Save Little Green Street

28 April, 2009 Gibson Square 1 Comment

I recently had a job up to Highgate and it gave me the opportunity to see the folly of local council planning departments. Not content with allowing a vast expanse of ugly housing at the end of this gem of a street, developers in their insatiable greed now want to build 20 houses, 10 flats and an underground car park on derelict land behind Little Green Street. Little Green Street has found itself, through no fault of its own, turned into the only access road for the developers.

[D]espite its size, the developers insist that this Georgian street is big enough to carry all the cranes, diggers, and lorries they need to carry all the waste away from the forty foot deep excavation they need to dig to build their underground car park. Some of the lorries and cranes weigh up to 49 tonnes and some are 2.9m wide. It’s a pity they didn’t measure Little Green Street, because the carriageway of the road is just 2.5m wide.

The street remains a very real threat of being turned into a truck route which would see a vehicle pass within inches of the front doors of these homes every three minutes, all day every day for up to four years down this delicate cul-de-sac.

So a little history is required at this point of the blog:

Little Green Street off Highgate Road in Kentish Town is one of the oldest streets in London.

It’s not very big, just eight houses on one side and two on the other. The houses were built in the 1780s are Grade ll listed and remain one of the few intact Georgian streets in London. They have stood unharmed through train crashes, the London Blitz, and survived two hundred years of wear and tear from the generations who have raised their children in the narrow cobbled terrace.

Although, after eight years of campaigning by more than fifteen thousand people, many visitors to their site, planning permission has lapsed, Camden Council are still vacillating about whether the construction work on a gated community with an underground car park should continue.

Mad, isn’t it? I made the mistake of driving my cab down this cul-de-sac and had to do a 9-point turn at the end in a vehicle famed for its 25 foot turning circle.

Thinking allowed

ArseBook a new anti-social networking site

24 April, 2009 Gibson Square 1 Comment

[W]hat do you think; it has a certain ring about it? I am thinking of starting a new networking site as an antidote to these social networks. My creation would have the purpose of discouraging anybody from joining my group.

As Groucho Marx once said “I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members”.

So this is now it works, you post all your disagreeable faults:

Picking toe nails in bed;
Describing where your spots are;
Disgusting eating habits;
And any others I won’t be able to write about here.

If you are a trainspotter, fine sign up; change your underpants weekly, great; enjoy talking interminably about some obscure sport, come on down.
The original social network site, Facebook is now five years old and nothing sums up this shallow world more than a group of people chatting away to each other in cyberspace. I realise as the author of CabbieBlog I might have committed social suicide by shunning social networking, but have these people nothing better to do?

Although Facebook has been a runaway success it has its darker side. The site is increasingly being seen as a boon to scores of identity fraudsters, as you have to use your real name when you sign up, anything you reveal on your site can be used by sophisticated criminals to open bank accounts and secure credit cards in your name. On your page you could include where you live, your birthday, your e-mail address and your mobile phone number.

British public say they are not in favour of ID cards, storing the details of our phone calls, emails and texts, and they claim it would be invasion of their privacy. But on Facebook, millions regularly communicate with total strangers, telling them all about their movements and where they work.

Did you know that one in five bosses now check potential workers’ details on social networking sites in case they reveal unsuitable social habits like drug use or weird hobbies?

Another worrying aspect is that it enables men to groom children and young women via these social networking sites.

And if you’re still not convinced consider this; recently a company called Greylock invested $27 million in Facebook – and one of their senior partners, Howard Cox, sits on the board of In-Q-T, the division of the CIA which invests in new businesses.

Clearly, the CIA has fully realised the value of personal information collected on internet sites such as Facebook – so the chances are Big Brother may be monitoring you as you make new contacts online.

“Arsebook is an anti-social utility that connects you with the people YOU HATE.”

A big warning be careful out there Twittering, Big Brother may be watching your movements.

A window on My World

The London Omnibus

21 April, 2009 Gibson Square Leave a comment

Now children get out your Ian Allen I-Spy Bus books and get yourselves down to Oxford Street, you can while away your time counting empty buses as you sit in the 18 hour a day traffic jam caused by these monsters.

You could almost walk the entire one mile length of this shopping street on the roofs of the vehicles.

[L]ondon buses receive subsidies to the tune of £910 million per year an increase of 511 per cent since Labour came to power, while for the Shire areas of England subsidies have risen only by 52 per cent. It is in the operator’s interest to put as many vehicles on the road in London. While in small villages with lower subsidies they are losing all their routes. London is inundated with these usually empty red monsters.

The safety record of London buses is very high with one fatality for every 100 million miles operated. But am I the only driver to notice that these vehicles are not driven with the same care and pride as the old Routemasters?

Talking of which Boris is planning to introduce a new safer and wheelchair accessible Routemaster in the future. Watch this space for updates in about 4 years, in time for the Mayoral election.

With most drivers on the road having the spatial awareness of a hedgehog it is almost impossible for bus drivers to navigate London in a Bendy bus, as cars are trying to squeeze past these juggernauts at every opportunity.

Taxis, black ones from Centre Point to Marble Arch, a free shuttle service, passenger journey times reduced from 25 minutes to 8 and taxis get some kind of subsidy. Everyone’s a winner. Oh! If you want the kind of sulky driver you get on a bus ask your cabbie to oblige.

