A 75th anniversary.

Erith is receiving extra money from the London Mayor’s Good Growth Fund. The cash will be used to improve several public areas around the town, including the Riverside Gardens (pictured above - click on the photo in order to see a larger version). In an interview with the News Shopper, Councillor Louie French, Bexley’s deputy leader and cabinet member for growth, said: “I am delighted this latest round of funding will see the Riverside Gardens rejuvenated and refurbished based on designs developed in partnership with local residents and community organisations. The project will upgrade this much-loved open space to improve visibility of and engagement with the river, creating opportunities for the community to use the gardens for play, leisure activities, planting and learning." The historic Carnegie Library in Walnut Tree Road has received similar funding, and the official opening event of the Bookstore Cafe within the building by The Exchange is scheduled to take place on the 14th February. You can read details about it here.

The mystery surrounding Electricity House deepens. Regular readers may recall that the large 1930's brick building opposite the De Luci fish roundabout and Pier Road. The building contains a number of businesses and other organisations. In recent times the building has had a somewhat rocky time. Part of the building was home to the Bright Steps children's nursery, until it was shut down by the Police and officers from Ofsted after a member of nursery staff was seen hitting a child, and the nursery owner tried to cover the crime up. After an unsuccessful court appeal against the ban, the owners of the nursery put it up for rent. This is all under a background of Bexley Council negotiating with the individual leaseholders in order to buy out the leases in Electricity House prior to what I and many others believe to be a compulsory purchase order and then site redevelopment. A new nursery provider took up the lease of part of the building. The nursery was originally called The Carnegie Playhouse, but shortly changed its name to The Bexley Road Nursery. Some building refurbishment work was undertaken, but for the last couple of weeks no activity has been observed on the site. I have Emailed the nursery owner asking for an update, but so far I have not had a response. In the meantime, the African church which has been using The P2 Events Centre - the shabbily converted former snooker club, located on the upper floor of the large building - have now moved out, and they are now holding their services in the White Hart African restaurant and wine bar. You may recall that last year the White Hart controversially submitted a request to Bexley Council licensing in order to stay open until 5am every day. Understandably this was thrown out. One other issue that came up at the licensing meeting was that the White Hart had converted the former beer cellar into an events space and an overspill area from the restaurant upstairs. The problem with this was that there is no fire escape - there is only a single staircase in and out of the lower floor area. Because of this, both Bexley Council planning team and the London Fire Brigade forbade the owners from using the former beer cellar until extensive alterations to create a fire escape had been made. Some locals have expressed concern that the church may be illegally using the former beer cellar area in order to hold their services, but at the time of writing, I have no solid evidence to back this up. Whatever is happening, things are changing, and the businesses located in Electricity House are gradually closing up as their leases are bought up by Bexley Council; I have it on reliable authority that the long established shoe repairer and key cutting shop called Soles and Heels. on the corner of Pier Road and Cross Street is soon to be no more. The council surveyors have been in to measure the place up prior to making the owners an offer that they will not be able to refuse. 

Nowadays many people are familiar with the ground breaking work done by hundreds of men and women during World War II at Bletchley Park to break the Axis ciphers, which are said to have shortened the war by around two years. Much has been made of the work by Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman and the hundreds of mathematicians, linguists, statisticians, cryptanalysts and administrative staff who worked to crack the Enigma Code, and several films and documentaries have been made on the subject, including the absolutely terrible film, The Imitation Game, which is horrendously historically inaccurate, and actually fabricates much of the story. Nevertheless, the work carried out in utter secret was absolutely vital to the Allies eventual victory. What is far less well known is the story of how Station X (the code name for Bletchley Park) broke the cipher used by Germany's high command, which was even more fiendishly complex and hard to break than the already formidable Enigma Code. Tuesday of last week marked the 75th anniversary of the first use of a digital, programmable computer, which not only substantially eased wartime code breaking, but went on to change the world - and it all started in a draughty shed near Milton Keynes. I digress; The cipher used by Hitler and his top generals was called the Lorenz Cipher. Lorenz used a massively modified electrical teleprinter. Teleprinters are not based on the 26-letter alphabet and Morse code on which the Enigma machine depended. Teleprinters use the 32-symbol Baudot code. Note that the Baudot code output consists of five channels each of which is a stream of bits which can be represented as no-hole or hole, 0 or 1, dot or cross. The system enciphered the message text by adding to it, character by character, a set of obscuring characters thus producing the enciphered characters which were transmitted to the intended recipient. The simplicity of the Lorenz system lay in the fact that the obscuring characters were added in a rather special way (known as modulo-2 addition). Then exactly the same obscuring characters, added also by modulo-2 addition to the received enciphered characters, would cancel out the obscuring characters and leave the original message characters which could then be printed. The Lorenz machines at each end of the communication link had to be set up with the same cipher key in order to effectively communicate. The difficulty was how to ensure, in a hot war situation, that the same random character keys were available at each end of a communications link and that they were both set to the same start position. The Lorenz company decided that it would be operationally easier to construct a machine to generate the obscuring character sequence. Because it was a machine it could not generate a completely random sequence of characters. It generated what is known as a pseudo-random sequence. Unfortunately for the German Army it was more "pseudo" than random and that was how it was broken. Brigadier John Tiltman, one of the top codebreakers in Bletchley Park, took a particular interest in these enciphered teleprinter messages. They were given the code name "Fish". Because the Lorenz system depended on addition of characters, Tiltman reasoned that if the operators made a mistake and used the same Lorenz machine starts for two messages (known by codebreakers as a depth), then by adding the two cipher texts together character by character, the obscuring character sequence would disappear. He would then be left with a sequence of characters each of which represented the addition of the two characters in the original German message texts. For two completely different messages it is virtually impossible to assign the correct characters to each message. Just small sections at the start could be derived but not complete messages. As the number of intercepts, now being made at Knockholt in Kent, increased a section was formed in Bletchley Park headed by Major Ralph Tester and known as the "Testery". A number of messages were intercepted but not much headway had been made into breaking the cipher until the Germans made one horrendous mistake. It was on 30 August 1941. A German operator had a long message of nearly 4,000 characters to be sent from one part of the German Army High command to another — probably Athens to Vienna. He correctly set up his Lorenz machine and then sent a twelve letter indicator, using the German names, to the operator at the receiving end. This operator then set his Lorenz machine and asked the operator at the sending end to start sending his message. After nearly 4,000 characters had been keyed in at the sending end, by hand, the operator at the receiving end sent back by radio the equivalent, in German, of "didn't get that — send it again". They now both put their Lorenz machines back to the same start position. This was absolutely forbidden, but they did it. The operator at the sending end then began to key in the message again, by hand. If he had been an automaton and used exactly the same key strokes as the first time then all the interceptors would have got would have been two identical copies of the cipher text. Input the same — machines generating the same obscuring characters — same cipher text. But being only human and being thoroughly bored and disgusted at having to key it all again, the sending operator began to make differences in the second message compared to the first. The message began with that well known German phrase SPRUCHNUMMER — "message number" in English. The first time the operator keyed in S P R U C H N U M M E R. The second time he keyed in S P R U C H N R and then the rest of the message text. Now NR means the same as NUMMER, so what difference did that make? It meant that immediately following the N the two texts were different. But the machines were generating the same obscuring sequence, therefore the cipher texts were different from that point on. The interceptors at Knockholt realised the possible importance of these two messages because the twelve letter indicators were the same. They were sent post-haste to John Tiltman at Bletchley Park. Tiltman applied the same additive technique to this pair as he had to previous Depths. But this time he was able to get much further with working out the actual message texts because when he tried SPRUCHNUMMER at the start he immediately spotted that the second message was nearly identical to the first. Thus the combined errors of having the machines back to the same start position and the text being re-keyed with just slight differences enabled Tiltman to recover completely both texts. The second one was about 500 characters shorter than the first where the German operator had been saving his fingers. This fact also allowed Tiltman to assign the correct message to its original cipher text. Now Tiltman could add together, character by character, the corresponding cipher and message texts revealing for the first time a long stretch of the obscuring character sequence being generated by this German cipher machine. He did not know how the machine did it, but he knew that this was what it was generating. This manual cracking of the Lorenz Cipher proved that it could be broken, but it was far too slow and laborious to be used in any kind of practical manner. What would massively accelerate the breaking of Lorenz enciphered messages would be if there was a way to automate the comparison of the hundreds of messages that were transmitted by the Nazis every day. This is where Colossus - the world's first, digital, programmable computer came in. Built by the Post Office at their research and development laboratory in Dollis Hill, and designed by a largely unsung genius called Tommy Flowers. Colossus was huge - hence the name, and used thousands of thermionic valves (what the Americans call tubes) to operate. Colossus reduced the time to break Lorenz messages from weeks to hours, and sometimes even minutes. Colossus read teleprinter characters, in the international Baudot code, at 5,000 characters per second from a paper tape. These characters were usually the intercepted cipher text which had been transmitted by radio. The paper tape was joined into a loop with special punched holes at the beginning and end of the text. The broad principle of Colossus was to count throughout the length of the text the number of times that some complicated Boolean function between the text and the generated wheel patterns had either a true or false result. At the end of text the count left on the counter circuits was dumped onto relays before being printed on the typewriter during the next read through the text, an early form of double buffering. It was just in time for the deciphering of messages which gave vital information to Eisenhower and Montgomery prior to D-Day. In effect Bletchley Park were "reading Hitler's Email". These deciphered Lorenz messages showed that Hitler had swallowed the deception campaigns, the phantom army in the South of England, the phantom convoys moving east along the channel; that Hitler was convinced that the attacks were coming across the Pas de Calais and that he was keeping Panzer divisions in Belgium. Colossus was so good at deciphering Nazi High Command messages that there were many instances when the cryptographers at Bletchley Park were reading decrypted messages before Hitler did! After D-Day the French resistance and the British and American Air Forces bombed and strafed all the telephone and teleprinter land lines in Northern France, forced the Germans to use radio communications and suddenly the volume of intercepted messages went up enormously. The Mark 1 had been rapidly succeeded by the Mark 2 Colossus in June 1944 and eight more were quickly built to handle the increase in messages. The Mark 1 was upgraded to a Mark 2 and there were thus ten Mark 2 Colossi in the Park by the end of the war. By the end of hostilities, 63 million characters of high grade German messages had been decrypted — an absolutely staggering output from just 550 people at Bletchley Park, plus of course the considerable number of interceptors at Knockholt, with backups at Shaftesbury and Cupar in Scotland. The first Lorenz enciphered message to be cracked by Colossus happened 75 years ago last week - and it changed the world, launching the computer age.

