Photography Competition

...Aha - thought that would make you look...

Yes indeedy, folks, the good burghers at The Friends of East Greenwich Pleasaunce are running a competition to coincide with their latest Summer get together on June 8th. After the last couple of washouts, let's hope they have better weather for their summer kneesup, because if you want to enter, you'll have to go along...


The exact stalls are, I'm told, yet to be decided, but will include the usual faves, which I'm assuming will include books, cakes and punch plus others, something for the kids and perhaps the local fire service.


But onto the comp. You need to get over to the Pleasaunce and start snapping now (well perhaps not quite now unless you like capturing artistic drips from ancient anchor-shaped gravestones...) The only rules are that it has to be all your own work and it has to be recognisably East Greenwich Pleasaunce. There will be a mystery prize courtesy of Ivor Howell Cameras in Westcombe Hill and entrants will be eligible for a planned exhibition at Viewfinder Photography Gallery in the Autumn.


Now - no sending the stuff to me, ok? I mean - yes - by all means send me pictures of anything you like (see my FAQs for how that works) but if you want to enter the competition, you need to bring the picture(s) along to the shindig on June 8th. If you have any questions about the competition please email pleasauncefriends@hotmail.co.uk

Selling The Blackwall Tunnel Southern Approach

It's new, it's groovy and it's going to solve all your problems. Look - it's so funky we've even done you a cool leaflet in sizzling brown 'n' orange, with all kinds of amaaaaazing models and diagrams to show you just how fab it's going to be. The GLC is getting on down like the proverbial sex machine you always knew we were and we're going ape...

Ok, Flower People. It's 1971. The Age of Aquarius is dawning and Love is all around. And what better way to promote Peace to all Men than by creating a hip new motorway to link hands across the water, North with South?

The old Blackwall Tunnel, built in 1897, was created at a time when the best it could expect was the odd milk cart or horse-drawn omnibus. Fewer than 1,000 vehicles used it a day. By the Swinging Sixties all those camper vans and minis had forced the building of a second tunnel, opened 60 years after the first in 1967.

I'll get onto that another day (unless Tunnelbore beats me to it, of course...) for now, I'm more interested in a slim pamphlet that came tucked in between a bunch of guidebooks I bought as a job lot recently. One of those ephemeral leaflets that would have been distributed to houses in the area to let them know what was going on (much as we're getting - or perhaps not getting, ahem, leaflets about the Olympics) and by rights should have been thrown away. But it wasn't - and now, though pure fluke, I've got it.

It's a Greater London Council document about the proposed new Blackwall Tunnel Southern Approach Road (the A102 to us; Misery Alley to thousands of commuters.) Work had begun in 1967, but this leaflet was produced as an extra clarion call to trumpet the joys of the coming Saviour of The London Motorist.

It's a fascinating document for many reasons - not least the sheer optimism with which it's been written. There's no puff-piece from some councillor at the beginning - it relies on the excitement that such a project will surely imbue in every citizen by its very existence. I mean - who wouldn't want a new motorway running through their back garden? So it ploughs straight into the technical stuff. It gives, in far more detail than today's dumbed-down documents, snippets of how it will be constructed and what with.

Charmingly, one of the ingredients is ribbed concrete. Perhaps not your idea of Nirvana, but the pamphlet can hardly conceal its excitement that this is the very same material that had just been used on the new elephant house at London Zoo. In similarly excited terms we are told of exotic materials such as 'grit-blasted' and even 'fair-faced' concrete. Innovations such as electrical road heating on the Woolwich Road Flyover (blimey...) emergency telephones and traffic surveillance equipment would be installed. Truly a Seventies Dream.

This was quite a departure. The old Blackwall Tunnel approach was (unsurprisingly) Tunnel Avenue. Hard to imagine that that sleepy little backwater was once the artery that led to the gaping maw that is the tunnel today. The leaflet is at pains to describe the new route. It would "begin near the gas holders (note the plural there - TGP) in Tunnel Avenue...and from that point southwards it will take a new route for nearly two miles, bridging over Blackwall Lane and Woolwich Road and passing under the railway by Westcombe Park Station."

