Walking Back To Happiness

Tony asks:

"For reasons best known to myself I'm planning to use a free day coming up to walk from Greenwich into the West End, something I've wanted to for a long time. However, I'm stuck on which is the best route.

Taking the Thames Path on the north side of the Thames seems the most obvious route. It takes in a number of classic sites - Canary Wharf, Wapping, The Prospect of Whitby etc. However, my loyalty to South London makes me wonder about the mysteries of the southern route - I know far less about the areas I'll be going through.

Can anyone recommend one path over the other (I won't have time to do both, alas)? Or is there perhaps a third way - Evelyn St, Jamaica Road? I'm looking for history, sights I haven't seen before, a chance to experience a different side of London."

The Phantom rubs spectral hands with glee. This is the sort of question I live for...

At first sight, yes, the Thames Path to the north does seem to offer delights - and I'm not pretending for a moment that it's not an extremely pleasant affair, especially if you're into the ancient pubs of Wapping. A walk through Canary Wharf will yield all kinds of hidden joys - I love the new glass city, but the history and old architecture isn't completely gone - in fact its hidden nature makes it even more fun to find. And short deviations later in the route take you to wonders such as Wiltons Music Hall and St Georges in the East (who have got our cast-off church tower...) not to mention St Katherine's Dock and the Tower.

But the path isn't always distinct, and while I can't claim perfection on the southern route either, let me be a cheerleader for the south in this post (as opposed to all the others, ahem) and tell you a few of the highlights I enjoy most about the walk between Greenwich and Tower Bridge (after that I'm guessing you're already familiar with the South Bank, though maybe it would be worth another post sometime to deal with that. I'm a Greenwich-oholic but I'm not beyond spending far too much time wandering round the rest of the capital...)

The first thing I would recommend is the Thames Path National Trail Guide, by David Sharp. I got mine from the Visitors Centre in Greenwich but I'm sure Waterstones have it too. If memory serves it's about twelve quid - but it may have been updated to include the new bit east of the barrier. I like it because it covers both sides of the river on the same page when it gets to London, and it tells you good things to look out for along the way.

I can't put my hands on it at the moment, so I'll have to talk about the Southern side from memory - I'm sure other people will chip in with things you shouldn't miss too.

At the moment the start is a bit inauspicious, as it involves a trudge across the bridge on Creek Road, but hopefully when the building work is done(fingers crossed) we'll have a nice footbridge connecting Millennium Quay with Greenwich. Don't miss the slightly creepy statue of Czar Peter the Great and his even creepier dwarf...
You can walk up past, on one side, new build flats, on the other side some old piers, then fiddle your way up a small cobbled street behind old warehouses. Planning permissions currently being haggled over for the site, so see it now before it all changes (again.)

Continue until you get to Watergate Street, where the walls for the old wharves get in the way of the path. Still - it will give you a good excuse to see the wartime stretcher railings around the flats there.

If you get the opportunity to divert and pop to St Nicholas Church, it's a fantastic sight inside, with a famous wood carving by local-ish boy Grinling Gibbons, but even if it's not open, it's worth the detour just for the gateposts with the sinister skull and crossbones. Legend has it they were the models for pirate flags; I don't know if it's true, but I don't really care. It's a good story. Just round from there is the Dog & Bell pub, a bit of a Mecca for real ale enthusiasts round here.

Cut through what's left of poor old John Evelyn's estate, Sayes Court (I'm convinced the mulberry bush in the park there is a remnant of his garden) and through the more modern estate to get back onto the Thames Path. It will lead you up past the groovy ex-council block that was turned private and became the subject of the TV docco last year. It has good 'head' sculptures round it.

The bits all around Surrey Docks are fascinating - in that there are still little pockets of history nestled among the 1980s reworking. Just be aware that if you start walking round the docks, it's lovely - but a loooooong way round.

From now on, it gets really interesting - and frustrating - in equal measures. I keep meaning to log all the gates onto bits of path by the Thames that have been gated and locked outside new-build flats to find out whether or not it's been done illegally. I'm willing to bet developers have been forced to create access, but when no one's looking they've just locked the gates - there seem to be an awful lot of restricted access places in builds that are too young not to have had a Section 106 access order stamped on them. A project for the future - and perhaps one for the Ramblers Association.

Even with the annoying detours around modern flats, there's still much to see. The City Farm, for example, which always manages to be closed whenever I'm there, but which advertises random produce available if you don't mind carting a leg of organic pork around with you on your walk.

Hmm. What else? Oh, yes. The old Custom Houses are fun, and further on, I take great delight in arrogantly marching straight through the Hilton Hotel which has annoyingly plonked itself in the way of the Thames Path (though I've never had the gall to traipse the bike through too.)

By now, you'll be coming up towards Rotherhithe, which, frankly, is worth a trip in itself. The ventilator houses for the Rotherthithe tunnel are curious, one each side - at least I'm assuming that's what they are.

Just before you get to the villagey part of Rotherhithe, don't miss one of the saddest sculptures in town, Dr Salter's Dream, depicting Doctor Alfred Salter, who stayed in Bermondsey at a time of serious contagious illness to tend the sick at the cost of his own family - his daughter died, aged 8, from scarlet fever. Dr Salter now sits on a bench in perpetuity, fondly watching his daughter play with a pet cat by the river wall.

Moving onto Rotherhithe, if you have an opportunity to nip into the Brunel Engine House Museum, it's worth it. It will take about 20 minutes to see the exhibits and another hour and a half to talk to the passionate curator there. They do nice cake.

The Sands Film Studios almost certainly won't be open to the public on your visit, but they occasionally have guided tours and I would highly recommend joining one if you can. The also have a very eccentric film club, where you can see extremely obscure movies for free - just put a donation in the film cannister at the end.

Also in Rotherhithe, the Mayflower pub (the esteemed Dame was unimpressed with the fare last time she visited, but a pal visited the other night and reckons it's improved. On the plus side you can fulfil your US postage stamp requirements at the bar...

Oh - and look out for the Charity Children on St Mary's, a classic riverside church.

Right. Where are we... Ah, yes. More sundry Bermondsey new-builds with the odd bit of Tudor ruins and curious stuff (that's where the guide comes in handy, telling you what the hell it all is - and where to go when the path runs out) before reaching the area around Shad Thames street/ Butler's Wharf, Tower Bridge etc.

I could go on, but I'm really out of the blog's area now. Besides, this post is indecently long. Tony - whichever path you choose, you'll get a great view of the other bank of the river as you walk. And let's face it - unless you're planning emigrating to Mars anytime soon, presumably you'll have other days off when you can explore different routes. Take the Clipper home afterwards to see yet another view of the Thames.

Ahhh. I almost wish I was coming with you. But I think I'll leave the weather to warm up first...

Greenwich Bird

"Thou art an arrante whore and came from Greenwiche!"

In early 17th Century Petworth, it would seem, that was about the worst thing you could say to anyone. In fact, it was so offensive in the fair Sussex town to imply that a woman came from Greenwich that it was considered worth going to court over.

I don't know. First it was Greenwich geese, then barbers, and now, thanks to the marvellous Julian Watson and his friend Peter Jerrome from the Petworth Society, I have a new insult to add to the Greenwich cannon of execrable terms - "Greenwich Bird."

The court case 0f 1603 centres around an innkeeper's wife, Margaret Goodman, (presumably quite used to some choice language in her line of work) who was so offended by one Thomas Westdeane accusing her, in the open streets of Petworth, of coming from Greenwich that she took the trouble to gussy up a case against the bounder.

Actually, as Jerrome points out, this would have been a church court, and it was, in those days a bit of a case of 'accuse or be accused' - if you didn't do something public about a slur on your character, it was not only assumed that the remark was apt, but it might mean a case against you from the very bishop to whom you should have gone to complain in the first case.

Goodman prepared for the case, by lining herself up three stellar witnesses who had heard Westdeane call her a "Greenwich Birde" outside the mercer John Bywimble's shop.

Before we go any further I guess I should explain the insult - though I doubt it takes much imagination to work it out. Greenwich at the time was a busy port, full of sailors - and ladies who enjoyed entertaining them. Margaret had been accused of whoring.

Joanna Curtyes was inside the shop at the time, "buying of wares," and heard the plaintiff and the accused coming along the street. They were clearly having a right old ding-dong, and Joanna heard "angrie words betwixt them."

Westdeane told Goodman that she was not honest. "Oh yeah?" she said (or words to that effect.) "How's that then?" He replied she was a whore.

The storm in this particular teacup getting splashier by the moment, Margaret Goodman called over the good mercer, Joanna and William Mose, a yeoman who just happened to be around at the time, and dared Westdeane to repeat what he'd just said. Which he did. "Thou art an arrante whore and came from Greenwiche."

A bit later on Westdeane made things worse for himself when he asked Joanna if she was going to bear witness at the court and what she would say. She told him she'd tell what she heard, and he replied that he would teach a whore to spit in a man's face. Joanna reckoned that, in her view, the slander would mean that Margaret "amongste grave men within the parishe of Petworth...is of lesse estimacon than before she was."

William Mose agreed that the barney between the accuser and accused took place, and he thought the original argument had been about Margaret's brother, but he know hear any more details. He also heard Westdeane call Margaret a whore and a Greenwich bird, and what's more, John Bywimble had heard it too.

Bywimble himself (don't you just love that name?) didn't appear, but a tailor, Mark Upfield, confirmed that the pair had been "walkinge togeather verye discontentedlye and brawlinge one with another."

Oddly, there doesn't seem to be an outcome recorded from this suit, though given the weight of witness evidence and the lack of anything coming from Westdeane himself, it's probable that Margaret won her case and he would have faced a fine or possibly paid public penance in white sheets for his "incontinence".

So there we go - an example of someone else's local history having a direct message about our own. The image, by the way, is part of the testimony of William Mose. In the middle of the fourth line down, if you're sharp-eyed, you'll see the insult that started it all, still, outrageous today in some parts of Sussex, I understand...

And Then There Was One

Continuing from our transport-related discussions yesterday, Roger asked a question I've often wondered about (and then told me the answer - the best kind of ask) - where's the third boat on the Woolwich Ferry just now?

Hull.

That's right. Hull, where the third boat is undergoing a major refit - not really a surprise given they're all 46 years old. What puzzles me is how it got there - there's no way it would ever fit on even the lowest of low-loaders. So presumably it arrived either by chugging around the coast under its own steam (well, diesel) or majestically travelling by tug. That would have been a sight.

I must find some more out about the Woolwich Ferry. I know there's a book by the splendid Julian Watson (with Wendy Gregory, I believe) called Free For All; must seek it out. West London may have more bridges than us, but I think travelling by boat is so much more romantic. Yes, even with all those fumes and queues. And only two boats.

John Julius Angerstein - Monster Hunter

What do we remember John Julius Angerstein for? A railway? A pub? A grubby industrial estate on Greenwich Peninsula? Starting the National Gallery? Some curious theories on interior ventilation? A faux-naive 'accidental' encroachment on Blackheath? As Catherine the Great's illegitimate son? Being a Lloyds Name? Abolitionist slave owner?

I'm willing to bet that whichever of the above - or the many other curious things about his life stick in the mind, the one that hasn't occurred to you so far, but will do forever more is as The Man Who Wrote The Monster Hunter's Handbook.

Of course it didn't have a title anywhere near as snappy as that. He named it An Authentic Account of the Barbarities lately Practised by the Monsters! Being an Unprecedented and Unnatural Species of Cruelty, Exercised by a Set of Men Upon Defenceless and Generally Handsome Women.

Now, those last three words will be important, as will the plural on the word 'monster' - but I think I'm getting ahead of myself. "Monsters, Phantom? What the bloomin' hell are you talking about?"

Well, THE Monster, actually. The London Monster, to be completely accurate (which the rest of this post almost certainly won't be...) A chillingly bizarre 18th Century precursor to all the other perverts, murderers and bugaboos that have stalked the streets of the capital ever since - and a direct link with Jack the Ripper a century later.

But more than that, he was a phenomenon - a classic example of mass hysteria that created its own monster between 1788 and 1790 - and, like all such things, with results that were ridiculous, comic and, ultimately rather tragic.

And in the middle of all this, John Julius Angerstein, a successful merchant living, at the time, in the heart of London's fashionable St James, who volunteered to be the Van Helsing of the story and, in doing so, probably fanned the flames of panic rather than saving the world.

The Monster's speciality was in stabbing women in the thigh or buttocks (naturally the papers and cartoonists of the day seized upon the buttocks-part) as they walked along the street. He'd follow them, muttering obscenities, then quickly plunge his knife into their skirts and disappear.

Sometimes he changed his tactics and carried a nosegay that he would invite girls to sniff. It contained a knife that would cut their faces. Personally I find it a bit odd that any girl would sniff a stranger's posy (and that sounds much ruder than I intended) when all the town talked about was of a monster who got his kicks through such an act but hey - we're not talking sense here, we're talking the Mob.

The newspapers and coffee houses were full of it. Poems were written, ballads sung and lurid caricatures scribbled. Some women became so panicky about walking the same streets as the Monster that they started wearing specially-fashioned copper petticoats. Those who couldn't afford armour contented themselves with cork-rumps (no, I'm not entirely sure what one of those is either) or even giant porridge pots placed over their posteriors - thankfully the fashion for massive skirts meant that the porridge pots probably didn't show much.

Monster Mania only began to take crazy proportions, however, when John Julius Angerstein took it upon himself to start collating all the evidence (despite the handful of John Fielding's Bow Street Runners, the police force was still a bumbling mixture of elderly beadles, useless night watchmen and part time constables, though apparently the Chelsea Pensioners weren't to be crossed...) and create a reward for the capture of the Monster.

The grand sum of one hundred pounds was offered for the capture of the monster, and Angerstein created a series of posters declaring the reward.

Suddenly everyone went berserk. People were accused left, right and centre and it only took someone to point a finger for a mob to form out of nowhere and attack some poor guy for no reason whatsoever.

This had the unfortunate side effect that pickpockets who had been caught by their quarry, merely shouted "Ooh - look! There's the Monster! Quick! He's getting away!" and the poor gent would be chased and beaten up by a crowd of mad people while the pickpocket got away with the loot.

It got to a point where some doughty fellows formed their own group called The No Monster Club and wore badges to prove they weren't the Big Bad, which of course worked really, really well and was completely unfakeable.

Angerstein did his own 'investigations,' which involved him interviewing each of the 'victims' (not all turned out to be - some lied or even cut themselves, for various sordid reasons, the most common being that the monster was only supposed to attack beautiful women, so being attacked by the Monster was a declaration that you were a gorgeous creature...) and making notes, much of which seemed to focus around how attractive he found each one.

His notes got more detailed the prettier the girl, but the annoying thing was that no real picture of the Monster appeared. He was tall, short, thin, fat, big-nosed, small-featured - in short, he could be anyone.

Eventually, just as Angerstein was creating his Monster Handbook, a guy was arrested, and charges (very probably) trumped up. Enough of the women agreed that artificial-flower maker Rhynwick Williams was their man to get him convicted. Despite his cast-iron alibis for several of the attacks and good character witness statements, in the eyes of the mob, he was the Monster.

Williams wasn't actually hanged, which was what I was fearing as I read Jan Bondeson's The London Monster - Terror on the Streets in 1790, (heartily recommended.) He was imprisoned, and people used to go to gawp at him in gaol - using the excuse that they were going to buy his fake flowers - and commented on how weedy and insignificant the Monster looked, unsurprising, since he probably wasn't the Monster.

Reading Bondeson's book, it occurs to me that the Monster was probably many-headed - that the hysteria provoked copycat attacks and there wasn't actually any one Monster but a whole bunch of weirdos who got their kicks from poking women with sharp objects. Angerstein says as much in the title of his pamphlet. The attacks lessened when Williams was banged up, but they didn't stop entirely.

For me this is as much the product of the times as one guy in particular. There was revolution and mass hysteria oing on in Europe; we had our own, almost Carry-On panic. And John Julius Angerstein, however well-intentioned, probably didn't really help matters with his posters, leaflets -and that massive reward...

Quiet Shame

Back in September, during Open House weekend, I went to visit the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich - a curious building with a curious history. But I'm not talking about that today, I'm more concerned with something I learned that morning which has been troubling me ever since.

Our group was shown round the barracks by the man in charge - always good to get the head honcho - and I took the opportunity to ask about the fate of the Rotunda.

For those of you who aren't aware of this very, very odd building, tucked away behind a screen of trees and a fence of barbed wire (the photos here are the best I could do back in the summer - there's just no way of really seeing it any more...), it's a weird tent-like structure, which started out as exactly that - a tent.

John Nash built it in 1814, in the grounds around Carlton House Gardens. It was the centrepiece of six tents created to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon (so what if it was all a bit previous...)

Everyone liked the tent so much that Nash decided that it was too good just to take down again, so he hit upon the idea of surrounding the tent walls with brick, and covering the canvas roof with a rather splendid, sweeping lead version to protect the original. I guess the equivalent would be if someone put a giant metal dome over the top of the O2.

The whole thing was moved to Woolwich in 1820, to become the Museum of Artillery - which it was for about 180 years. It even got a revamp in 1975.

When the Woolwich Arsenal was turned into what it is now, it was decided to create Firepower, and all the stuff was moved from the Rotunda to the new museum. They're still moving the last cannons, I understand. Here's one:

What one makes of Firepower is an individual matter. But the question of what happens to the Rotunda next is one that I'd never fully got to the bottom of.

It's completely closed, with high fences and the aforementioned trees, though it would have once had fantastic views - for miles around. I knew that the place had reverted to the MOD so I took the opportunity of asking our guide what would be happening.

Frankly, after he told me (he was completely, and typically militarily up-front about it) the rest of the weekend was a bit of a downer for me and I've been trying to get my head around it ever since.

When the final cannons go (and they may have gone by now, though I doubt it - they're big buggers) the place will 'have the lights turned off.' That, to you and me, means it will just be left, to moulder away. No access, no views, just a quiet rotting into the earth.

It's economics, of course, that dictate this. The guy told me it takes sixty-odd grand a year just to stop the place collapsing (it faces special architectural problems due to its 'unusual' construction) and he has other drains on his finances - not least huge amounts of military memorabilia that finds its way into his hands which he's supposed to lovingly curate.

I expressed my distress at this news, trying hard to lower my voice from the strangulated squeak it had become. He said that he would be interested in talking to anyone that could make a financial go of leasing it - after all - it's a liability - sixty grand a year before you do anything to it (and I'm not sure if they're even going to spend that when they finally go...)

I would SO love to see something happen to this - but what - and with what kind of cash? The place is listed (of course) but there's no real stick to beat the MOD with if they just let it moulder. It's out of the way - I can't even see what it could be used for - but hell - this is a John Nash building that is at the very least 'exotic.' Surely there's something...

Michael Faraday's Shed

Well - not actually his real shed - but a teeny-tiny installation/museum that's been set up inside the old shipyard's clerk's 'office' (looks exactly like a bog-standard B&Q garden shed to me) at Trinity Buoy Wharf.

Being such an artistic crew, the guys at TBW couldn't just leave a boring old shed on the site, so Ana Ospina has decorated it, using antiques, found objects and things 'of the sea' such as fishing nets and those lovely glass weights that I only seem to see decorating the homes of friends who live by the sea, rather than actually at the seaside itself, to create some sort of imaginary 'study' for Victorian science-hero Michael Faraday.

If that sounds a bit random, there is a reason for putting it there - Faraday worked out of Trinity Buoy Wharf for some years, helping to develop lighthouses, in between inventing the Faraday Cage - a structure based on Benjamin Franklin's somewhat risky studies in storm-management (using kites) ensuring that lightning or other electromagnetic charges strike round something rather than through it, and discovering the Faraday Effect, which is something to do with the polarisation of light in relation to magnetic fields, the details of which, frankly, evade me.

Faraday's work on the Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouses (my favourite mental image is definitely of how they were tested - some poor sod used to be sent up to Shooters Hill of dark winter's night to see if they could spot it...) is being celebrated in this minute work of art - with the usual sound effects, words, images and atmosphere - and it's really rather fun. The artist has a beautiful (but tricky to navigate) website here

When I first saw The Faraday Effect (the shed is named after the phenomenon I don't understand above), it was tucked round the back, next to Fat Boy's Diner, but I went back the other day and noticed it was gone.

Slightly worried, I had a poke around and realised it's been moved to the wharf-front, much closer to the lighthouse itself, not far from the entrance to Jem Finer's Longplayer, which I'll get onto another day. It's open every weekend (as is Longplayer) between 11am and 5pm

Tudor Barn Bar & Brasserie

I've been meaning to get over to test out the new cafe at the Tudor Barn for a long time - and my failing to get into Blackheath Golf Club on Open Day (all down to v. narrow slot of entry which, of course, I missed - but I thought I'd chance my arm anyway by having lunch at the restaurant, which I'll SWEAR used to be open to the public - I'm SURE I saw it advertised in one of the free mags, though I guess that was when I used to actually get free mags...) gave me the perfect excuse .

I've been looking forward to it - it's a fantastic building and it just needs that little something to make it really special.

I'm delighted that the little balcony that overlooks the (rather duckweedy) moat has been reopened after the refurb, and we leaped at the opportunity to sit outside - a little cooler than I'd expected but still a lovely day.

Service is friendly and I was pleased that not too many things appear on the menu - trying to do too much often leads to nothing being much cop. The basic choices are filled baguettes, jacket potatoes and hand-made burgers. The bar is new, but apart from that, all I can really see is different from the old cafe are the chairs and tables. All good so far.

I thought the prices for the food were a little optimistic - an average of £5.50 for a sandwich, a fiver for the spuds and £8 for the burgers, but the alcohol seemed quite reasonable - £3.00 and under for a (bottled) beer and a rather staggeringly cheap £2.60 per glass for the wine (one choice each of red, white and rose.)The wine, I have to say, tasted like it cost £2.60, though, of course, bottled beer is bottled beer.

I have to say that despite the lovely setting, I found this meal disappointing. When I saw how much food was piled on my plate, I thought 'oh, that's what I'm paying for...' But size really isn't everything.