You may recall that last week I wrote about the Metropolitan Police who are in the midst of what it is calling a trial of automated facial recognition (AFR) technology, although it has been using the kit since 2016. Last week it used the kit in Romford, parking a van outside the station between 10am and 6pm. The cameras scan the faces of passersby and checks them against a watch list that is supposed to be freshly drawn up for each deployment. Forces have argued the public expects them to use emerging tech to improve policing, but critics railed against the fact it is being tested in live environments without a legal framework and in the face of evidence it has a 98 per cent false positive rate. Last week's deployment was due to be the final one before a full analysis, but snow meant that the second day had to be rescheduled because footfall would be lower than is required by the tests. The Metropolitan Police have yet to provide details of where and when this will be – info about the Romford trial was only released at 4pm the day before. The problem is not with identifying and tracking criminals, which I am sure pretty much everyone applauds, but the fact that the technology currently deployed simply does not work as advertised, and the extremely high rate of false positives means that potentially passers by can be identified as a wanted criminal when in reality they are completely innocent. What do you think? Leave a comment below, or alternatively Email me at hugh.neal@gmail.com. 

Now for the weekly local safety and security updates from Bexley Borough Neighbourhood Watch Association. First a report from Barnehurst ward:- 

Image:- Fire fighters attending a property in Parkside Avenue, Barnehurst on Monday which resulted in the discovery of a cannabis factory. "Not a bad week crime wise across the ward with no burglaries reported. There has been an increase in theft from motor vehicles offences with five being reported in Hillingdon Road since Wednesday 30th January. All offences have occurred overnight. There has been no damage to vehicles and property including electrical items, sunglasses and small change has been taken. Please make sure that your vehicle is locked securely, do not rely on the electronic fob always check manually that your vehicle is locked. The team will be adjusting their duties and will be carrying out both uniformed and plain clothes operations at the relevant times. On Monday 4th February the fire service responded to a house fire in Parkside Avenue, the property was seriously damaged and whilst fighting the blaze a cannabis factory was discovered across the first floor of the house. Police attended and approximately 150 cannabis plants were seized from the property. Enquires are continuing in regards to potential suspects identified regarding the cultivation. Most cannabis factories are situated in residential streets, normally the electricity is by passed and with the heat generated from the hydroponic set up creates a major fire hazard. If you have suspicions that a property is being used to cultivate drugs please call the local policing team with details. If you do not want to talk to the police consider calling Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111 this is completely anonymous and you do not have to give any personal details. Thankfully nobody was injured during this incident, however this was only due to the quick response from the fire service and the skill of the crews tackling the fire which prevented the blaze from spreading to neighbouring properties. A member of the team will be at Barnehurst Golf course on Tuesday 12th February at 11am. Please come along for an informal chat about any concerns or issues that you may have or just pop in to say hello. As always we can be found on twitter @MPSBarnehurst and Facebook, just search for Barnehurst Police". Belvedere ward:- "The team began this week by attending Belvedere Junior school in order to monitor parking and traffic along Lower Road, directly outside of the school after concerns were raised by both the school and Bexley Council. This has historically been an issue and the team are hoping to attend more regularly with partner agencies to take the necessary action against any person(s) that are found to be committing offences. We have now been advised that the elder of the two men that were sleeping rough on the site of the disused Belvedere Police station has been housed. A great deal of work took place by not only ourselves but several outreach workers and Bexley Council officers to assist the male with his health issues and he is now hopefully in suitable accommodation. We are aware that the younger male seems to have repositioned himself further along Nuxley Road and we are still working toward a suitable outcome for this male also. With the help of Ian Holt, the estate manager of the Lesnes Abbey heritage site, the team have recovered a safe that had been discovered discarded in bushes at the entrance to New Road. This has been stored in a more secure area at this stage and appears to have been taken from a house in the Welling area during a burglary. We are in the process of contacting the rightful owner in order to restore their property to them. Over the weekend the team responded to a call for Police as youths were apparently causing a nuisance in both Tennyson and Scott Houses in Albert Road. Unfortunately there was no sign of the group when we arrived at the location however we will continue to patrol areas such as this on a regular basis. Finally, the team visited a resident of Woodland Way who had reported a male that had been caught on CCTV from the property. He had been walking along Woodland Way in the early hours of one morning recently and was trying to open car doors. He eventually managed to enter a vehicle that had not been locked overnight, although he did not take anything from the vehicle as no items of value were left in the car by the resident. No other damage was caused to the vehicle however the team would advise that you always lock and secure your vehicle even if leaving it unattended for the shortest time. Also, never leave items on display within your vehicle. Place items where they cannot be seen (glove box or boot) or take any valuable items from the car when you exit your vehicle. Our next Community Contact session is due to take place on Friday 15th February at the Asda café from 12 noon". Bexleyheath ward:- "There has been one report of a burglary along Bedonwell Road Bexleyheath on the Friday 01/02/2019, method of entry is unknown. Saturday 02/02/2019 – Report of a theft from motor vehicle, outside Asda store Bexleyheath; Wednesday 30/01/2019 – Report of an interference with a motor vehicle along Hyde Road Bexleyheath. A theft of purse was report on the Monday 04/02/2019 along the Broadway Bexleyheath between 3.30 and 4pm; On the Monday 04/02/2019 - A male was stopped along the skate park in Bexleyheath for possession of cannabis. The team has received reports of males on bikes causing anti social behaviour in the carpark area at the Premiere Inn, patrols are conducted daily. If you do wish to pass on information to Police then please contact Crime Stoppers on 0800 555111. Please do not hesitate to contact us via Twitter, Facebook, email and the ward phone. If you are after crime prevention advice, please look at the Met Police website which has lots of information that you may find useful. Remember in an emergency please dial 999 or 101 for non-urgent reporting". Crayford ward:- "Number plates were stolen from a Ford Transit parked to the rear of a business by Crayford Parade between Friday 25th and Monday 28th February. On Thursday 31st January a burglary occurred at an address in Iron Mill Lane between 13.30 and 21.30. Entry was via a rear door, it was not reported what was stolen. Number plates were stolen from a vehicle parked in Farm Place between 18.00 on Thursday 31 January and 10.00 on Friday 1st February. These number plates OV53 VHJ should be on a Blue VW Polo. It was reported that between 09.00-09.10 on Tuesday 29th January a wing mirror was deliberately broken off a Ford Fiesta van whilst parked outside a property in Mill Place. Number plates KW10 GWV were stolen from a Black Volkswagon