Open House London weekend celebrates 25 fantastic years: hurray! But what's with this Clapham Old Town walk?

Here we go, into the radical redesign of Clapham Old Town on the new cycle-friendly pathways....sort of.

If you're into London's Open House weekend, then your annual treat is getting very close, and this year's free booklet is packed with even more potential pleasures than ever before.

What's more, this year's weekend - on the 16th - 17th September -  is the 25th anniversary of Open House London, which took a brilliant, simple idea and made it happen: why not open up interesting buildings - however grand or however modest - to the public, just for one weekend in the year?

This year's catalogue includes a great Top 25 of the most popular buildings it has featured over the years - the perfect trigger for debates. It also includes several topical essays on the big issues facing the city now, notably affordable housing, transport and traffic congestion, and accessible open spaces.

As a creature of bad habit I turn immediately to my local borough - Lambeth - and find amidst a well-stocked selection of local treats, this slightly curious entry in the Walks & Tours section:

"Clapham Old Town and Venn Street: This guided walk...looks at a radically redesigned public realm which re-balanced the street environment in favour of the pedestrian and cyclist..."

This refers to the recent tarting up of the old Polygon area which was commented on by this blog back in 2014.

So here you are at the end of Bromells Road. Cars have to turn
left across the pavement. No signs to say what bikes should do,
even though a bike path starts just across the road...

Well, the patch of artfully sown wild flowers at the northern tip of the Polygon (or is it "piazza" now?) is gorgeous. The new public space around the Polygon and Rose & Crown pub is certainly neat and tidy but to be honest it's a bit sterile. Especially now that the old public toilets have disappeared behind hoardings.

There are a few of those metal chairs scattered around, single seaters which look like they were designed to give bankers who have just been told their bonuses are frozen, somewhere to sit and contemplate their futures.

There's a very celebrated upmarket restaurant, a trio of pubs (if you include The Sun and The Prince of Wales across the road)  and...well,  a couple of cafes, also over the road...but not much else.

As for it being more cycle friendly: well, how, exactly?

After a couple of years of trying to get to grips with the remodelled and supposedly bike-friendly traffic flows,  they still seem at best puzzling, often confusing, and in some places downright dangerous to both cyclists and pedestrians.

Here it is - so off you go, heading north against the traffic 

Firstly, far from "reining in" motorists, they have given those coming from the north two separate routes up to the Common and the High Street. They can either be good and follow the B303 past Orlando Road and stop at the junction with the one-way system around Clapham Common.

But if they're in a hurry, or just typical motorists, there's nothing to stop them going the old way, up past The Sun pub and the local Sainsburys and a load of new flats, then pushing their way back onto the one-way system via The Pavement. It's a new rat run beloved of big white vans and equally big black SUVs.

Originally under the new scheme, as I remember, this road was gated at the northern end, and should have been for resident and delivery access only.

A few yards on you get to this bit, but no explanation why
you might want to turn right across the road...nothing!

Most of the pedestrians coming from Orlando Road, The Omnibus Arts Centre and the homes and many businesses on North Side want to get to the tube station. So they continue to cross the road at the point, directly outside the old Library (now The Omnibus) where there used to be a very well-used pedestrian crossing.

Mysteriously they have now moved that crossing just 20 or 30 yards further east, past the Starbucks, and just far enough to make it seem an annoying diversion if you're in a hurry.

The trouble is, this road is now two-way and there is also a bus-stand a few yards to the west. There are almost always a couple of 249 double-decker buses waiting there, which completely block the view, making it impossible to see approaching traffic until it is literally upon you. This is so dangerous for all pedestrians.

As for cyclists, well it seems like the cycle route has been sketched-in by some town planner at the end of  a long liquid lunch; clearly they all forgot that this bit of the scheme was never fully planned.

Not that anyone expects joined-up thinking from a council that has recently shut down one of the finest, best-loved and most-used libraries in London.  (In case you missed the stories, I mean the Carnegie Library in Herne Hill).

But a joined-up cycle route through this complex junction of roads would be good. The route as it stands is, frankly, bonkers.