My jacket potato was the size of a large hamster - the biggest spud I'd ever-bloomin'-seen, but it was largely hard as nails inside, and although it had clearly been done in the oven rather than the microwave, the skin was light brown, rather than the crispy loveliness that's my personal favourite.

I'll give them there was plenty of filling - tuna mayo and sweetcorn (from a choice of eleven usual-suspect toppings), and the small salad that came with it was really rather tasty, but by the time I'd removed all the hard bits from the potato I had decided that I'd have rather had a regular sized one that was properly done.

My companion's 100% "Tudor barn" Beef Burger, on first bite, seemed much better. It was even quite nice on the second. It was clearly home-made and again, it was a good size. But it was very fatty and the bun and accompanying (again, very good) salad just didn't make up for the grease.

In a couple of weeks' time, a new evening venue, 1568 @ Tudor Barn will be opened. Open between 6.00pm and 10.30pm, it will be 'serving gastro food including a daily three course specials menu.' I'll be testing this out, of course, but IMHO the Tudor Barn is going to have to raise its game to become a destination restaurant...

Thames Barrier Park

Pontoon Dock

I haven't been on a local 'excursion' for ages - but yesterday was sunny and bright and I wanted something different.

I'd noticed the strange lines of undulating hedges of the Thames Barrier Park from the DLR; I thought it would be fun to walk among them. After all, we can't be sure how many warm, sunny Sundays we have left.

I entred via those hedges - a living scuplture called Green Dock by Alain Cousseran and Alain Provost - who I could have sworn was a racing driver ;-) - past some fountains which, I'm happy to say, were playing at 11.00 on a Sunday morning (so many features like that get quietly turned off after the grand opening.)

I wandered up and down beautiful - and slightly unsettling, not sure why - lines of alternating hedges (a bit on the fluffy side just now, they could do with a haircut) planted with good late-summer flowers, towards what I assumed was a viewing point at the end.

It's a surreal walk once you get down amongst those hedges, which are much higher than they look from above - with an almost Alice In Wonderland feel to it. It wouldn't surprise me to see the White Rabbit run out, looking at his pocket watch, or to look down another row and see the Mad Hatter having a tea party. Under the hedge, a caterpiller on a mushroom would be puffing away at a dodgy-looking concoction in a hookah. Of course, if I looked again, they'd be gone...

The weird Green Dock is my favourite bit, but I was staggered when I got to the top and realised that the weird hedges are just a tiny bit of this modern park. Yes, there are dramatic views of the barrier:

but there are also wide spaces, a little wilderness area, places for organised sport or a kickabout, and a kiddie's playground.

I had a coffee on the decking outside the cafe - I'm savouring each outdoor coffee I can get these days. I suspect it will be cosy behind those giant plate-glass walls in in the crisp Autumn mornings to come.

This is not a 'day out' in itself, but it's a nice thing to do for different - a goal on a Thames Path walk, perhaps, or a quick trip along the DLR.

Opening hours are here.

Bella Vista

Montpelier Vale, Blackheath

I hadn't been to Bella Vista since the refurb, but, being a cheapskate, thought I'd go for the early evening cheapo deal. Once I got inside, of course, there were things on the a la carte I couldn't resist so I was back to spending cash again...

The refurb has worked well. I'm pleased to say that they've avoided anything so ultra modern that it's going to date within seconds of the place reopening, but, now it's done, I guess it was a little tired before, though I can't say I'd noticed.

Things are always going to be snug in a restaurant that size, so they haven't even tried to make it look spacious, instead emphasising the cosiness. I like the mirrors, the high cupboards with the nicknacks and the colour scheme, though the cushions, whilst looking sumptuous, get in the way.

The menu is part new, part old. Francesco said that if he tries to change anything his regulars moan, so he has to quietly slide things on and off the menu and hope no one notices. If you see BVC after anything on the menu, it means "Bella Vista Classic" and it's a dish he doesn't dare remove.

I had the Apulian ‘burrata’ cheese with smoked aubergine, partially because I can't resist aubergine and partly because I'd never had Apulian burrata cheese before. It was fab. My companion had the cold cuts. I was so busy chomping my smoked aubergine I forgot to note down what the cold cuts were actually like (I'll never make a proper restaurant critic...) but the plate was cleared so I'm guessing it was good.

There are some times when only lasagne will do, and for my sturdy companion, this was one of those times. It was perfectly acceptable, but not an exciting dish, only going half-way to satisfying the lasagne-urge. Probably not a recipe that will make it to BVC menu-stardom...

I resisted the urge to have aubergine in a second dish in the same meal and instead tried the cod in ‘guazzetto Livornese’ which is, according to the handy menu translator, a Tuscan fish and tomato sauce - tangy and pungent, and really rather tasty, even if it is a wise idea to brush your teeth immediately afterwards, if you're going to be within 10 feet of anyone else...
I can't remember what the hell the wine was - only that I enjoyed it and its label had a comedy picture involving a donkey on it, which we each guessed the story behind, then asked the waiter if he knew what it was about. He didn't but was happy to supply an alternative unlikely, shaggy-dog-alike yarn. He got his mate over who told a fourth, equally nonsense, tale behind the picture.

Actually, it might not have been our first bottle.

Bella Vista's been around for over 20 years now. Deservedly.

Pet Semetery

Not even people who visit Hornfair Park regularly necessarily know about this place. Sadly some people know it all too well.

Charlton Pet Cemetery seems to have been at its zenith in the 1930s - when, I'm guessing, so was the Lido. Memorials carved with all the sincerity as for human loved ones, noteable as being of the furry variety only because in the 1920s and 30s there weren't too many people in Charlton called Chu-Chu, Ickety Man and Ming Zee.


It must have been a charming corner of the park, and I'm guessing that - what - about 10-15 years ago, someone thought it could be charming again. What I'm assuming were by that point badly-overgrown graves were ripped up and a little patio made from the headstones, with a couple of (cherry?) trees overhanging some rather sinister-looking low concrete benches.

These days, sadly, a good half of said benches have been knocked over. Around the edge, other headstones line beds with a few shrubs dotted around them, now also populated with ground elder and brambles. Oh - and something else...

I found it an intensely depressing experience, wandering round, looking at memorials to much-loved pets - Mike, Rex, Floss, Roy, Mickey, Buntie - and a couple of names that would be, ahem, less acceptable these days - cracked and forgotten, broken and left to moulder.

In human cemeteries, like Nunhead and yes, even areas of Charlton's own, decay is a natural and beautiful part of Life. Plants growing out of graves are to be ooh-ed and ahh-ed at with an indulgent sense of the bucolic.

This, with its municipal, concrete paving, grim, flower-less railings and dusty, empty beds, is just downright sad. Bizarrely, it's actually very photogenic, though. The photo above makes it look quite cute. It isn't. I get no feeling that this is visited for any kind of happy reason. At my feet I saw smashed memorials and signs of a fire. Around the edges was another kind of litter. Take a look at this memorial to Susan:

Now take another look - at the bottom left. Click on it if you can't see properly.

This place could be lovely again - but whoever designed it - I'm guessing in the 1980s - has made it a hard area to love. There's just so much concrete. And I'm guessing that most of the Council's cash goes on looking after that superb area in front of the lido that, admittedly, looks wonderful just now.

I don't think it would take very much to keep this area looked-after - after all, it's 90% hard-paving - but if it was made a little more inviting, perhaps it would be used by someone other than drug addicts...

Old Horses Home

Another from my hideously-large pile of unanswered questions today, from the darkest section of all, labelled 'Hard Stuff...'

Jo (who admits she may have had one or two when she saw this...) asks:

"I took a cab from Greenwich through Deptford and somewhere along the way (think it was only 5 minutes from Greenwich) the cab drove past a stables which seemed to house shire horses – I assumed an old people’s home equivalent for London’s rag and bone horses where they can see out their final days and avoid the glue factory. Do you know anything about it? Google doesn’t throw anything up but another cab driver did know where it was but I’d had a few too many drinks to remember the answer…. "

This has so far defied any attempts to find an answer, Jo - I tried various places and got nothing in the way of answers. I found this list of horse and donkey sanctuaries, none of which appear to be in South East London.

Then I tried looking for heavy horses that might still be working - perhaps drawing those old-fashioned funeral carriages or wedding coaches - but the closest I could find was in Hampton Court.

I understand that Youngs Brewery still uses shire horses, but again - they're in Wandsworth. Lewisham Police Station has horses, but that's one strange journey you would have taken home.

I found an article in the Independent (sadly from 1994) about rag & bone men still using horses, which, being fifteen years old can only be vaguely useful, but is a great read - beautifully and engagingly written. I'm not in the business of reinventing the wheel, so I won't rehash it here, but in brief it talks about Corky, a Deptford totter, and his horse Sarah, who seem to be based somewhere around Broomill Road, though when I was down there a couple of weeks ago I didn't see any likely candidates. Another character, 'the Major', deals in old cookers round the corner, and Billy and John, got out of the totting trade years ago, but kept the horses on as a hobby.

Sadly I can't for a moment hope Corky's still doing the rounds, given the article's entitled The End of the Road for the Rag & Bone Man...

Is it possible you saw a Traveller site, Jo? They often have horses. There's a list of Deptford-local Traveller sites here - recognise your journey at all?

But I have to say - Deptford isn't my manor. Might be worth asking the Dame...

Dastardly-Do By The Charlton Cad

Odd, isn't it, what you end up reading when you're sick. As I started to get better, I found myself reading a history of Hampstead, mainly because I didn't have to move off the poorly-sofa to pick up the book. I discovered that the North-South divide of London is nothing new.

Mention the name Maryon Wilson to someone from Charlton and they'll probably smile as they think of a nice piece of open parkland, available to all to wander and play. Say the same name to anyone from Hampstead and a dastardly villain of the twirling moustache variety pops into their head...

Actually, once I started reading further about London's first great preservationist war, I began to realise that the good burghers of Charlton didn't have much to thank the Maryon Wilsons for either, until well after the sandpits there had been exhausted and the family had no further need for the land they so generously gave to the people.

They inherited Charlton House in 1767 through the Maryon side - and the fact that they chose South East London over their other giant chunk of land - er, Hampstead - is somehow satisfying - inexplicably so, of course, given their less than charming nature. They owned all of Hanging Wood (some of which is now Maryon and Maryon Wilson Parks) and much of the surrounding land; what they didn't own they took anyway.

The family, headed by the darkest individual of them all, the eighth baronet Sir Thomas Maryon Wilson (boo, hiss) enclosed the ancient village green in front of their gaff and called it their front garden. The centuries-old Horn Fair was booted out to a field near Fairfield Grove until they finally got rid of it altogether in 1874.

But if the fairgoers of Charlton thought themselves hard done-by, the Hampstead people were spitting tacks. Hampstead Heath, just part of the enormous North London estate he owned as absentee Lord of the Manor, was, in Thomas Maryon Wilson's avaricious eyes, just another bit of land upon which he could build a whole slew of new housing.

All he needed to do was get himself an Act of Parliament - a mere formality at the time - landowners everywhere were getting Acts granted willy-nilly in the early to mid 19thC.

Where Maryon Wilson went wrong though, was in not doing his homework and working out that several MPs lived within spitting distance of the Heath. They might not have cared about the grazing rights of the peasants but they certainly didn't want a sink estate on their doorstep. The Heath Protection Committee was formed, and over the years, every single one of Maryon Wilson's applications was rejected.

The eighth baronet wasn't going to take that lying down. He decided to go underground (pretty much literally) and use guerilla tactics. He started digging, and selling off 'Heath Sand' to anyone who would buy, deliberately undermining its beauty (though now they've healed over, the pits make rather pretty 'dells.') He tore up all the native gorse bushes and planted ornamental trees ready to line, eventually, his streets of houses (ever wondered where 'Willow Tree Road' comes from..?)

A protest meeting was held in 1856, one of the fiercest, apparently, ever. I keep reading that the curses hurled at Maryon Wilson were 'bloodcurdling' at the meeting but I can't find any examples, which is a shame. I'd have enjoyed them hugely. I daresay the words 'bounder' and 'cad' were two of them but maybe you folks can supply me with some more splendid Victorian insults to savour.

I guess the lesson learned is never to try to take posh people on their own ground. Maryon Wilson perpetually failed in his applications and in 1870, when he died, his son gave in and sold the heath to the Metropolitan Board of works - at full face value, of course.

Of course the board was too mean to rectify the damage done to the heath, their only concession to regeneration was to give the groundsmen gorse seed to scatter as they walked around. The willows are rather loved these days.

His brother, Sir John Maryon Wilson, btw, didn't have to rely on Acts of Parliament to build on his bit of the estate, which is why Finchley Road looks like it does today.

But back to Charlton.

It seems that later generations of Maryon Wilsons were pretty fed up with the whole landowning business and once one piece of land (the sandpits) was given to the people in 1891, it was only a few decades later that they sold Charlton House itself to the council and gave the rest of Hanging Wood to public parkland.

I have no idea what became of the family. I can find virtually nothing about them anywhere, and certainly no pictures, though just-for-random, here is a rather ugly settee, and here a slightly less ugly table that they once owned.

The really odd thing I discovered about the panto-villainous Sir Thomas is that he is, apparently, the subject of the first poem in English by an Icelander living in Iceland.

The Dream, by one Larus Sigurdsson, is a 170-line, cod-medieval-Gothic fantasy praising, alongside Sir Joseph Banks, the rather less-likely hero-figure of Sir Thomas Maryon Wilson - who, presumably, made some sort of trip to Iceland and impressed the poet with his grandeur.

"The living love him and the dead esteem
Poverty blesses him in every clime
To aid the poor, 'tis business of his mind
That always is to God and virtue join'd
Thus has the nature (to uncertain aim)
But good and noble grace'd with Wilson's name.

Andrew Wawn, the author of The Vikings and the Victorians, tells us that, at that moment "the narrator wakes from his dream and, perhaps not a moment too soon, the poem comes to an end."

And so should this post. Nurse, my medication, please...

Make Do And Mend

Okay. World War II's ended, the bunting's been taken down, the street parties packed up and the cost is finally being counted.

Top of the list of jobs to do is to build housing for all the people displaced by the Blitz. Thing is, the stuff you have in your warehouses isn't always quite right for the job...

For example - you're really short on railings to go round these new homes for heroes. All you've got in the stores are thousands of old stretchers hurriedly fashioned from tubular metal and wire mesh as standard issue for ARP wardens. They'd always been bloody uncomfortable if you had the misfortune to have to lie on one, but they did the job - and it seems a shame to throw them away. Waste not, want not...

I first read about Wartime Stretcher Railings in Peter Ashley's fascinating More London Peculiars (English Heritage, 2007) but he was only talking about them as being around one block of flats - just outside Oval cricket ground. I actually made a pilgrimage to see them - and they are fab.

You honestly wouldn't know they weren't actually built as railings if it weren't for the four little kinks - one in each corner - bent into the supporter bars to keep the stretcher off the ambulance floor, and the weld-marks every six feet or so where the handles have been bonded together.

Thing is - the picture above isn't from the Oval.

I actually took this picture in Watergate Street in Deptford. I hadn't noticed the railings - I was too busy looking at the ancient piece of wood embedded in the giant dock wall opposite and they had to be pointed out to me - but there's no doubt about it - these are wartime stretcher railings.

Which begs the question - how many more are there? I was under the impression that the ones at Oval were unique - it would seem not. South and East London copped most of the bombs - so presumably they also had most stretchers. I'm beginning to think there must be more of these recycled pieces of Home Guardery - anyone know any?

Next time you happen to be walking down Watergate Street (if nothing else, to see the watergate itself, slid in between that poor old Borthwick warehouse that only has its facade left and doesn't appear to have been touched for years, and the giant dock wall, down a nasty scaffolding passage) take a moment to look at those railings and allow yourself to be transported to the Blitz.

To the rubble and smoke, fires and blood - and the poor sods who were carried to hospital on a set of garden railings...

Charlton Lido

Toby asks:

"I wondered whether you knew what was happening to Charlton Lido. We spent a lovely day there on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in 2007 (perhaps 2006) and have been keen to return. Last year, I discovered that it was closed but the Greenwich Council website reported that it was being developed as a Diving Centre.

Looking again to see whether it had re-opened, I discover that, 1984-style, it seems to have been excised from history. The relevant pages on both Greenwich Council and Greenwich Leisure's website lead nowhere. There are some oblique references in Council minutes in 2008 - including a spirited defence by the Council for not running a public consultation on its future - but otherwise it seems to have disappeared. It all makes me rather suspicious."

The Phantom replies:

You're right, Toby, in that it's hard to find out information about the chequered fortunes of the 1939 lido - the council page is broken - but, happily, wrong that the place is dead. It took a bit of snaffling out, but a lease has been signed between the council and a private company, Open Waters (who don't seem to have a website, which seems a bit odd in this day and age.)

There is an article about it here but the gist is that

"when complete, the four-storey dive centre will have a 22m-deep, 25m-dive pool, a gym, treatment rooms, exercise studios and a crèche. It will also include a restaurant, bar, conference facilities, and a sports retail area with a dive shop that will link with the lido. The lido will be refurbished and will retain all its current facilities."

My one thought, looking at that list, then looking at the picture, is - how on earth will they fit all that into that area? But hey - I'm sure the council have it all in hand and they won't be encroaching on the park...

It looks as though it will be open all year, so get larded-up for those chilly Christmas Morning swims - Serpentine eat your heart out...

Slightly worried that the article was written last year, and that when I went there to check the place was locked up with some scary-looking modern razor-wire stuff all round it (apparently the vandalism around there is punishing) I sent out some emails.

I understand from someone who doesn't want to be named that the lease has been signed, an understanding has been reached and that they will be on site soon. Because it will be a bit late in the season, they've decided not to open it this year.

So - cautiously optimistic, and not entirely mothballing my stripey one-piece, armbands and rubber ring, I'll be keeping an eye on this...

Khan's

It was such a lovely evening - a walk across the heath was just - well - it had to happen really. I didn't know where I'd end up - I just knew I wanted to go somewhere I'd not been to before.

The odd thing about Khan's for me is that I love curry, this must be one of the most established Indian/Nepalese restaurants in the area and I've always been curious about the building, yet I'd never been there.

First things first. The great thing about Blackheath as opposed to Greenwich is that its buildings have been meticulously researched and written about, in some cases by street number; something Greenwich can only dream of (and no - I'm not volunteering - I'd leave all sorts of gaps and anomalies and go off into flights of fancy - it'd just be rubbish.)

Neil Rhind's superb three-parter, Blackheath Village and Environs Pt 1&2 and The Heath, is hard to get in its entirety these days - only Part One is readily available, which is a real pain. Happily I've managed to snout-out copies of all three (though my copy of The Heath is the original - I understand the update is the better version...)

All of which means that I was able to look up the curious building that houses Khan's. Neil Rhind tells us that for most of its life, Number 28 Montpelier Vale was, in various guises and under sundry owners, a dentist/druggist. "Teeth stopped, sealed and extracted. Artificial teeth from 5/- a tooth..."

It remained a quaint old mid-Victorian store with original fittings until the 1970s when, as Rhind says, "despite protest," the place was gutted and turned into a restaurant.

I have to say that Khan's decor is nothing to write home about. They've saved the cute windows, but everything else has gone, replaced by the now-almost-but-not-quite- retro-cool in itself flock wallpaper, dodgy chandeliers and gilded mirrors. The music is of the Indian pan-pipe variety, and walking in felt like stepping back in time - albeit 30 years rather than 130.

It was going to go one of two ways - it was either going to be an undiscovered (okay - for me) gem - or a huge disappointment (and I've had one of them already recently.) But hey - I was in there, the waiters were keen to sit me down and - well - I love curry.

I don't stick to the Phantom Control Meal when out. I like to have a range of stuff, including chef's specials, so I dodged around the menu, picking out various things that took my fancy. Jalfrezis, Dansaks, Dopiazas, Aloos - a real mix.

The food is like the decor - retro in feel. But that's no bad thing in my book. I like modern Indian food - but there's definitely a comfort-factor in Indian food that has 30 years of Britain ingrained in it. It's middle-of-the-road food - even the Jalfrezi wasn't particularly hot (despite the warning on the menu) and most of it has seen quite a bit of the sugar bowl, but that, for me, is no real problem.

It was tasty, fun and nostalgic. Not gourmet food, not nouvelle cuisine - but that's not what Khan's does. The service is charmingly old-fashioned too, though the prices seem to have kept up with the times. I enjoyed it a lot, and if I felt ever so slightly guilty looking at my expanding waistline later, hey - it's a good way to go...

A Lady's Captivity Among Chinese Pirates

Fanny Loviot, 1858/ 2008, NMM Publishing £8.99

So - I was just about to review Paul and suddenly realised I had no book to read. A cardinal sin, that needed immediate rectification.

The volume I chose has only the slenderest connection with Greenwich - its only link is that it was discovered among the archives of the Caird Library and republished by the NMM, but it's fun and I liked it. So shoot me.

I confess I only bought it for the cover. Production values are a big thing for me, shallow Phantom as I am, and I really liked its small sized, heavy papered, hardback-with-dustjacket presence. Oh - and it fitted in my pocket for the walk home...

Our heroine Fanny Loviot, the far-too-brief introduction tells us, was, despite the book's title, no lady. Sadly the annoyingly short intro is too coy to tell us what she actually was, but she 'won' her passage to America in the French Lottery set up to rid the country of 'undesirables' and made her way to California in the 1850s.

It's a surprisingly easy read, considering the stilted 19th Century style, and full of swashbuckling fun. The introduction, as I've mentioned is fine - but far too flimsy - it poses more questions than it answers - not least how Fanny actually got into her adventures in the first place, and what happened to her in the long run.

Half the book is a description of Gold Rush San Francisco and her exploits there with her 'sister,' who may or may not have existed (it's suggested the publisher made her invent a female companion for chaperoneage-purposes.)

Gunfights and fistfights, arson and greed, Fanny describes it all in high-falutin' Victorian prose, including descriptions of her own life, disguised as a man and travelling for her business - never actually spelled out.

When her lodgings and business were razed by fire, she decided to go to Hong Kong, and it was on her journey back that her ship was captured by junkfuls of Chinese pirates, straight out of Central Casting. The Pirate Captain is in the Chow Yun Fat mode, complete with shaved-head-and-ponytail ensemble and his crew are enjoyably dastardly. The adventures of Fanny and her companions really are just waiting to be made into a Hollywood movie.

