CabbieBlog

Raising the dead

3 September, 2010 at 1:08 am | Posted in Avoid like the plague | 1 Comment
Tags: London trivia

Just outside the City’s northern boundary on City Road you will find Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, where office workers go to eat their lunch. Here in this little oasis of tranquillity the small path traversing the graveyard appears to have sunk below ground level.

In the middle of the 19th century London’s population was buried into just 218 acres; and when poet William Blake died in 1827 and was buried at Bunhill Fields, along with 120,000 other individuals, he was placed on top of three others; later four more were placed on top of him. Where the National Gallery now stands on the north side of Trafalgar Square was once the burial ground of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields church, about the size of a bowling green interred within it were 70,000 bodies.

In 1859 it was decided to clear the crypt of its thousands of bodies (the underground space is now a rather good, if not creepy restaurant) and the exhumed bodies were lost to posterity. Among them are furniture makes Thomas Chippendale; royal mistress Nell Gwyn; scientist Robert Boyle; painter Nicholas Hilliard; and the original Winston Churchill father of the first Duke of Marlborough.

The City church’s main income came from burials, at the Eron Baptist Church, now the site of London School of Economics, 12,000 bodies were interred in its cellar in just 19 years. It was a rare service in which several worshipers didn’t faint from the smell of rotting flesh.

No one in their right mind would go to Bunhill Fields graveyard to witness a burial; apart from the sight of the odd decaying limb the putrid smell was downright dangerous.

A Dr Walker testified to a Parliamentary inquiry that graveyard workers before disturbing a coffin would drill a hole in the side, insert a tube, and burn off the escaping gases, for “to inhale this gas undiluted with atmospheric air, is instant death”, the committee solemnly later reported.

The problem was solved in Victorian London with suburban cemeteries, site on sandy or gravel soils, allowing the bodies to decompose naturally. In 1843 John Claudues Loudon published a guide to these new cemeteries, which essentially were parks. Three were built, unfortunately he could not avail himself of their benefits, dying before his idea was put into action.

While Londoners nowadays might go to a football match at weekends, Victorian’s weekend recreational activity was to stroll, take the air (if that was the right phrase) and have a picnic beside their deceased family member’s mortal remains.

By 1854 the impressively named London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company had a dedicated private railway station near Waterloo to their cemetery at Brookwood in Surrey, offering three classes of funeral service and two stations one for Anglicans and the other for non-conformists, railway workers dubbed it the “Stiffs Express”. All there is now to show for this Victorian enterprise is the sad entrance pictured.

So as you chomp into your brie and rocket on wholemeal sandwich courtesy of Prêt a Manger while strolling in Bunhill Fields look for the grave of Dame Mary Pace (pictured above) who died 4th March 1728 and “In 67 months she was tap’d 66 times. Had taken away 240 gallons of water; Without ever repining at her case or ever fearing the operation”. And thank you lucky starts it’s the 21st century.

CabbieBlog is published regularly under a Creative Commons License by a London Black Cab Driver. Powered by WordPress.com.
Take a look round, you might like what you find. Proudly supporting the National Trust protecting England’s heritage and coast.

CabbieBlog uses Technorati Tags: Brookwood Cemetary John Bunyon Bunhill Fields

The Greatest Day in our History

31 August, 2010 at 11:09 am | Posted in The Urban Landscape | 1 Comment
Tags: London icons

We’ve all had a Tardis Teaser fantasy. What moment in history would you like to be transported if you had a time machine?

One point in London’s timeline worthy of consideration might be the opening of “The Palace of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations” or as Punch nicknamed it the Crystal Palace. Covering 19 acres with room inside to accommodate four St. Paul’s Cathedrals it was at the time the largest building on earth.

Started 160 years ago on 31st August 1850, a year earlier it had not even existed as an idea, until Henry Cole more famous for inventing the Christmas card conceived the idea after visiting the Paris Exhibition.

