SeeWoo.

The historic photo above - click on it to see a larger view - shows the old SeeWoo cash and carry warehouse which was located in Horn Lane, Charlton. The building used to house a giant trade outlet stocking ingredients for Chinese restaurants and takeaways. Back in the mid-1990's I used to visit the place on a semi-regular basis. Unfortunately the Charlton location is no longer trading as SeeWoo, as the organisation split the business into two halves some time ago. The cash and carry part of the business was sold to a Japanese cash and carry trade outlet called Tazaki, and the conventional smaller consumer Chinese supermarket chain which shared the name SeeWoo was franchised, and subsequently has opened a number of individual supermarkets open to the general public. I have been reliably informed from an impeccable source that a branch of the SeeWoo consumer supermarket is scheduled to open in Bexleyheath Broadway in the near future. I understand that it will be located in what originally used to be the retail unit that was occupied by Woolworths. At present no date has been set for when it will actually open. The original SeeWoo supermarket branch is still located in Lisle Street in London's Chinatown. Please send your comments and feedback to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com. 

As readers will be aware, last Thursday was Bonfire Night, and the local area has what I consider to be a somewhat tenuous link to the historic Gunpowder Plot; let me explain. Erith has cropped up a few times in the course of the greater history of the United Kingdom, most famously as the place where Alexander Selkirk – the real life “Robinson Crusoe” came ashore after being shipwrecked and living on a desert island. Something that until now has been less known is that Erith is thought by some historians from Bexley Local Studies and Archive Centre to have played a pivotal role in The Gunpowder Plot; they indicated that their research showed that in the summer of 1605, Erith Manor House, which was located on what is now Erith High Street, was rented under a pseudonym by Anne Vaux, the daughter of Lord William Vaux, the head of one of the wealthiest and most prominent Catholic families in the country at the time. Anne Vaux was known to arrange for safe houses to be made available for Catholic priests to hide up and hold underground church services – Catholics were widely persecuted in England at the time. Erith Manor House was considered an ideal location for Robert Catesby, Guy Fawkes and the other plotters against the King to hide up, as it had, according to Catesby “a secluded but convenient location” on the banks of the Thames, which had the added benefit of offering an easy escape route by boat, should the situation arise. What the plotters did not realise was that the intelligence service of the time was aware of them – spymaster Sir Anthony Standen, first assistant to Sir Francis Walsingham, who was then head of the English Secret Service, working directly for King James I, had broken up a plot (The Bye Plot – click here for more details) eighteen months before hand, and was now acutely aware that other Catholic activists had designs on the life of the Protestant monarch. Sir Anthony Standen had informants all over the place, and soon became aware of the small group of men who were acting very suspiciously in and around Erith. Several of the plotters had also been seen in a number of taverns in Southwark, and it is possible that they were followed back to Erith, where their safe house was then discovered. When agents subsequently raided the house, the conspirators had already made their escape, and the place was deserted. Some of this is extrapolation from verified facts – it is certain that Anne Vaux did indeed rent Erith Manor House using the cover name Mrs Perkins, though it is not certain the Gunpowder Plotters did use it as their primary base of operations – there may well have been an underground church in the house, which in itself would have aroused suspicion. Unfortunately there is no opportunity for Erith Manor House to become a tourist attraction, as it was demolished in the 19th century after falling into a state of disrepair. Personally I find it unlikely that the Gunpowder Plotters would have used Erith as a main base of operations; Nobility and the wealthy would stand out like a sore thumb in the Erith of 1605, which, much like now was inhabited by working people who back then were mainly involved in trade on the River Thames and fishing. If the plotters wanted to keep a low profile, expensively dressed strangers appearing in Erith would not be a very intelligent idea, as they would not have fitted in with the locals. Tying up a purebred, high quality horse outside an inn in Erith back then would have been the equivalent of parking a Ferrari 488 GTB outside of the Running Horses pub nowadays - people would most definitely notice, and tongues would wag.

Openreach has recently issued a reminder to customers that the legacy analogue copper phone line network is being officially switched off on January the 31st next year, and that the deadline will not be postponed, as it has been in the past. The infrastructure arm of BT Group, Britain’s biggest telecommunications business, circulated the warning last week in a letter to communications providers that use its network to deliver their services. Openreach informed them that any customers still on legacy analogue public switched telephone network (PSTN) copper phone line connections are at risk of disruption when these are retired at the end of January, 2027. The analogue phone line switch-off could affect businesses and consumers alike. Beyond the plain old telephone, systems that rely on PSTN connectivity include point-of-sale terminals, fire and security alarms, and personal care alarms for elderly and vulnerable people. The move is part of a wider government scheme to get the UK onto all-digital high-speed networks running on fibre-optic infrastructure, and the legacy phone service – with its dependency on copper cabling – was standing in the way. Unfortunately many members of the general public are still unaware, or only dimly aware of this switchover, and very few are aware that the cut-off point is so close - approximately 100 days from now. In an interview with IT news website The Register, Charity Director Caroline Abrahams at Age UK said:- “With only three months to go, the digital landline switchover is entering a critical final phase. Most people have moved over without major problems, but nobody who relies on their landline or TeleCare should be left behind," anyone with concerns should contact their provider, but the responsibility cannot rest with customers alone. Providers must not give up on people who have not responded. They need to keep trying to reach them and offer practical, individual support, recognizing that some may be unwell, living with dementia, worried about scams or without anyone nearby to help”.