All that's needed is to innocent-her up, have her fall in love with the captain of the ship that's captured and make the French Vice Consul of Hong Kong corrupt instead of nice and, bish-bosh - you got a script.

You read it here first, folks. A Lady's Captivity Among Chinese Pirates has just GOT to be turned into a blockbuster - it needs so little to be done to it to make it classic Joseph Campbell stuff.

Of course, one of the very few things it does need is a name change. Not nearly lurid enough for today's tastes...

Jemima Ayley

Today, folks, I bring you a mystery. Or at least part of one.

While, it seems, virtually the whole of South London was visiting Nunhead Cemetery's Open Day last week, I was trudging in the opposite direction.

That's not to say I don't want to visit Nunhead - I really, really do, but the Magnificent Seven Cemeteries of London need, for me, at least, to be visited in relative silence and solitude, sans book stalls, tea-urns and face-painters and, according the the Friends of Nunhead Cemetery the graveyard is open every day of the week. So I'll go, alone, another day, but at two quid a head to join the Friends I may sign up anyway. It's not a case of being antisocial - just of seeing something at its most atmospheric...

But back to my own trip. I went to Charlton Cemetery. It's not one of the "great" cemeteries of London, and as far as I can see it doesn't have any organised 'Friends' but it had plenty that both fascinated and moved me. I turned left and walked clockwise - and some day I'll get onto some of the quirkier graves and memorials, but today I want to concentrate on the very last tomb I enjoyed that day (though of course it would have been the first if I'd turned right...)

A large Classical canopy, complete with columns and capitals covering a sleeping young woman's effigy, dressed in a flowing stone gown, covered with a carved shroud, ivy and sadness, peacefully mouldering away under years of dirt and acid rain, it's a monument worthy of any of the great cemeteries, and the only true 'mausoleum' tomb in the place. As far as I can see, it's also the only one that covers a family vault.

The mystery is that, frankly, I can't read the inscription. Pollution and not a few accidents have seen the stone worn or broken away from its brick base then clumsily repaired. Perhaps stories of buried treasure circulated among the local youth, or something, and it was broken into.

Certainly, in the place where it feels like the entrance is supposed to be there's just grass now, though I suspect there were once stone steps leading down under the tomb - there's a grassy bit just in front of it. Against one of the sides, leans a stone slab - though again, whether it was an entrance or is just a bit of monument that fell off is difficult to tell.

At the back, I can just about make out words that look something like "family vault," and, perhaps, "Willian Mayley." I noted it down and thought "Oh - that will be easy to look up when I get home..."

Absolutely nothing. I tried books, papers and, of course, the Internet. Besides, this was very definitely a young woman. She didn't look like a William...

After a LOT of faffery, I finally found London Necropolis , a photography site that explores all of London's cemeteries, and also includes a handy glossary of tombstone symbolism . Mrs Necropolis (I believe her name is actually Polly) names our sad stone girl as Jemima Ayley, a fact discovered by checking out Hugh Meller's London Cemeteries - a book I clearly need to get...

According to Hugh Meller, the vault below is twenty-two feet deep and houses a table and chair, for use by mourning relatives - or, presumably, friends of Nobody Owens.

Meller also says that the precise minute of Jemima's death in 1860 is recorded in the faded inscription on the side and he tells us that her sister died on the very same day in Norfolk. Sadly, since the book was published in 1981, pollution has hit hard - I can hardly make out a single word of the carvings.

In fact that's all I know about Jemima Ayley. In vain have I searched for the family - to be able to afford a tomb like this they must have had a fair amount of cash - and therefore, one might have thought, been prominent in Greenwich/Charlton/Woolwich Society, but I have found nothing.

Does anyone know anything about this family or young Jemima Ayley?

Tudor Feasts

Eltham's Tudor Barn has just had a facelift courtesy of the council, who have been looking for someone suitable to run it. The mantle has fallen upon Suzie Bailey's events company Staar, and she will be holding a special open day on Sunday 24th May where, she tells me, there will be a "community consultation/display of the works which we intend to do to the building."

After some searching, (I was sent a powerpoint presentation that looked lovely and used lots of buzz words but didn't actually say what the reworking was actually going to include...) I found a website for the project.

I have to say, at first look, it appears impressive (even if the concept of 'servicing' visitors made me giggle in a childishly Phantomy sort of way...) None of the links on the page work yet; perhaps that will happen after the 24th - but hey - if this lives up to the promises it's making here, it could be very exciting indeed.

I'm slightly bothered by the inclusion of wedding marquees - if you stick a marquee outside somewhere lovely like the Tudor Barn (and in my experience these 'temporary' tents tend to go up on the 1st May and come down on the 31st October...) the only people that enjoy the 'historic' view are those inside the marquee itself.

But hey. That's small gripes. This looks like it could be a very nice idea indeed. Let me know what you think if you go along...

Funny Ha Ha

Ha Ha Road SE18

You know it never occurred to me that there would actually be a ha-ha in Ha Ha Road. I always assumed that it was a leftover from the grounds of Charlton House and it would be long gone.

Nevertheless I was walking along it the other day (hands up - it was first time I had ever walked along there, normally I'm driving) and was absolutely amazed to see that the ha-ha not only exists but is in damn fine condition.

It appears to be nothing to do with Charlton House; everything to do with Woolwich's military presence.

I confess I'm surprised - I tend to associate ha-has (holding-walls with a ditch or sharp drop one side, usually erected as invisible barriers between formal gardens and the rest of the landscape, preventing animals from chomping the flowers, but without nasty fences - hugely popular in Capability Brown's day) with grand old country piles, rather than army security. I guess it must just come from less hisk-risk times.

It flanks the Barrack Field of Woolwich Garrison, and the brick gateposts of what must have been a rather splendid entrance are still there, as are some curved stone curbs. I can't tell whether the ditch that leads into Charlton Park Lane is a continuation of the ha ha that's not been so well looked after, but I am absolutely delighted to see that the bit along Ha Ha Road is in such good nick.

There's a story that goes round that ha has are called that because when unsuspecting people failed to look where they were going and fell down the ditch everyone else found it hilarious. A nagging doubt about this is going through my mind - I have a feeling there's a much duller reason for the name - a corruption of the French word for it or something equally prosaic. Maybe Capability Bowes can help me out here?

Bluebells

No - not another band slot. Just a suggestion from Charlotte for something to do today, if you're stuck for ideas.

The bluebells at Oxleas Woods are stunning just now - as seems to be most of the greenery around here - presumably a combination of a long wet Winter and a warm sunny Spring.

If you take a trip up there, don't forget the Oxleas Wood Cafe where you can get all the egg & chips you can eat, and if you haven't already visited the a-bit-poorly-just-now Severndroog Castle you should take a peek - though it won't actually be open for a snoot around until Open House Weekend. The Preservation Trust has grand plans for it, though, so fingers crossed.

Everest Inn

41, Montpelier Vale, SE3. Tel. 020 8852 7872

Here in Britain we're never really going to get 'authentic' curry. We just don't have the fresh ingredients or the chefs. But that doesn't mean that the subcontinental food we get here can't be extremely enjoyable - and the stuff I like best is where a place has taken, perhaps, the place they come from, some general favourite all-purpose Indian dishes and sundry British interpretations and created their own blend.

Everest Inn claims to be Nepalese but there were definitely some influences from central and South India, as well as a British-y twist in the food I ate here at the weekend. And I have absolutely no problem with that.

I never visited the old restaurant in Tranquil Vale - for no real reason other than 'so many eateries, so little time...'

It always slightly bothered me that they advertise so much though. Every local magazine and paper seems to carry an ad for the place and it seems to be a stalwart candidate for the aforesaid mags' 'independent reviews,' where, of course, everything is always marvellous and the reviewer has always been so well-fed by the previous courses that they felt they couldn't possibly stuff away a pud as well, but it was all so delicious they just had to have one anyway. I mean, - who, other than restaurant reviewers, ever manages a pudding after a curry?

But I'm digressing again. Walking across the heath, the old Laughing Buddha site seemed worth a test-out (maybe that's why Everest Inn moved - they're certainly more visible from further off on Montpelier Vale than tucked away on Tranquil.)

It's all very modern and smart. It reminded me distinctly of next-door at Chapters, with all that bare brick and downlighters, and for a second I wondered if I'd gone in the right door.

Do I miss the flock wallpaper, fringed lampshades and cheesy music of old Indian restaurants? Not really - but I do like places to have a bit of individuality and this, lovely, smart and clean as it is, has nothing other than the restaurant's name tastefully squirled in silvered perspex on the wall down the stairs to tell it apart from any other restaurant.

Having said that, it's very comfortable and clean - right to the loos - which, of course, instills confidence in the quality of the cooking.

The menu, as with so many 'regional' restaurants, is a tad schizophrenic. But I already said I like that. Every so often, they point out which are the most popular dishes - handy, I guess, if you can't decide what to have.

We had a general mixture. Onion Bhaji - rather flat but tasting okay, Lamb Bhutuwa, which was tasty and well flavoured, Malabar Prawn - again, delicately-flavoured if a bit sweet (all that coconut...) and some Brinjal Bhaji, which was absolutely divine. It was nicely done, but at the Blackheath prices they charge, it ought to be. I thought the rice portion that came with the prawns was, frankly, a bit stingy, something that always surprises me in places like this since it's the cheapest part of the meal for them to provide, though the individual portion of rice ordered as a side dish made it up.

All this sounds as though I didn't enjoy it and that's absolutely not the case. I really did like it - especially the aubergine - and I will eat here again (and judging from the overheard conversations between the staff and customers, they rely a lot on repeat custom.) This is enjoyable food. But I still haven't found my ultimate curry. The search continues....

Everest Inn, btw, is not a standalone restaurant. They have branches in Hythe, Old Kent Road and, er, Grantham.

The Viceroy

10, The Village, Charlton SE7 8UD

020 8319 3439

I have been trying to cut down on the number of takeaways I've been having - the Christmas pounds have taken their toll in both senses of the word. In fact this is only my second of the year (the first I have temporarily refrained writing about, as it's an old establishment that I once enjoyed and it scored its second strike in the Phantom's Black Book. One more and it's out...)

I've had so many of you recommend the Viceroy in Charlton that it just had to be the next on the list.

First things first, the ordering. The phone was answered quickly, and the guy got me to spell the address and repeated it. He took the order, then repeated that. He didn't give me the overall price without prompting, but had it ready when I asked.

It arrived within the time specified, and I was somewhat surprised to have a free bottle of Coke forced upon me. Nice - but unnecessary. The calories were already going to take me way over budget for the current quarter.

They are obviously keen to court custom in a shrinking market. We got several other little freebies too - mainly of the salad-variety - in a vain attempt to counteract the naughty main event, I guess.

The Viceroy serves what I call 'retro-comfort curry.' While many takeaways these days make a big deal about using vegetables you can actually recognise in the mix, no artificial flavours or colours and the odd show of herbs, (I've even seen organic ones) there was none of that wussy stuff here (though in a concession to quality they say they use 'chicken breast only.' I'm guessing it's not organic breast meat...)

All the dishes in the Phantom Control Meal were bright neon orange and swimming in oil. So much so that we poured the run-off into a separate bowl for hygienic disposal, then soaked up the worst of the rest with kitchen towels before serving. The pilau part of the rice was like hundreds-and-thousands on a fairy cake, and, apart from some odd bits of spud, there wasn't a recognisable item in the melange of dishes.

And it was bloody wonderful. Even as I ate it, I could feel my arteries furring-up, any antibodies I had left squaring-up for a punch-up with the E-numbers and my waist losing its battle to fit in my jeans. But what a way to go.

This is British curry of the 1980 and early 90s - exactly how I remember my first Indian food. It takes me back to times of carefree abandon, when I didn't have to worry about what I put in my mouth.

I can't eat this stuff every day - it's for nostalgia purposes only. But as a trip down Memory Lane, as happy-food for cold winter nights, this is - what did they used to say in the playground then? Oh yes. Ace...

Woolwich Foot Tunnel

Anyone else see that article in Time Out last week about London's secret museums and get really excited? Yeah - me too. So I thought I'd check one out last Saturday.

It was only when I got there that I realised that Time Out's Peter Watts didn't seem to have done quite as much research as he might...

I was particularly intrigued by North Woolwich Old Station Museum, which, whenever I'd passed it whilst queueing for the ferry, had been very definitely closed. So I looked up the web address given and it said it was open Saturdays 1-5pm. The website looked a bit old - but it is in Time Out this very week and they wouldn't put somewhere in a current edition that had been closed for ages, would they?

Sadly, the answer is yes. Don't bother trying to go to this little local gem, folks. It's very shut - to the point where it's a building site just outside. It's a shame as, on a peer through the window, it looks brilliant - an original 1854 station at the end of what, according to the website, is hoped to be a tiny little heritage line at some point. I wish them luck - but in the absence of any information or an up to date website, I can't see that it will be any time soon.

What it did do, though, was give me an excuse to walk through Woolwich Foot Tunnel, Greenwich Tunnel's lesser-known friend, a couple of miles down river. To my great shame, I'd never been through it.

The first thing you notice is that it's a hell of a lot longer than Greenwich's version. It's nearly a third of a mile long. And, frankly, it's in better nick than at Greenwich - slightly dusty - but not as caked with dirt. Maybe that has something to do with it being 10 years younger (it ws opened in 1912),or maybe it doesn't get as much traffic, given that the ferry's just above it. Every so often barriers have been planted across it to dissuade cyclists (which don't work) and, amazingly, there is mobile phone access - which delights some and drives everyone else nuts, given the echoes and the fact that anyone on a mobile phone in public seems to have to shout...

The entrance buildings are just as cute (if not cuter) than those at Greenwich, though the one on the south side is a challenge to find first time (follow the Thames Path, it's round the back of the leisure centre.)

The excellent IanVisits tells me that both tunnels are just about to undergo a general spruce up. I asked the lift operator whether this meant losing the wooden panelling in the lifts. He seemed to think not as he told me they're listed buildings. How odd is that - for somewhere to be a public highway AND a listed building. There can't be many of them about...

Local Heroes

Postman's Park, in between Little Britain and St Bartholomew's Hospital, has to be one of the most touching green spaces in the City. It's not very large - or even very exciting, visually. Just a few flower beds, a couple of benches and a big pile of gravestones that were presumably removed to make way for the greenery.

Apparently there used to be a 1970s statue of the Minotaur there, too, but I understand it was removed because the enormity of it genitals offended the church who still owns the land. But this is not the place to snigger about mythical creatures' privates (or 'publics,' in this case...)

What Postman's Park is best known for is a small, covered wall of 54 Royal Doulton Arts and Crafts ceramic plaques celebrating the heroism of ordinary folk. Of pantomime artist Sarah Smith who died saving her companion whose costume had caught fire when her own suffered the same fate. Of fitter Thomas Griffin who went back for his mate after an explosion in a sugar refinery and died for his efforts. Of 11 year-old Solomon Galaman, who died saving his little brother from being run over.

It's all rather Victorian - they couldn't help adding at the end of Solomon's epitaph "Mother, I have saved him but I could not save myself." But that doesn't take anything away from the fact that these stories tell tales of true altruism, tales that would have been lost.

It was the idea of the 19th Century painter G F Watts - who's a bit flavour-of-the-month just now - there is currently a series of exhibitions of his stuff on under the umbrella of Watts In The City. He's not entirely my cup of tea as a painter, but whether you find it mawkish or moving to look at this little row of pottery plaques, it's certainly different.

Watts started erecting the memorials in 1900, and thirteen went up in his lifetime. His widow (not, BTW, Ellen Terry, to whom he was only married a year) continued adding them when he died in 1904. I don't know why she stopped.

I didn't see any from Greenwich town, but there are two from Woolwich. So today, let us remember Frederick Alfred Croft and David Selves and ask ourselves whether we'd have had the courage to do what they did...

Sundials (3)

Don't recognise this? No, nor did I. That's because this one, despite being one of the oldest (perhaps the oldest) locally, is in the courtyard of Morden College and most of us never get to see it. It was sent to me some time ago (thank you, Anon) and I'm afraid it's taken me this long to get round to it...

I know virtually nothing about the architecture of Morden College. The frankly tedious volume The History of Morden College, which I thought would end all my woes when I found it but is actually most useful as a cure for insomnia, says very little indeed about the building - more about the trust itself. Sadly it's almost all I have on the subject and, although the far more readable Neil Rhind touches on it a bit, he refers readers back to The History.., which looks as though it was being written at the same time as his own Blackheath Village & Environs (2). I daresay he was being polite, leaving it to their own historian, but I wish he hadn't been.

Admittedly the early political history of the college is fascinating (and if wagging tongues are correct, later political history too...) though perhaps not for a day dedicated to sundials.

And here is today's Sundial in context - on the South side of the quadrangle- sensibly set up to get the most hours of sun, though it doesn't look as though it was part of the original plan. Apparently, although it says 1695, it was actually erected 30 years later in 1725 "for keeping the clock which often goes wrong."

It seems generally agreed today that Sir Christopher Wren didn't build the place (as some tried to claim over the years...) - it was more likely his master mason for St Paul's Cathedral, Edward Strong, but I can guarantee he didn't create the sundial as he died a year before it was made. Whoever did make it had an eye for cute.

It's a pretty little thing - all curly and Dutch-looking (a very popular style then) and handily set up on a chimney, though looking at the damage on the face, it could do with a spruce-up. The little golden sun looks particularly battered.

And here is, presumably, the clock that was always going wrong. It looks like it would have been part of the original building, but I can't be sure.

1725 makes it five years before John Harrison would have created his first marine clock, so accuracy was a real problem - and a red-hot issue across the heath at Greenwich. All kinds of people were coming up with timekeeping inventions, hoping theirs was the most accurate to win the prize offered by the King.

The local dogs must have been delighted that the guys at Morden College decided to go with a sundial when they were getting a timepiece rather than that nutty idea some bright spark had of poking one dog at a certain time to see if the other one yelped.

Sundials have their drawbacks - not least the whole cloudy-day bit, but given what was on offer at the time, it seems a good choice. And even when it isn't usable, it looks good.

Has anyone noticed if they ever open Morden College to the public, like Trinity Hospital does? Open House Day? Charity fetes? Guided Walks?

Feeling Flush

Methers has just lifted my heart by directing us to an article in the Londonist which imparts the brilliant news that the pumping station at Crossness is to recieve £1.5m to help restore it to glory.

I'm so excited by this news (The press release can be found at Greenwich Industrial History's Blog ) But though the Crossness Trust may have swanky board members, the day-to-day restoration is carried out by a team of volunteers who spend their lives crawling around sewers blocked with rust, a century of crap, and the sand that was used to prevent them collapsing when they stopped being used, cleaning them out and trying to get them working again - and they're the real heroes of this.

You only have to look at the single engine they've restored to its original condition to see a) how bloomin' beautiful something that should by all rights have been a purely functional piece of engineering is and b) how far they've still got to go. And none of them are getting any younger.

This picture demonstrates. In the middle, the fabulous cathedral-like atrium of painted ironwork. To the right is the shiny steel of newly-restored steam engine. To the left is the bit they haven't got to yet. My inclusion of the random hard-hatted head at the bottom is deliberate of course. It's Art. Obviously.

What? You haven't been there yet? Shame on you. Go to a steaming day as soon as you can (and make sure it's a steaming day and not just an ordinary visit. Far more fun.) You'll find dates here. But don't expect the little coloured glass lantern in the Londonist feature. I'm pretty sure that that's actually the Abbey Mills Pumping Station on the north of the Thames. But hey - that's great too - and the Londonist feature itself is fab - I particularly like the last sentence...

Ghostwriter

Ok - so she's not actually from Greenwich - but she lived in Blackheath and then Eltham for 23 years; a mildly scandalous woman for whom I have a lot of time, and of whom virtually nothing remains at her old home...

A few months ago I went for a cup of tea at Well Hall Pleasaunce where I fell in with one of Life's characters, whom I will call Alf. Alf was determined that I shouldn't just see the Pleasaunce as a pretty park, but as the ex-home of Edith Nesbit, one of our greatest children's writers. He virtually frog-marched me round the grounds, pointing out the wiggly wall, heavily buttressed to support its ancient bricks,


the secret pond in the corner,

the formal gardens

...and the fabulous barn itself, but of the actual 18th Century mansion Nesbit lived in between 1899 and 1922, absolutely nothing remains. There's a picture of it here, which shows it as pretty impressive, but I'm still not entirely sure why it was pulled down in 1931 - the closest I can find out is that it was to make way for the current park. I'm guessing local 'politics' - perhaps even a desire by 1930s social climbers to expunge a mildly scandlalous figure from Eltham's genteel history? Who can tell...

There's been loads written about Nesbit's 'unconventional' life - her sort-of open marriage to the Fabian Hubert Bland, who apparently 'could not by any effort of nature leave women alone' and her bringing up of his various children fathered on herself and, ahem, the assistant secretary of the Society, who also moved in. Gregarious and kind, she threw parties at Eltham for political big-hitters of the day - George Bernard Shaw, Annie Besant, Eleanor Marx. She was also the epitome of early 20th Century Bohemian Woman - tall and striking, dressed in trailing gowns of peacock blue satin, dripping with pearls and Indian bangles - and chain-smoking cigarettes from a long holder. And when Hubert died, she married, if memory serves, an engineer on the Woolwich Ferry, one Tommy Tucker, whose name sounds like it's straight out of one of her books.

Doesn't that put a different slant on The Phoenix and the Carpet or The Railway Children? And don't you just love her more for it?

But I'm not writing a biography here - there's plenty about her knocking around. I'm not even writing about the place - I know virtually nothing about Eltham. What I'm writing about today, it being the day before Hallowe'en and all, is the little-known fact that Edith Nesbit was also a horror writer.

I only found this out when I was in New York a few days ago, in Strand Bookshop, looking for something to read on the way home. I was initially drawn to the display because I thought someone had spilled something sticky on it - the imprint of obscure ghost and supernatural writers has a skull marked out in shiny on a matt background. But there, among the Aylmer Vances and the Gertrude Athertons, was The Power of Darkness - Tales of Terror, by Edith Nesbit.

