26 June 2020

Endnote

I started writing my Walthamstow Notebook blog back in January 2015, in fact on the second of the month, so it may well have been a new year's resolution. As I wrote at the time, things in Walthamstow were changing fast and there were always things to write about: a period of transformation with gentrification and redevelopment just beginning to pick up pace. It's still going on of course - some places are now completely unrecognisable - but there are fewer surprises, even when we see planning applications for ever-taller towers, or yet another coffee shop opens up. The blog was a bit of an obsession for a while, but as usually happens with blog-writing the number of times I felt inspired to write something tailed off - regular posts up to 2017, then just one post in 2018 and one in 2019. I guess that's it for now. I still pay a tenner every year for web hosting, in the hope that it’s still an archive of interesting stuff that people would like to look back on.

Just one of many rainbow window displays during Covid-19 lockdown, June 2020.

3 February 2019

Bell corner

The first thing I noticed was this striking portrait, painted big on a gable end facing Forest Road. Then it hit me - the giant scrolling advertising hoarding that's been there forever is missing. And about time too. Hoardings might in reality be less intrusive than Facebook, but they are much more visible, making the streetscape around them feel like a tawdry left-over, second-rate place. Waltham Forest council, if you're behind this - I can think of three more advertising sites offhand that could use the same treatment.

10 May 2018

London award for Mini Holland?

Apparently Mini Holland is one of the contenders for the London Civil Engineering Awards 2018. Actually the award is for the engineers, not the Borough of Waltham Forest. The voting website asks the public to ‘pick the engineering project they believe has inspired and delivered a positive impact for London’. Our local entry is Enjoy Waltham Forest, widely praised and derided as Mini Holland. Part of the voting is a People's Voice poll, which will give all concerned a chance to show what they think, even if it won't change anything.

The strange thing about the shortlist is the disparity between the projects. This is the competition shortlist:

- The entire Crossrail line, massively disruptive but something that will make life easier for millions of commuters.

- The new Victoria and Albert Museum extension.

- An eco-friendly water treatment plant in Highworth, somewhere near Swindon.

- Two very big tunnels, one for gas and one for electrical cables, useful but unexciting.

- Two more unexciting entries, the maintenance programme for London's flood defences, and a temporary 'marine facility' whatever that is.

- London's ‘first plastic road’, experimental recycled plastic road surfacing in Enfield.

- Enjoy Waltham Forest, £27 million worth of road surfacing and bollards. And aspiration to reduce the dominance of cars of course.

We recently got a Copenhagen crossing at the end of our street, at least it's nearly finished. No fancy planters or street furniture yet, but I live in hope, and I did happen to mention it to the Labour councillors who came round canvassing a couple of weeks ago. It's not really making a huge difference to be honest, the street drinkers still hang out there and leave their debris for the street sweeper. There is no bin so that's not really surprising. But I did vote for the local entry anyway. There are no actual prizes, just the prestige of winning the award. In a way it will be surprising if Crossrail doesn't win, as it's easily the going to have the most positive impact for London as a whole. But Enjoy Waltham Forest could be in with a chance. The voting is here.

Footnote - Enjoy Waltham Forest was one of nine finalists. No overall winner.

18 November 2017

Urbo bike road test

It took a while to get my hands on one of the new Urbo hire bikes, even after I downloaded the app and signed up. That’s because there are only 250 of them in the whole of Waltham Forest, so the chances of finding a bike when you want one are low. The app seems quite erratic too. I came out of Blackhorse Road tube looking at the map and it told me there were no bikes in my area. But across the road there were two of them, highly visible with their signature bright green wheels. Getting the bike to unlock was the first hurdle. The bikes just have a European style demobilisation lock on the back wheel. I messed up somehow and lost 50p, but the second attempt was successful. On the app, you click on ‘unlock’ then scan the QR code on the lock, and after a bit of a wait the lock pings open and you’re ready to go.