whilst parked in Perry Street on Saturday 2nd February between 12.15 and 14.30. Between 12.00 on Thursday 31st January and 14.15 on Saturday 2nd February a shed was broken into at Crayford Allotments, a quantity of power tools and gardening equipment was taken. A theft from motor vehicle occurred on Monday 4th February between 01.00-04.00 at Old Road. A small bag containing toiletries, a small flick knife and caravan keys were stolen from within a red Honda CRV, victim believes the suspect's intention was to steal the vehicle but it had a steering lock fitted. Our officers have dealt with 2 youths who had cannabis on them close to Halcot Avenue, their parents have been made aware. We were at Town Hall Square on Tuesday early evening with our partners from Peabody Trust to conduct house to house surveys about anti-social behaviour and disorder at that location and close by. Tackling anti-social behaviour in Crayford Town Centre is one of our current ward promises as agreed by our ward panel. Whilst there some youths were seen loitering in the rear of the underground car park and on seeing police ran off. A short foot chase ensued but the youths had too great a head start, they did however drop their lit cannabis joint which will now be destroyed. Many of the residents at Town Hall Square want us to be there to deal with the constant ongoing issues occurring there". Erith ward:- "Around Erith – A new café is opening soon, the bookstore café in the old Erith Library for more info have a look at this link: https://www.theexchangeerith.com/the-bookstore-cafe/ we will be popping in for a coffee every now and then supporting new local businesses. Also a free exhibition Windrush and Bexley's Story of Migration [exhibition] Sat, Feb 16, 2019, 11:00 AM - Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 4:00 PM. The Exchange Open Thursday – Sunday, 11 – 4pm. - Crimes of note: Burg Res (Burglary Residential) Sunday 27/01/2019 Rutland Gate - By suspect, breaking into victim's household whilst away, stealing several items and causing damage to several items + the household; Theft from MV (Motor Vehicle) Thursday 31/01/2019, St. Fidelis Road - Vehicle boot left unlocked and items taken; Burg Res Friday 01/02/2019 Crusoe Road - by suspect unknown gaining entry by smashing rear conservatory door to gain entry then remove property from within; Shoplift <£200 Saturday 02/02/2019 WM Morrison Supermarket, James Watt Way; Theft from MV 03/02/2019 Bramble Croft - front and rear number plates stolen from vehicle; Burg Bus (Burglary Business) Friday 01/02/2019, West Street - break in to a construction site. Community Contact Session date:- Thursday 14th February Erith Library". Northumberland Heath ward:- "One burglary reported to us over the past week in Belmont Road. This took place on the afternoon of Thursday January 31st between 3pm - 10.50pm when the occupiers returned to find the back door smashed and the house ransacked. A safe containing a large amount of cash was stolen along with a Rolex watch, a Louis Vutton handbag and office equipment to the value of£500. A Land Rover discovery was stolen overnight on Monday February 4th in the small hours of the morning between 0130 – 0620 when the victim discovered it missing when leaving for work .The vehicle was stolen with the owner still of possession of the keys. The victim has CCTV footage of three men in Balaclavas on their property, these males were believed to be driving a silver ford focus prior to the vehicle theft. Two theft from Motor vehicles in very close proximity to each other in Parsonage Manorway and Shinglewell Road. Both took place overnight on Thursday January 31st and Friday February 1st between 6pm and 8am. One vehicle had a bag containing £40 stolen and the other had a dashcam stolen. This week we had a meeting with Bexley council to discuss several youths who are still coming to police attention, we will update you with any further information in due course. Our next drop in Police Surgery will be held on Wednesday February 13th at Midday. All are welcome to attend". Slade Green and Northend ward:- "An armed robbery took place on Tuesday 05/02/2019. At 11:45 2 masked men entered the Post Office in Forest Road armed with axes demanding money from the tills. They got away with £600. Fortunately no one was hurt. The investigation is under way with the good news that one suspect has been arrested and hopefully the second will be caught soon. If anyone has any information relating to this matter please let us know or call 101. A vehicle was stolen from Cedar Road at some time between Saturday (2/2/19) and Monday (4/2/19) this week with no evidence of any smashed glass or stolen keys. The vehicle details have been flagged for the ANPR cameras. 2 positive searches this week. PC's Mark and James carried out some plain clothes work on Saturday 2nd Feb resulting in 1 suspect searched in Frobisher Road and found in possession of cannabis which ended with the relevant warnings given. Another suspect is coming back for an interview next week after also being found in possession of cannabis but denying any knowledge of it. On the morning of Saturday Feb 2nd police attention was drawn to an unattended motorbike with its engine running in the car park of Tesco Express, Northend Road. As officers went to go in the shop a male came out carrying £31 pound worth of chocolate, he said it was his bike. The bike was stolen as was the chocolate so he was duly arrested for both offences!" Thamesmead East ward:- "Burglaries - No burglaries to report this week. However remain vigilant at all times. Theft of motor vehicle - Between the hours of 02:00pm and 04:00pm on Thursday 31/01/19 a vehicle was stolen from Manordeane Road. Theft from motor vehicle - Between the hours of 07:00pm on Saturday 02/02/19 and 07:50am Sunday 03/02/19 a vehicle parked, locked and secure in Lensbury Way had the front passenger window smashed and a brand new tom tom valued at £220 taken from the glove box. During the early hours of Sunday morning of the 03/02/19 another vehicle parked in Lensbury Way had both the front passenger window and rear passenger smashed, an Apple mini iPad, Microsoft surface laptop, optical equipment and £350 taken from the glove box. Crime prevention - Wallets, purses ,handbags ,credit cards and loose change should never be left in an unattended vehicle. Remove sat nav mounts, suction cup marks on windows and cables which may indicate electrical items in the vehicle. Good news - On Friday 01/02/19 a male who resides locally was arrested for failing to appear, was kept in over the weekend and bailed to court. Meetings - Have A Say Day On Thursday 14/02/19 at The Link, Bazalgette Way between the hours of 1:00 – 2:00pm,an opportunity to meet with your local police team and discuss any concerns that you may have". West Heath ward:- "The ward has suffered two theft from Motor vehicles and two Theft of Motor vehicles. Between Tuesday the 29th January at 9pm -- Wednesday 30th January at 7.40am a vehicle was stolen without the use of the keys in Powys Close, a second vehicle was taken from Canberra Road again without keys between 11pm on the Monday 21st January and 7.30am Friday 1st February. Number plates were stolen from a vehicle in Clovelly Road daytime between 9.30am and 8.15pm on the Thursday 31st January. Petrol was stolen and the vehicles tyres slashed in Hurst Lane between Sunday 10th at 10am and Monday 11th February at 10am. We have been made aware by the residents of Glenview that person/s are informing them that un-necessary remedial works are required to their properties, they have also been offered services of driveway cleaning. Please be aware of unexpected callers offering these services. Please do not hesitate to contact police if you have any concerns about these callers. Our next Community Contact Session will be on Saturday the Saturday 9th February at Hurst Lane Estate between 1 – 2pm. The team have carried out arrest enquiries for persons who are wanted and now currently have only one person outstanding on the ward. We continue to carry out high visibility patrols in an attempt to reduce burglaries, ASB and drugs. We have delivered leaflets regarding drug activity in Heath Avenue and Powys Road".