If you do cross the road, you end up on this scary contra-
flow bike lane where you are glared at by drivers of big
black shiny SUVs (and OK, other vehicles too...)

If you're coming from the Brixton direction, or from Clapham Common tube station, and aiming for Lavender Hill or Wandsworth Road - well, you have to think hard about where to go. Most cyclists just follow the roads. The pavements around the tube station offer no bike routes (although quite a few cyclists use them, to the annoyance of crowds of commuters and school-kids milling around here at the busy times).

There are no signs to encourage cyclists to use, for example, Venn Street - which looks pedestrianised, but is it?

So the bike lane seems to start quite arbitrarily on the edge of the Common, 100 yards further north, opposite the junction with Bromells Road. This is a one way street with no bike lane. Cars and bikes have to cross the wide pavement to rejoin the road (which, confusingly, is called The Pavement at this point).

Cyclists can then cross the road and get onto a little bit of bike lane going north; but a few yards further on it sends them back across the road and onto a contra-flow bike lane which is frankly scary.

If you follow the cycle path past the above-mentioned wild flower patch, it sends you back west towards the Common - and to re-cross the main traffic flow, this time on a zebra crossing - so

As you can see, parked cars and oncoming traffic both
habitually impinge on the so-called cycle lane.

that you've negotiated four of the five sides of the Polygon to get back to a point a few yards from where you were 5 minutes ago.

There's a tiny bit of pavement here which has one of those joint use cyclist/pedestrian symbols in one paving slab - but who notices that? And the path is not wide enough for this dual use.

Like you, I hate seeing cyclists charging around recklessly on footpaths - but around here, it's sometimes almost understandable.

Lambeth Council is still open to changing these arrangements, apparently, so let's hope this Open House Weekend walk makes the crazy layout of these bike lanes clearer to all.

Plenty of really great stuff in the Open House programme, though. In Lambeth, the residents of the threatened Cressingham Gardens Estate have organised a tour, as have the residents of the Central Hill estate in Crystal Palace. Both these estates were built in the 60s and 70s; a Lambeth architect, Ted Hollamby, was involved in both; they are both largely judged to be successful in meeting the need for low-rise, high-density, housing - important in the 70s, absolutely vital now.

In neighbouring Southwark, there's a chance to learn  more about the Dawson Heights Estate, a place that has always caught my imagination. From the distance, say in Brockwell Park,  it has the look of some re-imagined version of a medieval hill-town. Somewhere, in other words, where I always wanted to live!

There's so much to see, and only one short weekend to see it all in! Until 2018.

Meanwhile, September's also the month of the Lambeth Heritage Festival. Plenty of fascinating things are promised: must try to digest all this info, and get along to at least some of these events. Thanks!

The long and windy road to Woolwich (aka Get your kicks on the A206)

Less time to write this pointless blog as longer and longer journeys are required in search of the few hourly-paid hours of soft labour.

Less time needed, because stupid pointless blog no longer aims to do anything other than satisfy writer's solipsistic urge to see its verbal utterances smeared across a dirty Macbook screen.

Following the migration further out of town, further east, further south - writer finds itself cycling all the way to the Thames Barrier and beyond to what used to be Woolwich Dockyard.

Biggest surprise is actually getting as far as SE18 as there's so much incredibly interesting stuff to see on the way. From the leafy groves of Camberwell to the densely-packed historical delights of Deptford - we have to rush past them all, heading into the wind and the rain and the diesel fumes. And then, we dare not even mention....Greenwich.

All along the route, the sublime is buried under deep layers of ridiculous levels of pollution and aggression. The pollution from nose-to-tail trucks and buses on large sections of the obvious route is appalling.

The aggression, mainly from drivers. All along the Peckham Road, you try to beat the traffic lights and avoid all those huge angry powerful cars trying to push out across your cycle lane from their backstreet turnings. Bad enough even in the dog days of August; so much worse when schools are back.

