Mother's Pride and Radio 390.

It is amazing how Erith changes with the weather; when overcast and rainy, the town seems to metaphorically sink into the gloom, but conversely when the sun shines, the place perks up considerably. I noticed this last weekend when I went out with my camera to get some photos of the town centre and the Bexley College new campus on Walnut Tree Road. As you can see in the shot above, the building is steadily taking shape, ready for opening in September, at the start of the 2014 / 2015 academic year. I have been invited for a guided tour around the new college, and will be reporting back, complete with photographs once I have had a good old nose around next Thursday. I cannot help but feel concerned that the old Erith Library, which as you can see above is located directly opposite the new college campus, is still left unused and locked up. It is an excellent building, and to my mind in every way far superior to the soulless and anodyne new library, which is located opposite Erith Health Centre in Erith High Street. The old library building was gifted to the town by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation. I really wish it could be put to some use, as I think otherwise the building could end up being demolished to make way for yet more flats. Erith is under a lot of development pressure at present; the overheated property market all over Greater London has meant that developers have been snapping up  affordable land all over the place. Erith has a reputation as a town that has (relatively) affordable housing that is in easy reach of central London. One can get from Erith to London Bridge or Cannon Street in around forty minutes by overland train, and the forthcoming Crossrail link to Abbey Wood will mean easier access to places in West London and Heathrow, again making the local area more desirable for the commuter looking for a convenient place to live. The downside of this is that currently it feels like every scrap of land is either built on, or about to be built on. The apartment block that is sandwiched between the KFC Drive Through and Morrison’s petrol station on the old Erith Trades and Social Club site is taking rapid shape; the Erith Park development, currently the largest housing development in Europe is proceeding apace, and the huge area of brown field land on what was the old gravel pit located between Bexley Road and Fraser Road has been earmarked as the potential location for a thousand residential properties. This is over and above innumerable smaller scale developments that are springing up all around the town. Erith is undergoing building growth unlike anything I can recall, and in many ways it will bring opportunities to the area; my concern is that I have seen little activity in respect of improving water supply, drainage and other essential amenities, and how schools and social services will cope with the influx of new people, especially in this current harsh economic climate – things may be getting better in the City, but in the less trendy suburbs, there has been little evidence of new employment and financial recovery.  What Erith needs is a new employer on the scale of Morrison’s or ADM Oils – two huge organisations with resources that really make a difference to the local economy.  Tesco have opened a delivery depot in the area, but compared with some of their other sites, it is relatively small scale, and as warehouses are largely automated nowadays, they do not provide the number of jobs one would have seen historically.

One local company based in the Manford Industrial Estate on Manor Road may not be the largest employer, or the most prosperous, but they do have a couple of important things going in their favour; they have a very specialised field, and they have a great sense of humour. Cat Flaps South East are a dedicated supplier of cat flaps ranging from the most simple mechanical flaps to the most sophisticated micro chip reading cat flaps which will only admit your own cat and not half the moggies from the neighbourhood. You can see a short promotional video about them below. I wish them every success.

I am not a great party goer; unless the person holding the party is well known to me, I must admit that I tend to decline invitations. The reasons are various, but one of the main ones is that when I invariably get talking to someone, and they ask what I do for a living and they find out I work in IT, the reaction is like that of a moth to a flame. The party goer will almost without exception then regale me with tales of computer problems and a tedious list of issues that they cannot resolve. Almost as night follows day they will then ask me to “take a look” at their PC. What this infers is that they then expect me to fix their computer woes for free. The fact is, I have not got my hands dirty fixing hardware issues or resolving software bugs on personal computers for years; my day job involves massive corporate databases and applications which may span over multiple servers and thousands of desktops around Europe, the Middle East and India. I employ resources from various technical specialisations to actually carry out the remedial work “on the coal face”.  All this is lost on the person wanting my individual help. When I tell them I am not really the person they need, they tend to counter this with “I can pay you your going rate”.  What they don’t realise is that my corporate charge rate is nearly £500 per hour (please note this bears absolutely no relation to my actual wages – it is what my employer charges clients, and how they make shed loads of money – believe me, the consultancy business is extremely lucrative for the large corporate professional service providers). On top of this, my knowledge of Windows is minimal at best – I think it more than likely that they know more about Windows than I do (I run a Mac and various Linux boxes myself, and only use Windows when I am being paid to – my background is in Linux and Unix). You can get a good idea of what I am talking about by clicking here. I have even gone to the extent of, when asked at a party, saying that I am an undertaker – it certainly kills the conversation stone dead, if nothing else. You would not get a party goes expecting a landscape gardener or plumber to do work for free, so why expect someone with an IT background to do so? Do please feel free to comment below, or Email me directly to hugh.neal@gmail.com.