I had a good look at the bike first. Like a Boris bike, it is very heavy, has three gears and a kickstand, mudguards and lights. It doesn’t look as vandal-proof as the Boris bikes, with quite a few accessible bolts. It has a handy front basket with a sheet of brown plastic which turns out to be a photovoltaic panel to charge the electronics. I found the kickstand was half unbolted, and more seriously the saddle does adjust but although I’m not that tall, just six foot, the highest setting is not quite high enough. A Boris bike saddle will extend a good 10cm higher. Getting on the bike, I was immediately worried because it felt unstable, like riding with a flat tyre. Perhaps I should go to a petrol station and pump them up to a decent pressure? But there are no valves - the bikes have solid tyres, puncture-proof because they are filled with some kind of foam rather than air. You get used to it but there is a sideways wobble whenever you go over anything uneven in the road. Plus I’m riding with my knees slightly bent because the saddle is too low.

I rode my Urbo to the high street, left it unlocked outside a shop (but keeping it in view) while I bought a few things, and rode back with my purchases in the basket. Locked the bike and left it in the street outside my house. Two hours later it was still there so I made another short shopping trip, about 15 minutes for 50p. You are supposed to leave them in a designated spot which is all very well, but cycling is not like driving a car and then walking from a parking space, your journey is likely only short and adding a ten minute walk is not the way you want to use a bike. This time I left the bike on the corner by the main road where a lot of people could see it, and a short walk from the tube, but it was still there 24 hours later.

To summarise, these are not bikes that proper cyclists will like much, but they get you from A to B if you can find one available. The scheme is currently just £1 to join and you get £2.50 credit to start with, which is up to two and a half hours of riding, so you can join without any long-term commitment, on the chance that it will come in useful. It’s interesting that Urbo chose Waltham Forest out of the many areas that don’t have a bike sharing scheme, presumably becasue of Mini Holland. But the joining fee will go up to £30 eventually, which will not be worthwhile unless you can use it on a regular basis. At the moment this is an unreliable service, and it will not be much practical use unless they bring in a lot more bikes. Even then you will be restricted to the borough and any other areas Urbo might decide to colonise in future. It would be a lot more useful to have the London-wide Santander docking stations extend out to Waltham Forest and other outer boroughs, and I wonder if all the privatised bike sharing schemes make that more or less likely?

11 November 2017

A bit of a shock

Now the reservoirs are officially open as Walthamstow Wetlands, there is nobody guarding the gates and you can just walk or cycle right in. It seems to have made a big difference. I've visited the reservoirs a few times over the years, and got used to being often the only person there, or the only person not fishing or having a job to do. So it's a bit of a shock to find the place suddenly full of people. The last few weekends have been spectacularly busy, the influx of urban hipsters, families with toddlers and even the odd bird watcher drawn by the opening publicity, and perhaps the sense that the site was a bit of a secret until now. In reality there was nothing to stop people visiting before, just a £1 admission fee to pay (except the ban on under-eights obviously put off the young family contingent). I think very few people either knew they could get in or thought it worthwhile visiting. Now with two additional entrances, it's easier to get in and I have to admit, it's also more tempting. I was expecting something much more regimented, like the smart new walkway where you enter the site from Forest Road. But that is the only place where visitors are confined to a walkway, and the rest of the site still has the character of a working reservoir with very little in the way of intrusive barriers and notices.

Passing the untidy billboards on Forest Road near the entrance.

The site is unfinished and today there are many signs that things are still being worked on, things being put in place and maybe strategies being developed. The engine house is finished but the Coppermill is still a construction site. There are photocopied signs taped up asking people not to run or cycle except on the designated concrete track. The old rusty bridge is still rusty but it has a nicely-designed new handrail bolted to it. Bits of old machinery, unrestored, are dumped anyhow on the grass next to the engine house. Big concrete blocks sit among the trackside weeds here and there, awaiting their proper place. Next to the cafe, temporary rope barriers and cones block off a big expanse of bare soil to give new grass a chance to grow. Bedraggled wildlife illustrations in plastic sleeves are flapping in the breeze along the cycle track. There are no bins except the big ones at the entrances - will that work? I rather like all this, and for this visit I want to focus on photographing that rather than the birds and empty expanses of grass and water.

The new walkway...

...with holes in the metal deck for trees to grow through.

The old brick railway viaduct was replaced with this concrete structure a few years ago.

The engine house, the showpiece of the new visitor infrastructure.

Unnecessarily bright bollards...

...and various temporary barriers.

Smart new railings by the new cafe contrast with old steel barriers.

Work on the Copper Mill is still being finished but you can just make out the new lift that will give access to the open viewing deck.