The congestion reaches a peak in the bottleneck of New Cross Gate, every day, all day.  Hardly surprising, as this unfortunate stretch of what should be a High Street has to double as part of the trunk route out of London to Dover: it's a local, regional, national and international artery and it's about the width of three buses. And the pavements are hardly wide enough for two McLaren pushchairs to pass. It's bonkers!

So, for a superannuated cyclist, each journey involves cheating death many more than nine times.
I've tasted the tarmacadam of Coldharbour Lane too many times: I now have to make eye contact with every driver and every pedestrian before I dare to proceed.

But all the way to Woolwich? Madness. Last time this gormless blogger came this far south-east, it was to visit someone who was starting, and later finishing, an eight-year prison stretch, which began and half-ended at HMP Belmarsh, near Plumstead and Thamesmead.

This fellow always said he preferred the time in this modern high-security prison than the in-between years spent on a low-category wing somewhere near Nottingham, or  later spells in Rochester, Lewes and Brixton.

And now, when you look east down the river  - which is visibly more an estuary at this point - you can see that these areas will soon be as "sought after" as Battersea or Rotherhithe have already become.

Woolwich is here and now, Plumstead is coming soon after. Apparently there's even going to be a Crossrail link at some point.

The good news is that the river itself is so majestic that even the shittiest of new developments on the riverbanks fade into insignificance. There's more river traffic down here, as well: dredgers, sugar boats, the occasional small cruise liner, and lots of those giant steel barges filled with rubbish, or with earth or sand, presumably coming from or going to the high-rise building sites all along the river.

The Camberwell Hokusai: read the fascinating
story of its creation and near-destruction on the BBC website

So what's so interesting about this ancient west to east run?  Unless, that is, you are a rich property speculator.

To cycle the route from Clapham to Woolwich is to witness the creation of a new seam of property developer gold in the making.

The  newish apartment blocks with their bright green balconies along Coldharbour Lane are just an overture to the really Wagnerian stuff going on around Deptford Creek and all the way up the Greenwich peninsula, and then across the river...and back again into Woolwich itself.

But....but....against all this, there is so much to love on this journey.

There's still the pure joy of passing through Camberwell, one of the few bits that has yet to succumb to the particularly nasty strain of the gentrification virus that has consumed Clapham entirely and is now well ensconced in Brixton.

Camberwell has its long-term affluent enclave, all the way up the Grove and into the hills over to Dulwich. Salute Hokusai as you cross Denmark Hill, cutting through leafy Love Walk and back onto the grinding reality of Peckham Road.

And how, and how. All the way from Camberwell to Deptford, you see it, you feel it, you are crowded off to the curb by the thundering ready-mix trucks and the massive "motorway maintenance" lorries which seem to be more often found on narrow inner London streets.

This great old-school junk shop announces your arrival
in  New Cross Gate

Oh but cheer up - there's still plenty of old school south-east London on this route. Peckham is obviously requires a chapter or two all of its own; you daren't linger here, you'd never get away. Keep on until you get to the historic high street of New Cross Gate, signalled by the wonderful and genuine junk shop just before the railway station.

Amazing how the presence and huge influence of Goldsmiths College has never impacted on this high street in anything but a good way; the students and staff clearly care about their very special bit of urban streetscape.

Then on into Deptford: and this, like Peckham, or perhaps even more so, is such a deep well of history that the best thing is to shut your eyes and cycle on, else you'll be here for weeks. As you cross the Creek, you spot another dumped scooter in the mud.

Then suddenly you are in tourist heaven or Hell, whichever you prefer - and again you must keep the blinkers on, cycle on grimly through all that maritime stuff, the grandiose Wren, of Greenwich; stop if you like in the wonderful park for a sandwich and some water.

Because you're going to need all your strength for the next and final leg of this trip as you plug on east. There's a very distinct change in the atmosphere as you past the dark, almost northern looking chimneys of the big old power station, and as you enter the straggling suburban badlands east of Greenwich.

Cross that major artery, the Blackwall Tunnel Approach, at the nape of the neck of the Greenwich Peninsula - swing hard left onto the Woolwich Road and by God you get your first real sniff of life in outer-SE London.