It was all a bit bewildering, especially for the good folks of places like yesterday's Aldeburgh and Fearon Roads. So they provided maps a-go-go. The one that has the road superimposed over an Ordnance Survey Map didn't want to scan, so I've included (at the risk of getting my head cut off - this is, after all, all Crown Copyright, gulp) a photo instead:

From what I can tell, there was some compulsory purchase and demolition (even today roads such as Farmdale and Siebert and Westcombe Hill feel curiously truncated) but once it got to the Peninsula, it seems to have gone over allotment land (if you look at old maps, there were acres of allotments even thirty years ago) before ducking back down to the old road - where those two once-glorious red-brick buildings now stand forlornly wondering whether there was something their best friends never told them...

But my favourite part of the leaflet is definitely the artists impressions. No computer graphics in those days. Oh no. We got proper drawings then - such as that orange delight of the underpass at Bramshot Ave (above) and proper models, made out of cardboard, sticky-backed plastic, toilet rolls and matchsticks. Here, just for Dazza, is the model of Woolwich Road Flyover, complete with attendant foot and railway bridges. Not quite sure where you'd be on this map, Dazza - probably just off it - but cute, isnt' it? I love the little trucks, myself.

For anyone on the northern end of Tunnel Avenue, here is the model of the Boord St Footbridge. Puzzled by the name? Boord St (or what's left of it) is just next door to the Gas Holder (note the use of the singular form - TGP) - I'll wager it's the street with the old school on it. Curly, huh?

Whatever this road turned into, they clearly thought at the time it was the end to all Thames crossings ills. It was an age of optimism. An age before Global Warming, OPEC embargos and Environmental Concern. And this leaflet, in its brown and orange livery, is a little part of that optimism. Hell - reading it, even I feel excited. So when's this all happening then?

Hot News

Straight off the press, folks.

I emailed the Cutty Sark Trust yesterday about my idea for an Observation Platform - and have just received this from Julia Parker, Operations Manager:

"Guess what? We will soon be having a viewing platform!It’s taken us a while to sort out the details, but hopefully we should have it in place within the next month.I’ll send you an update as soon as I have an exact date….."

So - not quite because of me - the idea was in the ether already - but hey - who cares. Beat you to the front of the queue, guys...

Julia's said she'll send me some up to date pics too. Cor...

Yet more filming...

Ross says:

"On my way to work this morning I noticed umpteen lorry loads of filming equipment being unloaded at the top of Point Hill into the small park behind where I live (on your right as you get to the top of Point Hill - the name escapes me having only just moved there recently). I wonder if it's related to the goings on down in the Maritime area?"

The Phantom replies:

Goodness - not again! That will be the Point you're talking about. I have no idea what it's for this time. I walked up to the Point a few days ago only to find, once I'd huffed and puffed my way up there, the whole place overtaken with meeja types in square glasses telling me I couldn't go in, and giant cameras creating 'sun' on what seemed to be a perfectly sunny day. When I had a couple of friends to stay recently we couldn't get into the Painted Hall because they were filming a Japanese biscuit commercial. And that's not even beginning to count biggies like Wolf Man, The Golden Compass and The Duchess. Heavens to Murgatroyd.

Do you think that Greenwich Film Unit aren't charging enough or something? I mean it's nice to see the place being used - but there doesn't seem to be a day in the calendar that somewhere isn't out of bounds. I might as well move to Pinewood...

On a slightly less grumpy note, though, you do get to meet some interesting folk. Here is, for no other reason than he made me smile a lot, a security guard on the set of Wolf Man, giving me his impression of the Hairy One himself.

Uncanny, eh...

Phantom Favourite Front Gardens (8)

Alderburgh St, SE10

Right down the bottom of the Peninsula, tucked away between the various industrial estates and the A102 M flyover, two dainty little streets quietly exist in that strange place that is neither Greenwich nor Charlton, but something all of its own. Fearon St and Aldeburgh St could just be tatty little nothings tacked onto an unexciting business area - but they're not. The residents keep them neat and tidy and there are lots of little touches in them that makes me realise that this is a community that likes being where it is, and has a little unique flavour to it.

There are some sweet window boxes and filled tubs, early-days hedges and tidy flowerpots, but my favourite is an unassuming Victorian terraced house on Aldeburgh St with topiary grandeur punching above its weight.

Two great boxes of box, stepped like Aztec pyramids, a pair of square 'braziers' burst with an unfettered 'flame' of tufty growth on top from a simple brick wall. There is nothing else to muddy the view - no extra flowers, ornaments, hanging baskets, gnomes, wishing wells or birdbaths - and that's what makes this statement so bold.

A gardener of taste lives here.