It's of its time. The golden age, some might argue, of of ghost and horror writing - the Victorian/ Edwardian eras. The stories are at once cosy and really rather disturbing, and not all of them follow classic 'story' pattern. Many are more like incidents - statements, even, rather than plots with beginnings, middles and ends. And they are much crueller than I have found other writers to be. The endings are often harsh and dark, though they include the odd practical joke. There's no let-off for her characters - they make one mistake and are doomed for life. Apparently she was taken to visit the mummified corpses of St Michel in Bordeaux as a small child, and she had a relative who was accidentally put in their coffin ready for burying whilst still alive, something that stayed with her for the rest of her life. Both of these incidents clearly influence her work, as does, I'd guess, Poe.

With the best will in the world, I'd say the collection was patchy. When she's good, she's utterly terrifying, but other stories left me a bit bewildered. The most famous, Man-Size In Marble is creepy and atmospheric, something at which she's very good, and yet it, like all the stories, carries an Edwardian patina of snugness that belies the somewhat sudden and pretty grim ending. The Five Senses is bloomin' scary and From the Dead is singularly callous, but other stories, like Uncle Abraham's Romance and the mightily puzzling Power of Darkness left me wondering what to make of them.

Hand on heart, she's no M. R. James. But if you want a shiver for Hallowe'en you could do a lot worse than checking out Edith Nesbit's non-kiddie stories. In the meanwhile one thing at least remains of her at Eltham. The suitably satanic-looking bell hanging from the east end wall of the Tudor Barn comes from her house.

Fat Boy's Diner

Continuing in my not-really-in-Greenwich-but well-worth-a try series, Fat Boy's Diner could actually be in the American Mid-West, the amount of trouble it takes to get to, despite the fact that it's only a couple of hundred metres from The O2 as the crow flies. As the Phantom trudges, it's a good three-quarters of an hour, but the kitsch-value alone makes the trip worthwhile.

There's no information about the history of how this 1940s American diner, complete with aluminium cladding, Formica tables, slightly ageing red vinyl bench seats and twirly bar stools at the counter actually made it over to Blighty, but you know, I'm sure I remember it around Liverpool Street in the late 1980s (Am I mistaken? Or was that a different Fat Boy's Diner? Maybe they're all over the place - two-a-penny - and I just haven't noticed them...)

Maybe it got too pricey to keep a what is essentially a posh caravan selling burgers in the City, but it's found its spiritual home now, nestled among dead lighthouses, weird installations and container studios of Trinity Buoy Wharf, beloved by the artists who live there and their visitors alike.

How to describe it? Well - just think of practically any Hollywood movie that has pretensions to nostalgia and you've got it. Plastic sauce bottles (sadly not in the shape of tomatoes or hot dogs but you can't have everything) Venetian blinds that make me think of that sinister scene in Goodfellas where Robert de Niro meets Ray Liotta 'with intent' (yeah, yeah, that wasn't a trailer, but it was still damn creepy) black and white tiles and tabletop juke boxes. I once found a job lot of over 70 of those babies for just under thirty quid each, but I couldn't even lift one of them, let alone get it in my suitcase, chiz.

Outside, they've plonked a few tables and some Yuccas. I don't recommend them just at the moment, but they're lovely in summer.

I'd say, to be absolutely honest, that the setting and the fabulous, fabulous decor are the real reasons to make a pilgrimage to this place. The food is predictable - burgers, hot dogs, fries (not chips, obviously) with shakes and Cokes, followed by pies and sundaes. And so it should be - it would be just wrong to eat anything else in such a venue. As it goes, it's well-cooked and cheerfully served. But don't expect anything more than that. It's fun food, not gourmet, like most caffs, really.

The joy is in just being able to sit in a backwater in East London and pretend you're in The Last Picture Show or Back to the Future or American Graffiti (even if their diners aren't caravans either) Or maybe one of those really terrifying Films Noirs that aren't set in the night or the city, but which usually involve deranged hitchhikers and escaped criminals kidnapping travelling salesmen in the scorching desert sun. Or maybe Sliding Doors, which was apparently actually filmed there, not that I remember anything about that movie save that the film makers clearly thought it was possible for John Hannah to run from the Albert Bridge to the City, via what looked suspiciously like Battersea, in ten minutes, and that no one would notice that the Waterloo-City Line doesn't go to Upminster...

OK, so here's the snag. Getting there. Normally, you're going to have to either drive round via the Blackwall Tunnel or get a DLR to East India Dock from which it takes about 15 minutes to walk.

Every once in a while, on high days and holidays, Thames Clippers take pity on us and run a free shuttle boat from the 02 to Trinity Buoy Wharf. Keep an eye out for such events here and take advantage of them, because it will mean that everything else is open as well - artists' studios, installations, etc. And the first weekend of every month, the very-odd-indeed tinging and bonging sound installation Longplayer by Jem Finer gives you the excuse to get inside the historic lighthouse. But that's for another day...

Deptford X

Robert's asked me to remind you about Deptford X, an art festival going on around Deptford and which is ending soon. I confess I found the publicity, though plentiful, very confusing, until I got hold of a programme, which finally told me what the hell was going on. The Ghost Trade leaflets, which seemed to be everywhere, told me practically nothing, and the website left me puzzled - in it's keeness to tell us about prestigious sponsors it seemed to leave out that vital clue that tells the novice (i.e. me) what it's all about, which is a great shame. I was almost put off going at all.

But I did go and as soon as I hit the first venue and they gave me an actual programme, it was suddenly obvious. I saw about three quarters of it all, and plan to see the rest before it goes.

The best day to do it on is Saturday, because there's an opportunity to climb the extremely narrow and steep stone spiral staircase up St Nicholas Church to view Yinka Shonibare's White Flag at Half Mast. It loses a tiny something in that poor old St Nick's flagpole isn't quite tall enough so it's really White Flag at Full Mast, but I'm not sure I got it anyway, and let's face it, it's worth it just for the view. The people there are very sweet indeed. Down in the crypt there is a brilliant little film - Matt Stokes's Cipher, where two pipe organists play some truly creepy and exciting modern compositions; an example of art and place melding perfectly. I sat for a full minute in silence afterwards - a first for me.

I was also taken by the Dead Art (I'd tell you who did it if I could find it again on the website) and, once I had the programme, by the fun attitude of the organisers. They're having a funeral for it this weekend.

It's been a successful festival, and the great Deptford Project train cafe has somehow managed to polarise it. I managed to eat there three times last week.

But Deptford X have to do something about their publicity. To me - no art critic, but someone who likes to see art - it was confusing and difficult to work out when and how to see it. Frankly the irony of the The Ding Dong Twist Club which "gently mocks the elitism of art fairs with its inhospitable Hospitality Complex," was that I couldn't work out how to bloomin' get there and missed out entirely on being treated inhospitably.

This must sound like I didn't like it. That's so not true. The actual art is great. I just couldn't work out the publicity. Maybe I'm just getting old. But do try to get to see it. Go to one venue, and all will be revealed.

Monsters Of The Deep.

I know this looks like the world's crappiest photo - and yes, I guess it nearly is - except that I took three more that were all worse than this. There is a reason for it though, honest...

I don't often go off-topic and write about things other than Greenwich - and even if I do, they usually have a Greenwich theme or are great 'days out.' I have no real excuse for including this other than it's fantastic, Thames-ish and there's only a week left of it. And since our trains go there, and lots of people work around London Bridge, I'm sort-of counting it as a Lovely Thing to see on your way home...

Drift is the first annual art exhibition on the Thames - large-scale projects free for all to view. It's been on a couple of weeks but I hadn't been wildly impressed with most of the exhibits I'd seen up to Friday. They weren't bad art (there is a lot of Bad Art about), just not exciting. There was a shiny wavery board floating by the Millennium Bridge, and some sounds played on the bridge (when I was there, the 'seagulls' meant to "disorientate passers-by" were drowned out by the real thing. Now if there had been cows mooing and pastural sounds of goatherds yodelling through the mountains - now then I'd have been disoriented..) a decorated buoy and a rather nice, but slightly promising-more-than-it-delivered laser 'bridge' reaching across those ghost piers by the modern Blackfriars one. I liked it all well enough but not enough to break Greenwich rank and write about it.

That was before I saw the monsters.

Walk to the north end of London Bridge and look over the western edge at dusk. I got there around 6.30pm and it was a bit early, the sun wasn't quite down yet, but I like to think that part of the art is staring into the murk and thinking you can see sea monsters.

As it gets darker, a series of projectors start to show CGI mythical creatures of the deep swimming around 'under' the water, diving, coming to the surface, intertwining with each other, racing each other, then disappearing down again. Then the water goes black again before - yes - is that a fin? Oh - no. It went down again. But - hey - there's another. Look - it's got bug-eyes and a weird - no it's gone again. Everything goes dark. You wait ages. It must have stopped. Almost a minute goes by. Shall we go? Yeah let's - no, look - there's two more . And a baby...

The artist, Craig Walsh, has managed to capture something very deep in our imaginations (well - in mine, anyway) about the Thames. Ok, I've usually had one or two when I normally look into the river and see weird creatures - but there's something very primeval about Man and monsters. We love them and are terrified by them pretty much equally, and stories of them have been with us since - well, since forever.

I love this installation with a passion. What I love about it is that it's really subtle - you have to wait - and watch. And the magic isn't just in seeing projections of creatures swimming around - it's in the time in between those creatures' appearances, and the thoughts that envelope you as you wait.

I thoroughly recommend this work of art. If you're at London Bridge it's a short walk to the north west corner. I reckon from about 6.45 to about 7.15pm is probably best. I went a second time to see it, later in the evening and the combination of lights under the bridge and the fact that later on you can ever so slightly see the whole projected image instead of just the monsters, makes me think that magical crepuscular moment is the most enchanting.

I tried, a bit half-heartedly, admittedly, to get a pic - but this isn't something to be captured - it's something to experience. You can try clicking on the image to get it bigger, but it won't really give you anything like what it's really like.

I would love to see this as a permanent installation - or at least an annual thing. It's just great.

There's one other exhibit, at Canary Wharf, which I haven't seen - a moving 'sinking ship' - anyone here seen it?

Deptford Project

I've been wanting to visit the Deptford Project train carriage cafe for ages, but I'd been a bit worried that Time Out raving about it would mean it was choc-a-bloc and it would be hard to get in. Still, sometimes you just have to join the crowd and eventually I could resist no longer.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Deptford is so trendy these days - but it does surprise me every time. There's a vibe there that was once of the variety that could only be smelt in Hoxton and Shoreditch, (and, a very long time ago, in Covent Garden and the South Bank) but now - now, it would seem that South East London's getting its turn. You can read all about it in the splendid Deptford Dame though I confess I deliberately didn't read her review before I trotted along to the the caff, so I that could get my own impressions.

Often when people like Time Out rave about somewhere, by the time I get to it, it's gone downhill, but if this is true about Deptford Project it must have been wondrous indeed. I have rarely visited a cafe where the whole experience was as fun as this.

I'm glad I wasn't behind the convoy that brought the 35 tonne carriage to its final resting place on Deptford High Street - it apparently did 2 miles per hour all the way down from Essex - though if you'd like to enjoy the trip for yourself you can see a video of it on their website.

But with a lick of white paint and some colourful decor, it's now bright and shiny, with a raised palm-fringed decking area outside (complete with stripy deckchairs if you're brave) and a simple long-line trestle inside, stools painted with sweet messages and lamps that look like they're made from neon licorice bootlaces.

The people who run the caff are far too young to remember the 80s in any great detail - but it really does feel inspired by that era to me. They even play 70s and 80s reggae / pop classics - I can't think of anything more suitable.

The food, too, has an 'alternative 80s' feel to me - fresh, chunky salads that remind me of the old Cranks days, and giant cakes which actually taste as good as they look (I'm often disappointed by cakes in cafes - they look great but taste like cardboard. These are fab.) The sandwiches are of the doorstep variety and the hot food simple and filling. Absolutely no complaints there.

But what I liked best was the atmosphere. Somewhere like this could be horribly arch - and exclusive - catering for the Goldsmiths crowd and people in pointy shoes and vintage jackets, making anyone else feel a bit out of place. But there's nothing hipper-than-thou about the welcome that we - and everyone else who came in while I was there - received. Wide smiles, solicitous service and general cheeriness from people I'm happy to believe actually want to be there.

Don't miss the Elvis loo. A converted garden shed, wallpapered with black and white shots of The King, fetish shoes and people dressed up as the man himself, studded with unlikely conspiracy-theory newspaper cuttings and highlit with The Elvis Mirror.

Yes, you, too, can be Elvis, just for a second, if you shut one eye, and stare into the mirror. If you're visiting the loo with a friend and you have a camera (and let's face it, if you're in there with a friend, it's entirely possibly you've taken a camera with you...) said pal can take a photo of you and send it to an online gallery. Sadly I was in there alone.

This place lives up to its hype. I thoroughly recommend it and will be back as soon as I can. Oh - and it's worth taking the wheelchair ramp route to the place, and keeping your eyes open. As with so many places trendifiying at a rate of knots, there's art everywhere...

Oxleas Wood Cafe

Oxleas Wood Cafe describes itself as "The Best Kept Secret" and it's certainly tucked away somewhat, up Shooters Hill and down a little side street, but if it is a secret, I'd say it's very poorly kept.

Even on a Monday lunchtime, it's bustling and busy, with a steady flow of customers, many of them clearly regulars, returning for the kind of caff food that is just right for a setting in the middle of a forest. Dog walkers, elderly people, local builders and, I suspect, a fair few hospital workers escaping QEH for a few precious minutes.

It was refurbished last year, and it is really good to see what is essentially a park cafe kept neat and tidy, free from graffiti and urinating youths, still used for what it was built for. I'm particularly taken with the fridge housing the cold drinks and ice creams, covered in Smarties sticky-backed plastic. A Blue Peter triumph.

There's nothing fancy about this place - but what there is is neat and clean - pine tables and chairs, white paint and sundry film posters. A noticeboard advertising local events (anyone for a six-piece female-fronted band? No indication of style or genre, but guaranteed girls...)

The food matches the place. Good, honest greasy-spoon stuff - the blackboard advertises every variety of fry-up breakfast - available all day, as far as I can tell - plus hearty pies, lasagnes and ploughman's lunches. Oh - and the odd special.

Don't expect gourmet cookery. But who wants delicate towers of batons, swirls of coulis or tiny jugs of jus when they've just been for a brisk walk in the fresh autumn air? I, for one, want a big pile of hot stodge, a big bowl of soup or a big plate of egg, chips and beans, washed down with a mug of orange tea.

It's well-priced, bright and fresh - and a joy to visit in between showers just now. In fact it will also be good when the leaves, still just about green and swollen with all the rain we've had this summer, turn and fall, the walks become crisper and your breath precedes you in little clouds of steam. The added bonus there, of course, is that the view will be even more breathtaking, glimpsed through bare branches and the odd holly tree.

If you go to Oxleas in the next little while, don't miss this charming den that's clearly been built by enterprising local kids.

They have a website (the cafe, of course, not the kids...) but it doesn't mention the opening hours, so here they are:

They open every day between 8.00am and about 4.30-5.00pm. Bear in mind, though, that although they're open at 8.00am, they don't start cooking until about 8.30.

An Act Of Royal Vandalism

"Goodness, what a lovely ceiling!"

"That old thing? If you like it so much do take it with you, My Dear."

Don't you just find yourself saying that every time you have guests round? It's probably a good thing that Queen Anne, possibly one of the dullest monarchs and definitely the biggest Royal vandal Greenwich has known, didn't spend much time at Greenwich, or we'd have lost the walls and floors of the Queen's House too (we'll get onto the name-'em-and-shame-'em commoner vandals on other occasions). It also points to the perils of painting beautiful ceilings onto canvas and pasting them onto the roof like Orazio Gentileschi did, instead of doing it properly by spending years on your back on a scaff-tower...

I hope you lot had a more productive Open House Weekend than I did. Of the six buildings I tried to visit on Saturday, I managed just one, largely due to sodding London Transport and sodding, sodding South East Trains who between them shut most of the tube and Maze Hill and Westcombe Park and North-sodding-Greenwich, and which meant it took me nearly an hour just to get out of Greenwich.

The one I did get to, though, I have been trying to visit for months.

Marlborough House, in Pall Mall, is a lovely place. One of the few remaining early 18th Century town houses in London, it's a glorious Stuart affair, complete with extensive gardens and murals all over the place, but I can't see that it would be much diminished had it had its own ceiling, instead of nicking ours.

Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, was a feisty woman, well-versed in the politics of her age, and afraid of no one. At first, the frankly wimpy Anne was impressed with her, and they played together at being 'ordinary,' taking tea together as Mrs Morley and Mrs Freeman, and giggling at the world. I'm not sure what Anne was doing visiting Greenwich - she certainly didn't go there very much - but on one occasion she must have been accompanied by her Lady of the Bedchamber, who seemed to consider the Queen's houses as her own personal shopping mall.

Talking of the Mall, the Queen had already granted Sarah a large chunk of her grounds between the Mall and Pall Mall so that she could build herself a grand house. The piece of land didn't go quite up to Pall Mall, though, and Sarah was too mean to buy the little strip of land between her new gaff and the road, something she would regret later...

She admired the paintings on the ceiling at the Queen's House, and from what's left of them, there was indeed much to admire. Designed by Gentileschi along with Inigo Jones who built the place, they were painted in 1635, with or without (but probably without) his daughter Artemesia, and, as I mentioned earlier, painted on canvas stretched across wooden frames.

The pictures were based on a famous textbook, Cesare Ripa's Iconographia, which had models for classical designs. This particular set shows Old Testament scenes - The Finding of Moses, Joseph and Potiphar's Wife etc., a sundry group symbolising the Nine Muses and, in four separate panels the Arts - painting, sculpture, architecture and music.

I have never come across anything that was so heavily patrolled by people stopping other people taking photographs, and once they discovered my camera in the bag-search, I was a marked Phantom. No chance of a picture. I can't find one on the internet either, so you'll just have to imagine it.

But back to the Royal vandal. Anne gave the ceiling to Sarah as a gift. The canvases were ripped down and transported to Westminster where - OMG - they were too big. No one had bothered to measure them first. No problem, they thought. Better too large than too small. They just got the scissors out. The ceiling was hacked back from 5.5sq m to 4.6sq m. Bish Bosh. Tidy job, mate.

And very nice it looks too. Lots of gold and overpainting, joined by lurid paintings on the wall of an almost opposite subject - the sundry wars that the duchess's husband had been fighting in. Some of the pictures are really quite eye-popping - complete with dead bodies, the rolling eyes of horses and peasant women stripping corpses. I'm not convinced much thought went into marrying the two subjects...

Sarah and Anne famously fell out, and the Queen probably regretted giving her ceiling to the duchess. Much as the duchess must have regretted not buying that strip of land. A woman with a talent for falling out with people (she fought with Sir Christopher Wren over the building of Marlborough House and finished it herself) she later clashed swords with the Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, who cannily built the 18th Century equivalent of a tower block between her and the road...

To cover up the edges, the ceiling was heavily overpainted, and bits added and subtracted. During the 19th Century, a minor royal wallpapered over the paintings (I'm not sure whether it included the ceiling or just those scary walls) but the place stayed a house of opulence and there's no doubt about it, that ceiling does look good where it is.

But I can't help feeling it's wrong. The Queen's House always seems so - well, austere, when it shouldn't. It was designed to be every bit as fabulous as its later neighbour, the Painted Hall, and yet it is stripped. Elegant, yes, but denuded. There was a laser display panel which projected the ceiling until recently, when, presumably, it was commandeered by the BBC and redeployed for I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue...

There are two ways I can think of to see this ceiling. 1) You can become a head of state of one of the Commonwealth Countries - the building now operates as the Commonwealth Secretariat, or 2) you'll just have to wait until next Open House Day. Sorry guys...

The Victoria - A Sad Sight

I know nothing at all about this (very) dead pub on Woolwich Road in Charlton, but it makes me sad every time I see it. It was clearly once a thriving place - when the docks and factories were working flat-out. Money had clearly been spent on it - the decoration, though shabby now, is still pretty ornate.

At a guess I'd say it was late Victorian - which would tie in with the industry in the area, and, judging from the abrupt way in which its walls end, it was probably surrounded by terraced houses. Were they destroyed in the war, perhaps? Or did they just go when the place was cleared for - well - nothing much, really. There are whole swathes of post-industrial Charlton that have nothing at all on them.

(Once again, last night, as I was walking past the fire station a little closer to Greenwich, I peered through the holes in the high walls surrounding the two-odd acres that are home only to buddliea trees and abandoned shopping trolleys. My usual fantasy of creating a herb farm within those walls danced about my head, though I confess I have no real intentions in that direction. Anyone fancy starting Charlton Herbery?)

But back to the Victoria. I have a horrible feeling that this is a gonner. There are giant holes in the fabric of the building that would make it hugely expensive to repair, and without the custom to keep it open (it's opposite Maryon Park and close to the Thames Barrier, but as for much in the way of housing that would provide 'regulars,' it's pretty much on its own) I can't see anyone coming up with that kind of cash. It's a cute late Victorian pub - but I suspect that no one would argue it was unique.

I truly hope I'm wrong. I love this building - especially the enormous spread eagle that holds up the corner - and I would love to see something 'nice' happen to it (I'd even happily accept luxury flats) - but time is definitely running out for this one...

Favourite Inn

Today, Folks, I bring you something a little out of town - but a secret that if you don't know it already, you will thank me for sharing with you...

We were talking recently about the lack of decent Chinese eateries, but when Henrietta asked me the other day about places to live, I was reminded of one that really deserves a mention.

Round the back of Woolwich Arsenal train (and soon to be DLR) station, lies the intriguingly-named, somewhat tatty Spray Street. And in the middle of Spray Street, about two minutes' dawdle from the station, lies The Favourite Inn. Brightly-lit, which makes it especially welcoming on a dark rainy night, you really can't miss it.

Don't expect anything glamorous - simple decor, with the ubiquitous plain-walls-bar-and-strange-fairy-lights combo - but what it lacks for in ambiance is more than made up for by the welcome - solicitous and attentive - and the food.