The end video this week is a documentary from 2014 featuring Welling born and raised musician Kate Bush; it makes for fascinating viewing. Please feel free to leave a comment below, or Email me at hugh.neal@gmail.com. 

Bexley gets tough.

Since around this time last year, the old Erith Trades and Social Club building, which had been closed and disused for ages has been demolished and a new structure is now taking shape. Property developer Moat is building a block of flats that have been partly funded by Boris Johnson as apartments that will be for affordable rent. There are going to be six one bedroomed apartments, twenty nine two bedroomed apartments and five three bedroomed apartments, making a total of forty new homes near the junction of James Watt Way, Erith High Street and Manor Road. The fact that the apartments are being built for affordable rent is to be lauded; most developers are after a quick buck, and knocking up shoddy flats to flog at the maximum profit often ends up being the case. It would appear that Moat are taking a more socially conscious approach on this development. My only concerns are more down to the physical location of the apartment block. It is packed into a relatively small parcel of land which has the KFC Drive Through on one side, and the Morrison’s petrol station on the other. Residents will be awoken by revving engines and the smell of petrol and diesel from 7am each morning, and then will have to endure the smell of frying chicken and chips and engine fumes from the drive through for the rest of the day. It is just as well that local residents rose up and managed to prevent the KFC from effectively becoming a 24/7 operation, as the franchise owners had wanted, otherwise the inhabitants of the new Moat block would have disturbance around the clock. It is often stated by economists that the state of prosperity in any urban area can be roughly estimated by the number of construction cranes on the skyline. By those measures, Erith could be said to be doing well – not only is the new Bexley College campus on the verge of officially opening, but new accommodation is going up on Erith Park, the aforementioned Moat development, the Slade Green “Ratio” housing development by Orbit Homes, and the much discussed future Erith Quarry development. Compared with some readers, I am a relative newcomer to the area; I moved into Erith in October 1996, so by some standards I am still pretty much a “new boy”. Nevertheless in my time living in the area I have seen it transform from a run – down post industrial backwater mainly inhabited by people who could not afford to move elsewhere into a dynamic, modern commuter town. I feel that Erith is on the verge of a major positive change; the opening of Bexley College, and the Cross Keys Centre, the expansion of the Erith Riverside Shopping Centre, with the rumoured opening of a second Mambocino restaurant which it is said will offer proper “sit down” hot meals in the evenings. All this points to Erith becoming “gentrified” in a similar way to what has occurred in parts of North East London such as the London Borough of Hackney, and specifically Dalston. Some might be alarmed by this, but personally I think it is a very good thing; Erith has traditionally been one of the very cheapest places to live within easy commute of Central London. Sooner or later the developers and money people were bound to pick up on this – in my opinion it is the reason why some of the development we have seen recently is for three bedroomed houses and apartments – for families with children, rather than smaller places aimed at first time buyers. This is going to be especially true for the Erith Quarry housing estate – the developers actively state that they are not building for first time buyers.  It shows that the local housing market is changing and maturing. I won’t go as far as to say that we will soon know that Erith has officially become posh – we would need a local Waitrose to open before anyone could make that statement with any degree of credibility! The town is however changing, and for my mind it is definitely for the better. What do you think? Either leave a comment below, or Email me directly at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

As regular readers will be acutely aware, I am a great supporter of the Scores on the Doors food hygiene rating system, and I have been very critical of local food outlets with atrociously low scores. I have also in the past been critical of Bexley Council and their seemingly somewhat relaxed approach to enforcing the public food hygiene laws. Recently things have begun to noticeably improve, which I have also written about. There are definite signs that Bexley are stepping up their inspections, as you can read in the following press release which was sent to me by one of my best sources on Friday afternoon:- TOUGH MEASURES PAYING OFF Bexley's tough stance on food safety continues to raise hygiene standards in the borough.  On Wednesday (17 September) two applications went before Bromley Magistrates' Court to condemn a quantity of imported foods seized from two separate food businesses in Belvedere. The court imposed food condemnation orders in respect of- Tropical Foods, Pier Road, Erith for melon seeds and peanuts contaminated with excessive (up to four times legal limit) of aflatoxins, and smoked fish with more than 40 times the legal limits of benzo-pyrenes. Aglory Cash and Carry, Erith High Street, Erith for whole melon seeds, ground melon seeds and peanuts contaminated with excessive levels of aflatoxin. The levels detected were up to six times the legal limit.  Cllr Alex Sawyer, Cabinet Member for Community Safety and Leisure said; "Importing and selling dangerous products in Bexley is not something we will tolerate. The health and well-being of our residents is a priority for us and we want to make sure businesses like this, have dangerous goods destroyed." Last year ‘Which?’ highlighted the poor food hygiene performance of a significant number of Bexley’s food businesses. This was based on the proportion of food businesses deemed to be broadly non-compliant with food hygiene requirements. Since 1 April this year, the Council has put extra resources into food law enforcement and a new tougher approach has been adopted towards dealing with non-compliant food businesses. This has made it possible to inspect non-compliant businesses much more frequently than the minimum required by the Food Standards Agency. The increased level of inspection coupled with targeted training sessions and robust enforcement has led to the serving of 171 hygiene improvement notices on 93 separate food businesses. The impact of this new approach has been that the percentage of all Bexley food businesses (including restaurants, take-aways and shops selling food) achieving a Food Hygiene Rating Score of 3 (Broadly Compliant) is now better (74.5%) than the London average (73.4%). When looking at all food businesses, some are exempt or excluded from the FHRS scheme then Bexley (86.3%) still outperforms the London average (85.1%). Cllr Alex Sawyer added; "Bexley has always been proud of its tough stance on inspection - we will not compromise on the health of our residents. This, along with the additional enforcement measures, the comprehensive support and advice we offer businesses, and encouraging residents to vote with their feet, is making the businesses raise their standards.  "We will continue to focus our efforts on securing compliance in those businesses that have a score of less than three, as well as taking foods - that do not meet safety standards - off the shelves. But we still need residents to continue to play their part, by checking the scores of food establishments before ordering. "Over the next three months, with a grant from the Food Standards Agency we will be taking steps to encourage all compliant businesses to display their FHRS scores prominently at the entrance to the business. Help us to help you and ask to see their score." For more information visit www.ratings.food.gov.uk Notes - Aflatoxins are a type of toxin found naturally in some foods that have been linked with cancer when eaten at high levels. Some spices, nuts, dried fruit and cereals, including cereal products like breakfast cereals, can contain high levels of aflatoxins. Aflatoxins are mycotoxins produced by two species of Aspergillus, a fungus which is especially found in areas with hot and humid climates. Since aflatoxins are known to be genotoxic and carcinogenic, exposure through food should be kept as low as possible. Several types of aflatoxins are produced in nature. Aflatoxin B1 is the most common in food and amongst the most potent genotoxic and carcinogenic aflatoxins. There are limits on the level of aflatoxins that can be in foods imported into the UK and the rest of the European Union (EU). Benzopyrene is a Poly Aromatic Hydrocarbon (PAH) compound. PAH’s are genotoxic carcinogens. These substances can contaminate foods during smoking processes and heating and drying processes that allow combustion products to come into direct contact with food. In addition, environmental pollution may cause contamination with PAH, in particular in fish and fishery products. It is good to see that the Council are starting to pull their collective fingers out in respect for health and hygiene inspections and enforcement in the local area; I hope we see a lot more of it in the near future. A crackdown is long overdue and most welcome in my opinion. Forcing food outlets to display their star rating stickers would also be a big step in the right direction. 