An open competition attracted 245 designs all were deemed unworkable. A design committee was formed having amongst their number Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and between them they produced a vast low, dark shed of a building, needing 30 million bricks. Now with only 16 months to go desperate times required desperate measures and Joseph Paxton was approached.

Paxton, born into a poor farming family in Bedfordshire, he was at the age of 20 running an experimental arboretum for the Horticultural Society. There one day he made such an impression on the Duke of Devonshire in that his strong, clear voice could be heard by the near deaf Peer of the Realm, he was offered the post of Head Gardener at Chatsworth House.

Paxton really was a boy wonder, he created one of the great gardens of England at Chatsworth with the Emperor Fountain’s raising a jet of water 290 feet into the air, a feat only exceeded once to this day in Europe; built the largest rockery in the country; designed estate villages; became the world’s expert on dahlias; produced the country’s finest melons, figs, peaches and nectarines winning numerous prizes; he ran two gardening magazines; a daily newspaper; he was on the board of three railway companies; built the world’s first municipal park, later copied to form Central Park in New York; the hot house at Chatsworth he built was so vast that when Queen Victoria visited the Great Stove, as it was called, she toured it in a horse drawn carriage.

Learning of the committee’s struggle to design a building for the Great Exhibition he doodled plans while chairing a meeting and had completed drawing ready for review in two weeks. The design broke all the criteria stipulated for the competition, but desperate times required desperate measures and after a few days of hand wringing the committee accepted them in their entirety.

Nothing, really absolutely nothing, says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than entrusting this iconic building to a gardener. No bricks, no mortar, no foundations, prefabricated from standard parts away from the building site it was simply bolted together. The build time was phenomenal in eight months, one million square feet of glass, 18,000 panes a week (one third of all the glass produced that year); 20 miles of guttering, 33,000 iron trusses and tens of thousands of planks of wooden flooring, this being tested by a battalion of soldiers marching across it. The finished building was 1,851 feet long (in celebration of the year the exhibition was held, now copied by the new World Trade Centre whose height matches in feet the year of their independence), 408 feet across and 110 feet high and spacious enough to accommodate a much admired avenue of mature elm trees.

Queen Victoria opened the exhibition on 1st May 1851 describing with some justification that it was “the greatest day in our history”. Open for five and a half months it attracted six million people at a time when Britain had a population of only 20,959,477. Almost 100,000 objects went on display; a knife with 1,851 blades; furniture carved from coal; a 4-sided piano; a bed which automatically tipped its surprised occupant into his morning bath; an enormous lump of guano from Peru. Newfoundland for some inexplicable reason devoted its entire stand to cod-liver oil, and the highlight of the day was a use of the elegant “retiring rooms” the flushing toilets, a novelty at the time. During the exhibition, 827,280 visitors paid one penny each to use them, this is often given as the origin of the British euphemism “to spend a penny”.

Unlike its successors the Great Exhibition cleared a profit of £186,000, enough to buy 30 acres of land south of the exhibition site where the Royal Albert Hall, Victoria and Albert Museum, Natural History Museum, the Royal College of Art and Royal College of Music were later built.

After the Exhibition was closed the Crystal Palace was moved to Sydenham were we managed to burn it to the ground in 1936. All that marks its passing is the Colebrookdale Gates originally made to stand at the entrance to the north transept of the Exhibition, now moved to the entrance to Kensington Gardens beside Alexandra Gate and behind which Albert sits enthroned in his memorial, on his lap he hold a book:

The Catalogue of the Great Exhibition.