I have never eaten a bad meal at this place. I've had things I preferred to others - the King Prawns with Cashew Nuts were a hit where I wouldn't particularly order the Scallops with Ginger and Spring Onion again (nothing awful about it, just nothing exciting) - but it's always been well-cooked and nicely flavoured.

But the real ace in the hole for those with vegetarians in the group (as we often have) is the Crispy Aromatic Duck. It's wonderful - and for once the veggies don't have to sit around watching the carnivores with their tongues hanging out. I have no idea what is actually in the Crispy Aromatic "Monk's Duck" - but it's totally vegetarian and just as tasty as the real thing, so everyone can sit around together with piles of wafer-thin pancakes, dishes of hoi sin sauce and shredded spring onion, fighting over the last shreds of crispy seaweed.

Give it a try. This is an honest, simple place that has always come up with the goods when I've been there. I don't know what will happen to it when the whole area gets regenerated, but it's survived so far...

http://www.favouriteinn.co.uk/

Greenwich Wildlife (5)

Is it 'wildlife?'

Well it could be. Paul sent me this Mandarin Duck that he spotted in Maryon Wilson Park. Chances are there's another of them just out of shot as they are romantics of the bird world.

Because they're so attractive, they've been used as ornaments in lakes for years, and every so often, a young couple pair up, obviously against their parents' wishes, and secretly elope. They may be endangered in their native Russia and China, due to deforestation, but Russia and China's loss is our gain.

There are about 1,000 wild breeding pairs in Britain, apparently - and though these may have been brought in to Maryon Wilson for pretty, they could also be of those lost young couples, desperate for a pond to call their own, Wild or not, they're still helping keep up the world population.

We have to be extra careful with them, though, as they're not protected birds here, despite their worldwide decline. That's because they're not technically native British birds. Cue one of those 1950s B Movies about misunderstood teenagers...

For the Chinese, they are symbols of love and wedded harmony as they are said to mate for life. Ahhh...

Favourite Front Gardens (11)

Trinity Buoy Wharf,E14



We haven't had a favourite front garden for ages. Maybe this is because the weather's been so bloomin' duff that I haven't been out looking for them - or maybe nobody wants to do much in the way of primping and preening their greenery in the rain.

But I said I'd bang on about Trinity Buoy Wharf a bit more, and today, I want to show you what a bunch of creative people do with no fixed gardens.

Trinity Buoy Wharf (not actually in, but I like to think "honorary" Greenwich) was basically an experimental station built along the Thames to test out lighthouse technology before it was used in really dangerous areas. There are some fab stories about it - one of my favourites is where they'd fire up a new type of bulb and some poor sod would have to leg-it round to Shooters Hill to see if they could see the light - and famous people - Michael Faraday, no less, who worked there, but that's for another day. A dark winter's day, perhaps, when stories of bravery and derring-do on the high seas are all the more dramatic.

Trinity Buoy Wharf has a fascinating life these days too. It's inhabited by creative types - with wonderful installations and art projects (see Aluna for one of my favourites) - and a great diner - all of which I'll also get onto in good time. They warrant looking at in more detail than one post.

The place is a wonderful mix of the old - Victorian warehouses, light-ships and the lighthouse itself - and the new - a pile of containers, painted bright colours and inhabited by arty types. And there's nothing arty types like better than creating exciting plant projects.

All over the place pieces of art mingle with found objects, juxtaposed in curious ways, both inside and outside the workshops of potters, mosaic artists and sculptors. Strange inventions and old objets d'art and honest tools mingle together - and grow from and alongside plants. Gay annuals and bright bedding jostle with runner beans and courgette plants, tomatoes and herbs.

This place is great. On the first weekend of every month most of the installations are open, and it's best to go along then. It's currently a bit of a trek to get to - you have to either drive or go to Canning Town on the Jubilee and take a 15 minute walk. But occasionally, just occasionally, they have a "festival" day and there's a free boat service from the O2 - and if you see one of those advertised, GO. It's a great afternoon out. The website is a bit out of date - it's still advertising the last festival - but I checked London Open House Weekend and it's going to be open then.

Laura Williams, the artist responsible for Aluna, tells me that since the Thames Clippers are now based around there, they can pretty much hop on a Clipper any time they want to go across to Greenwich. Wouldn't it be great if there was a boat service every weekend the art is open?

Peter "The Phantom" Parker Scores A Scoop

Good citizens relax! All is well; we are being watched and protected by our own superhero.

I was toddling up Victoria Way in Charlton a few days ago when I spied something strange atop a chimney stack.

Could it be? Clutching my faithful box-brownie, I tip-toed quietly towards the crouching figure, hoping that his eagle eye and razor-sharp reflexes wouldn't trigger before I could get a picture. The Daily Planet pays good money for clear shots of Spiderman himself...

The conditions weren't good (they never are when you're trying to capture a myth - The Loch Ness Monster - The Abominable Snowman - Boris Johnson actually in London...) but I think that my pictures will be clear enough for conspiracy theorists everywhere to agree that Spidey does exist...

Aluna

I get heartily fed up with Corporate Art - usually in sculpture-form, designed, effectively, by committee, even if it has a famous name attached to it, poorly executed and often just in the wrong bloomin' place (I don't, for example, disapprove of a statue of The Unknown Construction Worker - but what's it doing outside the Tower of London?)

Companies decide they want a piece of Art and put the job out to tender. Somehow it seems that it would be better that the art actually grew out of a moment of inspiration - from someone with something to say, rather than coming up with something that "will do," as long as it fits in with the corporate image.

Anyone who's been to Bluewater recently may have seen the uninspiring selection of submissions for the in-my-view-utterly-pointless Angel-Of-The South sculpture to be hoved up - around Ebsfleet, if I recall. The folks up North have their Angel - and, I'll admit, very fun it is too. But that doesn't mean we have to have one too (though of course anyone who was reading last week will remember this is not a new thing...)

In my humble opinion the best form of art grows from an artist's very soul - where they have absorbed what is around them, the issues they care about and the history and landscape that the art is to be in (and no I don't count the entry for the Angel of the South statue that looks exactly like a dodgy Kent scrap metal yard - I don't believe it's actually occurred to the guy...)

You could say that makes me a hopeless idealist and that sponsorship has gone on for centuries. Perhaps I am and of course it has. But Art where the artist actually has something to say does exist. What I don't get is why they don't seem to attract the kind of giant corporate sponsorship that the vacuous ones do...

If you haven't already met her, allow me to introduce you to Aluna.

She is (or might be, if they ever get the cash) the world's first tidal-powered Lunar Clock. A gigantic series of concentric glass rings, she's made out of thousands of tiny recycled glass panels each containing a little LED light. As the tide rises and falls, powering the lights, they illuminate various areas of the rings, telling the exact state of the tide - and the phase and time of the Moon. The relationship between the Moon and the tide have been vital to the Thames and to London for - well - for ever, actually, and this is a physical - and IMHO beautiful - representation of that.

It will be so big that, if it actually comes about, they'll be able to use the ground around the base (at the currently derelict East India Dock Basin across the river) as a park and place for festivals for people to whom the Moon is still a powerful religious/spiritual symbol.

I met Laura Williams, the artist who came up with this eccentric, but perfectly-placed and conceived project, when she opened her studio for all-comers over a weekend at Trinity Buoy Wharf a couple of weeks ago (an extraordinary place; I will be banging on about TBW at great length in sundry later posts) and she told me that she was desperate for it to go at the East India Dock Basin as part of the park, because it is so well-aligned with Greenwich and the Meridian, with all its time-space-maritime connections. We'd be able to see it glowing eerily from Greenwich Hill, but I don't see that this could be anything other than a thing of beauty.

There's something almost 'soft' about this giant, solid structure that I can see settling into the modern landscape with an almost timeless feel - a link with the past, the present and the future. Because it's powered by the moon, this isn't going to be arc-light-strength - it will be a much softer, gentler light - highlighting, rather than adding to the lighting pollution problem.

I utterly love this project. It helps that I've actually seen a model - the picture, which I've pinched from the website doesn't do it justice. There's another image which I can't find, which shows the fabulous Meridian laser clipping it (I do hope that that laser doesn't have to be turned off when they build that giant building on the Peninsula.)

The Aluna guys have development funding - but not the cash they need to build it. Even with all the Olympic "regeneration" going on north of the river, the project seems to be slipping under the radar, so to speak. If we don't get it, though, it's possible it will still be built but not quite so easily accessible. The Australians, apparently, are very keen to see it go Down Under...

Dancing Sailors

I found the most extraordinary volume in a second hand bookshop yesterday. I thought it was fairly odd at the time, but it was only getting it home that I realised just how peculiarly encased in 1930s aspic it is.

Twice Round the London Clock, published in 1933, was written by one Stephen Graham, about whom I can find virtually nothing, but from his writing appears to have been a newspaper columnist, writing for The Sunday Chronicle. In the book, Graham goes to various bohemian parties in Belgravia, slums-it round the East End, and eats at old City establishments, making witty comment as he goes. The illustrations are by the Chronicle's resident artist, Rick Elmes. The pair of them - oh, how they get into scrapes, largely surrounding Graham's portly figure, and the gaping yokels they come across.

There's nothing about Greenwich in there, chiz, but I was highly intrigued by the chapter entitled Dancing Sailors where Graham and Elmes visit a North Woolwich dance hall. I obviously haven't a clue what Graham was really like; I imagine a tubby posh bloke with a cut-glass BBC accent condescending to talk to the hoi-poloy in an excruciatingly patronising tone...

"The interior of California in North Woolwich is something like part of a ship...perhaps that is why an otherwise ordinary public house has become one of the gay spots in Dockland," he informs us. "The sailor ashore looks for something like a boat, and they are almost all sailors who dance there."

Interestingly, despite it being 1933, Graham really does mean 'gay' in the modern sense. But more about that in a minute.

The California's clientele is from around the world - Graham spends time describing the colourful array of costumes, skins and languages of the various Jolly Jack Tars whose ships have brought them to the port of London. He describes their conversation - their finding out about each other's worlds, their customs, what they want in life - and there are definitely those who are there for the local girls.

"The barmaids are buxom, well-cared for and independent. Sailors treat them respectfully. But the dancing girls, in their smart stockings and shabby everything else would really be kept out of the public houses except that they bring more custom. "

They're dancing to a "the shabbiest piano, with its top partly removed to let out more noise, and then to a one-man jazz band of the kind that used to be the wonder of children in the streets."

Eventually, Graham works out that "the men did not get off with the girls at all;" but "danced together in the funniest burlesque style."

Graham is not at all sure about This Kind Of Thing. He blames that very fast music Jazz, which has "infected ships by way of radio and, as, except on passenger ships, there are no women the "nancy boys" dance together."

He gradually gets used to it all though, noting that "when there is shore leave one may see hundreds of couples of sailors dancing together," especially at The California. Apparently, according to Graham, "the Navy dances much better than the mercantile marine." He's even worked out why - " the Navy has more time for it and the discipline helps."

Graham sits with a couple - a sailor and his new on-shore friend. When the friend discovers that the sailor is a butcher, he's all for going back with a car and loading up with provisions from the ship. The sailor doesn't seem particularly happy about this and Graham changes the subject - "he evidently hoped we'd forget - which we did for his sake."

Graham and Elmes later pick up a couple of girls, just in case the reader was getting any ideas about him.

"The dancing ladies are by no means averse from sitting down to a plate of ham if they can find a man who is willing to pay for that form of entertainment."

Watching women eat ham, eh. Whoooarrr. Of course, they have websites for that kind of thing these days...

So there you go - a curious little snippet, locked in the pages of a truly bizarre book hidden beneath a pile of dusty tomes in the musty basement of a bookshop on Charing Cross Road. I'm not really sure what it's saying - merely,perhaps, that there is a whole underbelly of History still to be discovered. In that one chapter, Graham touches on class, poverty, gender, sexuality and race-relations - fascinating to us seventy five years later. There is still much to be learned. Much to be discovered and discussed.

I thought you should see the pictures. The top one is of the California itself - check out the burly couple in the middle. But the one below gives me the creeps in its very smugness - a couple of East End girls overwhelmed by Lord Snooty and his motor carriage...

The London Nobody Knows

Slightly off-topic here, guys, but only slightly. The London Nobody Knows, as some of you will be aware, was a series of books and articles by Geoffrey Fletcher in the mid 1960s.

Fletcher was the Sinclair of his day. Writing not about Sixties Swinging London, but its dodgy, edgy underbelly. The seedy, seamy side. The poor side. Most of it talks about north of the river, although he does mention Greenwich as "not yet sufficiently explored architecturally," though he reserves praise for the junk shop in Spread Eagle Yard (now part of the restaurant) and Goddards (now the burger bar.)

Fletcher's prose is elegant and flowing, punctuated with line drawings almost as evocative as the writing. He's most at home in decaying music halls, decaying markets or with decaying, tragic people. The homeless, the chronic poor, the meths drinkers.

The books have been out of print for years, though they're not particularly hard to find second hand. But just released on DVD is the frankly surreal documentary written by Geoffrey Fletcher and narrated by James Mason in 1967.

Mason, in flat cap and tweeds, carrying a furled umbrella, wanders around 60s London, looking at the bits that Austin Powers missed. He visits bombsites, abandoned music halls, decaying Spitalfields houses, slums and miserable factories. It's in colour, but that colour is so washed out that the feeling of melancholy is almost palpable. Mason walks around markets, taking in the local characters, the goods for sale, the patter. He visits waterside factories (including a bizarre 'humorous sequence' about an egg-breaking factory, making fun of it, but never actually explaining what the hell it was (anyone who knows, do tell.)

By far the most distressing part is when he meets the people Fletcher's writing about. The people who still live in the slums. The has-been street performers. The down-and-outs at the Salvation Army shelter. The squabbling alcoholics, fighting over a bottle of meths (The PG rating is qualified by a warning "contains scene of a man drinking methylated spirits.")

This is a highly affecting film. I was really quite down by the time I finished watching its 45 minutes. Interestingly, despite his fascination with London's history and architectiure, Fletcher is in favour of those hideous tower blocks that by the 60s were springing up all over the place instead of ancient Georgian mansions, and warns us not to get too sentimental about the wrecking ball we see in full flow in the film (no warning about that in the PG rating...) but somehow, watching those kids playing in the streets of a war-devastated London, the 60s attitude, however depressing, is at least understandable.

Greenwich is mentioned only as a place where pirates used to be hanged - and even that not in name, but I think this is such an important slice of recent London history that I make no apology for including it here.

Bundled with it is the even more surreal Bicyclettes de Belsize - a sort of cross between Blow Up and Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. The thankfully-short 'cult film' is, as far as I can tell, about the hazards of bad cycling. Hip Anthony May cycles irresponsibly around the streets of Hamsptead, having two crashes in about ten minutes - once with a small girl on a trike who gets a crush on him. The second time, he goes headlong into a poster of a fashion model and gets a crush on her.

After a chase, a spurious fashion-shoot in Belsize Park (no David Hemmings - but there might as well have been) and a groovy party scene, it all ends happily ever after. I should also point out that there are only about two words spoken in the entire film. Everything else is sung. There are some extremely cheesy musical numbers, none of which are classics but annoyingly hang around the mind for hours afterwards, and some very dodgy miming on the part of the stars. Shut your eyes for the embarrassing comedy queue. Quite cringe-making.

What makes the film watchable is the location and the camera work. Hampstead seems to have largely missed out on the wholesale destruction the rest of London suffered and there's a lot of recognisable stuff. But for me, the aerial shots and the lingering long shots are the best bit. Even if you can't stomach the rest, do watch the opening credits - one long tracking shot which turns out to be the view from Anthony May's roof.

I'm not sure I'd agree with the jewel-box, which describes Bicyclettes de Belsize as "an absolute gem," but if you like tooth-edgingly sweet slices of lost 60s kitsch, this is your movie.

I've just found a groovy widget that allows me to recommend stuff if it's on Amazon. It will come in useful for a new section I'm in the middle of creating on Greenwich books and resources (though of course most Greenwich books and resources are out of print and therefore not Amazonable.) So I'm testing it out here:

Rathmore Benches Update

I'm feeling just a little smug just now. Remember the Rathmore Benches? Those beautiful, snaking mosaics in Charlton that must have once glowed like jewels and now look a little patchy to say the least?

Well I just got an email from Carol from Greenwich Mural Workshop who tells me that thanks to my reminding them (i.e. banging on about them being really shabby-looking) they have just successfully applied to Awards for All for a grant to repair these lovely works of art. The work will be going on in August and September, so we should have sparkling-fresh restored benches by October.

Huzzah!

Carol also tells me "In addition we will be running a short course for young people from 10 years upwards for 8 days from 18th August to 29th August in mosaic production and as part of this course will be producing a new panel for the exterior of the building. The course is also being supported by Greenwich Youth & Play Services."

She doesn't mention how to get involved in these workshops but I guess an email to her from their website (above) should do the trick. I'm just hoping the budget stretches to a tin of paint for the building itself. Whoever thought Battleship Grey was a good colour for a Youth Club? I'm guessing not Greenwich Mural Workshop...

But hurrah for regenerating the regeneration. If only a few other projects that were done in good faith but that have fallen by the wayside could be similarly resurrected.

Caught Knapping

You know how much I like people with passions, especially unusual ones (passions and people...) and Paul, our friendly neighbourhood flint-knapper, is a Man On A Quest.

He and I have been discussing the lack of flint in buildings round here, which, when you come to think about it, is a bit odd...

Flint is Paul's passion - you only have to check out the flint-knappery on his website to see that. He loves the stuff, even if to you and me it's just bits of rock, Paul sees it as fabric of beauty, and its knappers as people of a great lost skill.

Paul has been trudging round Greenwich (can't you just see him in his Neolithic loincloth, stone axe in hand?) searching for what appear to be non-existent flint buildings. He finds this puzzling as "many 19th century geology journals mentions Blackheath and Charlton as a good flint source in London. One geologist mentions you only need to stroll up Blackheath Hill or through Hanging Wood to find flints lying on the ground."

But despite hours, nay, years of trudging, so far he's only managed to find two examples in the whole of the area - and at least one of them is surprising. Let him tell you about them...

"The first is barely in Greenwich at all. Four or five hundred yards in the wrong direction and it would be in Lewisham instead. The building in question is St Michael & All Angels church nestling down Blackheath Park. A private road, not exactly welcoming to visitors.

The church itself is not flint and was built in the 19th century in two phases. Around it is a superbly crafted flint wall. I have no idea when the wall was made but the flint shows the discolouration of weathering and aging so was probably put up around the time of the church. The high quality of the flint bricks also suggests age too. Knapping is a dying skill and few people today could manufacture bricks of this quality. At its most basic level the wall is simply flint bricks + mortar. The skill is in the knapping of the flint bricks."

Here's the wall, "consisting of almost perfectly shaped bricks fitting tightly together with a thin layer of mortar. An excellent example of the skill of the 19th century brickies. Most flint buildings stretching back millennia show this."

But by the 20th century, when a bit of the wall was damaged, the art was already dying. The repairers used the original flints, but they don’t quite fit together neatly, the person lacked the skill to modify the bricks so filled the gaps with mortar.

"Another repaired section uses modern bricks," continues Paul. "Only the most basic knapping skills have been used splitting the flint, the pieces are erratic in both size and shape, the end product being more a mortar wall with lump of random flint added."

Still, flint it is - and the fact that it wasn't used in the actual church implies either that it was a rare commodity only used for 'special' bits - or that it wasn't actually good enough for the church itself. Who can tell?

Paul wrote to the vicar of St Michael and All Angels, who passed the question onto John Allen, who knows about these things. He reckons that the wall is almost certainly from that time, though no records of the building remain, since it was built as a private chapel and no one was compelled to keep records for private builds. But he confesses he has absolutely no idea why the architect (George Smith - don't I vaguely remember him from the John Penn Almshouses - or is it another George Smith?) chose flint for the walls and not the church itself. And if John Allen doesn't know and Flint-knapper Paul can't tell, chances are it's lost to History.

Given that flint seems so rare around here, and that knapping is going the way of the dinosaurs, it's surprising then, that the only other example of flint in Greenwich that Paul's found is very modern. On the brand new estate along Nelson Mandela Road in Kidbrooke:



"Only a few of the houses have flint walls and then only one or two of the walls on that house. The flint itself is very basically worked mostly in its original quarried state, the white cortex on the outside testifies to this. Once again it uses mortar to replace brick shaping, usually a recipe for an ugly wall, but the excellent pointing work make these buildings an exception and quite stunning."

It's an even braver move given that "when making flint walls traditional Lime Mortar must be used, which takes weeks to dry, so discourages people to use it.

This is because flint has a water content which on hot days dries and wet days increases, so the flint expands and contracts. Lime Mortar moistens each time it gets wets so continually sets and resets around the moving flint. If a hard setting modern concrete mortar is used, when the flint expands and contracts, being held firmly in place by the mortar it cracks and the wall eventually falls over."

So good on the company for making the effort to create something virtually unique in this area.

So here's the thing. So far, Paul has found no examples of flint in the town of Greenwich itself at all. Now - I know what you're thinking - surely you've seen some somewhere in the town... Me too. But I've been racking my brains and I can't come up with any either. Admittedly Greenwich itself is largely chalk, gravel, and the much-talked about Thanet Sand - but it's close to good flint places - you'd have thought something would be made of the material.

Can you come up with anywhere that's made of flint for Paul?

A Cautionary Tale

Michael has sent me yet another reason to spurn the supermarkets in favour of the independents:

"There am I shopping in M & S as I normally do and silly me decided I fancied an Avocado. So silly me picks up the Avocado and puts in my basket. At the checkout the assistant scans the avocado and "beep", it comes back as 'restricted.'

Restricted? What could that mean? Another assistant comes along, takes my avocado and eventually comes back with another; "we are not allowed to sell this one, but you can have this one".

I stare at said avocados. Despite the fact my original choice was bigger, they look the same. Me being me says, "No I want my one"...."

"Well you can't, it is restricted"...this goes on for a while.

Eventually a manager turns up and says they are not allowed to sell "my" avocado until the 10th July? Why I ask?...because they are "too hard - someone might complain".