There are two electricity pylons on the site. This one in particular is known as a perch for peregrine falcons.

18 October 2017

May Morris:Art and Life at the William Morris gallery

This small exhibition brings together a collection of work and artefacts by May Morris, who lived in the shadow of her father, William Morris, but successfully made her own way developing embroidery as an artform, living an artistic lifestyle and consolidating her father's reputation by way of the 24-volume Collected Works. The exhibition room is dominated by her large-scale embroideries, and the first impression is that tackling embroidery on such a large scale must be daunting. There is some very fine accurate stitching in some of the pieces, but often she sensibly used thick threads and large stitches to achieve large-scale effects, as you can see when you look closely, and she would have helpers to complete the large designs, some of them six feet high. Some of the hangings are protected by a rope barrier to stop you getting too close, but not all of them, so you can get a good idea of the amount of work involved in making an embroidery of that size. One double panel is stitched onto a fabric that already has a pattern woven into it, increasing the sense of richness. Another is based on a silk mesh so fine it's almost invisible. There is the original artwork for her best-selling honeysuckle wallpaper - I think my mother had that in her kitchen at one time, and it's still available at £70 a roll from John Lewis. Nothing ground-breaking though, nothing too far removed from the established Arts and Crafts pattern of interwoven foliage and decorative birds. And her birds are really not that well drawn, nothing to compare with the birds-with-attitude of the Strawberry Thief. Worth a visit, but not worth trekking half way across London.

20 September 2017

Open House

At Open House weekend, once a year, all sorts of interesting places open their doors to the public. This year, Walthamstow's offerings included a hipster popup bar and a trendy house extension. It has to be said, there were not many venues locally apart from places that you can just walk into anyway, like the William Morris Gallery and Vestry House Museum, but a little can go a long way. Nothing to compete with getting to visit the revolving restaurant at the top of the BT Tower (you have to apply on a lottery basis and I finally got lucky this time) but interesting enough.

We visited Sideshow first, the temporary bar space on one of the demolition sites next to Blackhorse Road station, a spin-off from Blackhorse Workshop that is only there until the end of the year. Although it is open for coffee in the mornings and as a bar a couple of nights a week, I hadn't seen it before, and the architects were there to explain about the place. It's colourful, a series of plywood walls painted in bright primary colours, with zigzag tops to remind us of the factories that have been demolished all over the area. The bar has a roof but most of the space is open to the sky. There are tables and benches, various bits of art to look at, a metal fence to lock your bike to. The colour is uplifting, as is the indoor-outdoor feeling on a fairly cold morning. The star turn though, is the Heath Robinson-ish ball race contraption. Turn a huge rubber tyre and steel balls slowly rise way above your head, propelled by a very long archimedes screw (like a wood screw but much bigger) until they reach the tipping point. From there they race round a complicated array of tubes overhead, making a lot of noise but, since the tubes are mostly opaque metal, it's impossible to work out where they are - you can only guess from the sound, and look out for them hurtling through the clear plastic bits. When the balls get down to the lower levels, there are levers you can pull to let them go a bit further, until they get back to the beginning. Worth a look on a normal opening day, probably a nice place to drop in when they open in the evening. Catch it before it closes and the excavators move in.

The other venue was quite different, a private house that has had a drastic overhaul of the sort you expect to see in Islington, not in Walthamstow. Or did until recently. Originally a quirky Warner house with tiny rooms, the back of the house has been extended to make a spacious kitchen / living room with big glass doors opening out to the garden. Upstairs, a new bedroom extension juts out from the back of the house, a tall bright space internally, on the outside clad in trendy charred timber. Charred timber is literally burnt black on the outside instead of being painted. It's burnt somewhere else, before being nailed on to the outside of the building. I was sorry to see the downstairs part of the extension - although it's also black - is not charred but painted, perhaps because all that burnt wood will blacken anything that touches it. The combination of old and new does work, up to a point. You have a sense that the original rooms are very much secondary, and there is inevitably something a bit jarring about the juxtaposition of old and new. One of the original front rooms is an office, the other is really just a way through to the back. But it helps having some old furniture in the new part. A bit of inconsistency makes for a more interesting place to live, and it's certainly a cut above the standard kitchen extensions and loft extensions you see all over Walthamstow.