The photo above shows a rather unusual view of Erith High Street, which was taken from the first floor Presentation Suite in the Cross Keys Centre. The Post Office / HQ for WDS Signs to the right of the photograph is possibly the oldest structure in the town centre; I believe at one stage it was a stables and livery store dating back to the 18th century.

There is an issue which will shortly become a front page story, but at the moment very few people are aware of it; the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) is requiring that all energy companies roll out smart power meters to all UK houses and small businesses between next year and 2020. The thinking is that the meters will have a remote display showing how much power the householder is using, and providing advice on how best to reduce their power consumption. All well and good you might think, but the whole project is riddled with problems. Firstly, the government is worried that by the time the five year project is completed, the smart meters will be out of date and obsolete. It is predicted that the smart meters would save the average consumer around two percent of their annual bill – that is £26, but the programme to roll out the meters will cost at least £10.6 billion – a cost that will be passed on to the customer. It is thought that the project will cost more to roll out that it will save. There is also the issue that each energy company would be issuing their own model of smart meter, and it is currently unclear if the different models are compatible with those of their competitors – if you were to change your energy supplier, you might well find that your meter stopped working, or charged the wrong amount per unit. There are also concerns about people on low incomes who currently have “pay as you go” meters; under the current legislation there is no mention of any provision of smart metering for prepaid meter customers, and it would seem that at the time of writing this sector of the energy consumer market has been overlooked. There are also security concerns in respect of the technical specifications of the smart meters, which use 3G mobile phone technology to communicate with their service providers. The issue is that the information transmitted by the meters about the amount of power used by the specific customer, the unit charge and the usage pattern is sent unencrypted, and someone keen on committing identity theft would have a relatively straightforward job of extracting valuable personal information from the meter system data stream. All in all, it does seem that the whole smart meter project has not been properly thought through – it would seem that someone at the top has thought “wouldn’t it be a good idea?” without consulting those who actually know about the pros and cons of the devices. Please feel free to leave a comment below, or Email me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

I took the photo above on Friday lunchtime in the blissful cool of the conditioning room in the Bexley Brewery, just off Manor Road in Erith. The brewery started operation last week, and the results of the first brew are now sitting in casks to condition before they are ready for delivery to customers all around the local area, probably in another week. I am told that the current output is close to being all sold out to pre - booked orders The second brew is due to finish fermenting and be transferred into casks and bottles in the next day or so. The Bexley Brewery has applied for an off - sales licence, and once this has been granted, customers will be able to buy ales directly from the brewery. You cannot get any fresher than that! Incidentally the Bexley Brewery bottled beers do not contain finings (a fish extract used to clear the particles of yeast suspended in the beer), so the beers are genuinely vegetarian / vegan, should you be so concerned. Currently there is a moratorium on details of the outlets that will be stocking Bexley Brewery ales, but I hope to be able to tell you by the next update.

Local resident Pam Cutterham dropped me a line earlier this week; she had the following recollections about living in Erith in the Early 1960's:- "Sorry I am a week late with this memory. Yes, I remember the waiting room, when I started work in London in May 1962, a week after my 15th birthday, ( we were grown up at that age then ) the Waiting Room was very clean with polished long wooden benches to sit on , and yes, it did have a coal fire which during the winter of 1962/63 was a very welcome sight when you had to wait at least 2 hours for a train to arrive. I remember the Station being very well run in those days , lots of staff , clean and tidy with a nice garden on the Down side , and a lovely man who as we all ran over the bridge to catch the train would hold up the red flag until we got on the train. Running down the steps one morning my high heeled shoe came off ,slid across the platform down onto the track, after waiting for the train to leave my nice man got a long pole with a hook on the end and got my shoe back for me, needless to say I was late for work that day. My husband (retired river person) has told me to tell you that it is a Causeway NOT a Jetty at Erith, we both remember the old PLA Hut which was wooden and built on stilts into the mud , we would often talk to the chap who worked there but neither of us can remember his name . The River Police used to have one of their launches tied to the Causeway which had to be moved with the tide all the time and the other launches behind the Police Station, so in an emergency there was always a launch available. I did meet my husband in the White Hart pub 49 years ago , it was a decent pub in those days with Nell and Alf and after them Nell and Jack as the Landlords, there was a Public Bar one side and a Lounge Bar the other side , upstairs there was a function room but I don't remember it being used very often. Nearly all the males that used the pub worked on the river or had a connection to it plus a few from the Police station. Apart from the Cinema and Diploma's Coffee Bar in Pier road which closed about 8pm the pubs were the only place to go for socialising. I did have orders from my big brother never to set foot in the Prince of Wales because he used to drink in there. In those days you could spend all evening , buy a round of drinks and still have change from 10 shillings ( 50p). Well, there are a few memories from the 60's in Erith when I was a teenager. Regards Pam Cutterham". Excellent stuff, and many thanks for sharing those memories Pam. I am sure my readers will appreciate the effort you put into putting your recollections into fascinating prose. 

There was much incredulity in the local press over the last week regarding the announcement that Southeastern had won the renewal of their train service to South East London and North Kent. Southeastern have been consistently under performing since they were selected as the train service provider for the region. This is despite them getting extremely bad feedback from customers when they were surveyed. In February, the News Shopper reported that when seven thousand regular Southeastern commuters were questioned, they gave a satisfaction level of just forty percent – the joint worst in the entire country. Later, in June a total of twenty seven thousand travellers were surveyed; the results were pretty conclusive. As if this was not bad enough, Southeastern also has the second highest number of train cancellations in the country. Figures released from the TSSA transport union show people in south London are the worst hit, with 22,443 trains cancelled in 2013/14 by Southeastern. They were only beaten into second place by Southern - who had a staggering 34,701 services cancelled over the same period. When asked about their satisfaction with the value for money of their Southeastern rail ticket forty five percent considered it to be “poor or unsatisfactory” – the highest level of dissatisfaction in the country. I foresee it only getting worse once the changes to the timetable to accommodate the building works at London Bridge Station take place. There will be fewer, but longer trains on the Dartford to London via Greenwich route; employing twelve carriage trains may somewhat compensate for the reduction in the number of services, but I predict an increase in train and track breakdowns. The longer trains will draw far more traction current, and will put a strain on the electricity supply, despite it being beefed up to cope. Longer trains will also mean an increase in strain on the rail switching points and the track in general – a worry when one considers the huge amount of engineering work also being carried out to create the Crossrail terminus at Abbey Wood. It all seems to be happening at the same time. One thing will be sure – the commuter will feel the brunt of the changes. I think these may be factors behind Southeastern being reselected as service provider – it may be a case of “better the devil you know”. I suspect that despite some fine words from Southeastern, service will continue to be below par, or just about good enough for people to not complain too often.