"Well I'm not sure about you but I think I'm quite capable of working out that an avocado is too hard....isn't that why we have airing cupboards? Perhaps I plan to eat it later in the week...".

Unfortunately my innate ability to tell ripened from un-ripened wouldn't cut it with the staff of M&S. Off to Blackheath Standard Grocers (Orange & Apple - TGP) where surprise, surprise they were quite happy to sell me any avocado I liked!

I guess this is all down to the way food is mass-produced - food is harvested stupidly early and kept refrigerated, often for months, in an unripe state, so that it can be produced at will on the shelves. Most of the time this is seamless - it all goes on behind the scenes and many of us don't ask questions about where our food is coming from and how it gets to us.

It's not genetically modified - but it's certainly not a natural process. I'll wager that slightly further up the food chain this is also happening, to some extent at least, with the smaller grocers, but there does seem to be at least a chance that the food is more local and has jumped through fewer hoops to get to us.

One step back on the chain, and the local farmers' market is probably the most unadulterated we'll get short of starting up our own smallholding in the back garden and renaming ourselves Tom and Barbara (BTW - has anyone here done that? It's quite beyond the realms of possibility in some of the bigger gardens round here, I guess...) It's not perfect and I have my suspicions about some stuff - but hey - if nothing else, walking there of a Sunday morning with a hessian bag and wandering around in the sunshine (or rain) makes you feel as though you're getting back to nature, and the food miles are at least a little fewer.

BTW does anyone know why the bacon-sandwich man only seems to do sausage sandwiches now? Or have we just been unlucky every time we've been recently?

Tudor Barn

Well Hall Pleasaunce, Eltham.

What staggers me about this building is that in the good old days of the 16th Century when it was at its peak, this fabulous moated Tudor pile was just the barn. The great house of Well Hall is long gone, and even its successor (both of which I'll talk about another day) has been dead for 80-odd years. Today, I'm just looking at the barn as a place to scoff tea and cakes.

It wasn't so long ago you could quaff as well as scoff. The barn and surrounding grounds (lovely in their own right - I'll get onto them when I talk about the Pleasaunce) were bought by Woolwich Metropolitan Borough Council in 1930 and the barn became first a restaurant, then a pub. To be honest it wasn't a very good pub - it had a great shell, but the interior was dull and the beer boring. The ambiance was flat and the atmosphere unwelcoming. I got the feeling the guv'nor didn't really care about the place. Greenwich Council got that feeling too and the place closed down.

After an unsuccessful attempt at a French restaurant - nice idea; was never going to work where it was without the TV clout of some celebrity chef - Greenwich Council have decided to turn it into a tea rooms during the day, and a venue for hire whenever they can get some cash.

I went to check out the teas one Friday afternoon whilst procrastinating. That will probably explain why I was the only person under the age of 80 and without a blue-rinse, though it was definitely well-used. They've cleaned it up since its pub days, but to be honest, there's still not an awful lot of atmosphere about it, given the place's history, fabric and surroundings. The walls are still painted creamy yellow and the furniture is municipal-cottagey. I can't quite explain it, but it still does feel a bit - well - civic. The interesting features - like the old fireplace and the stalls - weren't being used when I was there, and were plied up with spare chairs.

What I will give them, and give them in spades, is the friendliness of the staff. Cheery ladies serving cups of tea (I would have liked a pot - teabags in cups is never something I like to encourage) and huge wodges of very obviously home-baked Victoria Sponge, at really rather decent prices. I like a nice slice of Victoria sponge and this lived up to what it looked like - slightly wonky and slightly too full of jam. Perfect.

This place is so very nearly there. As a tea rooms, it is certainly very 'nice.' But in this particular case, I think I would like it to be even 'nicer.' I think they could afford to actually push themselves further in the cute-stakes. Normally I'd never suggest anything so naff, but with these particular surroundings, the jolliness of the matrons and the homey-ness of the cakes, I want sugary-sweet pastel cuteness too. Tea in flowery pots, Cath Kidston tablecloths, a whole array of massive cakes on glass stands under glass domes, and ladies in 'Nippy' outfits talking like that woman out of Brief Encounter.

I don't know. Maybe it wouldn't work. Maybe something as knowing as that would be a bit Tunbridge Wells and this is, after all, Eltham - posh in places, definitely un-posh in others. In the meanwhile, this is a sweet place to take the kids (or Gran) for tea and not break the bank. I haven't tested it out as a venue for birthday parties, weddings etc. but I can't imagine it's too expensive and with a bit of effort it could look great upstairs. You'd probably get a discount with a GreenwichCard too...

Find a few more details here.

Prehistoric Greenwich (1) Cox's Mount

Charlton

Start of a new occasional series today, guys, delving into Greenwich before Greenwich. Paul has been talking to me about the really ancient prehistory of the area which, in his own words, is "pretty lush," and virtually unknown outside archaeological circles.

He's been doing a bit of his own research, too and making some calculations, measurements and digging (not always literally - anyone who watches Time Team - a controversial programme, we're divided in our household - will know there's nothing like a spot of geo-fizz) and has been coming to some interesting conclusions...

Cox's Mount, at the Thames-end of the Maryon/Maryon-Wilson/Gilberts Pits group, was a vast Iron Age hill fort. I vaguely remember reading about it in Beryl Platt's book (though of course, much as I loved that volume, and romantic as I am, I still felt a tad uneasy about some of her conclusions about mythical characters and fairy tale princes - you'll find my entry on it on April 1st...) and it seems that Charlton was a big deal in the Iron Age. It's hardly surprising - if you climb all the steps up to the top of the mount above Gilbert's Gravel pit it's a loooong way up - and that's after the erosion caused by said pit.


Sadly the gravel pits, fascinating as they are in their own right (another day, another day...) are a large part of the reason why there's virtually nothing left of the fort. We can only guess how big it actually was - excavations reveal it's less than an eighth of its original size, though, and it was certainly big enough for the Romans to cast their beady eyes on it then move in themselves.

Paul's had his metaphorical tape measure out, and though he's still working on it, he has, as a by-product, cleared up a couple of questions I had about road names in the area. Rathmore (Road - where the benches are) means "Great Fort" and Troughton (Road, next door) means "Ditch" - but they are about 1000 metres away and Paul points out this is far too big for a single fort, so it was probably another one. I had wondered, since Paul also tells me that there were some excavations done around the turn of the last century, whether the Victorians named the roads for the dig but it seems that they were done in 1915 - too late, I suspect, for the buildings - so maybe the names are older.

During these excavations the remains of a couple of buildings were found, so it must have been an exciting time, but Paul reckons that most of the buildings wouldn't have been on top anyway. Excavations at Danebury, a humungus fort in Hampshire, show that most people, including the chief, would have lived in the lower slopes as farmers, saving the long slog uphill for the times when they were under siege - probably from rival clans - or even Mafia-style protection rackets. We can only specualte as to what an Iron Age Don Corleone might have looked like...

They also found three Roman vases, including one that had been tossed away by the gravel extractors. Paul continues:

"A prehistoric hearth was found on top, indicated by burnt pebbles to the depth of 33 inches deep and 36 wide. So deep it was probably for smelting bronze and iron. It's believed the two of the mounds at the highest part may be barrows. The site demonstrates 400 years of occupation from around 50bc."

By the time the Romans arrived all that climbing had clearly got to most of the farmers of South-east England, and since numbers were increasing, they were turning more to walled towns. The tribal boundaries would have been miles away anyway by now. But no point in wasting a good fort, and the invading Romans were most interested in its possiblities, which would account for the buildings and vases found.

There don't seem to be any of those fab 'artist's impressions' of the fort itself (yeah, yeah, who didn't buy that one of the Roman soldiers on the loo at Hadrian's Wall as a kid? Ah. Just me, then...) but Paul has sent me a fascinating picture of the view from the fort in the very early 20th Century. A truly involving picture in so many ways. As usual, click on any image to make it larger.

The colour photos are of the 'barrows,' which he took when he nipped under the fence to get a closer look. If you do the same, take care - last time I was there a woman walking her dog nearly ended up in the bushes below...

Paul has an archaeological manufacturing business (exactly what it sounds - his little cottage industry makes stone axes - I have a wonderful image in my mind of him outside his wattle and daub hut in Charlton, knapping his flints by the fire, a blackened cauldron bubbling away merrily as he works...) Check him out here and here ...

More prehistoric fun another day, folks...

Underground Greenwich (7) Charlton House

I've been reading my Stone again and am delighted to say that underground tunnels seem to be everywhere round here, not just Greenwich and Blackheath.

Not that this one is particularly exciting - given the ancientness and grandness of Charlton House, I would have hoped for something better - but hey - an underground tunnel is an underground tunnel - and who knows - there may be more exciting ones yet to be discovered.

This one, apparently, runs from the house, under Inigo Jones's arch, across the road and out towards the flats. It's about five feet high, and is 'oval.' John Stone actually went down it about 100 years ago - he reckons it runs "about 100 yards."

Although it's pretty big - and certainly could be used for clandestine rendezvous, the locking up of innocent maidens, smugglers' loot and the hiding of nobles in the civil war, etc, the truth, sadly, is much more prosaic - it was just a conduit, taking the water away from Charlton House down the hill. Apparently it still has the house drain in it.

I don't think it's get-in-able any more and I can't find any other reference to it. A shame, really. Maybe one of the Friends of Charlton House can furnish me with some more info...

St Alfege's Church Tower...

...in a parallel universe. An alternative world where, during the building of an alternative Nicholas Hawksmoor church in an alternative Greenwich, the cash didn't run out when they got to the roof.

It goes like this. The magnificent St Alfeges - the church of the Tudor Court, of Thomas Tallis, of Samuel Pepys, gradually fell to pieces when Royalty abandoned Greenwich and though it was occasionally patched up, it finally got so bad that on one particular dark and stormy night in 1710 the nave fell in.

Greenwich by now was quite poor and the parishioners petitioned for some of the Coal Tax, which they'd been paying for the past 40 years to pay for the rebuilding of St Pauls Cathedral after the Great Fire, to be given to them for a new church. They got their way - but the act passed in 1711 for fifty new London churches underestimated the cost of a large government building project (sound familiar?)

Certainly there wasn't enough in the coffers for St Alfeges to have Nicholas Hawksmoor's designs built exactly as he wanted them. The governors took the plans for the main, classical-style building but, after shaking the parish piggy bank as hard as they could, sent the tower/steeple plans back.

Hawksmoor stuffed the tower plans back in his pocket, shrugged and went on to the next project. In a spot of masterly architectural recycling, when he got the commission for St George's In The East, he dusted off the plans for St Alfege's, added and subtracted a few bits and bobs and passed them off as brand new. So it could be said that the splendid Shadwell church has Greenwich's cast-off tower. Or, more depressingly, that The East End could afford a steeple when we could only press snotty noses against the glass of Hawksmoor's shop window.

Whichever, we did finally get a tower - in 1730, designed by John James. I have heard sniffy comments made about this one being too 'fancy' for Hawksmoor's austere building, but me, I think it looks just fine. And it's got a clock, so yah-boo-sucks. We all know what it looks like, so instead of a straight photo, here's Theatre of Wine's glorious version created for last year's Advent Windows:


St George's has a chequered history, especially in the 1850s when a rector introduced 'Romish practices' and demonstrations ensued - men with barking dogs marched into church wearing hats and smoking pipes and chucked rubbish at the altar to the sound of catcalls and horn-blowing and much Unpleasantness ensued.

Both churches came off badly in WWII. I'll come to St Alfege's another day, but poor old St George's was so damaged that only the outside (a curious, slightly Italianate but nevertheless very London building) is left - inside, a post-war version squats unobtrusively behind its white stone walls.

It was a nice day yesterday so I took a little trip to see it. It's on the south end of Cannon Street Road, about five minute's walk from Shadwell DLR and it's got a little park around it. If you do the same, it's worth wandering around the area to see the remaining buildings around Cable St (and the fabulous Wilton's Music Hall.)

The Pagoda

Pagoda Gardens, SE3

I was saving this entry until June (I'll explain why later), but Benedict sent me such a fantastic picture with his question that I've escalated it to now.

He asks:

On a rare morning of no responsibilities my partner and I went for an unstructured ramble around the not so familiar environs and - blow me down - gor blimey - I have never seen this before , but it's obviously been in Blackheath since 1800s. A Georgian Pagoda!!! What on earth is/was it?

The Phantom replies:

Astoundingly, just put the definite article in front of it and that's exactly what it is - THE Pagoda, Benedict. And no - it's not been there since the 1800s - it's been there since the 1700s - 1767, in fact. It was built for the Duke of Montague at a time when everything Oriental was fashionable. It was called chinoiserie - though that term was used for everything that came from the East, not just China.

In fact, if we're being honest, they didn't really much care about authenticity at all - it was the flavour 18th Century stylists were after, not the precise style. All they knew was that all the things they liked - from fabulous silks and exquisite vases to the tea being loaded from massive ships at East India Dock - came from this exotic all-purpose 'Orient.' Many country houses have a 'Chinese' room, decorated with dainty wallpaper, screens, bamboo furniture and porcelain.

And they built their summer houses - for this was what The Pagoda originally was - a grandiose garden shed for Montague House which, if memory serves, was at the South West corner of Greenwich Park, next door-ish to Rangers House - in what they assumed was oriental style, too. They used all the bits of Western building they liked, and just added funky bits and bobs, like curly roofs and moon windows that would make it look Chinese/Japanese/Whatever.

You can still see them from time to time - Heal in Wiltshire, for example, has a fabulous oriental garden with a delightful 'tea house' - more English than Chinese but when it's as pretty as that, who cares?

I have heard that the Blackheath Pagoda was used by saucy Princess Caroline of Brunswick though whether this was before or after the Prince Regent turfed her out of Montague House I don't know. It was certainly used as a hunting lodge though, by one Henry Scott, third Duke of Buccleuch.

The poor old place eventually fell into disrepair - the Victorians weren't that bothered by the oriental style, presumably too busy dealing opium to import flowers and vases. It got passed from pillar to post, even being used as a convent school at one point, I vaguely remember; its final indignity being London County Council building a housing estate right up to its gates over its once-massive grounds in the 1950s.

I don't know when the formal Oriental garden was built - presumably around the same-ish time as the house - any info on that would be gratefully received, though, as to me it looks quite turn-of-the-20th Century. But whatever the original gardens looked like, they didn't last long. It turned into a market garden at one point, covered with greenhouses, and finally became totally overgrown.

And this is where the June bit comes in. The present owners, the Coopers, discovered the dilapidated mansion in 1991 (what does that sort of thing never happen to me?) and renovated it to its current state. Luckily, they were also into gardening and started hacking back the dense undergrowth, where they found the old retaining walls of a formal water garden and they set about restoring it. It's now a fine, mature secret corner in classic British-Oriental style.

Best of all, we can actually get to see it - once a year in June, when they open it as part of the National Gardens Scheme. It's a lovely evening event, where you can wander round with a glass of wine in your hand, soaking-in the bright red pergolas, stone water channels, and exotic plants - wisteria, palms and lotus-flowers.

I try to get there every year - as much to admire the building as anything, (don't miss the wonderful, huge round windows...) and I will let you know the precise date when I've got my sweaty paws on this year's Yellow Book. Devote the entire evening to the event - there are two other gardens, each exquisite in its own way, within walking distance of the Pagoda, that most considerately coincide their openings.

I'm usually a bit wobbly by the time I've visited all three. Aw - c'mon - it's drinking-for-charity. It would be rude not to...

Cattleya (Chu & Cho)

52 Charlton Church Lane, SE7 7AB

I'm going to have to visit this place again soon (not least because I still haven't seen the band that plays there on alternate Sunday nights) mainly because it's unfair to base a review on a visit at 6.30pm on a Monday night.

Not that I had a bad time - far from it - but more of that later. Merely that we were (understandably) the only people in there - and though I try to bring the party feeling with me wherever I go, I can't do it all on my own...

We nearly didn't get in at all. The sign said 'open,' the candles were lit, and the lights dimmed. They'd just forgotten to unlock the door. We began to wonder whether it had gone back to its pre-Cattleya opening hours, but a swift phone call did the trick. Terribly sweet people, deeply embarrassed, opened the door for us, and that kind of thing breaks ice - though I doubt it needed breaking. The service from the start was charming.

It's an odd mix, Thai and Spanish Tapas. I had somehow expected more of a crossover - classic Spanish dishes with Thai spices, for example, or Thai dishes with a solid Spanish twist. But it does actually seem that the menu is Spanish stuff on one side and Thai on the other - more of a combination than a fusion.

Just to be absolutely fair, we decided to do our own fusion, by ordering a selection from both sides of the Tapas menu - a real melange of flavours - something for our stomachs to deal with later - and sat back with drinks from the bar. They do a good selection of beers, but frankly 6.30pm on a Monday was too early for my new drinking regimen (aw, c'mon, I'm trying...) so I just had tap water, which The Evening Standard will be delighted to know came without question. (BTW am I the only person in the world who hasn't had any trouble getting tap water in restaurants for about 10 years? I truly wonder what all the fuss is about - every eaterie I've been in, from excessively smart to down-and-dirty, quite happily coughs up free tap water if I ask for it. Seems to me people are just too scared of looking tight to ask.)

The place has had a bit of a makeover to become Cattleya. Folding sliding doors for summer, the obligatory laminate floors and simple, solid-colour walls softened with funky lights and little exotic flowers in vases, which may or may not be the orchid the place is named for. Atmosphere was nil - for the reasons stated above, but I bet on a Saturday afternoon when Charlton are playing at home it's a different story. I'll try again on an evening, later in the week, for a compromise.

The food is good. Simple, honest and down-to-earth, (though they have registered the word Thai-Med as a trademark, which seems a little OTT to me, given that it's just two different types of food on the same menu.) It's not cordon-bleu - but that's not what you go to a place like this for. The Spanish stuff has a heat that's pleasing and the Thai dishes (essentially starters from a classic Thai menu) were very enjoyable. The tempura, always a bit of a test as it can be utterly horrid - wrong temperatures, old oil, bad batter, I've had 'em all - was crisp and fresh, and if ever so slightly oily, at least it was good, clean oil.

I always manage to over-order tapas so we ended up with a sea of dishes around us and, troughing away in the empty place, we felt like the parents out of Spirited Away. What's worse is that I was brought up to clear my plate, so I scoffed the lot. Well. It would have been rude not to.

So now I need to go back. I've heard this place has a great atmosphere and I want to experience it. But one thing's for certain - it fills a gap in Charlton which is not exactly over-endowed with good eateries. A nice find.

http://www.cattleyathaimed.com/

The Phantom Finally Remembers.

Pah. Guidebooks. Now I know I have a hell of a lot of them,and some of them are quite old but for some reason I thought that one that wasn't even as old as the millennium would still be reasonably up to date. I spent a considerable amount of time wandering round the car park of the Old Royal Naval College looking for this baby, finally convincing myself that my map reading really was just crap.

I'm not quite sure how I got the tip-off that Sir Edwin Lutyens's memorial to the Royal Naval Division had been moved back to its original home in Horse Guards Parade Ground, but I wasn't going to rest easy until I'd seen it.

Of course it wasn't going to be that easy - of all the times I could have gone there, I had to pick half-past eleven on a Saturday morning. I could see my quarry - I just couldn't get to it. My view was this:

What I wanted to get at was the white obelisk right in the centre of the picture and, short of The Queen's Official Birthday, I couldn't have picked a worse time. So while this lot pomped away to the delight of hundreds of foreign tourists, I snuck around the back to get a closer look at the funny white needle-in-a-bowl.

Like all of Lutyens's work there is a simplicity about it that is eloquent - a basic obelisk in an unadorned basin on a plinth, leaving the words of Rupert Brooke to speak for it.

Blow out your bugles over the rich dead

There's none of these so lonely and poor of old

But dying has made us rarer gifts than gold

Apparently, according to an old drawing, it was supposed to be a fountain - the plinth actually has a lower basin to catch water so that the little faces at the base of the obelisk spat water into the bowl which overflowed into the base. I'm sure it was lovely - I wish they'd get it going again. There's nothing sadder than a fountain that doesn't work. There's a great photo of the memorial in 1934 here which looks like it has some water in the base.

Of course we were only ever borrowing this delightful little monument. It was dedicated in 1925 on the 10th anniversary of Gallipoli, more or less on the spot it's sitting in now but was sent to Greenwich while they were building the stupendously ugly Citadel in 1940, though only actually erected there in 1951. And I have to say, from the picture in my out of date guide book, it looked very peaceful there among the trees. It feels a bit stark back in its old home where it was reinstated in 2003 squashed in between the hideous Citadel and Horse Guards next door, a nice enough building, but one so busy the poor old fountain almost disappears:

What once stood proud at the front of the parade ground now hides shyly in a corner. Still. Prince Charles knows best...

Hare & Billet

Hare & Billet Road, SE3

Many times had I passed this ancient-looking pub on the heath, never had I entered it. It looked fantastic from the outside; a local pub for well-heeled regulars, across the road from a willow-fringed village pond, surrounded by dinky mis-matched houses, each of equal charm if not building style. Much of Blackheath, after all, could be some rustic village in the Home Counties if one didn't know that Lewisham was a few streets one way, Kidbrooke a few streets the other. The Hare & Billet, dating back a couple of hundred years at least, is part of that olde English charm.

It was an early Sunday afternoon. I was certainly right about the regulars. This isn't a pub for tourists or out-of-towners. Not that it's unfriendly - the vibe's perfectly pleasant - but people keep to themselves, reading the paper or chatting quietly. At least no one looked at us as we walked in - if a piano had been playing, it would have continued. That I can't remember whether there was music or not means at least that if there was it wasn't of an offfensive level.

It's rather self-consciously 'unreconsitituted' - wooden floors and simple painted walls - where we sat a large chunk of ceiling covering was missing - presumably the result of a flood. No one had bothered redecorating and it didn't seem to matter. It fitted in rather well with the wooden bookcase and the darts board. I don't get the feeling that people play darts there very much - not necessarily because they're not very good (there were lots of holes around the board, especially underneath it...) - more that I'd wager it's that gauntlet walk from the kitchen in direct firing line of said board.

