Search results

Quite a few street names associated with Germany were renamed during the First World War; Battenberg Road in Richmond became Windsor Road. Leipsic [Leipzig] Road in Camberwell became Comber Grove, but Blucher Road remained unchanged, as did the Blucher pub in Twickenham, presumably because...

Of course! I forgot that as I would be driving from Bromsgrove to Ludlow -- A448 then A456 -- and wouldn't need to go all around it. I remember that the roads got badly clogged, and I found it slightly easier to go via the south of the town centre on the A451 and cut across to the A456 on the B4549.

I've always been appalled at the way the Kidderminster Ring Road seems to have been blasted through the town centre. It almost makes the Coventry Ring Road look an aesthetic success by comparison. When I've visited the Severn Valley Railway, I've never been tempted to go up the road to the town...

Yes, the Selous Scouts were a part of the Rhodesian army and they had a particularly unpleasant reputation, details at Wikipedia here. I'm not usually in favour of changing street names, but I was quite happy with this one's renaming. A puzzling one is in Kingston. Here are three snips from OS...

For me, until I went to work and learnt about tender documents, a tender was the coal and water vehicle on a tender locomotive, but for older people -- and we are talking about really older ones here, as I'm 70 next year -- a tender was also a boat that took supplies to ships, and that was a...

I saw somewhere on the internet that South-Western services on the Windsor Line had been disrupted because of animals on the line between Mortlake and Richmond, and was puzzled as I know the area well and was unable to think of anywhere any farm animals might have gained access to the track, as...

Having been a driver for half a century, I don't think that driving manners have become worse, rather I think that there is a lot more traffic on the roads these days, more motors, more lorries, and despite the road-building that's occurred, the roads are for the most part more crowded. One...

Living in London, I've never had the dubious pleasure of riding in a Pacer. Much as I have enjoyed riding in four-wheelers on the Bluebell Railway, and a full-length trip on the Ffestiniog Railway in a Hudson four-wheel wagon was great fun, I think that anything but a short run in a four-wheel...

I don't remember that one. There used to be a long gloomy subway under Tottenham Court Road / Charing Cross Road / Oxford Street; the gents was still open (and useful if one had had a few pints), although Soho's junkies would for some reason push their old needles into the holes in the pegboard...

I agree with a lot of previous comments. It would be a pretty meaningless gesture for most people, for whom the old names are something from the distant past, if they mean anything at all. One has to be getting on a bit to recall Austin, Morris, Singer, Hillman, etc, etc. And even those names...

The 1930s privately-built housing estates were often built with back alleys wide enough to take a motor and a garage at the bottom of the garden, or with a garage on the side of the house as a single-storey addition. But they were pretty tight even back then, and, as others above have noted...

Some ten months back I posted the following: Travelling through Strawberry Hill station the other week, I noticed that brackets had been attached to the fencing posts on the up (towards Twickenham) platform; travelling through this week, I noticed that a solid fence of fairly substantial timber...

I agree. Broad Street really was a sorry wreck by the 1980s; even had the North London Line retained a City station, it would have required but a small sliver of the extensive Broad Street site. As for Liverpool Street, I was impressed by the rebuilding, with a full-width, spacious and...

I imagine that a high-speed railway link to central London would have been envisaged as part of the project. It's not so much distance as travelling time and convenience that is the major criterion here. Until the Piccadilly Line extension was built from Hounslow West I reckon that Heathrow was...

The old buildings at Highbury and Islington have always appeared to me as rather excessive even by Victorian standards, along with some of the others on the North London Line, such as Bow. More generally, I imagine that the changing nature of railway traffic in the postwar period (no more...

I had a similar experience yesterday evening. The Kingston loop service was at Hampton Wick, but the train's tannoy announced that the train was at Kingston, the next stop. The guard didn't correct this erroneous announcement. A blind or poorly-sighted passenger who alighted on the strength of...

Perhaps it's building material for Woking Council's skyscraper-building scheme, which has been such a wonderful money-making venture for the council and council-tax-payers alike?

To what degree, if any, is Victoria run these days as two stations? Even after the formation of the Southern Railway, the two halves were fairly autonomous, but is this still the case?

Years back, a young work colleague came into work with a big grin on his face. He told us that coming up from Gillingham, where he lived, he and a pal rode in a vacant guard's compartment that had been left open. The train had been held up several times on the journey, and as they approached...

My dad and I had front seats on the DLR some years back, and a little kid came up to the front, and I said, 'Do you want to drive it?', he said 'Yes', so my dad and I moved to another pair of seats, and let the littl'un and his mum sit there.