Beware the stare of the plaster meerkat

The Road to Woolwich is lined with mythical creatures;
leave your best instincts behind, dear traveller, smell
the burning rubber!

 Here you confront a row of small animals, chained to the railings, all staring at you, blank eyed, as if traumatised.

Oh by the way, these animals are made of plaster, and belong to a shop selling mirrors. Nevertheless the way they sit there, tethered, to brave the great surge of traffic, is always impressive. The plaster doggie closest to the junction is a goner.

He's imbibed too much tyre dust, too much distilled diesel, to many hard stares from lads on nicked scooters. Then you see the dead stare of the plaster meerkat,  and you think, that's enough I'm going home.

But it's too late, you are now in fast-moving traffic, it'll take you through Charlton and on, and on... to the next big junction.

A big pub on the righthand, south side of the road catches the attention. It's name seems to be a rallying call to the heavy traffic surging up and down yet another feeder road for the tunnel. It's name - The Antigallican.

In plain, polite English, that pub's name means: "against the French"...

Now, given we're not far from the main A2 road to Dover and Folkestone and thus to Calais, you might be forgiven for thinking this area has it own special take on history.

The old military influence of Greenwich and Deptford, the Woolwich Dockyards and Arsenal - all that stored-up potential violence - prevails, of course it does, it is all relatively recent history.  And of course it all came back home again in 2013 by the murder of the soldier, Lee Rigby.

No coincidence that one of the more violent scenes of Clockwork Orange was filmed in the brutalist concrete estates of Thamesmead, while the supposed murder in Blow Up happens in Maryon Park  - one of the entrances to which we're passing right now.

This strange green space is like a maze or snail's shell, folding in on itself, a strange vortex, paths leading upwards past tennis courts, up to a peak where there are views across the Thames. It is a Tardis of a park: much bigger on the inside than its boundaries suggest.

As is well-known and documented, this is the park where Antonioni shot the key maybe-murder scenes for his wonderful and crazy 1966 film, Blow Up.

I search in vain for the antique shop where David Hemmings buys a wooden propeller, before entering the park with his Nikon F.

The shop has gone but the park remains very much as you see it in the movie - except that many of the trees have doubled in size, and most of that distinctive wooden fencing has gone. And the grass is just normally green, not painted green as the mythology of the film suggests the Director insisted on.

For me the part that really worked was cycling around past the tennis courts where, 51 years ago, a load of hippie extras from the the Living Theatre performed their mimed tennis game, and drove off in a batter old Land Rover.

The murder scene - then as now - is supremely dull and inconclusive. I sit on a bench somewhere near where the killing might or might not have happened.  People have been here. There's the usual mess of silver foil, fag packets, dirty tissues, energy drink tins, fast-food containers, empty prescription pill strips, used condoms.

I eat my 9-seed bar and from the corner of an eye detect movement; about five teenagers in school uniform have arrived, seen me, and turned back down the hill. I've occupied their favourite spot, by the look of it.

What were they planning? God knows. I get back on my bike and edge downhill to the A206, and take a detour down to the Thames Barrier Park, a not very convincing sliver of green space which does take you all the way down to the river - and one hell of a view of everything.

From this angle, the scale of the development around Canary Wharf becomes truly apparent. Just for once, I think the developers got it right. This was the right place for a dense plantation of high-rise luxury apartments, and they are still shooting up. Many of them look much more interesting than any of the dreary rubbish going up in Nine Elms.

And so on to the next roundabout, this one blessed with a big drive-thru MacDonalds, just before you get to a huge Co-Op funeral parlour.  Which is about as far as we're going today, just back down to the river and on to the weird former industrial estate where new enclaves of artists' studios rub shoulders with confectionery warehouses, police vehicle depots and abandoned factories. Just across the river, Tate & Lyle's Silvertown plant sucks a lot of the world's sugar production into the UK.

Right next to London City Airport, which quickly sucks in and spits out global executives looking for always newer, always better havens for their megabucks.

So, new stories begin.