The News Shopper did not really do justice to local (Dartford) chap Nicky Boardman, and his excellent blog “tooupbeatforcancer.com” which covers his struggle with a rare form of terminal abdominal cancer. I feel that he should publish the blog as a book; it is excellently written – both upsetting and blackly humorous in turn. You will find yourself both disturbed by his plight, whilst also laughing at his turn of phrase, for example Chapter One of the blog is fetchingly entitled “The Day My Bum Fell Out”. Nicky Boardman writes unflinchingly about his situation and the experiences he has gone through; the blog can be harrowing, but his prose is beautifully crafted, and often very funny indeed. Unfortunately I doubt that there is going to be a happy ending to Nicky’s story, but his online writing may help bring greater attention to this horrible, invisible killer. Highly recommended.

I received some very pleasing news from one of my anonymous sources on Wednesday. As long time readers will be aware, I am keen to preserve and promote community pubs, and to ensure that they are run to the benefit of locals. There is one notable exception to this – an establishment called the Phoenix, which was located in Lower Hythe Street, Dartford (photo above copyright David Anstiss). I am delighted to be able to announce that the place has recently been bulldozed flat. Back in November 2009 I wrote a scathing report on the place, which got me a lot of enemies for a while – you can read the piece here. A small (ancient and rather smelly) unrepresentative sector of Dartford’s biker community took umbrage to what I said, all of which was true; the pub allowed smoking inside, served very underage drinkers, and had posters on the walls promoting extreme racist hate organisations. On top of that, there was an elderly motorbike in a side room which was in the final stages of disintegration, and reeked of raw petrol. With all of the smoking going on, I was surprised that the whole festering morass did not go up like a Molotov Cocktail. Patrons were seen urinating up the pubs’ exterior walls, and the place was covered by a barely suppressed aura of menace. Some readers thought that I was exaggerating for effect, but actually nothing could have been further from the truth. After my piece and a few challenging comments, it all then went quiet for a while, then in January 2011, the following story broke, initially in the local papers, but soon after in the national tabloids. The Dartford Messenger reported: “Police found guns, ammunition, and knives when they raided The Phoenix, in Lower Hythe Street. Officers executing a firearms warrant at the pub found a loaded handgun in a cabinet, a cloth-covered .22 rifle in a cupboard, a dart gun, a Taser-style stun gun, and a large amount of ammunition, including rifle rounds. They also discovered shotgun cartridges, a clear sealed bag containing three white bullets, and a small bag of Class B drug amphetamine". According to the report from North Kent Police's licensing department, search teams found knives and "an assortment of other weapons throughout the bedroom and the rest of the living quarters at the pub”. To which I then commented “The place has been a threat to civilised society for some time, it being the base of a group of racist thugs and drug dealers - the place would not look out of place in a Guy Ritchie gangster movie. The thugs call themselves bikers, but the bikers I have known for years would be offended to be associated with this lot. The Phoenix should be bulldozed and the hole concreted over. As Ellen Ripley once said "Take off and nuke them from space - it's the only way to be sure". Well, my wish has now been granted. The Phoenix is now no more. It will not be missed by many.

One of the most important and heavily used main roads in Erith is being closed for extensive improvement and remodelling. Manor Road will be closed for a period of ten weeks from the 16th June to allow it to be completely rebuilt. The road has had attention in the recent past. It was resurfaced in 2009, and again in 2011, but in both cases the new surface started disintegrating within months of being laid; not something you would wish for when one considers the cost of the special road noise reducing tarmac formula is somewhat over £1 million per mile to the council tax payer, this is not good news. This time a far more dramatic set of repairs are planned. The road is being constructed pretty much from scratch, something that really should have been done before. The crumbling road foundations are being dug out to a depth of several feet and replaced with new material being installed. The work will be carried out in phases, so that access to homes and businesses will be kept, albeit with some fairly dramatic diversions – if you look at the graphic above, it will give you a good idea of the drastic route changes both buses and private vehicles will be subject to for the duration of the rebuilding project. Personally I feel that it will be a lot of short term pain for a lot of long term gain. Finally the council and their contractors are doing what they really should have done back in 2009. Hopefully by the end of the summer Erith will have a road to be proud of. I will be documenting the work over the forthcoming weeks, and will post any interesting developments – watch this space.

Every so often I like to highlight something that locals may not be aware of; Thamesmead has had a food bank for quite some time, and recently one has also been set up in Erith. I asked Reverend Julie Conalty of Christ Church Erith to be a guest writer this week to explain exactly how the food bank works, and what they do. I have also found out that they are planning a credit union as a secure and far more affordable source of credit compared with the pay day loan companies that proliferate and charge thousands of percent in interest. More on this in future editions. 