Cutty Sark Cash-Generator-O-Matic

I've just had a thought. Every time I go past the Cutty Sark's boarded-up hulk, I see some one or other trying to peek through the little gap in the gate where the padlock goes. Sometimes there's even a little queue of nosy parkers trying to get a glimpse of what's going on - especially now there are interesting noises again. And let's face it - we're all just a little bit curious to know how things are proceeding behind that chipboard and plastic shell.

Don't you think it would be great if they created a little scaffolded observation platform, where people could pay a couple of quid a pop to watch the work going on? It would surely pay for itself - they might even get a local company to donate the equipment and erection in return for a little sign on the side - and they'd get more money towards the restoration programme. It could even be a little ramp so that wheelchairs could get up there too - after all it's not that high up.

I'd certainly return on a regular basis - especially if there was the odd expert around to answer questions from time to time. And it would be a good way of getting tourists involved in the works so they'd be more likely to return when it was finished.

What do you think, folks? Shall I suggest it to them? Would you pay a small fee to see the restoration works? How much? Maybe they could do a loyalty card scheme - where you get your card stamped every time you visit the works - a full card would be a free visit when it all opens again?

Right Royal Car Boot Sale

Q: What do The Greenwich Phantom and HRH The Duke of Edinburgh have in common?
A: When they went to the Historic Dockyards at Chatham they were both really only interested in seeing one thing - the bits and bobs of the Cutty Sark that are currently in storage there.

To be honest I didn't really think they'd be in some place the public could go. And I certainly didn't expect to see them in the open air. For some reason I just assumed that they would be being kept in a warehouse somewhere obscure, under lock and key. But on a family day out to Chatham Dockyard I just had to ask where it was.

The answer is on a very dull piece of dock, in between HMS Gannet and the submarine HMS Ocelot. All lain out on the ground, surrounded by metal fencing, like a giant car boot sale. I actually passed the stuff twice before finding it - it just looks like a pile of marine scrap - which I guess in some respects it is.

One of the orange-boiler-suited chaps who show people round, told me that the Cutty Sark guys rang round all the dockyards looking for space. Most of it's here, but not all; it's in various places - some's even down in Portsmouth - which at least spreads the risk. And it is behind metal fence, and the whole site is locked at night. But somehow it just feels a bit - well - vulnerable, to me. After all, a chap in the Ropery on the same site said that a giant coil of 28" rope that was not even useful to HMS Ark Royal got half-inched this winter - and some of the Cutty Sark's parts are really quite small and must have 'souvenir' value...

But what I really find so odd about it all is that this is a museum with paying visitors - you'd think they'd make a bit more of it. There's no sign, no note on it to say that this pile of junk is part of possibly the most famous ship in the world. You'd think they'd cash in, give it a sign and perhaps have someone dedicated to showing visitors what there is and what's going on with it (complete with collecting box - they still have a few million to find...)

The guy (whom I had to seek out - he certainly wasn't hanging around the stuff) told me that work has been done on it - especially the cabins (not that you'd notice it just yet) and people are interested - when The Duke of Edinburgh came to unveil a sculpture he was far more interested in making them show him round the Cutty Sark stuff (hooray - a royal patron who actually cares about their cause...)


And I really think that everyday visitors (and Phantoms, natch) would want to see it too - as it is I'd say that 99% of them will be just walking straight past this right-royal jumble sale, without even noticing it. I mean - I know the Dockyard's being paid for it - but this isn't the Big Yellow Self Storage Company looking after a couple of old wardrobes and some skiing gear here - they're missing a trick. It's all in full view - and yet somehow it's invisible.


But whatever. The main thing is that it wasn't on board the ship in Greenwich last May. And for that I am grateful. And there seem to be chalk markings everywhere so that the jigsaw will go back together again easily:



One other interesting thing about Chatham Royal Dockyard for Greenwich-o-philes (apart from the Chatham Chest) is that the guy also told me the giant 18th Century brick-built Dockyard Foundry (which has to be 150m in length) and which is being restored now:

will, by 2010, house the National Maritime Museum's collection of model ships. Apparently whenever a new ship is built a model HAS to be made of it - and the NMM holds them all, currently in storage. We will be able to see them soon, thanks to a £13m lottery grant.

But don't leave it that long - do give Chatham a visit. The guy told me (before he got called away to deal with a double-parked steam engine - I kid you not) that very sunny days like these are generally quiet because everyone goes to the coast instead...