For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

The Festival of Empire (12.05.11)

When I was young affixed to the classroom wall of my primary school was a giant map measuring 5 feet wide by 4 feet high. It depicted the world with each country picked out in a colour denoting its governance. Proud to be pink was the order of the day – stretching across the entire map – for pink-denoted countries belonging to the British Empire.

It was said by the English that the sun never set on its Empire, and Indians from the sub-continent were given to remark: That God didn’t trust the English in the dark. Little did we know it then but just after the Second World War it really was the remains of the day for Britain’s Empire and the sun was indeed setting – those little pink shapes would be changing colour one by one.

One hundred years ago on 12th May 1911 King George V opened The Festival of Empire at Crystal Palace, a rather self-congratulatory piece of theatre. “The Festival of Empire, Imperial Exhibition and Pageant of London: Crystal Palace” to give it its formal title was originally due to open in 1910, but his father King Edward VII after only nine years on the Throne managed to eat himself to death.

With a budget of £½ million, the Festival of Empire would stay open until 28th October 1911, giving visitors two main entertainments:

The Great Pageant of London and the Empire gave the Empire’s glorious development from the “Dawn of British History” to a Grand Imperial Finale, in which visitors from the Dominions joined with the English performers to provide a wonderful “living picture” illustrating the vastness of the British Empire. Upwards of 15,000 performers with music accompanying the scenes performed by a band of 50 and a chorus of 500. The Pageant gave visitors various scenes including The Dawn of British History; Roman London; King Alfred and London; the Danish Invasion; The Norman Conquest; Return of Richard I; Edward I; and The Days of Chivalry.

While the All-British Exhibition offered a cut-down version of The Great Exhibition devoted to British Arts and Industries. The following sections were among some of those that were represented: Applied Chemistry; Pianos; Mining; Engineering; Shipping; Transportation and Motive Power; Decoration and Furnishing; Arts and Crafts; Home Industries; Photography; British and Colonial Agriculture; Forestry; Fisheries; Sports; and Imperial Industries.

To reinforce the perception ion of Britain’s power and might the British Empire was constructed in miniature on the Palace grounds, complete with three-quarter-size replicas of the Parliament buildings of all the Commonwealth countries. These replicas, their exteriors architecturally complete to the smallest detail, were built of timber and plaster. They depicted the Parliament Building of the Union of South Africa, the Government Building of Newfoundland at St. Johns, the Parliament Building of New Zealand at Wellington, the Federal Government Building of Australia at Melbourne, and at a cost of over £70,000 the building of the Government of Canada. For tuppence ha’penny, a miniature railway could take the visitor to view a South African diamond mine, an Indian tea plantation, and a Canadian logging camp.

Unfortunately the British were celebrating the last gasps of the Empire, three years later the Great War would see a generation of young men die in the trenches, the Wall Street Crash would help destroy Britain’s wealthy families, and in 1936, the venue, Crystal Palace burnt to the ground.

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

Avoid idleness and intemperance (22.04.11)

In 1837 a young woman found herself the monarch of her country, she was to remain Queen during an unprecedented time of burgeoning industry and wealth creation, giving her name to the 64 years she reigned and a time Britain was at its zenith of influence and power.

That same year a novel was printed which would change a country’s attitude to the poorest and venerable, that novel was the second major work to be published by Charles Dickens.

Charles Dickens was no stranger to poverty. In 1823 when his father lost his job and was sent to Marshalsea debtor’s prison 11-year-old Charles worked in a blacking factory pasting labels on shoe polish bottled for six shillings a week. At that time he also certainly worked alongside children from the workhouse, it was an experience that would remain with him all his life and be the subject of his novel Oliver Twist.

In 1834 a Poor Law was enacted, with the sole purpose of discouraging claiming relief in times of poverty and forcing individuals to take work offered to them however low the pay. Welfare assistance was only available inside the workhouse, once admitted the unfortunate inmates would be deloused and forced to wear uniforms, families were broken up and if individuals were capable of working they would be sent to labour for unscrupulous employers. The very young, ill or old who were unable to produce an income were in most cases refused admission to the workhouse and starved to death.

In a fascinating piece of research, Dr Ruth Richardson has established the source material for Oliver Twist which tells the story of the illegitimate orphan Oliver who endures a miserable time at the workhouse and during his parish apprenticeship with an undertaker, before running away and being taken in by a gang of juvenile pickpockets.

It was known that Charles Dickens lived in a certain Norfolk Street twice in his early life for a period of four years. Dr Richardson has established that Norfolk Street once was the southern continuation of Cleveland Street which exists today and that Dickens lived only nine doors away from the Cleveland Street workhouse ending years of speculation by historians to the exact location of Dickens’s childhood home.