Bexley Foodbank – Erith Distribution Centre

Like the esteemed author of this blog, prior to moving to Erith I too supported the Greenwich Foodbank in Thamesmead. When I became vicar at Christ Church Erith, it seemed evident to me that Erith was also in need of a Foodbank Distribution Centre. From the leafy vicarage it is hard to tell, but our parish is the 4th most deprived in the Rochester Diocese. Recent changes in benefits regulations have undoubtedly made things even tougher. Fortunately my fellow ministers at St John’s Erith and Queen Street Baptist Church agreed that in addition to praying for our local community, our churches should follow Christ’s command that we quite literally feed the hungry. Avery Hill Christian Fellowship had already set up a Trussell Trust Foodbank for Bexley Borough but at that point were only distributing from Sidcup, so we teamed up with them to set up the Erith Distribution Centre based at Queen Street. Every Wednesday and Saturday morning from 10am until 1pm at Queen Street Baptist Church Hall our volunteers distribute food to local people who have been sent by the JobCentre, Citizens Advice Bureau or other recognized referral agency (a ticket is needed from a referrer who knows more about the circumstances of the individual claimant). The food bank cannot provide a long term solution to poverty – it is designed to plug gaps and address crises - but at the moment we can’t keep up with demand. In Erith we are distributing food faster than it comes in. Morrisons in Erith have come on board to support us (you may have seen the trolley for donations down there) and many churches in the borough now collect food for Bexley Foodbank, but we still don’t have enough. If you want to find out more then go to www.bexleyfoodbank.org.uk. You can deliver food donations direct to the Erith Distribution Centre during opening hours or drop food off in the box in porch at Christ Church from 8.30am to 11.30am any Sunday morning. Finally I need to say that there really is something very wrong with a society that seems to be removing the safety nets that protect vulnerable individuals and families from poverty and deprivation. As I write this there are media reports about how the UK targets to reduce child poverty will be missed – even the most optimistic projections for wage and employment growth suggest that absolute poverty is still forecast to be a full 16% above target by 2020. Volunteers and donors are stepping in, but we must not lose sight of scandal of people going hungry in the UK. So don’t just give food (or time or money) to the Foodbank, raise your voice in protest.

The Revd Julie Conalty, Vicar of Christ Church

I have found out a strong link between a local company and a short lived, but incredibly popular 1960’s offshore radio station (which were erroneously labelled “pirates” by the popular press, but were in fact no such thing, as they operated outside of British territorial waters, and at least until the 1967 Marine Offences Act, were outside of the law). As I have previously written, Erith based Grooms “The Hygienic Baker”, who began in a shop in West Street in Victorian times, became extremely successful, and later moved into dedicated premises in Belmont Road, Northumberland Heath. This massive bakery also featured stables for the horses that pulled their vans, along with a tack room and even a forge for their dedicated Farrier. The bakery is still there nowadays, though it is now owned by British Bakeries, and the stables are long gone. What I have uncovered this week is that in the mid 1960’s, Rank Hovis McDougall (the company who took over and absorbed Grooms prior to the advent of British Bakeries) were a major sponsor and commercial partner with offshore radio station Radio 390. Radio 390 was located on the abandoned Red Sands sea fort, off the coast of Whitstable. The station was the third enterprise to broadcast from the fort – previously it had been used by Radio Invicta from June 1964 until February 1965, followed by KING Radio from March to September 1965. Both these earlier stations were amateurish affairs, and used a relatively low powered one kilowatt AM transmitter feeding into a rather inefficient antenna system. This meant that their signal was not heard over a wide area, and they struggled to gain a decent audience, and consequently they were largely ignored by advertisers. All this changed with the advent of Radio 390, which was a far more slick and professional, and had both a rather more powerful ten Kilowatt medium wave transmitter (which they told people was actually thirty five Kilowatts, but it wasn't), and a huge and very efficient 297 foot tall vertical antenna mean that the signal of Radio 390 was audible all over London and the South East – the most lucrative market in the UK as far as advertising revenue was concerned. The format of the station was also a complete contrast to that played by the ship based offshore giants – Radio London and Radio Caroline; they both played non – stop pop music. Instead, Radio 390 was firmly targeted at housewives. When regular broadcasts began on the 25th September 1965 at 4pm on a wavelength of 388 Metres (773KHz) the musical format was easy listening, smooth classical and big bands – the first track played was “Moonlight Serenade” by Glenn Miller. While other offshore stations had shows lasting two or three hours, Radio 390's schedule contained a number of short programmes. This was more like a BBC schedule than an offshore one. And, although slightly more warm and informal, the presenters had an almost BBC-ish style too, even to the extent that at the end of each show one of the presenters would give a credit (“South Of The Border was introduced by....”) in the manner of a continuity announcer. As Radio 390 grew, other programmes were added to the mix. There was a daily drama serial, “Doctor Paul”, imported from Australia, and bravely scheduled opposite the BBC Light Programme's long-established Mrs. Dale's Diary; and there were shows devoted to musicals, blues, country and light classical music. After only three weeks on the air, the station was receiving some five hundred fan letters a day. By May 1966 National Opinion Polls estimated the station's audience as 2.6 million listeners, a majority of whom were women. This was an absolute goldmine for the advertisers, who flocked to the station in droves. Back in the sixties, it was less common for women, especially once they were married to go out to work; many stayed at home and looked after the children. They had almost complete control over domestic purchases such as brands of food and cleaning materials. The fact that Radio 390 very cleverly targeted this audience meant that advertisers were prepared to pay high rates to get their commercials broadcast; companies that took out ambitious and successful campaigns on Radio 390 included The News of the World, and the magazine Reveille, along with a host of smaller companies, but the biggest of the lot was for Mother’s Pride bread, which was produced by Rank Hovis McDougall in the Northumberland Heath bakery. There is some evidence to suggest that the advertising campaign and programme sponsorship on Radio 390 was so extensive that the baker became an investor and business partner in the radio station during the summer of 1966, though as the Government began to take action to stop the offshore stations, and prepared to introduce the Marine Offences Act, many investors decided to distance themselves from offshore broadcasting altogether. In September 1966, Radio 390 was taken to court for the first in a series of cases where they were accused of broadcasting from within British territorial limits. The cases were fought, and one by one they were lost by the station, they appealed, then lost the appeal; by the summer of 1967 the Marine Offences Act passed into law, and all offshore stations with the exception of Radio Caroline had ceased broadcasting. Radio 390 was also such a casualty. The station is largely forgotten now, but in 1966 it was one of the biggest radio hits in the UK, and had a real connection with the local area, thanks to the power of Mother’s Pride and the Northumberland Heath former Groom's bakery!