We'd actually come in for food, but despite a number of notices all over the place announcing the food, menus on the tables and our being there well within the time speicified, the kitchen was closed. Some kind of crisis, they told us. Fair enough - these things happen. We settled for drinks instead. The beer's absolutely fine - a good, sturdy selection and a pleasant place to drink it. Absolutely no complaints. Then came the wine.

Now there are people who would argue that wine has no place in an English pub and even having the choice of red or white is a concession too far. And they may have a point. But if you're going to move with the times and actually have wine in a - let's face it - posh area, and charge upwards of a fiver for a glass of it (some glasses were well over six quid) then personally I'm going to expect something a bit more exciting than supermarket crap. These were all the usual suspects - unexciting boggo plonk that you really can get in Sainsburys for £3.99 a bottle.

My glass of tempranillo was hideous - and believe me, I can put away virtually anything that isn't battery acid. I even - gulp - considered not finishing it, but one thought of how much I'd just paid for the glass sitting in front of me (and, of course, plain greed) meant that I did actually drink it. (And no - it wasn't off. )I didn't try anything else, though my beer-drinking companions had a whale of a time. We stayed longer than we expected - the atmosphere is good - then went off in search of something to eat, rather sad that we hadn't managed to sample any of the fare there.

Overall, though, this is a decent, traditional pub, which probably doesn't ever get as hideously packed as, say the Princess of Wales or that horrid O'Neills in Tranquil Vale, even in summer - a local pub for local people. It's snug and cosy in winter - every table seems to be a good one. And in summer, the little area around the pond must be lovely - and more interesting than the general flatness of most of the heath. To be honest, I'm not going to be making many pilgrimages back there until they discover the delights of Theatre of Wine, Nicolas - or even Oddbins - but I suspect they won't be shedding many tears at the thought of losing me...

The Old Sportsman Ground

Darth asks:

I've been looking for the site of the old Sportsman Ground on maps of Greenwich, but I can't find anything that places an old pig farm anywhere near Manor Ground or Plumstead Common. I think it's under HMP Belmarsh now; does anyone know if that's true?

The Phantom replies:

You're touching two topics I'm extremely hazy about there, Darth - Sport and Plumstead - I know nothing about the first and practically nothing about the second. But there are people who can help you here, I'm sure. ScaredofChives? Charlton Average? Paging Inspector Sands...

Inigo Jones's Loo

Inigo Jones was a man in demand in the 17th century. Britain's first Palladian building - The Queen's House - had been a a massive hit and he had consequently become a bit of a status symbol.

Charlton House, down the road to Royal Greenwich was already twenty-something years old, and built in the old Jacobean style. It was grand enough, but The Dean of Durham was always looking for new ways to fancy-it up. And what better way than to get the most famous architect of your day to build you a nice little summer house? Stick it in the front garden so that everyone can see it, make it pretty as possible and bish-bosh - you're well-in with the nobs...

It was built about 1630, which makes me think it must have been for the Dean's wife - he died in 1629 - and it is very girly. It's also known as The Orangery - but I confess I'm not totally convinced. I can't see that it would have been much cop as a greenhouse - there just don't seem to be enough windows. My humble guess would have been that it was a banqueting house - a place to enjoy your pudding with a handful of your most important friends, apart from all the general hoi-poloy.

Sugar was ridiculously expensive. Only a few selected toffs would have been allowed to have dessert - so a banqueting house didn't need to be any bigger than a very cute shed. If my culinary history is vaguely accurate, it was an ever-so-slightly outmoded idea by then, but still popular among social climbers. And who better to get than Inigo Jones, who, after all, had built the grandest banqueting house of all, at Whitehall.

I have no idea if I'm right and Charlton's was a banqueting house rather than just a nice place to take tea - but I cling to my romantic notion of candlelit after-dinner frivolities with velvet-clad gentry stuffing their faces with candied fruits, spiced comfits and marchpane...

A gorgeous little place, with fancy brickwork and a high, vaulted roof, the flats opposite wouldn't have been in the way in the 17th Century, so guests would have had a fantastic view across the river while they were scoffing their sweeties.

It's in the shadow of a massive old mulberry tree, one of James I's bright ideas. In the first years of his reign, he got all his nobles to plant mulberry trees in their back gardens so that Britain could have a silk industry of its own. Sadly he wasn't much of a botanist and he picked the variety that silk worms don't like...

But banqueting was on its way out, and fashions were changing. The Brian Sewell of the 18th Century, Horace Walpole, quite liked Inigo Jones, but couldn't help himself from being sniffy even about people he rated. "Overdoing ornament," he wrote, of Jones's "supposed" work at Charlton House, and it is true that we can't be absuloutely sure that Jones actually built the little kiosk. Slowly forgotten, the dusty Summer House saw a bit of use as a base for Charlton Village Guard for a while in the early 19th Century, and it even managed to retain some of its dignity until the mid 20th Century when everything went horribly wrong.

Some bright spark turned it into a public loo. I guess a few people in 1937 would have been delighted, but it was an ignoble end for such a fine little building. Or it would have been. There was one final indignity. The loos were closed a few years ago. It's bad enough being a public bog, but a dead public bog? Not even useful in a lowly way?

But I am an optimist. I harbour hope for this lovely little place. It's Grade I listed, so it can't be pulled down. Maybe - just maybe - it can live again. Charlton Village is a gorgeous little enclave, maybe enough cash will be found to turn it into something lovely again. A sweet shop, perhaps...

Lesnes Abbey

By the time the hangover had worn off yesterday, it was almost dark, but I didn't want to let the day go without doing anything some way useful - somehow it would have set a bad precedent for the year ahead. So we decided to try to find the abbey at Abbey Wood...

Lesnes was founded in 1178, eight years after the murder of Thomas a Becket, by one of the naughty boys who was involved. I can't tell whether Richard de Luci actually plunged the dagger into Becket's heart, or just held the big boys' coats while they did the dirty deed with the dirk, but he certainly felt bad enough about it to build an abbey in penance.

It was an Augustinian order, which, it would seem, mainly meant the Vatican's admin department. They did burials, baptisms, giving of penances - that kind of thing. The original Augustinians were pretty strict, but according to the sign-boards placed all over the site, this lot were more relaxed about the rules - presumably this translates that they were good-time monks.

They can't have been very good-time. They were always in financial trouble (though of course that could have been from being good-time monks, though it's politely implied it was more to do with constantly having to rebuild river defences) and by the time of the Dissolution, they were prime targets. Lesnes (do we pronounce this lez-nez, less-ness or even le-ney, French stylee?) was one of the first to cop it. Cardinal Wolsey strode in, the (presumably meagre) spoils intended for a new college he was building at Oxford.

Over the centuries the place was gradually plundered for building materials, but the foundations remain almost intact, giving a very pleasing layout map of what it would have been like. It's a sweet little place with all the necessary rooms you would expect in an abbey - a no-frills, EasyMonk monastery. A simple church with a raised altar and pillars, a cloister, somewhere to eat, somewhere to sit and and somewhere to ablute. The Abbot's own lodgings were next door to the bogs, not a layout I would have chosen, but maybe that was part of Richard de Luci's penance...

De Luci's great granddaughter, Roesia, was so fond of the abbey that she had her heart buried there. In a slightly icky-moment, the casket containing said heart was discovered in one of several archaeological digs and that, along with sundry bits of stone carvings, tiles and a monument are apparently in Greenwich Borough Museum - a place I haven't visited yet, its being situated most inconveniently in Plumstead, but which is definitely on my list for this year. Apparently there are also some finds in Erith Library, even less convenient, but I'll be making a trek out there too at some point.

In the meanwhile, despite it being almost dark yesterday afternoon and the place being virtually deserted, a little, non-vandalised, 'visitor centre' was open, with some faded photographs and info, which, along with close-cropped grass somehow made the whole place seem a little less abandoned.

I have to say that labelling this as a "day out" in itself might lead to a small amount of disappointment unless you are some kind of ruined-monastery nut, but as one of those things to do when you've, ahem, wasted most of the day but want to do something interesting, it's perfect.

Valerie Dressmaker

The Village, Charlton, SE7

A tiny, hidden gem today, nestled in the shadow of Charlton House. I don't get to go east instead of south or north as much as I would like but I noticed this curious little store during a night-time visit to The Big House and have taken this long to get back during daylight hours to check it out when the shutters are up.

It's a quaint, old-fashioned wool and haberdashery shop - Andrekabu - sit up straight at the back there - which sells all manner of fabric-y frippery, knitting nonsense and novelty notions that are nigh-on impossible to find in this neck of the woods.

There's a lot of wool. The whole of one wall is covered in shelves full of different types of knitting yarn, patterns pinned and pegged around the edges, jostling with printed tapestry kits. Actually, there isn't a spare spot of wall left, after all the drawers of buttons, boxes of trimmings, trays of greetings cards, wheels of glass-headed pins, racks of ribbon and spools of thread. Tiny tubes of ribbon rosebuds, minute buttons for dollies' clothes, cards of elastic and piles of Vilene. Not much of any one particular thing, but a wide range of types of thing. And following the long tradition of these shops stocking wedding and party paraphernalia, nestled among the reels of cotton and lengths of lace, lie satin gloves and diamante tiaras. By the door, in between the knitting patterns for bootees and lengths of bobble-trimming for 1970s lampshades hang several garish feather boas.

Do you know that bit in Alice Through The Looking Glass where she visits the sheep's shop? she can see through her peripheral vision that the shop is choc-a-bloc, but when she tries to focus on any one shelf it seems to be empty. I sort of get that feeling in this place. As I write this, in my mind's eye, it is jammed with glass cabinets full of fake flower corsages, bargain bins full of remnants and shelves-to-the-ceiling full of intriguing-looking brown cardboard boxes with ageing tissue paper-wappings peeking out from their lids, but when I try to think of any one specific place, the vision becomes hazy.

What isn't hazy is the middle-aged lady in a nylon housecoat sitting at an ancient sewing machine at the back. This, I presume, is the titular Valerie, and although she will stop her sewing to help you, she doesn't immediately do so - you are left to browse, something I appreciate. She tells me that she does alterations and makes clothes to order - a handy little thing to remember, though she is adamant she is a dressmaker, rather than a tailor.

I was surprised to find this little place - somewhere well worth remembering when you need those funny little things that nowhere else will sell. More like something out of Wallace & Gromit than a London suburb, its just the kind of store that needs to be cherished. It's right in the middle of Charlton Village, which means a bus ride if you don't drive, but worth it just for the novelty value - and a chat with Valerie...

Hand Made Foods (Upstairs)

Tranquil Vale, SE3

We all know how good Hand Made Foods fare is - excruciatingly expensive, of course, but utterly wonderful. That pastry, those tarts, those pies, those salads - every single dish is fabulous - and frankly, for quality this high, I'm happy to push the boat out from time to time.

Only one real problem. Where to sit whilst eating it. The shop is tiny and most of the interior was taken up with - well - food, and the odd bar-place. Outside, the little wooden tables are a wonderful way to while away a lazy half-hour but try getting one. Short of hovering over some poor sod who may or may not be finishing and then fighting off three other would-be munchers with elbows and carrier bags - so uncivilised - only the takeaway option remained.

But what's the alternative? Expansion? Trouble is, that virtually every expansion I've ever witnessed has seen a corresponding contraction in quality. (Has anyone else been to Maison Bertaux since it expanded? Twice the price and half the atmosphere.) First it's next door, then it's a small chain, next thing you know it's become a 'brand' and private equity funds are sniffing around (Cue Patisserie Valerie, since we're sort-of in Soho for this paragraph...) Somehow I feel more abandoned by small, cute companies that have expanded to the point of being stock exchange fodder than the big multinationals that never pretended to be anything else.

Hand Made Foods, happily still a long way from being buyout-ammo, has found a half-way house - albeit only a temporary one. They've expanded upstairs. And it's charming. What was clearly the original shopkeeper's old front parlour, complete with fireplace and homely feel has been simply painted, given a couple of funky pictures and a few old wooden kitchen tables and mis-matched chairs and opened as an upstairs eating area. The pics are good - I like the circular one above the mantel, though I confess I was sorely tempted to colour-in the oneimmediately above my place - it's exactly like a giant version of those 'painting by numbers' kits you get as a kid.

It's still a bit of a bunfight to get a seat, but not as bad as it was. I couldn't decide (as usual) so contrived to eat various pies and pastries vicariously through the people I was with ("Oooh - that one looks amazing, doesn't it, George...") and although I was actually brought the wrong item (something I didn't realise until I bit into it) it was so good I didn't complain - I'll just have to have what I originally ordered next time...

The problem is already beginning to resurface though. Even six months after they first opened upstairs, you already have to check there's somewhere to sit before you make any choices. I just hope they have a third floor.

But the food is as incredible as ever. As one of my companions remarked "It's the sort of food you'd make yourself if you had the time. And the ingredients. And the energy. And the skill..."

The Museum of Mr Cottingham

The more I delve into dark corners of the Internet, the more peculiar the discoveries become. I can't actually remember what I was trying to find when I came across an article from The Gentleman's Magazine in 1851. It went on at length about the way that institutions such as The British Museum tended towards the more exotic artifacts - those of Rome, Egypt and Greece "and even the barbarous sculptures of nations less cultivated so long as they come from a distance" over English medieval sculpture and architecture.

It then went on to praise the private museum of a Mr Cottingham who had collected all kinds of medieval paraphernalia and put it on show to the public in his basement. The Gentleman's Magazine was particularly upset because, since Cottingham's demise, the collection wasn't appealing enough to any 'proper' museum and it was to be sold off piecemeal - and probably dispersed.

It took me a fair amount of rootling around to find out who the hell this Mr Cottingham was, and there's not much out there. But from what I can find, Lewis Nockalls Cottingham was a Regency architect who was responsible for most of the area around Vauxhall/Waterloo (now mainly demolished by Waterloo Station, WWII and sundry arterial roads.) He was fascinated by medieval art - and has been credited with being the herald to the Victorian Gothic Revival. He set up his museum in Waterloo Bridge Road, and it would seem that he was the Sir John Soane of his day - collecting stuff of no real interest to most, but of great importance to the bigger picture. Among his very odd collection featured sculptures, plaster casts and bits of old houses - including an entire Elizabethan ceiling - long before that kind of thing was thought of as worth saving.

So why is this of interest to us? Because, The Gentleman's Magazine was firmly of the opinion that the collection should not be broken up, but should be moved wholesale to Greenwich Park. It argued that, much like the Royal Artillery Museum in Woolwich, it could be moved to "a suburban locality." Greenwich, it considered, was the best choice because of the "water access" but they weren't bothered about the actual venue being particularly beautiful "for it requires no lordly building, but merely such shelter as is afforded by the terminus of a railway station" (mind you they knew how to build those then, too...) and since it was only going to be out of the way of gentlefolk, "a few well-lighted barns" would do.

Sadly Greenwich never got this cornucopia of capitols, canopies, fonts, piscinae etc. This was just before it was acceptable to move cultural things out of the centre of London (though only the following year, the beautiful Crystal Palace was moved from Hyde Park after The Great Exhibition, down to Sydenham.) The authorities just weren't interested in saving Mr Cottingham's Museum and despite public outcry (from what I can tell, it wasn't just The Gentleman's Magazine that was outraged) flogged the lot off by auction. One or two bits and bobs ended up in the V&A. The rest - heaven knows.

But this interests me is that it was perhaps the start of Greenwich's magpie eye for taking other people's leftovers. We like to collect things that don't have a home. Only a couple of weeks ago, we had that cannon "back" that the Naval School didn't need any more. We had The Gipsy Moth (even if we didn't look after it and it was taken away from us) and The Cutty Sark (hmm - even if we don't seem to have learned many lessons from looking after the Gipsy Moth...) Over at Ranger's House, we're being a bit more circumspect - the magnificent - if extremely weird - Wernher Collection does much the same thing as Cottingham's, only with gold, silver and diamond knobs on - a collection without a home finally finding a little peace in a house without a collection.

By the way - did anyone ever hear whether we managed to adopt what was left of the Baltic Exchange (?) a couple of years back? It was mouldering in a junk yard and Greenwich Council offered to have it (though I don't know what they were going to do with it. Perhaps Greenwich Council has a giant garden shed full of things that "might come in useful.") Then it all went very quiet...

The Royal Standard, or Who Kidnapped the Cuckoo?

Vanbrugh Park, SE3

Stuart reminded me over a month ago that the Royal Standard pub has been refurbished (again) and I actually checked it out myself over two weeks ago, such is the backlog of things I need to write about here. I don't quite know how the more I write, the more intresting things there seem to be to write about. Perhaps these things have always been there - I just never saw it all before...

Stuart thinks that it's a "great success, no pool tables, leather sofas, nice toilets, low volume/ silent sport and the clientele seems to have improved" and I'm inclined to agree on the whole. The entrance is very swanky now, with its cleaned-up pillars and chequerboard tiles, flanked by bay trees. It looks inviting from the outside - though of course that could have been something to do with the filthy night I went, where the rain lashed against me as I battled my way there and hell, The Old Friends would have looked appealing. No. That's not fair. It does look great.

Inside, there are plenty of squashy armchairs and funky bench seats with hip coffee tables (one's made out of what looks like an entire tree root) and modern pendant lights. There are very definite 'sections' which makes this large pub not look too cavernous. Some areas are cosier than others - the section near the garden where even on the night I went a couple of brave souls shivered outside with their fags - is full of newspapers and sofas; others have sit-up-tables and at the far end a strange long 'bar' with stools acts as a break from a long table where a large party sat the night we went, observed by the glassy eye of a stuffed stag's head.

We sat underneath a post-modern cuckoo clock, in a corner that though very comfy and sofa-esque, felt ever-so-slightly too bright under the halogen spotlights. Some of them weren't working, already hanging from their sockets; it must be like the Blackpool Illuminations when they're all on.

But enough of the decor, and onto the fare. The drinks are about average for the area - £ 2.60 for bitter, around four quid for a glass of ok-ish wine (out of a bottle, I'm relieved to report - I went into a pub in Hampstead, no less, the other day and discovered "red" and "white" wine on tap...)

The food is alright - but I wouldn't go any further than that. Stuart had the roast and tells me

"I'm afraid it was disappointing as the veg was boiled within an inch of its life and there were no roast pots (criminal!) but apparently they had been let down by their suppliers (I saw the chef coming in with bags from M&S!). Rest of the party had bangers and mash and burger in a gastropub style (meat comes from Sparkes apparently...) other customers said it was good the day before (oh, that old one - TGP) and the staff were very responsive to my complaint.

We were there in the evening. I had hoped they'd still do pizza - it was one of the things about the last refurb that I had enjoyed - but it's all gone gastropub now. It wasn't all fabulous value for money - £ 2 for a grand total of six onion rings seems a bit steep to me.

The Thai Chicken Curry was pleasant enough - albeit with a sauce that tasted as though it had come out of a jar (perhaps they'd nipped over to M&S that night too.) It came with a single, giant prawn cracker. Is that hip? I don't know - I'm just asking. The assembly-line cookery continued with my seared salmon which, if it had been covered with sauce, would have become one of the other options on the menu. It tasted absolutely fine, even if it was accompanied by what was clearly the potatoes left over from the roast at lunchtime, coated in creme fraiche.

The food isn't bad here. It's just not wildly exciting. Stuart reminds me that they do wi-fi and fairtrade coffee, which would make it a good place to visit during the day for people with laptops and time on their hands.

The cuckoo clock above us suddenly went absolutely berserk, striking again and again. Heaven knows what time it was. I'm still not sure whether someone had half-inched the cuckoo and it was mourning its loss, or whether the pub is too cool these days to actually have a little plastic bird pop out of a silhouette clock.

Go try it out and see what you think. It's not going to give The Narrow a run for its money but I understand that the chain that's bought it (http://www.orchidpubs.co.uk/) intends to chuck money at it - and that can't be a bad thing...

Depressing Demolition

I was up at the Blackheath Standard just now, full of the joys of sunny October, when I suddenly spied this:



It took me a moment to work out what exactly the workmen were demolishing. Then it came to me.

What on earth did that little 1950s bus shelter ever do to anyone? Okay - it wasn't a paragon of design, but it fitted rather well, with it's honest brick sides and little tiled roof, within the 1950s crazy-paved design of the village green.

Presumably it attracted "the wrong sort" or something - though I can't say I ever noticed hoodies or graffiti there. Did it really warrant demolition?

I suppose we'll get some horrid glass affair as a replacement which will soon be a source of permanent employment for glass repairers.

Oh - I get it. They'll be able to put advertisments in the new one. So. A revenue-generating move.

Hmmm.

The Foundling Museum

40 Brunswick Square WC1N

Ok, Ok, stay with me. There is a Greenwich connection (albeit a bit feeble) but I visited this great little museum yesterday and it's so fab, I'd probably have told you about it even if there wasn't.

The Foundling Hospital was begun, like so many worthy institutions, in the 18th Century after a lot of campaigning on behalf of Thomas Coram. He wasn't rich himself, but he was childless - and had a passion for helping the abandoned children that littered London's streets that touched 18th Century Ladies Who Lunch and through sheer force of personality he managed to get it together.

Albeit he had a couple of very powerful mates - also childless - who muscled-in on the fundraising - One George Frideric Handel, whose benefit performances of The Messiah in the hospital were the 18th Century equivalent of Live Aid (they were so popular that gentlemen were told not to wear their swords and ladies their hoops so they could fit more people in) and the artist and satirist William Hogarth who donated some of his paintings(and who may or may not have rigged a raffle so that the hospital 'won' another.)

The hospital saw thousands of orphans and abandoned children pass through its doors between 1741 and its closure in the 1950s (though the actual location had moved by that time) but thousands more were turned away. The museum has a little 'tombola'-type thing for modern children to turn to find out whether they would be accepted (provided they didn't have a nasty disease,) put on the waiting list or rejected instantly - pretty much the same sort of thing that desperate mothers hoping to deposit their illegitimate children would have gone through.

It's not big - just a few rooms - and the entrance price (£ 5 adults, children free) might seem a little steep, but as with so many of our really fascinating small museums (like our own Fan Museum)it receives no government subsidy and has to fund itself.