Cleveland Street Workhouse was constructed in about 1780 on what at that time was a burial ground. Starting life as the parish workhouse for St. Paul’s, Covent Garden in 1836 it functioned as an infirmary, maternity unit, insane asylum or a place to deposit those suffering from highly contagious diseases.

Even by workhouse standards 44 Cleveland Street was dreadful, a contemporary account by Dr Joseph Rogers the chief medical officer at the workhouse from 1856-68, reported: a laundry in the basement filling the dining hall with foul-smelling steam; carpets regularly beaten directly outside the men’s infirmary; the nursery both damp and overcrowded; “nursing” provided only by elderly female inmates, many of whom were apparently habitually drunk; the brutal indifference of the Guardians of the workhouse; the “dead house” adjoins the main structure. This led him to campaign for better standards in the medical care available to workhouse inhabitants.

After the Poor Law was reformed the Cleveland Street Workhouse passed first into the control of the Central London Sick Asylums District, then to the Middlesex Hospital and thence to the University College London Hospital complex. Closing in 2006 when UCLH moved all their services onto a single unified site.

The building is believed to be London’s only existing purpose-built Georgian workhouse, a rare example of social engineering from the 19th century; now after a five-year-long campaign the most famous workhouse in the world has been saved thanks to its Grade II listing.

Without it would Charles Dickens have written so passionately his most successful novel and then spent a lifetime campaigning for better welfare to be given to the poor? Now 44 Cleveland Street has been given a Heritage listing we have an opportunity to convert this rare Georgian building into flats whilst keeping its integrity, and use some of that income to provide a teaching and resource centre at the very heart of social and welfare reform that has benefitted us all today.

In an echo of Dachau with its sign “arbeit macht frei” (works brings freedom), above the gates of the Cleveland Street Workhouse was a statute of an old man pointing to the words: “Avoid idleness and intemperance”, as with Dachau, 22 Cleveland Street’s importance to our lives should not be forgotten.

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

It’s a two-way street (19.04.11)

It was the Peruvians – that’s if Wikipedia is to be believed – who invented the first one-way street for their capital Lima.

The idea to the layman appears obvious, traffic flows better if all vehicles are moving in the same direction. Find two parallel streets in a city and you have the makings of a one-way traffic system, and with the correct signage or today’s SatNavs, nobody should get lost or confused.

Now conventional traffic planning appears to have been turned on its head. The first scheme to remove a one-way system was the Aldgate East gyratory, built in the 1970s it was criticised ever since for creating a “racetrack” mentality among motorists, terrifying pedestrians and cyclists. The word racetrack in this context is a euphemism for no traffic jams and was about the only road left in London where you could travel at 30mph. Now at Aldgate, the surrounding areas of Whitechapel and Spitalfields are gridlocked for virtually the entire day. The queue of stationary traffic spreads throughout all the small residential streets around the area.

The next one-way system to receive attention was Piccadilly Circus. Creating a bus lane at the southern extremity of Shaftsbury Avenue and making the west side of Piccadilly Circus two-way by inserting a 200-yard-long bus lane has improved journey times for buses travelling south. Unfortunately for buses travelling north on Lower Regent Street, the effect can only be described as gridlock with dozen of buses stationary. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Freedom Pass holders are alighting from their bus at the back of the jam, walking past the Piccadilly Circus pinch point to get on to the next available bus exiting the jam.

The latest roads about to get a £14 million two-way makeover are Piccadilly, Pall Mall and St. James’s Street which is but a stone’s throw from Albemarle Street which was the first one-way street in London. The occasion prompting this decision was a series of lectures given by Samuel Taylor Coleridge at the Royal Institute. The resulting traffic jams caused by those eager to attend resulted in such horrendous queues of horse drawn carriages that the measure was quickly adopted to remove the congestion and the road remains one-way to this day.

Supporter of the two-way movement, the Head of the New London Architecture Centre, Peter Murray, said: “One-way streets reflect the dominance of the car and the failed go-faster policies of the traffic engineers. As we begin to realise that walking and cycling should be the dominant forms of transport, the one-way street should be consigned to the dustbin of history.”

The two-way movement believes that a lot of gyratory systems were built in the Sixties and it is timely to remove them believing two-way streets make journeys easier for drivers and keep more traffic on the main road and out of side streets.

Other thoroughfares in the traffic planner’s sights include: Wandsworth; New Cross; and I can’t believe I’m writing this; Tottenham Court Road and Gower Street; followed by Baker Street and Gloucester Place once the 2012 Olympics are over.

No doubt there is a wealth of computer simulations that turn conventional wisdom on its head to prove two-way is the way to go, but they should remember the best-laid schemes of Mice, Men and Macs can go wrong.