I came across this weeks' end video somewhat by accident. It has been made by a local person who wants to illustrate how much Erith has improved over the last few years; it is mostly a slide show featuring locally taken photographs. I noticed with some amusement that roughly half of the photographs are actually mine, and have been copied from my Flickr photo site here. I am rather flattered - though it would have been nice to have been asked before they used them! See what you think anyway, and feel free to leave a comment below. 

The Bridge.

The photo above shows the view looking West, along Bexley Road, from Erith towards Northumberland Heath. You can clearly see the scaffolding that runs underneath the bridge across the railway line that connects Erith and Slade Green stations on the Dartford to London Bridge / Cannon Street and Charing Cross stations via Greenwich. To say that I am perplexed by the actions of Bexley Council would be an understatement of epic proportions. As you may well have read over the last few weeks I have been recording the progress of the work to refurbish and strengthen the road bridge over the railway in Bexley Road, Erith, as shown above. This vital communications focus point connects The A206 Queens Road, which leads to the Dartford Tunnel and M25 with the A2016 Bronze Age Way, which leads to Woolwich and the South Circular, and the A220 Bexley Road, which connects with the A2 and the coast. As you can see, the single lane each way bridge forms an almost perfect choke point – the Bronze Age Way, and Queens Road are dual carriageways, that are filtered down into a single lane when traffic needs to head West along Bexley Road towards Northumberland Heath and eventually the A2. There has been talk for several years about widening the carriageway, which would involve replacing the existing road bridge with a double width structure. This was discounted a couple of years back, as Bexley Council decided that they could not afford the cost of the work in the current economic climate. Instead they did commission some urgent refurbishment and strengthening to the bridge, as the years of heavy traffic passing over it, and the corrosive atmosphere had caused the steel structure to develop cracks and weaknesses. None of this has been readily apparent from the road side – it is only underneath the bridge that the damage had become obvious. At the time of writing, the bridge is swathed in scaffolding as you can see above, and is reduced to a single carriageway, which is controlled by temporary traffic lights. Much local traffic is being re – routed via Bronze Age Way and Lower Belvedere, where it then can re – join Woolwich Road via Picardy Road (often erroneously referred to locally as Picardy Hill). The heavy foods vehicles and double decker buses on diversion up Picardy Road have caused all sorts of chaos and congestion, as for much of the roads’ length it is very narrow and winding – a fact that is not helped by parents who park their Chelsea tractors there whilst dropping off their children at the nearby Lessness Heath Primary School. The reason for my astonishment with the actions of the council is that whilst work is still under way to repair the existing bridge, at some not small expense, the council are now sending out letters to local businesses and stakeholders, in which they propose to replace the (newly refurbished) single lane in each direction bridge with a double width, dual carriageway bridge in 2015. If they had been contemplating this project, why did they authorise the repair work on the existing bridge? It seems that they are throwing good money after bad; the bridge will have less than a years’ use before it is replaced with the new structure – surely it would have been preferable to bring forward the dual carriageway bridge project, and not bother to have the expense of repairing the existing structure at all? It seems to make absolutely no sense to me; it would appear that the work, if it receives approval, will take up a year of time, starting at an unspecified date in 2015. It would thus appear that the current work, which is causing a huge amount of disruption to both local traffic and businesses, may be completely pointless, since it is all going to be dug up and replaced in a relatively short time frame. I fully appreciate that the bottle neck that is currently formed by the old bridge needs to go; it just seems that if the council had been proactive, rather than reactive in their traffic planning, they could have avoided expensive, unnecessary and embarrassingly wasteful work.