I need to bring to everyone’s notice a scam that is happening not only in Erith, but all over the country which will potentially affect you if you own or use a car. Someone very close to me was the victim of what in my mind is semi legalised extortion when they parked their car in a visitors car parking space in Chandler’s Drive, off West Street in Erith. They were visiting a resident and had full permission to park there. They arrived at around 11pm and left at just after 6am the next morning. Some weeks later they received a penalty charge notice demanding a fee of £100 for illegal parking. The “evidence” was a trio of photographs taken by a parking enforcement officer at 5.02am on the morning of the alleged offence. The fact that the parking space was privately owned and expressly designated for the use of legitimate visitors seems to have escaped the notice of the enforcement company. As the dispute is still unresolved, I don’t really want to go into the specifics of the individual case, but I thought that I would bring the matter to readers notice, as they may be affected in a similar way. If you are parking in or around West Street, do be careful. If you have had a similar experience, do let me know – hugh.neal@gmail.com

On Thursday the News Shopper published a story that both astonished and annoyed me. Residents of Grove Park have rejected a plan for Network Rail to install a new passenger footbridge and lift at the station; the paper reports that local residents are concerned that the new footbridge / lift structure will be unsightly, and it would overshadow their homes. The dispute over the positioning and specification of the proposed crossing has now gone on for so long that Network Rail have withdrawn the scheme as “we can no longer deliver it in the agreed time scale and agreed funding”. The lift / bridge upgrade work was to have been paid for by the Government’s “Access for All” scheme, which is designed to boost disabled access to railway stations, but things at Grove Park have dragged on for so long that the funding offer has been withdrawn. My first reaction to this was “chance would be a fine thing!” A campaign has been running to get a passenger lift at Erith station for some years, yet Network Rail do nothing to install a lift there – where it would be greatly appreciated and not talked down by NIMBY’s. It is ironic – had we known about the objections to the Grove Park lift, we could have said “since they don’t want it, can we have it?” what also concerns me is that since a Government scheme exists to improve access to stations, why has not Erith station been improved already? Once again it would seem that Erith residents are being treated as second class citizens. To my mind it is imperative that a lift be installed at Erith station – the number of residents in the town are steadily increasing, and the population is set to explode when the Erith Park and Erith Quarry housing estates are completed – and bearing in mind that the Erith Quarry site intends to attract second or third time buyers with children, it is highly likely that those buyers will need to commute to London to work. Besides this, I know of a number of disabled, wheelchair dependant travellers, as well as parents with children who use buggies who currently are unable to use Erith station to travel to London. This is simply wrong, and to my understanding it contravenes the Equality Act 2010.

I was one of the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people who was unsuccessful when applying for tickets to see Kate Bush in her series of London concerts - aside from her artistic talents, Kate hails from East Wickham Farm in Welling. She now lives in Devon, but I understand her family still own the farm. Maggot Sandwich reader Em Burdin was luckier, and has written the following review:- Kate Bush - Before The Dawn. In March 2014, it was announced via her official website that Kate Bush was to play some live shows later in the year. For anyone who is a fan of Kate, this was a very big deal. She hasn't toured since 1979 and has been largely out of the public eye for many years. Our family tried for tickets, but we only managed to get the one. I was the lucky member being the biggest Kate Bush fan of us all and so the countdown began. Kate has always been something of an enigma. Hugely talented from a very young age, extremely intelligent with a fierce imagination and so unique. There was and never will be anyone like her. I guess that's why she's always interested me. She travels her own path, does her own thing and is very sure of and true to herself. Her music has mass appeal, it's so diverse. I revisited each of her albums in order prior to the gig, realising that Lionheart and The Red Shoes are still my firm favourites. I never get bored of anything she's produced, I can always hear something new however much I listen. The date was 13th September. The concert had finally arrived. I was so excited. I bought merchandise before the show started, a t-shirt, programme and pendant with lyrics from Cloudbusting. I wanted special mementos to remind me of this occasion for years to come. Then I took my seat. She opened with The Red Shoes album track, Lily - a powerful song with a driving beat. As the intro narration ended and the music started, she slowly descended onto the stage with the rest of the band and the crowd went wild! She was quite small in relation to the others, I noticed later because she was performing barefoot. She looked stunning, dressed from head to toe in black with her long dark locks cascading down her back, her voice was perfect, so rich and strong. Hounds of Love came after Lily, followed by Joanni, Top of the City, Running Up That Hill [A Deal With God] and King of the Mountain. After each song she would thank the audience so humbly. From the moment she appeared tears welled up in my eyes and I don't think they stopped for at least the first half hour. I was just so overwhelmed. This was such a unique event and I knew just how lucky I was to be there. Following King of the Mountain, the theatrics really began. Side two of the Hounds of Love album. Film was shown of Kate, bound in life jacket and floating in the water. She began by singing And Dream of Sheep. The remaining songs - Under Ice, Waking the Witch, Watching You Without Me, Jig of Life, Hello Earth, and The Morning Fog, were all acted out spectacularly. There were enormous silk sheet waves, cracking of ice and pulling Kate from beneath it, actors in fantastic costumes and fish head masks, a leaning living room set, the shooting of yellow confetti into the audience, I didn't manage to catch any, helicopter search lights and sounds. It was a fantastic concept and had the audience in awe. In the second half, they played A Sky of Honey, from Aerial. Kate's son, Bertie had been present in the first half, but he featured more prominently in this section. He had the part of The Painter and was given his own song, Tawny Moon. A wooden puppet played a big part in this bit. Kate also donned a massive bird's wing, and was making bird noises, before being lifted and flown through the air briefly for the climax. For the encore, Kate sang Among Angels alone at the piano. The band then returned and she closed the night with Cloudbusting. Everyone stood and sang along. I ran down to the front to get as close as I could to Kate for the finalé. It was a magical moment. I don't think anything will ever top this night for me. It was truly the best experience ever and no one can ever come close to how amazing Kate Bush was on that stage. Thanks Em - you make me envious that I did not get a ticket. I suppose I will have to wait for the DVD / Blu-Ray release of the concert instead.

The ending video this week is a short amateur film made about Bexley College and how the old campus is being replaced by the new one in Stonewood Road, Erith. The film was made a few months ago, when construction of the new building was still under way. The film gives some valuable background into the venture, and deserves a viewing. See what you think.

The curse of the Bot.

The photo above shows the block of flats which replaced the old Erith Odeon cinema; the old cinema was a grade II listed Art Deco building which was illegally demolished by the property developers of the current residential block. Having said that, I have visited one of the top floor flats in the block, and I have to say that it was extremely nice indeed, with a view across Morrison's car park towards the River Thames. It is a pity that the original building was not sympathetically restored and converted internally, rather than having a faux Art Deco block put up in its place.

