The novelty of hearing the thunder outside followed by the thunder on the TV from the Wimbledon Championships still hasn’t worn off.
Last weekend when the Heathrow flight paths switched to Wandsworth you could tell whether we were on the landing approach or take-off route by whether you heard the plane on the TV or outside first: was take-off on this occasion!
Obvious and unremarkable perhaps but brings a new dimension to interactive TV.
Friends from outside the capital rarely believe me when I tell them how it’s nigh on impossible to buy a house or flat in the capital for less than a couple of hundred thousand pounds. Apologies: I’ve been misleading you.
For example, take this place in North London that can be yours for £160,000 assuming it gets planning permission. A full 8ft wide bargain.
If southeast London is your thing then maybe this is more suitable. It may look like a garage, it may be a garage but it’s only £50,000.
Alternatively you can grit your teeth, defy the London property beast and try not to flinch as the council tax bills and reports of house price crashes around the corner come in. Besides, even at half current market prices we could get at least another bedroom anywhere else in the country.
But then I’m confused: barely a week goes by when there’s not a story about either the population swelling or the emigration of Londoners to the home counties. They can’t both be right.
One thing I’m sure about though: despite paying over the odds and salaries not fully compensating just being here still makes it worthwhile.
Love Wimbledon
It’s that time of year when the world’s greatest tennis tournament comes to my postcode.
The town fills up, the Village roads clog up and Maria Sharapova posters adorn once-tame and formerly-forgettable billboards. As Hertz-branded cars errr ‘zoom’ past you try to catch a glance of the latest Russian sensation or British best hope.
Fantastic though it is to see the place buzzing and the queues forming the night before the All England Club complex is dead the rest of the year. I run past there regularly and most of the time it’s a shrine, a temple to these two holy weeks; but what a two weeks. Watching the world looking in on SW19, the tennis groupies filling the trendy bars of the Village and the smug people having got tickets through the ballot makes it all worth while.
Speaking of which… looking forward to my first visit to the show courts in a week or so…
I had the misfortune to have to venture down Oxford Street the other day, a street which was a tourist attactions in it’s own right, a shopping shangri-la when I wasn’t a Londoner. Has it changed or has my migration to the capital changed my view?
These days you have to run the gauntlet of language school pimps, clearance shops and buses that take longer to traverse Marble Arch to Tottenham Court Road than an asthmatic ant with heavy bags. I say ‘run the gauntlet’ but of course that in itself would be unwise with the uneven pavements, meandering visitors and advertising obstacles.
Having just returned from Paris my temporary lack of patriotism is only because I’ve got London’s best interests at heart! The Champs Elysees is wide, clean and tree-lined. Oxford Street is narrow, dirty with the occasional bench. But who in their right mind would want to sit down unless they were already about to die from the diesel fumes?
I’m sure most Londoners try and avoid the place too unless their life depended on it (John Lewis and Selfridges for example). The Oxford Street Association often mentions the odd nip, the occasional tuck there. It doesn’t need cosmetic surgery, it needs resucitation. Some radical schemes have been proposed including a tram or monorail: don’t discuss it in a committee, do it and pedestrianise the rest before everyone emigrates to Bluewater and leaves London’s main shopping artery for dead.
You are now entering the Thames estuary
By 2011 and with £1.5bn London could be receiving a quarter of it’s electricity (1% of total UK consumption) from the ‘London Array‘ of 270 wind turbines off the Essex and Kent coasts.
I’m no Greenpeace card-holding, tree-hugging environmentalist but I have become quite passionate about renewable energy and Kyoto and this is a fantastic step for the UK and, nominally, ‘London’. The picture above is from Utgrunden in Sweden, one of several projects in the Nordics; provided not too many birds get sliced by the blades and captains of ships can avoid running into 270 300ft lit & bright white turbines (despite their radar having gone a bit ‘fuzzy’) it might be a reality here too.
Originally sceptical about the whole wind turbine thing I’ve been won over. Beautiful, majestic but thankfully not in my immediate back garden.
London’s Olympic Stadium?
Today London, Paris, New York, Madrid and Moscow round the final bend with hopefully our fair capital if not in the lead, then at least with a Dame Kelly Holmes finish in her. Today the IOC delivered their final appraisal of the bids for the 2012 Olympics before the voting and results in Singapore on July 6th.
Despite all my enthusiasm for the attempt I have to admit I was rather concerned that we were going to screw up when Barbara Cassani ‘stepped down’ but it appears the bid team have done themselves and the Big Smoke proud. Here we are: neck and neck on merit with Paris with a technically excellent submission and all we need now is three things:
One, we ship all the unpatriotic Londoners, bitter Brummies and moaning Mancunians off to France. For once and for all, the IOC have already said they wouldn’t even consider a UK city other than London. The Midlands may be the heart of the country geographically but I’ll take London’s cultural, historical and emotional heart any day. I’m also sick of the tired argument that we could just spend the money on the NHS or something equally laudable. Using that logic though we’d never do anything to bring pride, inspiration and growth to the country.
Two, hopefully the IOC voters will want a bid that brings redevelopment and a lasting legacy, not that simply slots in to 15 year old stadiums. True, London has more to do than Paris and Athens very nearly cocked it up big time last year but so many of the plans coincide with what we’re doing on the Channel Tunnel rail link and other projects. Besides the UK’s not very good at capital projects (no pun intended) so it’s a good excuse for us too.
Three, we have to avoid tripping and falling at the final hurdle. Please no strikes, wars or other such PR disasters. Our level of public support is depressingly British. While we can’t do anything about Paris having bid recently or having a stadium or two up its sleave it’d be a shame to lose the greatest show on earth just because we couldn’t be bothered or see beyond the end of our street.
You watch, Moscow will end up getting it now…
One of the few remaining sanctuaries from mobile phones is being desecrated. London Underground are finally going ahead with the installation of transmitters in the deep line stations enabling hundreds of thousands of commuters to shout ‘I’m on the train’ in tiny little tube carriages and denying them the excuse that ‘I’m about to go into a tunnel’.
It’s fair to say that I like my modern technology but mobile phones are bad enough on normal surface trains where the background noise is high enough for callers to respond by shouting into their crazy-frogged lump of plastic. What’s it going to be like during the morning peak on the Northern Line with the echoes of tunnels 100 metres underground? Angrier stares, violence, carnage, death: that’s what.
About five years ago a survey by the then London Transport showed overwhelming opposition to such a plan. Excuse my cynicism when last year’s straw polls by the cash-strapped Transport for London showed the opposite. Who were these people? I doubt they were regular tube users….
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/18977544?source=Evening%20Standard
London Lines 