South Eastern Trains have been given a well deserved slippering by the local press this week; on Tuesday evening the main signalling control centre at London Bridge Station suffered a fire. The control centre manages the signalling on the Bexleyheath, Bromley South, Hayes, Sevenoaks, Sidcup and Greenwich train lines – basically everything running into and out of South East London and North Kent. There is no backup to this system, and all trains were suspended at the start of rush hour; many services did not start again until 11pm or thereabouts, and the whole of the region was in transport chaos. On top of the usual commuter related problems, the Greenwich line has the additional passenger load of travellers returning from a concert at the O2 Arena, and a football match at Charlton. This led to a complete train melt down. OK, in rare instances, this kind of problem can be expected; the important thing is how those responsible for getting things moving again react to the crisis. Typically for South Eastern, to whom it would appear that competence is an anathema. The Public Relations department of South Eastern Trains went into overdrive, sending out messages on Twitter that were not so much hopelessly optimistic, as completely untrue and misleading. At 5.45 pm they tweeted that the signalling issues had been resolved, and that normal service would be resumed shortly. In fact, severe delays and disruption continued for the rest of the evening, with commuters reporting four or five hour journeys home on overcrowded buses and an overloaded Docklands Light Railway service. South Eastern Trains abruptly deleted their misleading tweet, but not before many commuters had read it. Later, South Eastern Trains blamed the tweet on Network Rail, the company that maintain the railway infrastructure, then to make matters worse, then blamed customers who were trapped on trains stuck just outside of London Bridge Station for opening the train doors and climbing down onto the track to return to the station. Traction power had to be switched off due to safety concerns. Nobody it seems was talking to each other in an effective manner, and even though the signal control centre is a point of critical failure, little consideration of a backup system seems to have been made. What really comes out of this horrible situation is that people want honesty from the transport suppliers; Better to be told an accurate “the service is completely stuffed and we’re not sure when it will be back” than a completely erroneous and falsely optimistic “it will all be back to normal in a few minutes”. I just fear that South Eastern Trains will try and put gloss over substance when this happens again; they don’t appear to be capable of learning from their experiences.

The photo above dates back to 1920; it shows shrimp fishermen employed by William Gilder, the fishmonger who had a shop in Erith High Street for many years between the two World Wars. The distinguished chap in the Fedora hat the helm of the vessel is Mr. Gilder himself; I am not sure if he regularly went out on shrimping trips, or if this was a special occasion that merited a commemorative photograph. I was surprised when I came across the photo; I knew that the River Thames off Erith was a rich source of Lemon Sole, Dabs and Eels, but I did not know that it had been a historic source of shrimps. What is somewhat troubling is that back then, raw sewage was pumped into the Thames from Crossness Sewage Works. Shrimps and Prawns get their nutrients from filtering the water they swim in, and any noxious substances tend to get concentrated in their bodies as a consequence.  This would have made eating Erith caught shrimps a bit of a lottery regarding whether they would give you food poisoning or not; I guess that people’s constitutions were a bit more hardy back then; personally I would have avoided local shellfish just to be on the safe side. More on this later.

One unexpected outcome of the proposed transfer of the Bexley Local Studies and Archive Centre to Bromley Library would be the cessation of local studies book publication; Bexley has for many years run a small publishing house, printing small runs of books that are of local historical and social interest; if the transfer to Bromley takes place, there will be no more local studies books once the current stocks have been depleted. I found out this shocking fact from the Librarian in Erith Library – somewhere I frequent only very occasionally, as the new building is airless and horrid compared to its’ beautiful old home in the Andrew Carnegie gifted building in Walnut Tree Road, which now stands empty and unused.  Although I am far from convinced that Bexley Council will outsource the Local Studies and Archive Centre to Bromley (it is too much of a vote loser, and it is not that long before the local council elections) and I share Malcolm Knights’ opinion that it will be a popular vote winner to retain the service, which after all costs very little to run in the greater scheme of things, and the size of the petition against the plan may mean that Bexley drop the scheme. Either way, I would strongly recommend that if you have an interest in local history, you purchase any books on the subject sooner rather than later, as I don’t think the local studies publishing house will survive, whatever else happens.

I have a smart TV that has active 3D technology embedded in it. Like nearly all owners of such televisions, the 3D functionality gets little, if any use. I have to admit that whilst I have a degree of antipathy about 3D in general, I did watch the 50^th Anniversary of Doctor Who on the special Sky channel that the BBC hired just for the one – off show. What was novel was seeing the old classic BBC test card having been re – jigged for 1080i HD and 3D before the programme started. The show itself was excellent, and the use of 3D actually added an important element to the story, if you saw it. The thing is, the BBC have very little experience with 3D, and whilst the overall viewer experience was good, the Beeb did make one very basic error. The format chosen for streaming the show in a form suitable for  passive 3D TVs, computers and tablets is "side by side": each transmitted frame contains left- and right-eye images alongside each other. The receiver splits the frame into two down the picture’s vertical centre and presents one and then the other. Stereoscopic glasses make sure the correct eye sees the correct image. The BBC forgot to embed the station ID logo in the right hand image; this can cause the visual cortex of viewers to confuse the 3D illusion, causing eye strain and blurred vision. The active 3D transmission was not so affected, as it uses a single image that looks similar to a blurred conventional picture – the active shutters in the glasses synchronise with the TV to ensure that the correctly separated image is sent to the relevant eye. The Doctor Who 50^th special is likely to be the last venture the BBC makes into the 3D market for quite some time, if ever. The take up of 3D technology is very low, and it is not financially viable for them. As I have written in the past, 3D will never become mainstream until such time as a practical system that does not require special glasses can be perfected.