I, along with many other people, was unsuccessful in my efforts to secure tickets for the forthcoming residency of Kate Bush at the Eventim Hammersmith Apollo (don’t worry, come the revolution, it will return to its proper name – the Hammersmith Odeon). Even friends who were fan club members with preferred ticket access were unable to get any. This seems to ring true for many fans who tried repeatedly to book tickets, only to discover that they had all gone within fifteen minutes. Many took this to be an indication of the huge popularity of the acclaimed local singer / songwriter, but unfortunately the situation runs far deeper than that. A problem exists now when anyone wishes to book a popular cultural event such as a concert or play or even tries to book a table in a popular restaurant – the venue will be booked out for the entire period however assiduous the booker has been. The reason for this situation is that certain unscrupulous people – often ticket agencies and others who wish to resell tickets or restaurant bookings at a profit, hire programmers to create what is known in the trade as a Bot. A Bot is a piece of software code that automates the process of making a ticket reservation or restaurant booking. It scans the relevant booking website and sends regular requests for page updates, looking for openings such as cancellations and filling in the web page request form far more rapidly than any human could ever hope to do. The Bot can run for days – never getting tired, never making a typo or missing an online field, and just grinding on until the required bookings have been made. It is almost certain that the Kate Bush concerts were mainly booked by software Bots. Although the promoters have put pretty strict conditions on concert attendees (booker has to turn up with photo ID and their companions have to be with the booker at the time of entering the venue). This has already been shown to be ineffective. Tickets with a face value of £139 are available via a number of outlets at prices varying between £1,000 and £1,500 each. What the Americans call “scalpers” and we call “ticket touts” are behind this behaviour. I recently read about “Bot Wars” where organisations such as Ticketmaster are trying to analyse online booking behaviour in order to exclude orders submitted by Bots; recently they rejected just over 120,000 orders made for a number of events after they had been detected as Bot generated. The Bot writers get more sophisticated and there is a war waging between the two sides which shows no signs of abating. I can suggest that the only way to be sure that an event is not booked out by software Bots is to remove online ordering completely – go back to ordering via telephone or turning up at the venue in person to book tickets. Something that is unlikely to happen in many cases due to the high costs of employing staff to carry out the bookings. It may well mean that confidence in all forms of event booking are irretrievably damaged unless some drastic actions are taken – such as making the use of Bots a criminal offence with a suitably hefty penalty. People will swiftly cease booking events online once they lose faith in the system, and this would be a real shame – it would be like taking one step forwards, followed by two back. You can read more about software Bots by clicking here.

Bexley Council seem to be a pretty powerless and ineffectual lot in general; okay they keep the street lights lit and the bins emptied (after a fashion, though personally I take my rubbish to the recycling point in Morrison's car park myself each day, and don't trouble the bin men, who tend to leave a trail of destruction in their wake). They did not do too badly in respect of the KFC application to open 24/7 that recently got dropped, I will give them that I suppose. I wonder if we would be better off returning to a localised monarchy. Did you know that Erith used to be ruled by King Eadbald of Kent? No, I thought not - it was a few years ago, I suppose. It is amazing what you can find online if you look hard enough.

Last week I wrote about my personal thoughts in respect of a new crossing on the lower River Thames. I have had several messages agreeing that the place would make a good choice, and yet others asking for more details, and for me to more fully explain what I meant. You will see a map above which graphically indicates the route of the tunnel I propose – click for a larger view. The tunnel I propose is purely my own thought, and is not intended to reflect on any of the other “official” transport solutions which are currently being proposed. My suggestion, provisionally entitled “The Arthur Pewty Memorial Tunnel” would stretch between the Ferry Lane roundabout, South of Rainham town centre and the A2016 Bronze Age Way / Picardy Manor Way roundabout in Lower Belvedere. In effect, this would connect the A13 and Rainham in South Essex with the A2 and M25 via Bronze Age Way, and the South Circular via the A2016 Eastern Way towards Woolwich. It could also have the added bonus of connecting Rainham and Belvedere railway stations via a regular bus service through the tunnel. My vision would be of a structure very similar in size and scope to the existing Medway Tunnel which links Strood with Chatham in Kent. The Thames tunnel would use the same kind of immersed tube construction that the Medway Tunnel does – that is, sections of prefabricated tunnel sections are sunk into the river, joined together, then the water is pumped out. This relatively new method of construction is well suited to shallow and medium depths of water, and creates tunnels which are both very strong and relatively cheap to construct. Unlike the Medway Tunnel, I would hope that the Lower Thames tunnel would permit the use of bicycles via a raised cycle / walkway kept physically separate from the vehicular traffic. As previously indicated, by the time any tunnel of this nature had been constructed (which I understand normally needs an Act of Parliament) the level of harmful pollutants emitted by vehicles will be far lower than the already pretty low levels now, and many of the cars may well be zero emission via either conventional batteries, Hydrogen fuel cells or possibly even LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reaction) power, if one is somewhat on the optimistic side. This would not be the only new link needed across the Thames South of Tower Bridge; I suspect that the proposed Gallions Reach crossing will probably go ahead in some form or another, despite the traffic having to run through a housing estate and close by a large residential nursing home on the South side of the river. Please feel free to leave a comment below.

When I first heard the following announcement, I had to check the date, as I was sure that the story was an April fool joke. It was not to be – the story was first published last Monday, a full day before April the first. I then had to check the year, just in case I had been caught inside some kind of temporal vortex and shunted back in time to 1972. The reason for my consternation? The announcement that a movie version of the TV sitcom “Mrs Brown’s Boys” is due to be released in UK cinemas at the end of June. I fully understand that humour is probably the most subjective of human interactions, based as it is on shared culture and experiences, but Mrs Brown’s Boys seems to have come into existence as though the last forty years of British situation comedies had never evolved. To me, it makes the likes of “On the Buses” and “Love thy Neighbour” look sophisticated and knowing. The way the show treats characters such as the gay son are a relic of the 1970’s, and I am astonished that such a large number of the British public love the programme. I am genuinely amazed at how many people watch Mrs Brown’s Boys and greatly enjoy it. Personally I find it excruciating, embarrassing and downright bad. The script, performances, characters and direction are all very lazy, uninventive and old fashioned in a bad way; Les Dawson in a dress was funny - Brendan O’Carroll is merely foul mouthed and excruciating . I concede that the show has a huge and loyal following (otherwise I doubt that the Producers would have green – lit a film version). I just fail to understand why.  I am sure that the movie version of the TV show will be a big hit – after all the programme gets the kind of viewing figures shows of its ilk used to get back in the 1970’s – a figure of fifteen million viewers was quoted by the Guardian in a recent article on the subject. It also seems to be a “Marmite” show – I am not the only person to express a strong opinion – others find it the funniest thing they have seen for ages. I suppose that my main gripe is in the way the show treats the main characters as caricatures – something frequently done in popular sit-coms, but usually so much better – if you look at a recent classic like Father Ted, the main players were indeed caricatures, but they were also sympathetic and in many cases, likeable. This is not something that I can find in Mrs Browns Boys. Still, I have in the past found cinema outings by British institutions to be less execrable than anticipated – the one that comes most readily to mind is Bula Quo – the comedy adventure film made by Status Quo, which I reviewed on my February 16^th update where I wrote of it “ Bula Quo is cheesy, cheerful and fully aware of exactly how ridiculous it all is”. I somehow doubt that I will be able to say the same thing about Mrs Brown on the big screen.

Welling based micro pub The Door Hinge has been voted as Bexley CAMRA Pub of the Year only a year after it first opened to the public. That is a really shining endorsement of the place. Thus far I have only visited it once, as it is a bit of a pain to get to using public transport from Erith, situated as it is in Welling High Street – which involves some bus juggling. I found it far easier to get a cab door to door. It is certainly worth a visit if you like real ale and good conversation. If you did not see my previous posting in respect of micro pubs, a micro pub is a pub that does not serve spirits or much in the way of food. It tends to concentrate on real ale and cider, with usually one or two wines on offer. Micro Pubs tend to be established in former shop units, or other relatively inexpensive commercial property. They don’t have TV or piped music, and encourage visitors to talk to each other as was the norm in pubs of years gone by.  The other unifying feature of micro pubs is that they don’t serve gassy, mass produced lager. The Door Hinge fits this profile exactly. It is located in a former shop at the Bexleyheath end of Welling High Street, not very far from Crook Log. I can highly recommend the place.