CabbieBlog uses Technorati Tags: Crystal Palace Joseph Paxton Hyde Park Guano from Peru

Another Cabinet of Curiosities

27 August, 2010 at 1:19 pm | Posted in Slug snail & puppydog tail | Leave a Comment
Tags: London curios

Unfortunately CabbieBlog’s first cabinet has now been filled with all manner of interesting London trivia. So as to show off my collection to visitors another one has been obtained and here CabbieBlog gives you a further London Cabinet of Curiosities:

Village Underground
Situated on a roof in Shoreditch High Street, Village Underground is the brainchild of the splendidly named furniture designer Auro Foxcraft, who claiming he couldn’t afford a studio decided to build his own. To do this he spent £25,000 obtaining four redundant Jubilee Underground Line carriages, craned them onto the roof of a Victorian warehouse – quite a task: they weigh around 26 tonnes each – and fashioning out of them a series of offices for writers, photographers and other arty types.

The Elephant House
On the western side of Duke Street in Brown Hart Gardens, this peculiar structure is referred to as the Elephant House; its title suggests a place where huge mammals once resided. The story is that Queen Victoria kept her elephants here; apparently Victoria acquired the elephants when she was appointed Empress of India, having received a herd of elephants as a gift from loyal Maharaja’s. These unfortunate animals were then shipped back to London and the Elephant House was built to provide the animals with some kind of comfortable habitat. The design has huge gates where an elephant could access entry and exit, and has entrance doors that have an eastern looking appearance. Unfortunately there is no evidence as to the authenticity of this story and it would appear that the Victorian architects who designed this unusual structure, were overindulging their creative minds.

Unfortunately this building has a more prosaic history; it was developed as an electricity substation in the late 1800s and so remains to this present day, generating electricity to the local Mayfair area.

Before being redesigned in 1903, the site had a communal garden with trees, benches and a fountain but had become a hangout for “undesirables”. The new structure therefore continued to provide residents with a communal garden while accommodating transformers below. But one other curious fact remains why is the “garden” the only place in London where quarrelling is specifically forbidden by law?

The mole that killed a king
This statute of William III is only there because the well-heeled residents of St James’s Square got fed up with the centre of their square used as a rubbish tip for kitchen rubbish, dead cats and scraps of timber. They wanted something in the middle to give the square purpose, rather than as a refuse dump and William of Orange seemed to good idea at the time. William’s statue was not initially popular so despite the resident’s enormous wealth, they refused to pay for it, than a merchant, Samuel Travers, bequeathed in his will funds for its completion. But the family contested the will and for the next 70 years the statute remained just on paper.

Eventually in 1806 the statute was finally completed, but there is something strange about it. A small molehill lies at the feet of Sorrel, the King’s horse. What is the molehill for? The answer is that William is said to have died of pneumonia, a complication from a broken collarbone, resulting from a fall off his horse. Because his horse had stumbled into a mole’s burrow.

William was the Protestant King brought to England from Holland to replace the last Catholic. King James. James’s supporters and all Jacobites then and now still toast “the little gentleman in the black velvet waistcoat”. The mole that killed a king.

The saying “Dutch Courage” also comes from William III’s reign. After the Thirty Years’ War British troops returned home with “Dutch Courage“. Soon gin distillation took place in England. King William III actively encouraged gin production and gin was sometimes given to workers as a part of their wages.

Secret policeman’s hook
This hook on the wall near the junction of Great Newport Street and Upper St. Martin’s Lane in Covent Garden is reputed to have been here since the 1870s. Probably used for holding a policeman’s cape while he directs traffic or possibly to let the garment dry after rain. As this junction nowadays is only congested with pedestrians was it a Victorian traffic hotspot? It’s a popular yarn, whether it’s true, who knows? All Cabbies on The Knowledge are expected to find it.

CabbieBlog uses Technorati Tags: William of Orange Secret Policeman Auro Foxcraft

Requires no skill to operate

24 August, 2010 at 12:03 pm | Posted in Potporri of whinges | 2 Comments
Tags: Pedestrians

The man who invented the world’s most intrusive device described his instrument as: “The telephone may be briefly described as an electrical contrivance for reproducing in different places the tones and articulations of a speaker’s voice so that Conversations can be carried on by word of mouth between persons in different rooms, in different streets or in different Towns
. . . The great advantage it possesses over every other form of electrical apparatus is that it requires no skill to operate the instrument”.
[My italics]

Alexander Graham Bell (if ever a person’s name was better suited for his invention, I’ve yet to find), couldn’t have imagined what his invention would lead to in the 21st century or for that matter what idiots would make use of it.