I have been doing some more historical research this week, following the excellent photo sent to me recently by reader Dana of Bexley, which showed an open topped tram from the original 1905 Erith Tramways fleet undergoing restoration at the National Tramways Museum at Crich in Derbyshire.  I wrote about how the tram company was tiny, and their network only ran from Abbey Wood to Northumberland Heath via Erith. Subsequent to this, a chap called John King, who patently knows far more about the history of Erith's trams wrote me this Email:- "I read with interest about Erith Council Tramways, However this is not an Erith Tram. 106 was built for the LCC (London County Council) in 1903. In 1926 it was converted to a snow broom. I think Dana of Bexley may have been confused by the board on the tram displaying Belvedere, Erith, and Dartford. But is does say change at Abbey Wood for those destinations. Seen the LCC Tramways Trust for details. I have a small piece on my website here ". Thanks to John for the additional information - much appreciated. Since my piece, I have uncovered an old photograph of the dedicated tramway power station, which was located in Walnut Tree Road, on  the site of what later became Erith Swimming Baths.  The photo above dates from approximately 1910, and shows not only the power station, but also some allotments in the foreground. The site is still used today by EDF energy for their local high power step – down transformers – it turns high voltage current fed from underground cables into lower voltage power, suitable for domestic and industrial consumption.

As previously stated, I am not a hardcore video gamer; I have played and completed all three BioShock games on my Apple iMac, but I don’t have a games console, and could only really be called a lacklustre dabbler in the genre. Nevertheless, I have had quite a number of Maggot Sandwich readers contact me recently; they know of my professional background as a technology analyst. Despite the question being asked and answered many times online and on TV shows like the excellent “Click” on the BBC, I have still been asked on my opinion of the debate of  the day – which is better, the Xbox One, or the PS4? Well, they are both excellent machines, and to be honest, the real deciding factor between the two machines will be the quality and range of games that are made available for them. Both machines have very similar specifications – this incarnation, both are based on a conventional PC architecture. This will almost certainly be good news, as it will make porting games between the two competing platforms much easier than has been the case with the Xbox 360 and the PS3. The problem (which has impacted PS3 sales) is that the PS3 used a very powerful, but difficult to program processor called the Cell. This meant that many developers did not bother with the difficulty and expense of converting Xbox 360 games for the PS3, and sales of the PS3 suffered in consequence. Sony have not made that design error this time around. The bottom line is if you want an integrated entertainment centre, which is capable of handling everything from your BluRay collection, streaming online content, Skype calling and gaming too, with a high definition motion capture camera, then the Xbox One is likely to fit the bill for you. Of you want something a little more powerful, but a little cheaper, that has a stronger focus on games alone, then the PS4 will be my advice for you. Alternatively you may wish to wait a while, as Valve Software are currently working on several prototypes for a future Steam console, which will run a modified version of Ubuntu Linux. Why would you want one of these, from a newcomer to the console hardware market? Well, there are a number of strong rumours that when the console gets launched next year, that the launch title will be Half Life 3. This will go a long way to attract gamers even if they have already bought one of the consoles from the big players in the market. As always, your mileage may vary. As to which I would go for personally? I would rather purchase this little beauty. Please feel free to leave a comment below.

I do from time to time wonder exactly who does read the Maggot Sandwich. The Blogger management console does offer quite detailed and varied information into where readers are geographically located, what computer operating system and web browser they are using, and what particular posts they have found interesting. What it does not do is let me see who they are – understandably, as this would be a major privacy issue. The reason I mention the subject is that I suspect the member of the Welsh Assembly, and Welsh Health Minister Mark Drakeford must be a Maggot Sandwich reader, as he has put into law something that I have been proposing for a long time. On Thursday, Wales became the first country in the United Kingdom  to make it compulsory for food outlets to display their “Scores on the Doors” health rating sticker. The scheme is still voluntary outside of Wales, as I have  written about extensively in the past – this means that essentially the scheme is toothless – food establishments that get a bad rating just don’t display their sticker, or put up an older one with a better rating (or worse still, just change the name of the restaurant or fast food outlet, as has happened in Erith – the Oyin Nigerian restaurant merely changed its’ name to the Wazobia in order to evade a dreadful health rating). Other countries have similar systems; in New York the Metropolitan Authority introduced a compulsory rating system a few years ago; Food outlets were inspected, and graded as A, B or C for food hygiene. Since this compulsory system was introduced, 95% of inspected restaurants now merit an “A” rating. Anything with a lesser grade risks going out of business. We urgently need a similar level of enforcement that is backed up with law for the whole of the UK, and not just Wales.  Erith holds the unenviable title of having the worst rated food outlets in the whole of the country; a total of nine places rating zero out of five hygiene stars – yet the Council don’t shut the places down. Consequently I have not eaten anything from a takeaway or local cafe for several years. I should point out that there are a couple of independent local establishments that buck this dreadful trend. Both the Mambocino coffee house / restaurant in Erith Riverside Shopping Centre, and the T-Bone cafe in Fraser Road both score a creditable four out of five hygiene stars, and both proudly display their stickers. It is a pity that they are the exception to the general rule.  The newly opened King of the Grill kebab shop in Manor Road has not yet been rated, but I think it will do well. The Food Standards Agency has released statistics showing that there are over a million food related poisoning cases every year in the UK, with twenty thousand people hospitalised as a result, and a staggering five hundred deaths, all directly attributable to poor food hygiene. Perhaps Mister Gilder would not get a great rating if he was alive and working in his fishmongers’ shop today – I doubt his pooey prawns would go down very well with the inspectors (actually, they would probably go down fine, they would just come back up shortly thereafter!)

