the machine. Many writers got their first books published after typing it out on a PCW 8256. Back in 1986, only a small, intrepid minority of writers used word processors. The pioneers tended to be sci-fi writers such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke, who were perhaps naturally disposed to new technology, and authors of densely plotted thrillers and historical fiction who needed to incorporate lots of research and move material around without having to hold everything in their short-term memories. The Amstrad changed all this, for the simple reason that it cost £399, word-processing program and dot-matrix printer included, while an Apple Mac or IBM system cost four times as much or more. The PCW 8256 price lured in those writers who were beginning to realise that, on their Smith Coronas and Olivetti typewriters, they were spending as much time retyping as typing. A critical mass formed. any single piece of hardware can have been said to have introduced a computer to an audience it might well otherwise have bypassed, the Amstrad PCW 8256 is the machine - in the thirteen years it was in production in various guises, it sold a staggering eight million units. I suspect that in attics and the backs of cupboards all over the UK, some of these ground breaking computers still exist. Let's hope that they get preserved. 

Back in September of 2020, six years ago, plans were submitted to convert the Spice Master restaurant in Nuxley Road, Upper Belvedere into a block of flats, with the restaurant continuing to exist on the ground floor, but with a side extension and an additional two floors added to the building. What the situation is today turns out to be unclear, as the original planning permission will have now lapsed. You can see an artists impression as the lower of the image above - click on it for a larger view. The upper photograph shows what the building used to look like in its original form, back in the 1970's. The Coffee Tavern used to be a prominent building located in Nuxley Road, Upper Belvedere (NOT Nuxley Village - no such place exists - it is a fictional construct dreamed up by out of town estate agents and has no historical relevance or existence in reality). The Coffee Tavern was one of the oldest buildings in the area. For the last couple of decades it had been the home of The Spice Master Indian Restaurant. The building that the restaurant is located in has a lot of history. It was originally constructed as a Victorian temperance cafe called the Belvedere Coffee Tavern and Refreshment Bar. I can dimly recall it as a “greasy spoon” type cafe when I was a child, growing up in Upper Belvedere. I never went in it, but would go past regularly. In the mid to late eighties the cafe building was extensively extended and remodelled, to the extent that the owners got into some rather hot water with Bexley Council planning department, as the original structure was a grade II listed building, and they altered it so much that it lost its’ listing. At the same time it was extended, it changed from being a rather scruffy looking cafe into a rather upmarket Italian restaurant called La Dolce Vita, which seemed to be mainly  frequented by elderly Jaguar driving wide boys and their brassy wives. It was very popular at lunch times for people holding business meetings, and at weekends it was packed – especially for Sunday lunch when one would need to book in advance to stand a chance of getting a table. During the middle of this period, it was exposed by the News Shopper has having the worst kitchen hygiene recorded in Bexley to that date; the place was so bad that it was featured on at least one television consumer protection programme. This had the effect of killing trade off almost overnight. They cleaned the place up, and re-launched it the next year with a new name –“The Garden”, but people had long memories, and the trade did not return. One diner of the time told me ”It was nearly always empty and almost overly friendly with the service. We knew of its health and safety problems (but that was like a year before we'd started going there so it had cleaned up its act) and we had some lovely meals. We tended to use it as a "sod-it-we-can't-be-arsed-to-cook" night as it was local, quite reasonable and they had a tolerable/well priced wine list. It was nice enough but I'm not a fan of Italian Restaurants seeing as at home we eat a lot of Italian style dishes (pasta, lasagne, meatballs, Mediterranean salad etc) so I like to have stuff a bit different when I go out.  It was the height of mid-80's home decoration inside, if I remember rightly. Artex about 3ft thick and everything covered in fake Roman columns, plastic ivy and plaster statues with B and Q's finest wall-hangings and light fittings. Probably quite swish in the day but when we were there in the mid-90's it was a little tired and dated and not my type of thing at all”. Not long after this, it closed for good and lay empty and boarded up for quite a time. It was about at this time that I moved to Erith, and was less aware of the goings on in Nuxley Road than I used to be. The old restaurant building was again gutted and refurbished, this time as an Indian restaurant The Spice Master; the first competition for the venerable and long established Belvedere Tandoori, which was one of my introductions to high street curry eating back in the day. I did not try the new restaurant, now called The Spice Master for many years; I was working in the East End, and used to visit the legendary, and sadly now long closed Sweet and Spicy a couple of times a week; I would also make regular lunch time trips to the Halal Restaurant in Mark Street E1 – which has been serving up genuine Bangladeshi food since shortly before WWII, and is one of the oldest continually in service curry houses in the UK. In many ways at this time I was spoiled for choice, and “ate what the locals ate”. Consequently I did become quite sniffy about ordinary high street curry houses and the food that they cooked. I felt that it was not “authentic” and was too engineered to suit a Western palate. In essence I had become a bit of a curry snob.  During this time, The Spice Master just curried on (oh the wit!) and our paths did not cross. Once I had moved on from the job based in the East End, the curry consumption drastically reduced, but I still had a degree of disdain for ordinary high street restaurants. Over the last few years I have come to realise that your high street curry is a thing on its own. It may not bear much resemblance to food you would eat in Bangalore or Karachi, but it has now been around for long enough to have created its own unique identity – it is what it is, and it is rightfully unapologetic. Most high street curry, whilst being called “Indian” is actually far closer to Bangladeshi cuisine, as most of the original restaurant owners came from Bangladesh, rather than India, but were quick to realise that in 1950’s / 1960’s Britain, most English people had not heard of Bangladesh, so a bit of inspired re - branding labelled the new food outlets as “Indian” restaurants. Back in May of 2017, the Spice Master was subject to some extreme vandalism; a group of six or seven youths tried to enter the restaurant; as it was close to closing time and the group were rowdy and very drunk, the owner refused to admit them. After some altercation the group eventually agreed to leave, but asked the owner to call them a cab. As the group were abusive, and in any case had not been customers, the owner declined. The group eventually left. I have been informed from several sources that the yobs turned up at around 2 AM, long after the restaurant had closed, and proceeded to break all of the windows. As far as I have been able to ascertain, no prosecutions resulted from this criminal act. 

The end video this week features aerial footage showing the Crayford and Dartford marshes following the river Cray, as it meets the Darent and flows into the Thames. All comments and feedback should be sent to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.