So what has the latest reincarnation of Mr Bell’s invention got to do with CabbieBlog I hear you muttering amongst yourselves? Well, driving in London is becoming ever more stressful with pedestrians engrossed in using their i-phones walking into the road, then looking up with a startled expression when they see my cab bearing down on them.

Women are often accused of lacking spacial awareness, but men, sorry chaps it’s usually the male gender, that seems engrossed in their phones, and whatever they are doing on it, certainly excludes any road sense.

So when Alexander Graham Bell informed the populace that his “apparatus . . . required no skill to operate he should have added the caveat – but retraining might be necessary in the art of crossing a road, for how to talk on one’s phone and cross London’s busy roads needs a skill that many have failed to acquire.

FOOTNOTE: Around the mid 1800’s many were trying to invent the telephone, the most unfortunate was the American Elisha Gray who actually filed something called a patent caveat – a sort of holding claim that allowed one to protect an invention that wasn’t quite yet perfected – on the very day that Alexander Graham Bell filed his own, more formal patent, unfortunately for Gray, Bell beat him by a few hours.

Thanks for checking out CabbieBlog just don’t do it while crossing the road.

And thanks to Dan Forys at http://thelondonrulebook.co.uk for permission to use his cartoon. Check it out the site is very funny.

CabbieBlog uses Technorati Tags: Alexander Graham Bell Elisha Gray Apple i-phone

Famous Fictional Front Doors

20 August, 2010 at 1:15 pm | Posted in Slug snail & puppydog tail | Leave a Comment
Tags: London trivia

London has always been a rich seam for novelists, its diverse population from every corner of the world, 2,000 year history and a wonderful varied architecture makes for works of fiction.

Here is a CabbieBlog’s illustrated list of front doors that don’t exist:

280 Westbourne Park Road: Remember the famous blue door that belonged to Hugh Grant’s character in the 1999 romantic comedy Notting Hill? When the movie was filmed, it belonged to Notting Hill writer and director Richard Curtis, after it became such a hit (the highest grossing British film to date, in fact), Curtis cleverly sold his home at a nice profit, nice work if you can get it. The new owners became tired of all the attention their famous blue door received and auctioned it off for charity, and a nondescript black door now stands in its place.

221b Baker Street: When Conan Doyle installed his great detective at No 221 the street numbering ran no further than 85. It was renumbered in the 1930s, with former building society Abbey National landing the desirable 221. For a period, Abbey even assigned staff to answer correspondence addressed to Sherlock Holmes. In 1990, a Sherlock Holmes Museum open on the street, and despite its address being 237, Westminster Council allowed it to adopt the number 221b. All Sherlock Holmes letters, however elementary, are no handled there.

27a Wimpole Street: “I have often walked down this street before”. The masculine book lined study occupied by Professor Henry Higgins who takes a bet from Colonel Pickering that he can transform unrefined, dirty Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle into a lady in My Fair Lady are supposedly at this address, although in reality the premises are occupied by a doctors’ surgery.

110a Piccadilly: Why Dorothy L. Sayer invented a fictional address for her great character Lord Peter Wimsey she inserted an “a” in the address, suggesting either an act of homage to Sherlock Holmes or a sly parody. Unfortunately as a front door it remains fictional for the Park Lane Hotel ballroom occupies the site.

CabbieBlog uses Technorati Tags: Sherlock Holmes Lord Peter Wimsey My Fair Lady Notting Hill

Cracking the Coade

17 August, 2010 at 12:38 am | Posted in Slug snail & puppydog tail | 2 Comments
Tags: London statutes

Standing on Westminster Bridge guarding the gateway to south London stands the 13-ton South Bank Lion, made from London’s famous artificial stone, said to be the most durable and weatherproof of any such material so far invented.