In 1864 London’s first traffic island was built on St James’s Street, one of the roads currently being turned two-way. It was funded by one Colonel Pierpoint who was afraid of being knocked down on his way to (and more likely from) his Pall Mall club. When it was finished, the good colonel dashed across the road to admire his creation, tripped and was bowled over by a cab.

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

Goldilocks Hotels are just ‘right’ (12.04.11)

The ignominy, being thrown out of a hotel for the second time; it happened to me last week quite unexpectedly. The hotel in question, which uses Scotland’s national flower for its trademark, has decided that cabbies are persona non grata.

They are, not unreasonably, fed up with a procession of cabbies traipsing across their foyer to use their own “guests” toilets; but for them, the problem they face is that their hotel is a Goldilocks Hotel.

Let me explain: Some hotels are too posh, and wouldn’t want cabbies rubbing shoulders with their well-heeled customers in rest room. At the other end of the scale are the budget hotels whose customers don’t have the luxury of anything beyond their room and in the foyer a showcase of flyers with suggestions on how to spend their time in London after their budget breakfast. Between those polar opposites fall the Goldilocks Hotels, not too cheap, nor too rich; they are just right. Here cabbies can park outside; usually, these hotels also have taxi ranks, and gratefully use the toilets facilities.

Once it was a matter of civic pride for a borough council to build public toilets, often with gleaming brass pipes and beautiful tiling, while many toilets would have an attendant on duty to ensure that high standards were maintained.

Now many London Boroughs trying to squeeze as much value from the rates, to justify their manager’s inflated salaries find that maintaining adequate toilets that non-ratepayers might use, how can I put it? An inconvenience.

If you need to leave your taxi unattended while answering the call of nature, finding somewhere to park in Central London can prove at best difficult, at night in the West End, impossible.

Overzealous parking attendants, themselves indirectly employed by the self-same councils whose toilets you are trying to use. Cameras are now employed to book you for parking if your stay exceeds the magical two minutes and one second beyond that allotted time allowed for stopping cabs. I would defy anyone to be able to answer the call of nature in that Olympic time. At night, with no parking places available, it makes bladder control a prerequisite for passing The Knowledge.

Garages would seem united in their inability to find a decent plumber, for most claim when asked, that their toilets are out of order. Some of London’s private squares are covered by CCTV cameras, so fed up are the residents with people using their beautiful gardens as a toilet.

So I (and my bladder) would like to thank all the Goldilocks Hotels who tolerate the cab trade using their facilities and would like to think my colleagues will always provide those self-same hotels guests with the cabs they might require.

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

A no win situation (05.04.11)

When it landed with a thump on my doormat I thought the heavy manila envelope was the Census. I was soon to discover that its contents were not so benign, it was a court documents relating to a traffic accident occurring a few months previously, claiming personal injury.

Stopping late one night at traffic lights I inadvertently pulled up my handbrake insufficiently, and while distracted the automatic cab inched forward to touch the car in front. We got out, exchanged details; I took photographs of what appeared to be two undamaged vehicles and we went on our way. The next day the third party informed me that he was claiming on his insurance, although independent engineer’s report later contradicted the assertion of damage to either vehicle.

I don’t want to elaborate on my case as, at the time of writing, the case is sub judice, but I did notice that the plaintiff’s solicitors were a company well known for their remorseless “no win – no fee” advertising on local radio.

So we now have a situation that the plaintiff knows he’s not injured, his solicitor knows his client knows his claim is spurious and my solicitor knows that the other solicitor knows his client’s claim is based on a tissue of lies.

Since Legal Aid has all but been denied to anyone who has a job, leaving only convicted foreign criminals who are trying to evade deportation access to free legal representation, a whole sub-culture has built up in the legal profession, with all those involved knowing many cases on their books are works of fiction.

In most cases insurers just pay out nominal out of court settlements, as they know it’s cheaper that way, and the claimant will settle for a few thousand pounds, knowing that their claim is groundless and could not stand up to sustained interrogation in court.

The result of all this is that if you really do have a valid claim and will not be bought off for a small sum, settlement can take years. My neighbour’s daughter has suffered from an industrial injury, having waited over two years; she has no idea how long will be the wait for compensation for an injury that in later years will have a profound effect on her mobility.

I always thought that when studying to join the legal profession, apart from wanting to receive a reasonable income, the student hoped when qualified they could improve people’s lives with their learned and impartial advice. What must it be like on graduating with a law degree to find yourself processing – and that is what it is – claims, many of which you know are invalid? The newly qualified solicitor must suspect that previous generations in the legal profession wouldn’t have touched many of these cases for fear of being accused of malpractice.

If the plaintiff in my case does receive compensation he will probably put it towards his insurance premiums, for the irony of all this is that we are all paying on average 25 per cent more for motor insurance to cover these unreasonable claims, and as young inexperienced drivers claims are rising more steeply than other more experience motorists so are their premiums – as a result we all lose out.