Thinking allowed

Don’t ask me I’m lost too

17 April, 2009 Gibson Square 5 Comments

[M]aps define an area in more than the most obvious of ways. They define the landscape and the people that live within it. They allow us to make sense of its complexities. None more so than in London, so here are CabbieBlog’s top three London maps:

a-z The A-Z
Born Phyllis Isobella Gross in East Dulwich on 25 September 1906 her father was a Hungarian Jewish immigrant and her mother was an Irish Italian Roman Catholic suffragette. She was educated at Roedean School, a private boarding school near Brighton, which she had to leave when her father’s cartographic company collapsed.

She travelled all over Europe from an early age and then became an English tutor in a small school in Fécamp Brittany. Later, she studied at the Sorbonne, spending her first few months in Paris sleeping rough. At the age of 16 she married Richard Pearsall, an artist friend of her brother. They were together for eight years, travelling in Spain and living in Paris, but she left him in Venice while he was asleep, without telling him anything. She did not remarry.

By 1935, she had become a portrait painter, but while on her way to a party, she tried to follow the best available map of the time (a 1919 Ordnance Survey map). She discovered that this map was not up to the task, and ended up getting lost on her way. Following a conversation during this party, she conceived the idea of mapping London.

The next day, she started mapping London. This involved walking the 3,000 miles of the 23,000 streets of London, waking up at 5 am everyday, and not going to bed until after an 18-hour working day.

Throughout the walking, she was also drawing up the first A to Z map. Phyllis did all of the proof reading and design work herself, and drew up the map with the help of a single draughtsman. They founded the Geographer’s Map Company and in 1936, a year after the project begin, 10,000 copies of the first A to Z were printed. Initially, it proved hard to sell, but finally, WH Smith agreed to take 250 copies which she delivered in a wheelbarrow. It was a runaway success.

Harry’s Map
Prior to Harry Beck’s diagrammatic map, the various underground lines had been laid out geographically, often superimposed on a road map. This had the feature that centrally located stations were very close together, and the out of town stations were spaced apart. Harry had the idea of creating a full system map in colour. He believed that passengers riding the trains weren’t too bothered about the geographical accuracy, but were more interested in how to get from one station to another, and where to change. Thus he drew his famous diagram, looking more like an electrical schematic than a true map, on which all the stations were more or less equally spaced. This form of map has been copied around the world for various transit systems.

Because Harry’s map has no relevance to the geographical positions of the stations above, take a cousin from out of town to Bank station and tell them to make their way to Mansion House using Harry’s map. They will gamely take the Central Line 4 stations to Tottenham Court Road, the Northern Line 3 stops to Embankment and back on the District Line for 3 stations to reach Mansion House.

In the meantime walk the 100 yards down Queen Victoria Street, go into one of the fine cafes in Bow Lane, enjoy a leisurely coffee and then cross the road to meet your exhausted and perplexed cousin.

Pass GO and collect £200
The history of Monopoly can be traced back to the early 1900s. The version we see today was born in the early 1930s, and named Monopoly. Sold by Parker Brothers and its parent companies, the first English version featured many of London streets and has come to symbolise the wealth and poverty within London. You can even go on ‘Monopoly’ Monopoly cab tours of London if your pockets are deep enough.

Puppydog tails

George Davis is Innocent

14 April, 2009 Gibson Square Leave a comment

A change in attitudes has taken place over the past few years. For years graffiti has been the bane for any owner of a suitable wall which is acceptable for tagging. In the 1970s a successful campaign proclaiming on any suitable wall G. DAVIS IS INNOCENT O.K. It was claimed that a Mr. Davis was ‘fitted up’ by the police for an armed payroll robbery and after a long campaign the courts were forced to reprieve him – he was banged up later for a crime he really had committed.

[O]ther well known sayings daubed on walls are: ‘If voting changed anything, they would ban it’; or ‘Jesus Saves – at the Woolwich’.

Now an artistic genius has changed many peoples perception of street art. This person, who revels in his anonymity, goes under the name of Banksy

Banksy’s stencils feature striking and humorous images occasionally combined with slogans. The message is usually anti-war, anti-capitalist or anti-establishment. Subjects include animals such as monkeys and rats, policemen, soldiers, children, and the elderly.

Banksy even smuggled one of his works into Tate Britain art gallery which went unnoticed until it crashed to the floor hours later.

So loved are his anarchic offerings, a parody of a Tesco flag being raised painted on a wall in Islington North London has a Perspex screen put in front of it, as if it needs protecting like the Mona Lisa.

Many people regard Banksy as a generic name for a group of like minded artists, hell bent on changing people’s perception of authority, one of my favourites is the simple slogan: One nation under CCTV. Another image depicted a scene from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, with Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta clutching bananas instead of guns, alas London transport workers painted over this mural which was estimated to be worth more than £300,000.

So what is to be done to combat vandalism? A recent story of an oik after being given community service was told to wear a high visibility vest while cleaning up public property, he refused to wear the vest as his friends were making fun of him, so he walked away from his duties, jail him or what?

Answers on a postcard or written on any suitable building please.

An excellent site for graffiti images is to be found at the art of the state

We have heard recently of the death of Rosie, George Davis’ ex-wife from cancer. She was the driving force with Peter Chappell to free George Davis. An excellent article has been written in The Daily Mail of the campaign and Rosie has also written a book recording her involvement.