Patented by Richard Holt and manufactured in his Lambeth yard from 1720 for 40 years this stone was successfully modified by unmarried “Mrs” Coade by the addition of finely ground glass and prefired clay, when she took over the factory in 1769.

Over the next 70 years Coade Artificial Manufactory as it became known, produced a range of garden nymphs, sphinxes, statutes, busts and other ornamental features for buildings, Coade stone can be found at Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, the Tower of London and on the tomb of Captain Bligh in the churchyard of St. Mary-at-Lambeth.

As it says on one of its paws the South Bank Lion was completed in May 1837 just three years before the factory closed with a loss of the stone’s precise composition formula.

Our Lion first graced the Lion brewery on the south bank of the Thames near where Hungerford Bridge now stands. Painted red and standing high over the entrance archway he even survived the Blitz. The brewery was demolished in 1949 and our Lion disappeared to emerge to grace the Festival of Britain in 1952. Two years later at the King’s suggestion the Lion was placed at the entrance to Waterloo Station.

He has only stood in his current position since 1966. When it was moved several items of interest were found in a recess in the lion’s back, they included two coins from the time of William IV and a trade card of the Coade family, so when the Lion was moved to its present site a 1966 coin and a copy of The Times for 17th March 1966 were added to the original items.

The lab boys have rather broken the myth of a lost formula for Coade Stone having recreated it perfectly in a laboratory in the British Museum.

If you want to have a go this is how you go about it:

Its manufacture requires special skills: extremely careful control and skill in kiln firing, over a period of days. This skill is even more remarkable when the potential variability of kiln temperatures at that time is considered. Mrs Coade’s factory was the only really successful manufacturer.

The formula used was:
10% of grog (see below)
5-10% of crushed flint
5-10% fine quartz (to reduce shrinkage)
10% crushed soda lime glass.
60-70% Ball clay from Dorset and Devon.

The ‘grog’ was made up of finely crushed fired items, such as pitchers (ware that has been fired but rejected due to the presence of faults). This was also referred to as “fortified clay” which was then inserted (after kneading) into a kiln which would fire the material at a temperature of 1,100 degrees Celsius for over four days.

As a further blow to his mythical status our Lion’s manhood was reworked after being considered too large once he came down from his high archway over the brewery gate.

CabbieBlog uses Technorati Tags: Buckingham Palace Windsor Castle Tower of London Captain Bligh

731 days and counting

13 August, 2010 at 2:09 am | Posted in A window on My World | 2 Comments
Tags: Retirement

The London 2012 Olympics finish on Sunday 12th August, which thanks the introduction of leap years in the Gregorian calendar is exactly 2 years and 1 day from now, and marks the day I plan to retire from taking you, dear customer, to the destination of your choice with a degree competence.

Now I’m not one of those who rejoiced reading recently that the Government is to abolish the compulsory retirement age from next October, giving me the right to carry on pushing the old cab around London for as long as I choose, or more to the point, for as long as the Public Carriage Office choose.

Some may feel they have a lot to offer with their wisdom and experience, Disraeli and Churchill both spring to mind, but of course those two septuagenarian prime ministers weren’t picking up drunks on a Saturday night, indeed Churchill was the drunk most nights.

These days I forget roads and places nowadays with alarming alacrity, hell sometimes I even forget were I’m going with a passenger in the back. In my younger days, I had always hoped that work would get easier as I grew older, but now I’m finding it gets more difficult all the time.

Having been let down by successive Governments my pension is not what I was promised in the sunshine days of the Seventies, so now I find myself planning to work past my 65th birthday, if only up to the end of the Olympics.

Now I completely understand the argument that life expectancy has shot up since retirement age for men was set at 65 in 1926, and that was when three out of five of us didn’t live to draw our pensions, but I can’t help feeling however, that if only successive governments, while protecting their own pension pots, had kept their hands off our National Insurance contributions and protected our private pensions in the years of prosperity, since if they had, there would be no problems about funding my own retirement.