Longer term readers will recall that I have been banging on ad infinitum about the Raspberry Pi computer – the small, cheap (£35) computer designed to teach school children how to program. I had several people doubt my claims that the machine was a game changer – until recently, kids had zero exposure to computer programming at school; most “IT” lessons consisted of learning how to use proprietary software, like Microsoft Office, rather than writing programs. I was accused of wanting to turn back the clock to the 1980’s when pretty much any kid could write a simple BASIC program on a machine like a Sinclair Spectrum, BBC Micro, or Commodore 64. I am pleased to say that I was correct – the Raspberry Pi has become a game changer. Since its’ launch in February 2012, the Raspberry Pi has sold two million units, mainly to school children (and not just to 80’s throwbacks like their parents, as had been thought by some). The Pi has not only exposed kids to languages like BASIC and Python, but it has done something many pundits thought impossible – it has got Linux on the popular desktop. The Raspberry Pi can use a number of Linux distributions specially compiled for the little computer, and children are seeing that there is more to a computer than a PC running Windows. So great has the impact been, that the Raspberry Pi has entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the most successful educational computer in British history. It has sold two million units in a little under two years; it took the BBC Micro seven years to sell 1.5 million machines, and that was considered a resounding success. Many of today’s elite programmers started off on the “Beeb” – in fact the team that wrote “Grand Theft Auto 5” were almost exclusively BBC Micro users in their pasts. The game was written in Scotland, not California as many people think.

This weeks' ending video is something that I have featured before, though this video is brand new. It is the world's largest model railway, located in Hamburg, Germany; the place is known as the "Miniatur Wunderland", and it certainly looks worth a visit if you are ever in the neighbourhood. Do feel free to leave a comment below, as always.

The steel horse.

Erith has a small reason to feel superior to Lower Belvedere; as we quite clearly have a far more tacky and crap sculpture on the roundabout at the Erith end of Bronze Age Way than the sculpture of a horse that has just been erected at the Lower Belvedere end of the road. I am not particularly in favour of high, obscuring objects at the centre of roundabouts, as they can be safety hazards, but this certainly looks rather striking, and far superior to the hideous psychedelic "Mister Whippy" style giant alien turd that is the Erith Fish Sculpture (Click on the photo above for a larger view of the monstrosity). I first wrote about the fish back in 2006, which you can revisit by clicking here. You can read about the artist, and the efforts to install the giant steel horse on the News Shopper website. There is also a short video featuring the installation work, and an interview with the sculptor that you can watch further down this entry. Personally I am not that impressed with the piece, other than it is less rubbish than our own fish. Do let me know what you think.

I have recently observed that the former Belvoir Tavern in Lower Belvedere (See photo above - click for a larger view), which was converted into an African restaurant and events venue is once again out of business and up for sale. A pity, but from my understanding they were operating outside the scope of their licence, serving out of hours, and having loud and out of control parties running until 3 or 4 in the morning on a regular basis. I wonder who will take the site on now? I would not be at all surprised to see it bulldozed and flats built in its' place. Handy for commuters to London, as it is directly opposite Belvedere railway station, but does the area really need more flats?

I was queuing at the checkout in Morrison's yesterday afternoon, when I was approached by a chap who called me by name; unfortunately my creaky memory could not recall the gentleman's own name. He turned out to be a Maggot Sandwich reader and gave some generous compliments about the site - if you are reading this now - my sincere thanks to you.

Local film maker Jon Cheetham made the video below, showing the installation of the giant steel horse statue at the Lower Belvedere end of Bronze Age Way, as covered at the start of this weeks' entry. One ironic thing that does spring to mind is that the statue is designed to mark the historic link of the area to the traveller community. Traditionally travellers have had a strong affinity with the scrap metal business. Steel is currently riding at an all time high in scrap metal value terms. Putting two and two together, it does rather make one wonder just how long the structure will be in place before someone takes a cutting torch to it and takes it for scrap; the hideous fish sculpture has only lasted as long as it has as there is no intrinsic value to the materials used in its' construction - it is concrete, plaster and mosaic tile - none of which have any resale value. One guy did try to commit suicide by ramming his car into the fish, as I covered at the time, but other than that, no serious harm has yet come to it. I am sure that if someone put their mind to it, a couple of kilos of RDX (coincidentally developed at the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich) and a quiet night could soon change that...