The photo above was sent to me midweek by local historian Ken Chamberlain. It shows the old Erith Central School, which was located in West Street, just opposite St. John the Baptist - the oldest Church in the area at around a thousand years old. The photo below was sent to me by Garry "Tadge" Taylor, and shows another view of the same school from the other side. I understand that the field next to the school was subject to frequent flooding, as the only drainage at the time consisted of a couple of culverts, which frequently became blocked. Both photos of the Central School were taken in approximately 1910. I must admit that the area has changed substantially over the last century. The site of the school currently is occupied by housing, and is adjacent to an abandoned tyre warehouse, which I understand is shortly to be redeveloped as offices and a new church hall for St. John the Baptist. Click on either photo for a larger view.

The News Shopper has been reporting on a new spate of fly tipping that has been occurring in the area; in this time the worst incidents appear to be happening in and around Dartford. The fly tipping problems experienced around Dartford are really nothing new. The problem has been affecting most of the country for a while now. For once, fly tipping in Erith seems to be slightly on the wane. Certainly the problems I have documented over the months may be less common than of late. The reason for this is straightforward. The recycling centre behind the large Morrison’s supermarket in Erith is operated by Bexley Council. The recycling centre is easily accessible by road – James Watt Way leads directly to it; on top of this it is out of the way and concealed from view, as it is shielded on one side by the wall of the supermarket on one side, and the Thames riverside walkway on another. This means it is an ideal place for illegal fly tippers to dump their rubbish. Fly tipping is free, if illegal  – until the offender gets themselves caught. Fines can be eye wateringly severe. The Erith recycling centre is within a fly tipping exclusion zone which also includes James Watt Way and Appold Street, where fines upon a successful prosecution can go as high as £50,000. I have been reliably informed that even though the Erith recycling facility is one of the smaller ones operating in the borough, it suffers the worst from fly tipping. I think the ease of access and lack of visibility factors play heavily on this . Fortunately Bexley Council Environmental Crimes Unit have been busy. The Erith site now has closed circuit TV coverage for twenty four hours a day. Several fly tippers have already been caught red handed by the cameras, and action against those so caught is being taken. Hopefully a few examples can be made which will discourage others from fly tipping in future.

Did you know that GMail is ten years old this week? Google announced the (then) revolutionary browser based Email client on April 1^st 2004. Many industry pundits at the time thought the whole thing was an elaborate April Fool’s Day hoax – who would ever offer each and every user an online message storage capacity of 1 Gigabyte – five hundred times the capacity of the then market leader, Microsoft’s Hotmail? As history shows, it was anything but a trick – it was the single most important release Google had made to date since it launched its search engine in 1998. GMail was revolutionary for a number of important reasons: It has vast storage, a very zippy and responsive user interface that was well thought out, user friendly and intuitive. It also had a very powerful message search function, which other browser based Email solutions were not able to replicate. On top of this, it was the first major cloud based application that was feature complete and capable of replacing conventional PC software, rather than complimenting it. GMail was started by a chap called Paul Buchheit – a (then) young software engineer, who was Google’s 23^rd employee. He wanted a tool that would search through his archived Email messages, and realising nothing suitable was available, decided to write a search function himself. Initially the Email search engine was running on an old PC on his desk; then other Google engineers asked if they could use Buchheit’s search engine to search their own emails. At the time, the likes of Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail had little or no inbuilt search functionality – but then, it was not really a priority when users were limited to twenty megabytes of storage, and were having to continually delete messages in order to keep under their storage limit. Messages were hard to lose when the limits were so small.  GMail gave users a Gigabyte of storage – all for free. Initially the web based GMail was a product only used within Google itself. The company managed much of its business via Email, and having an in – house solution made a lot of sense to them. A decision was made to offer the web application (a first – previous web based Email clients from other vendors had been clunky and dog – slow efforts written in HTML – every time something changed on screen, the whole page needed to be reloaded, which was slow and flickery and gave a very poor user experience – something Google were keen to avoid). Instead Google wanted GMail to feel like an installed application that one merely happened to be accessing via a web browser – something revolutionary at the time, and not that common nowadays. With GMail, Buchheit worked around HTML’s limitations by using highly interactive JavaScript code. That made it feel more like software than a sequence of web pages. Before long, the approach would get the moniker AJAX, which stood for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML; today, it is how all web applications like FaceBook and Google Docs are built. But when GMail was pioneering the technique, it wasn’t clear that it was going to work. The fundamental issue was that back in 2002/3, when GMail was being developed, web browsers were far less sophisticated than nowadays. The problem with using large chunks of JavaScript programming code to make a slick, quick web experience was that Internet Explorer 6 (by far the most widely used web browser at the time) was pretty crap at handling JavaScript, (actually IE6 was pretty crap at everything, but that is another story). Google were worried that by making a sophisticated, cutting edge product, they would end up crashing Internet Explorer 6 every so often, which would annoy and alienate their key user base. Eventually the quirks and shortcomings of Internet Explorer were tamed, and GMail was ready for release. Initially it was going to be offered to a limited number of public Beta testers (I was one of these people – I have one of the first 1,500 Gmail user accounts ever created). Google were so unsure of how GMail would be received that they initially hosted the entire service on three hundred old Pentium III computers that nobody else at Google wanted, and were otherwise going into the recycling skip. The initial limited run of accounts was soon boosted, as a GMail address became the new, fashionable thing to have – the scarcity made it cool. Not everything was going Google’s way though. The GMail business model, which was (and still is) based on scanning the message text, and serving up discreet, context sensitive adverts was not universally well received. A U.S politician, California State Senator Liz Figueroa  sent Google a letter of her own, calling GMail a “disaster of enormous proportions, for yourself, and for all of your customers.” She went on to draft a bill requiring, among other things, that any company that wanted to scan an email message for advertising purposes get the consent of the person who sent it. (By the time the California Senate passed the law, cooler heads prevailed and that obligation had been eliminated.) Nevertheless, if ultimate privacy is a concern of yours, GMail is not for you. Despite this, the last time Google released usage figures was back in 2012; at that time GMail had 425 million active and frequently used accounts, which suggests to me that discomfort with Google’s approach to online advertising is a minority concern (either that, or many people know no better, which is a possibility). Compared with Hotmail (now Outlook.com) the look and feel of GMail has changed little – any updates and changes are incremental and subtly performed; Google realise that a substantial portion of their customers value the familiarity of the application, and don’t want change for change’s sake. Whatever your views, GMail has come a hell of a long way in a decade, and it is a cornerstone of many people’s lives. Happy Birthday GMail.

The News Shopper are reporting as to how the Nemesis Gym in Erith Riverside Shopping Centre has launched a health and nutrition bar, which is specialising in the currently fashionable "Caveman Diet". This is all well and good, and normally I am always keen to promote independent local businesses. The problem with the Nemesis Gym is that they had a visit from Bexley Council health inspectors not long ago, and their kitchen only scored a 1 out of 5 stars on the "Scores on the Doors" food hygiene rating system. It was judged to be "Poor" for for food hygiene and safety, "Fair" for structural compliance, and "Little" in confidence in management. I think that before the Nemesis gym start making claims about health and nutrition, they really ought to be sorting their own house out - chances are you would end up with food poisoning if you ate there at present. On a brighter note, the newly opened "King of the Grill" kebab shop in Manor Road was inspected last week, and rated a very respectable four out of five stars for food hygiene, which is very good news. They have their sticker proudly on display in the shop window, but the Council have yet to update the Scores on the Doors website. Let us hope that more local food outlets up their hygiene standards in future.

The end video this week is a full length two hour documentary on the calamitous state of American health care when compared to places such as Canada and the United Kingdom. We may think the NHS is far from perfect, but the situation on the other side of the pond seems to be far worse. Give it a watch and see what you think. Please leave a comment below, or Email me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.