A new crime wave has been under way in parts of North Kent and it shows signs of spreading into South East London. Criminals have been stealing the backup batteries from mobile phone transceiver masts, presumably to sell as scrap. Now that scrap dealers can legally only accept scrap from registered traders, and no cash deals are permitted by law, it is going to be far more difficult for the crooks to get away with their thefts, and I gather that the mobile phone companies have their own security investigators on the case, as well as the Police. More on this in the future.

If you live in the Slade Green area, then there is going to be a Police drop - in surgery on Tuesday the 10th of November from 11 am in the St Augustine's Church Community Cafe. You can discuss any concerns about local crime and anti - social behaviour with Police representatives from the Slade Green and Northend Safer Neighbourhoods team. 

Following the announcement of the forthcoming redundancy of the PSTN analogue copper telephone lines I described in the article above, and the ongoing story in the popular press about how hackers - whose identity is currently unknown - have been remotely altering the temperature of fridges and freezers in supermarkets to maliciously damage or destroy food items on a large scale, it did strike me that we have become increasingly vulnerable to using technology which it is possible for bad actors to disable or circumvent. We may be sacrificing security for convenience in some cases. For example, I recall that quite some years ago there was a well – used BT public payphone in Manor Road, Erith, outside of the former Royal Alfred pub - which nowadays is a successful Premier convenience store. A reliable source told me at the time that the phone box use got very much heavier, the further into the month one went. Apparently this was because local addicts would use it to phone their drug dealers when the credit on their pay as you go mobile phones had run out. That all ended back in the autumn of 2011, when joy riders in a stolen BMW lost control of the car and crashed into the phone box – you can see a historic photo of the damage above – click for a larger view. It was thought at the time that as the pay phone generated a fair deal of cash, that BT would replace it, but after a few days the box was removed and the hole it left in the pavement was covered with tarmac. That was the end of what I understood to have been the most profitable phone box in the area, so I am not exactly surprised that less well – earning phone boxes have been retired, and public phone boxes in general are now almost entirely absent from the local area. I do have concerns however; mobile phone signal coverage is generally good in and around Erith, due mainly to the cell transceivers and antenna farm on the roof of Electricity House next to the Fish roundabout. Other parts of the London Borough of Bexley have far patchier coverage, not to mention what would happen in the event of a national or local disaster, an outage caused by hackers, or even a terrorist attack? One of the first things to go down in such an event are the mobile phone networks. The authorities have the ability to disable all mobile phones in a given cell or series of cells, with the exception of specialist mobile phones (which have to be approved by the Police and the Home Office) which are used by the disaster recovery teams in large organisations. In certain circumstances, the entire mobile phone network may go down. If this happens the only alternatives are old fashioned copper landline telephones - which we know are being decommissioned at the end of January of next year, or the most reliable backup method of communication – two way radio. Unless, like me you are a Radio Amateur, the options for two way radio operation are very limited; UK CB and PMR 446 are pretty much limited to line of sight – 4 to 6 miles at sea level on average (your mileage may vary due to a number of factors I won’t go into here). This is where the organisation RAYNET steps in; RAYNET is a voluntary emergency service operated by Radio Amateurs that provide short, medium and long range voice, video and data communications in areas where there has been a total loss of mainstream communications. RAYNET volunteers train alongside the Fire Brigade, Police, Ambulance Service, Mountain Rescue and RNLI. When all other forms of communication have failed, radio will always get through. What I am really saying is, if you want to maintain reliable communications under any sort of adverse circumstances, then you really need to become a Radio Amateur – you can read all about how to apply here.

As regular readers will be aware, I do not normally comment on stories that have national significance. On this occasion I am making an exception, as I have some minor personal experience with the individual involved. About 10 years ago, I was waiting for a train home from Greenwich station, I was standing on the platform minding my own business when a chap sauntered beside me. He was wearing a loud red sports jacket and blue jeans that appeared to be so impossibly tight that they looked like they were either sprayed on, or he had been sewn into them. It was Russell Brand. A group of teenage school girls saw him and started giggling and pointing at him, it appeared that they were besotted with him. He then proceeded to make several lewd comments both to them, and following this he made some remarks to me which I found incredibly repulsive. I ended up blanking him completely and walking away towards the other end of the platform. I found him to be utterly offensive, and incredibly repugnant. It would appear that the jury in his recent court case not only found him guilty of several serious offences, but also questioned his atrocious attitude towards women and girls. I now understand he may well face prosecution over a further set of offences over and above those that he has already been found guilty of. I have always considered him to be a creep, and it would appear that the court and the jury concurred with this opinion. I sincerely hope he goes to prison for a very long time. An utter scumbag in my view.

The end video this week is a historic walking tour around Woolwich, including some relatively obscure facts about the origins of the Woolwich Arsenal. Along with the town's two little known links to The Beatles. Comments and feedback to me as usual at hugh.neal@gmail.com.