As I have mentioned in the past, I am a great supporter and proponent of recycling. It is much less resource and energy efficient to re - use materials than to dig more of the same out of the ground, or chemically wrangle them into existence. I live so close to the recycling facility in the car park of Morrison's that I generally drop my old glass bottles / tins / cardboard and plastics off into the correct hopper every couple of evenings. It saves having unsightly and smelly wheelie bins outside the house, and saves the dustbin men a bit of work. On Thursday evening I was dropping cardboard and paper into the hopper, when an old, dark blue Nissan people carrier came whizzing around James Watt Way and came to an abrupt halt next to the bins. A surprisingly spritely late middle aged couple jumped out, opened the back door and proceeded to turf out over a dozen bin bags stuffed with miscellaneous rubbish, followed by what looked like an exceedingly manky and stained bed quilt and an even grottier mattress. They then quickly got back in the van and sped off, but not before I memorised the make model and number plate of the vehicle. I popped into Morrison's and had a word with the Security guard, and gave him the registration details of the fly tipper's van. I doubt much will come of it, but you can't let them get away with an act that carries an up to £50,000 fine (the area is in a tipping control zone, with consequently higher penalties upon prosecution). Following this, I was crossing Morrison's car park at just after 4pm this afternoon, and what should I see, but the same van back again - only this time they were dumping a large volume of expanded Polystyrene packing materials, which then proceeded to blow all over the place in the wind, straight off the Thames. The scrotes need prosecuting and jailing for as long as possible. Fat chance that this will happen, though one can live in hope.

The photo above shows a couple of tugs moored on Erith Pier last week. You can see more photos of the local area, and quite a bit more by viewing my Flickr photo site here.

As you may know, I am a serious fan of science fiction, and I was excited to hear about a major new BBC sci fi series set in the year 2040 about the first colonists on an Earth like alien planet. The show is called Outcasts, and I have to say that it is utterly dreadful on every conceivable level. The general public seem to agree too, to the extent that the expensive drama has been moved from its' prime time slot on Monday nights, to a low rent slot on Sunday evenings - the BBC are burying the expensive embarrassment where they hope no - one will be around to see it die. To get an impression of exactly how dire the show really is, check out the feedback on the Internet Movie Database site here. Conversely, Boardwalk Empire by HBO, currently being shown on Sky Atlantic is absolutely superb - a very high budget, movie quality series about the birth of the gangster culture in Prohibition era 1920's New Jersey. It is produced and written by the same people that brought us The Sopranos, along with Director Martin Scorsese. The two shows have much in common - though Boardwalk Empire has even higher production values - every episode looks like a missing part of The Godfather - Part II. I highly recommend it.

Darryl of the excellent Charlton based 853 Blog has already mentioned, that there is a substantial proposal to have a two day professionally run music festival on Blackheath Common this September. If the details are correct, this sounds like an exceptionally good idea. You can read all about it on the 853 Blog here. The Blackheath Society oppose the proposed festival, and have launched a legal case to ban it. Their case seems to be based on "we've never had one here before" - which seems a bit weak. You can also see coverage of it on the Blackheath Bugle here. We will see how this one pans out over the next few weeks.

I have on several occasions made comments about how inferior the new Erith Library is when compared to the old one, which used to be located in the excellent Andrew Carnegie gifted building in Walnut Tree Road. Local film maker Jon Cheetham (who also made the steel horse video) has made a short documentary about the new library. As you will see, it is all very shiny, but soulless and antiseptic. The place is only a couple of minutes' walk from Pewty Acres, but I am not a customer. See what you think and feel free to post a comment below.

I note that Tinie Tempah won two Brit awards this week; I feel that this now should officially rank him as the most famous person to come from the mean streets of Plumstead, putting Steve Davis into second place after many years. His music is not to my own tastes, but each to their own. From all accounts he's a talented person, and apparently a very nice guy as well. Anything that puts Plumstead in a positive light has got to be a good thing.

Occasionally I recommend some computer software; this week I am going to make a big leap and say that the following application is by far the best media player available. VLC Media Player is not only free and open source, but it knocks Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, QuickTime and all the others into a cocked hat. It is multi platform, being freely available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris and BSD Unix (and being open source, you can always download the programming code to compile for any other operating system you choose). The real killer thing with VLC Media Player is that it will play any media format you care to throw at it - even if the file is incomplete or corrupted. Basically VLC will play anything, and for free. Download it from the VLC website here. Again - do let me know what you think. Comments below as always.

The video this week is a bit of a curiosity; it is a "talking head" style clip of a guy talking about the Linux Operating System. Before you all click away in boredom - do give it a go, it is quirky and humorous in all the right ways, and not at all technical or nerdy (though I concede I am both, before any wag thinks to point it out).