The present coalition isn’t compelling anyone to work beyond their retirement age, but since the respected National Institute of Economic and Social Research have estimated it will save the country £15 billion for every 18 months our average working lives are extended, it won’t be long before they raise the retirement bar, and we will simply have a choice of working on beyond our 75th birthday should we choose to do so.

CabbieBlog uses Technorati Tags: Benjamin Disraeli Winston Chuchill Coalition Government

Homeless not hopeless

10 August, 2010 at 12:23 am | Posted in Thinking allowed | 2 Comments
Tags: London heroes

While driving through Hackney recently I came across this group of social deprivation warriors, and like or loath them if properties weren’t left empty by landlords or disgracefully unoccupied by local councils, squatters (who often have not broken any laws) would not exist.

On closer inspection I was surprised to find this once elegant early Victorian detached house had a plaque attached to its gatepost “The Elizabeth Fry Refuge 1849-1913”. The irony of squatters living in Elizabeth Fry’s Refuge has obviously escaped Hackney Council’s attention.

Born in Norwich on 21st May 1780 Elizabeth was the daughter of John Gurney a partner in the famous Gurney Bank, her mother was a member of the Barclay banking family and a devout Quaker who would help the poor of the district every day. As a young woman Elizabeth’s friend was Amelia Alderson whose father was a member of the Corresponding Society Group advocating universal suffrage and annual parliaments.

In July 1799 she was introduced to a fellow Quaker, Joseph Fry a successful merchant’s son. They married the following year move to Plashet (now East Ham in London) and she bore him eight children.

In 1813 a friend of the Fry family, Stephen Grellet, visited Newgate Prison. Grellet was deeply shocked by what he saw but was informed that the conditions in the women’s section were even worse. When Grellet asked to see this part of the prison, he was advised against entering the women’s yard as they were so unruly they would probably do him some physical harm. Grellet insisted and was appalled by the suffering that he saw.

When Grellet told Elizabeth about the way women were treated in Newgate, she decided that she must visit the prison. There she discovered 300 women and their children, huddled together in two wards and two cells, the female prisoners slept on the floor without nightclothes or bedding. Although some of the women had been found guilty of crimes, others were still waiting to be tried.

Elizabeth began to visit the women of Newgate Prison, supplying those clothes and establishing a school, and later with other Quakers formed the Association for the Improvement of the Female Prisoners at Newgate. Her brother in law published an inquiry into prison discipline and upon being elected as an Member of Parliament, he addressed Parliament and pointed out that there were 107,000 people in British prisons, greater than all the other prisoners in Europe put together – it is also a greater number than in today’s prisons.

Elizabeth gave evidence to a House of Commons Committee, describing how Newgate held 30 prisoners to a room each prisoner had a space of 6 feet by 2 feet, with hardened offenders sharing rooms with first time offences. At a time when over 200 offences were capital offences she declared “capital punishment was evil and produce evil results”.

When Sir Robert Peel became Home Secretary he introduced a series of reforms directed at introducing more humane treatment of prisoners as a result of pressure from Elizabeth.

Elizabeth also became concerned about the quality of nursing staff. In 1840 she started a training school for nurses in Guy’s Hospital and Florence Nightingale wrote to Fry to explain how she had been influenced by her views on the training of nurses. Later, when Nightingale went to the Crimean War, she took a group of Fry nurses with her to look after the sick and wounded soldiers.

It is claimed that Queen Victoria, who was forty years younger than Elizabeth Fry, might have modelled herself on this woman who successfully combined the roles of mother and public figure.

Although prison reform was her main concern she also campaigned for the homeless in London. So when you have a £5 note in your hand turn it over, there you will find Elizabeth Fry, Quaker, prison reformer, campaigner for universal suffrage and champion of the poor and homeless, it’s just a pity that Hackney Council don’t try their best to follow her lead.

