Crossrail works have started right outside my office. Due for completion by 2017…
In a wider sense, south London is a provincial city hidden inside a metropolis.
OK, so most of Simon Jenkins’ column on how harshly south London is treated politically is a bit over the top and incendiary (“South London is to become Britain’s Gaza Strip”, for example), but it’s a good read for an exploration of exactly how south London is very much the lesser half of the city.
I’ve lived in south London since 2005, first in New Cross and Deptford, and then in/around Wimbledon for the last couple of years. When I first moved to London, I was up in West Hampstead, north of the river, and it really is a bit of a culture-shock to cross the Thames.
Things are just different here. The Tube is practically non-existent, and everyone uses proper trains to get around. That, and the ubiquitous buses, which are everywhere. As the article points out, there have been numerous mooted plans to extend various lines south, but nothing has ever really come to fruition.
But I love south London nowadays. It just feels more like a home, a community, and there’s less of the isolation which it’s easy to envelop yourself in in other parts of London. Where I live now, it’s very green, which is a bonus, but still has that London feel to it.
Now, if only they’d build a few more Tube stops…
Waiting for a bus last night at the bottom end of Putney High Street, I snapped a few photos as the traffic went past. I love this kind of long exposure shot of lights at night-time, and have hundreds of them from various places across London over the last few years.
Route 521: Another Bendy Bus Bites The Dust
I don’t like change… It was a little weird this morning, coming out of Waterloo station and seeing a bus that was a lot smaller than the one I used last Friday. The bigger bendy buses on the 521 route have been replaced by smaller versions, with two entry points instead of three. Obviously, this is now a completely anecdotal piece of evidence, having used it just once so far this week, but it immediately strikes me that there aren’t very many seats on the new bus. There are big areas to stand in, with plenty of poles and hanging grips to support yourself, but seats are few and far between. Maybe that’s the idea for this bus: transport as many people as possible as quickly as possible, with scant regard for comfort. I’m also a little concerned about the situation at Waterloo station with regards to queues. Even when the old 521s had three doors and thus three queues snaking backwards whilst waiting for a bus, these queues could get pretty damn lengthy. They’d go down the stairs and almost back into the station, and one would go round the back of the stairs onto that one-way street. Now we’re going to be down to two queues, and even with the supposed increased frequency of buses, long queues will inevitably form. These are going to be really, really long, and possibly a little dangerous if they stretch back to the bottom of the escalators. Plus, our driver this morning seemed to enjoy the thrill of having a smaller, more nimble bus than the unwieldy bendy version, and was really throwing it round the corners. When you’re standing (as more people will be now), that’s not the safest or most comfortable way to travel. I’ll see how it goes over the rest of the week, but it’s disappointing that bendy buses (which are after all relatively new) have been phased out to leave a less-than-perfect replacement…
Image via London Reconnections.
This the kind of thing that really gets the Londoner in me excited: artists’ impressions of new stations. Especially when that station is the one nearest my office that I use pretty regularly.
Yep, this is what the inside of the new Thameslink Crossrail extension will look like at Farringdon station. The entrance is directly opposite the existing ticket hall, and will connect with the Tube lines and also the overland lines through to Moorgate.
The two lines pictured are on the main north-south overland network that runs from as far as Brighton on the south coast, through central London, and up to Luton or Bedford in the north.
It’s a major commuter route for those that live in north/south London, as well as slightly outside the Greater London area too. I used to work with a guy that commuted in from Brighton every day, almost two hours each way…
It looks really cool, and the street-level image shows just how they are going to transform what is a pretty grubby street. The StreetView from pretty much the exact same spot shows what it looks like now (turn to the east to see it). That beam of sunlight is where the entrance will be, and all of those shops are currently boarded up ahead of the construction work.