CabbieBlog uses Technorati Tags: Elizabeth Fry Hackney Sir Robert Peel Gurney Bank

I don’t Adam and Eve it!

6 August, 2010 at 12:56 am | Posted in A window on My World | Leave a Comment
Tags: London life

The Oxford English Dictionary claims that the first use of the word cockney as a reference to native Londoners was in 1521, and since I did The Knowledge I’ve been telling anyone who cares to listen that I’m a cockney, blithely ignoring the fact that I was brought up in a leafy North London suburb.

For to be a cockney you have to have been born within the sound of Bow Bells, and contrary to the widely held belief the bells in question are not from Bow Church in East London, but St Mary-le-Bow on Cheapside in the City of London, and being born in Fitzrovia, I thought, erroneously, I easily came within its audible catchment area.

A church has existed on the site since Saxon times, and the subsequent Norman church was known as St Marie de Arcubus or Le Bow because of the bow arches of stone in its Norman crypt. The current building was built to the designs of Christopher Wren, 1671–1673, with the 223-foot steeple completed 1680. It was considered the second most important church in the City of London after St Paul’s Cathedral, and was one of the first churches to be rebuilt by Wren for this reason.

On 10 May 1941 a German bomb destroyed the Wren church including its bells made famous in the children’s nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons. Restoration was begun in 1956 and the bells only rang again in 1961 to produce a new generation of cockneys, a full 14 years after my birth.

Now according to research at Lancaster University a cockney accent will soon no longer be the hallmark of Londoners. The distinctive accent now known as Estuary Speak is more likely to be found in the Home Counties of Essex and Hertfordshire. The linguists claim that ever-increasing numbers of people in the capital are speaking Jafaican. The hybrid speech, created by successive waves of immigration is a mixture of cockney, combined with Bangladeshi, African and West Indian.

The London dialect could have disappeared within another generation and cockneys in their 40s will be the last generation to speak like stars from a BBC soap, and now the dwindling ranks of cockney speakers are being asked to record their voices for posterity.

But hope is at hand, the newly built Kings Place Arts Centre near King’s Cross has posted a downloadable recording of Bow Bells on its website so that cockneys that have moved away can still let their children be born within the sound of its famous chimes.

CabbieBlog uses Technorati Tags: Bow Bells Oranges and Lemons Christopher Wren Kings Place

Moving on up

3 August, 2010 at 12:09 am | Posted in Thinking allowed | Leave a Comment
Tags: london taxis

Our Political Masters have said to the electorate that savings of up to 40 per cent need to be made in the public sector, either Transport for London were lucky enough to have signed their lease before the axe fell, or just didn’t care when the politicians promised cuts before the election.

Take my little taxi world of the Public Carriage Office, now rebranded with the catchy title “Taxi and Private Hire Licensing”. The renaming of a perfectly understood title for the organisation that regulate taxis and private hire has been undertaken, no doubt at a not inconsiderable cost.

Furthermore, this public organisation have now moved its premises, from the building they have occupied for decades to one of the most prestigious recently constructed office premises in central London.

When charged with the task of regulating private hire the old premises were refurbished to accommodate the organisation’s new responsibilities, but clearly the old building didn’t match the aspirations of senior management so for their new headquarters Palestra has been chosen.

If you know Blackfriars Road you will know this new iconic building, looking top heavy with the upper floors overhanging the lower part of the building in an alarming way.

A simple bog standard office space wasn’t sufficient, for this scaled down department, for that is what it is as they now have withdrawn the counter services offered for cabbies renewing their licences.

But there, those upper floors at Palestra must make a great boardroom to discuss the PCO (oops sorry, Taxi and Private Hire Licensing) future direction, just don’t tell the new Conservative/LibDem Coalition how you are spending the public’s money.

CabbieBlog uses Technorati Tags: Public Carriage Office Palestra Conservative/LibDem Coalition