It's in three parts. The main part is the history of the foundling hospital - with touching little exhibits such as uniforms (which virtually never changed through the years) and cutlery, though easily the most moving display is the collection of little tokens the mothers left with their children to prove identity in case they were ever able to reclaim them. They range from little brooches and trinkets to the top off a beer bottle and a hazelnut. They were never either collected or given to the children themselves. There are also some heart-rending letters.

The Hospital, right from the start, was given a lot of paintings by Hogarth and his mates and they used to open them to the public to raise funds, making it the first public art gallery. The second part of the museum is the paintings collection. There is a wonderfully jolly picture of Coram himself, by Hogarth (another one was stolen by some rotter in the 90s) though from the painting of the poor guy in charge of the hospital's finances he clearly had the weight of the world upon his shoulders.

The painting that the hospital "won" in Hogarth's lottery is intriguing. The March of the Guards to Finchley was originally painted for the king, who was insulted because Hogarth, being Hogarth, couldn't resist painting the militia in total disarray, drinking, debauching and consorting with 'the wrong types.' Hogarth was left with the painting on his hands, so he made his cash by selling engravings of it (the Georgian equivalent to the Athena print) then put the original up for lottery. The tickets sold well, and he gave odd unsold ones to the hospital. Even at the time no one was surprised when the hospital won...

The third part of the museum is devoted to Handel - some of it is open to the public; scholars can book time to see the rest.

And the Greenwich connection? In what is definitely the grandest room of all, dripping with white rococo plasterwork, among the biblical scenes of the discovery of Moses, are little roundel-paintings of all the charitable hospitals of London. Most people flock to the early Gainsborough depiction of Charterhouse, but my eye was drawn to The Royal Naval Hospital, Greenwich. We're next to Bedlam...

Do check out this sweet little museum if you're in town. It's a two-minute walk from Russell Square Tube.

Developments at the Standard

Dan asks:

I live on the Standard and heard recently that there may be plans to re-design the area including doing something about the slip road between Westcombe Hill and Charlton Road?

Do you know of such plans?
If so, do you have any more details?

The Phantom replies:

I suspect you mean the argument that has been going on about that slipway between Old Dover Road and Charlton Road regarding access between the two. I believe it's by Hexagon Housing. I confess I found the reports in the WN very confusing and I'm really not sure what the hell is happening there. If someone would care to create a Blackheath Standard Development Proposals For Dummies (and Phantoms) I would be very grateful.

Definitions

Miss Oregon from - well, Oregon, actually, asks:

Is Blackheath considered part of Greenwich? The books I have seem to include it in the area. My good friend there tells me a story of how it came to be called Blackheath; maybe you have another story? (Learning is good.)

The Phantom Replies:

What an interesting question. Is Blackheath considered to be part of Greenwich ? Hmm. I would say an resounding "no."

Not by the post office - they have different post(zip)codes - anything SE10 is Greenwich; anything SE3 is Blackheath.

Not by the local councils - I can never remember the boundaries but at least some of Blackheath is operated by Lewisham Council; Greenwich Town, unsurprisingly, is under Greenwich Council's control.

Not by the good burghers of Blackheath themselves - they are very fiercely "their own men" and would probably be rather horrified to be lumped in with slightly-downmarket-in-comparison Greenwich.

But there are some grey areas. Westcombe Park, for example, LOOKS like it should be Greenwich - after all it's 'our' side of the heath -but has a Blackheath postcode.

Let's have a show of hands here. If you live in Westcombe Park, do you consider yourself Blackheath, Greenwich - or, indeed, Westcombe-Parkian (and are you applying for devolution in the near future?)

Come to think of it, even within Greenwich we have different areas (albeit some of them Easte-Agent-speak) - the Ashburnham Triangle, for example, or The Peninsula. Blackheath too, has its individual areas - The Cator Estate, or the areas fringing on Shooters Hill or Lewisham.

Me? I'm happy to appropriate and include anything around our area that is lovely and of interest to people from Greenwich - whether it's "officially" Charlton, Blackheath, Deptford or further afield. I don't care as long as it's get-at-able and enjoyable...

As to how Blackheath got it's name - to my embarrassment I did know and I've forgotten. I am sure someone will enlighten you, but in the meanwhile I will consult Neil Rhind's splendid book about the Heath and get back to you.

Billingsgate Fish Market

It's a bourgeois tragedy. The meat's bought (GG Sparkes) the cheese and veg is safely gathered in (Cheeseboard and Creaky Shed) vast vats worth of wine, port and sherry arrived(Theatre of Wine - delivery's free) but - zut alors! The Fishmonger's closed for the week! What's a phantom to do? Only one thing to do - brave the Blackwall Tunnel and the hour-that-dare-not speak its name, and Go Wholesale...

I utterly hate getting up when there's a five in the hour. It makes me literally ill - some kind of weird pressure thing at that time of the day seems to contract my chest and make me really rather queasy. I will do anything to avoid it - including getting up when there's a four in the hour. Billingsgate opens at five on a weekday (no Mondays, remember, and only shellfish on a Sunday)and because we knew nothing about how the place works we decided to turn up as soon after then as possible.

As it happens, it seems that the real rush happens about an hour later - and who can blame a bleary fishmonger for wanting to get an extra hour in bed? These guys do it every day, including winter - yeuch - and I confess I have a new-found respect for Julian at The Fishmonger Ltd for doing it. The only thing that would make me go at 5.30am again is the Blackwall Tunnel - really quite fluid at 5.15 - and going back south at six, but with a good queue building already on the other side going north. And from a buying point of view 5.30 seems a good time to arrive too. The car park is busy but not overflowing; the fishmongers doing a fair trade but still able to talk.

I confess that being quite a shy and retiring kinda phantom I was a little nervous of a wholesale market. I was concerned that I would stick out like the proverbial sore thumb as the tourist among all the Gordon Ramsays, Marco-Pierre Whites and, er, Julians. I had this image that the traders might be quite hostile to someone who didn't want to buy a hundredweight of Dover Sole or a whole barrel full of eels. I had also assumed that there would be no prices anywhere and a sort of Turkish bazaar-style haggling system would be the norm. I had, of course, forgotten one thing. This is Britain.

Billingsgate is one of those things everyone should do at least once in their lives, even if only so that they know what they're buying at The Fishmonger, and what goes on to get the goods to the shop. Wandering around the place is an education in itself, though not, I understand, as atmospheric as the old Billingsgate in the City, whose cellars, I have heard rumoured, took several years to thaw out when it was redeveloped by greedy people in the 80s. Their loss is our gain, I say. The market's new location makes it about 12 minutes by car. You could go by DLR to Canary Wharf (about ten minutes walk from the market,) but you might not be popular with other passengers on the way home.

The main market is, of course, covered, and a lot quieter than I had expected. As you know by now, I live in some kind of hazy 1960s time warp in my head and although there is friendly Alfred Doolittle costermonger-type banter going on (yeah, yeah, I know he was fruit & veg,) it's not the racket I had imagined - and not a single geezer with one of them silly 'ats on at all. Nobody seemed to be in the slightest bit interested in the tourists - ie. us - they were too busy going about their business, and we happily wandered up and down the aisles marvelling at the sheer variety of sea life we'd never heard of. I mean - what the hell do you do with a Ribbon Fish?

The whoppers are sold individually. We bought the biggest salmon we could fit in the fish kettle for a tenner - the truly mooosive ones were about twenty quid. While we were about it we bought a huge side of smoked salmon, also for ten pounds.

Of course where retail fishmongers really come into their own is with the giant fish - the halibuts, for example - you really do need to buy the whole damn thing when one slice from the local fish shop would feed a family of four for a month. All the individual can do is wonder at these majestic creatures laid out on slabs of ice.

Most of the smaller fish you need to buy by the boxful so its well worth going with friends and divvying up the spoils or making sure you have a LOT of room in the freezer. We bought a box of beautifully-filleted rainbow trout for fourteen pounds - there were thirteen in there, which makes them just over a pound each (unprepared trout was much cheaper.) As a final treat, we bought a kilo of gigantic king scallops also for fourteen pounds(with free plastic box, whoopee.)

We were treated with courtesy and smiled at by people who, at that hour of the morning could be forgiven for being very crabby indeed. There are two greasy-spoon type cafes in the place, but we didn't stop to test them (they looked fantastic)as we had one eye on the tunnel.

Back home we divided the scallops into sensible amounts in separate bags, and clingfilmed individual trout fillets we weren't going to use. Our freezer is now full to bursting - and anyone coming to dinner chez Phantom can expect scallops, salmon and trout for the foreseeable future.

It's still only 7.43am. I can't believe I'm up. I'd forgotten how good coffee is this time of day.

Seriously folks. Try this once. Take the pain, get up at 5.00am. Wander around, experience a little bit of London's heritage, buy some fish (oh - handy tip - take plenty of bin bags to put your loot in - some supply bags, others don't, you don't want it dripping everywhere) - and then grovel before Julian's feet, knowing he goes through this rigmarole every day.

Prime Time Video

Blackheath

I made a huge faux pas the other day. Admittedly it was a Sunday morning and I'm never at my perkiest then, but this was stupidity of monumental proportions.

I went into the video shop opposite the station and was bowled over. My feet stepped onto sumptuous dark red carpet, my eyes feasted on a simple but elegant store layout and lit up at the sight of interesting stock (though it seemed a little emptier than it could be - not sure what that was about - unless they'd had a busy Saturday night.)

It was like walking into an old cinema - clearly the desired effect. Splendid fake friezes in deco style of cinematic tableaux, curved stairways leading to different areas of the shop, fab subtle lighting - even with dark red ropes on brass stands dividing areas - it was just really beautifully laid out and I was excited. A closer look at the DVDs on offer (I didn't have time to check out the videos - which appeared to be being sold off) revealed a good selection of oldies and arthouse as well as the usual blockbusters, rom-coms and action movies.

And here comes the stupidity. I suggested to the guy at the desk they open a store in Greenwich. Of course he told me they'd just shut a shop in Greenwich. DUH...

One look at the name of the shop and it all came flooding back - as did a rather fetching tomato colour to my face. Prime Time Video. Of course. I even wrote about it. I just hadn't connected this sophisticated, beautiful place to wander round and enjoy for its own sake with the scruffy old video shop that just closed in what has to be Greenwich's worst shopping centre (next door to that dodgy old Somerfields and sundry other dead shops.)

What on earth made them open up there? Why did Blackheath get the luxury treatment and Greenwich the bargain basement? Maybe it's one of those classic Greenwich/Blackheath fundamentals that seems to apply to all wine bars/restaurants and shops (with one or two fabulously inspiring exceptions - places that keep my optimism for our wonderful, exciting town.) Whatever it is, it's depressing as hell.

Greenwich deserves a video store as classy as Prime Time Video in Blackheath - somewhere the evening's entertainment begins before the film starts - and I know just the guy to do it. Here's my fantasy. An independent video store that is as fabulous to look at as Prime Vids in Blackheath in what was going to be the lapdancing club at the Plaza run by the big guy from Blockbuster who seems to know everything thre is to know about film. Now there's a place I'd visit more than it was healthy. Actually, while we're about it, how about a small screening room in there too, with selections and introductions by The Big Man Himself (must find out his name...)

Ho hum. Back to reality and what has to be the grimmest day of the year - in effing AUGUST...

Milestone along Morden Road

Now here's a thing. It's clearly 'important' because it has a little railing around it - but nowhere can I find out anything about this sweet little milestone along Morden Road, near the pond at the South-East corner of Blackheath.

The wonderful Neil Rhind, who is usually so eloquent on things like this, doesn't appear to have an entry about it anywhere and The Milestone Society doesn't seem to have anything about London milestones.

Maybe someone who lives in or around The Paragon might have some idea? There are a few scratches on it, but they appear to be the work of local youths rather than any kind of detail...

Ruxley Manor Garden Centre

I have been looking for a fabulous garden centre for some time now. Given the price of land around Greenwich it's hardly surprising that there isn't much more than the piss-poor garden section of B&Q (Homebase is slightly better) but if you go out just a few miles there are quite a lot of them, some more impressive than others. There is one near the M25 which will remain nameless which didn't seem to have a plant in it that wasn't diseased when I visited, but others are at least clean and have a reasonable selection.

But I wasn't prepared for the sheer size of Ruxley Manor Garden Centre. Lovely Anita from House of Beauty told me about it and I thought I'd give it a try. The website looks nice enough but can't show just how big this place is. As you go in, you pass what turns out to be the overflow car park (the 'proper' one is next to the entrance.) What I like is that they have made an effort everywhere. Most garden centres have plenty of plants and then might do one or two displays, the rest being -well - a bit scruffy, really. This place, from the moment you go in. has well-cared for beds and smart displays. Presumably you pay for it in the prices, but I didn't notice many stupidly expensive items (and you know what a skinflint I am...)

If it goes outdoors, Ruxley will have it. There are huge sections of different kinds of plants - palms and ferns, fruit bushes, architectural talking points, perennials, annuals - you name it, they've got it. There are all manner of hard landscape-y things, outbuildings, summer houses, interesting ideas for back gardens from Japanese minimalism to country cottage charm. I particularly liked the dancing teddy bear topiary.

Indoors, every garden tool, accessory and frivolity jostles outdoor wear, conservatory furniture, kitchen stuff and dining clutter. There's a big aquatic and pets department I didn't go into - not my kind of thing, but I'm sure it's the same quality as the rest.

Plenty of loos, a cafe (Anita recommends the panini) and an intriguing-looking Italian Restaurant, which is open not just for lunch but evening too, implying that it's a proper restaurant - we'll see - it's now on my long and growing list of eateries for review.

The old manor itself (more like a lovely farmhouse than a traditional 'manor') isn't open to the public, but is a pretty place, and its attendant chapel, now totally dead, its windows covered in chicken wire to prevent bird damage, is also worth a look - it has a curious ruined tower next door.

I reckon this place is well worth a visit (if you're into gardens of course - if you're not, I'd give it a wide berth...) It's about 20 minutes from Greenwich by car, but much better than the same old, same old (and the horrid queues) at B&Q...

www.ruxley-manor.co.uk

Danson Stables

Have you ever had one of those Sundays where you're desperate to "go out" but don't have any real set plans? You know there are good places out there that you still haven't visited yet, but somehow the weather's not that great, your energy's not that high and besides - you're hungry?

That was us last weekend. I like to go out and do stuff but I'm not always quite as wired and targetted as I could be. "Let's go and find a nice country pub we've not already been to," we said, and set off with no plan at all in our heads.

This is always a bad thing. With theoretically all the time in the world, I reject places on the stupidest grounds. One pub is too noisy-looking, another is too rural. The next is too urban; I don't care for the windows-or the hanging baskets-or the 4x4s- or the local herberts in another. "But do they do food?" I whine about the next, "Yes, but it's family fun day" about the next (something I avoid at all costs.) And the weird thing is that the hungrier I get, the more pointlessly fussy I become.

We drove round and round - pretty much literally in circles until we had virtually decided to just come back to Greenwich or Blackheath, when it occurred to us to try the pub at Danson House

Danson Stables are just that - the old stable block, built just after 1800 from the remains of one of the wings of the house which had been demolished, all set in Capability Brown gardens - turned into a really not-bad-at-all pub. It's kept the compartmentalised feel - there are lots of different rooms so that it feels quite nice and cosy - it's a nice balance between bright and modern and traditional homely and a pleasant way to spend a lunchtime.

I get the feeling that this used to be a chain - there is something 'corporate' about the signage - but there is absolutely no indication of any kind of name, so I'm wondering whether it has been taken back into private ownership, just keeping the signs. A website I found said it was Bass, but it seemed out of date and I can't find anything about it anywhere else. I asked a waitress and she didn't know - a sure sign that there isn't any big corporate owner, I'd have said.

The food is predictable pub grub, but no less enjoyable for it. The portions are large - almost too large - and generally well-cooked. The gammon steak was huge and came with so much veg you couldn't see the plate. I suspect that my linguine had been made several hours beforehand and was the scrapings out of the the bottom of the pan - crispy and oily, but actually I confess I really enjoyed it - even the scrapy-bits. I felt sort of guilty for this since it was all the naughty oily cheesy sundried tomatoey bits and I should have complained - Gordon Ramsay would have had quite a lot to say about it - but frankly however 'old' it was, it was actually very yummy. So I have no taste. Shoot me.

There was music but it wasn't overbearing, the service was friendly and the beer not bad. Generally all good things.

As luck would have it there WAS a family fun day going on in the grounds of Danson House, but the pub itself was large enough to cope and despite there being lots of families it didn't encroach on us adult drinkers and the balance worked very well. The sheer number of people who had chosen to bring the kids indicates that the child portions are a hit.

I'd say this isn't a bad place to while away a Sunday lunchtime - just avoid the linguine if you don't get off on pan-scrapings. Me? I'd have exactly the same thing again...

Hortus

Blackheath Village, SE3

This is the kind of yummy, rather posh gardening shop that it's unlikely we'll see in Greenwich just at the moment, the nearest equivalent being the lovely florist in Royal Hill, though it's not quite the same. It is extremely tasteful in every respect ( a tad too tasteful, possibly?) and I wander around it like a little girl in Claire's Accessories, dazzled by all the finery but wondering whether my pocket money will actually stretch to anything at all.

To be honest that's not a very good analogy at all. Claire's Accessories sells cheap tat and even the poorest little ballerina can normally afford something. But cheap - in any sense of the word - is not what Hortus is about. Quality is the name of the game here, and though you'll pay for it, there is no doubt that whatever you pick up here will last longer than one party for under-10s. (That's enough dodgy analogies - Ed.)

OK, back to the gardening. Outside Hortus sits a selection of beautiful, fashionable plants, ranging from the simple to the exotic, and another selection of lovely, lovely pots to put them in. I am always particularly taken with the blue-and-white ceramic pots that come pre-weathered. I WILL buy one of those at some point.

Inside, there are lots of gardening accessories that I would say are intended more as presents - either for friends or as a personal treat - than as basics. Gorgeous gloves, pastel tools, curious ornaments and objets d'art. Not sure about the terracotta 'slug catcher' (because if it works, at some point it needs to be emptied - yeuch) but all the unusual gadgets and pretty versions of old Victorian curios are perfect for a gardening friend.

If you're not into gardens but you like being IN gardens, there is loads of 'outdoor living' stuff - barbecues, picnic gear and dozens and dozens of candles and candle holders. Once again, this is no bargain basement, but it's all LOVELY and lovely has to be paid for.

Out back there's a tiny gravel area with all the architectural plants, fibreclay and cast iron planters in traditional and contemporary designs and curious ornaments. I particularly like the potting bench (obviously not for sale) which really feels like it gets used.

Back inside again, they have a little selection of cheese and wine accessories - like labels for cellars, decanters and cheese knives. There's a small selection of books and other gifty-type things - everything beautifully and tastefully displayed. It's somewhere to visit for birthday presents. And one day I will actually buy something for me...

Apparently they also do floristry, landscaping and garden maintenance, though the website is a bit minimal on detail...

www.hortus-blackheath.co.uk

Rathmore Benches Revisited

I've had a fascinating email from Carol of Greenwich Mural Workshop and thought it was so interesting that I would post it in its entirety.

Carol writes:

Rathmore murals were painted in 1979 called " Charlton, Past, Present andFuture". The benches were constructed in 1980.

They were commissioned by Irena McFarland, then senior Youth Worker at thecentre. Paul Stephens( not Paul Simmons), also involved in the Centre,worked with us on the benches.
The theme for the murals and benches were agreed with local residents andyouth centre workers and users, and yes in response to a point you made Ithink, they were deliberately socio-political to reflect the aspirations ofthe local residents, also because that was the genre of GMW.

Each section of the walls reflected the theme of the benches. So from westto east - the first section showed portraits of local people debating /accosting national politicians, the second, people printing leaflets andposters, above the benches of faces; the next above the flames showed imagesof people welding and repairing parts of barges / boats, reflecting localinterest in re-establishing a working economy linked to the river Thames;the fourth section showed people growing food using wind, solar and waterenergy - way before the current interest in climate change etc.

This was linked to a wish to establish allotments on the corner of Rathmore Road andCharlton Church Lane, then a derelict site which was subsequently developedby the GLC for housing.
The doorway had a Mexican image of life - an eagleholding a snake in its beak, an artistic reference to Los Tres Grandes -Siqueiros, Rivera and Orozco - all muralists in the 1930's working on anational programme of mural painting within an education programme teachinga mainly illiterate indigenous population their history and education, andartistic mentors for GMW muralists. The pillars boasted images of the Rowantree - also a symbol of life.

The water bench was to remind us that Charlton lay on the river Thames andhistorically relied heavily upon it for work. The gable - the centralsection showed modern day Charlton-supermarket shopping, moderntransport-buses, motorcycles, computers, skateboarders. Either side werehistorical references including the Bottle Kiln once sited at the end ofRathmore Road - I believe, but certainly locally, market sellers, chairrepairers, the first train, Woolwich ferry, horse-drawn trams etc.

Throughout portraits of local people figured as characters in the mural andduring the painting of the mural we had a "portrait chair" where peoplepassing by were invited to sit and had their portrait drawn and subsequentlytransferred to the wall.

Sounds a bit worthy, visually I don't think it was and it was certainly wellreceived then. So it is particularly uplifting to find that people still think the benches are worth comment.

The benches were repaired about ten, possibly longer ago, but then no money has been forthcoming to do it a second time, plus it is a lengthy anddifficult job. However your site and people's comments have inspired us tolook into finding funds to repair them again.

For us it was an interesting project as we had to pioneer thebench construction and eventually took advice from a boat-builder, using theconstruction method adapted from making the hulls of concrete boats.

The Phantom adds:
Just a thought - but how easy would it be when you get a new commission, to add in a 'trust fund' contingency for upkeep? Presumably the amount wouldn't need to be huge and could be ring-fenced, the interest earned keeping it in line with inflation. I am always saddened by things that were once 'projects' loved by the locals, opened with great pomp by dignitaries and then abandoned to vandals, weeds and Time.

The first time I saw Rathmore Benches was at night, lit by sodium streetlamps and it was an almost magical sight. By day, they are still lovely but would be even more wondrous with a bit of a spruce-up...

No matter. They continue to delight passers-by such as myself 27 years on from their construction and I for one thank you, GMW...

Zero Degrees

As the weather finally takes an upturn and a few rays of sunshine warm the cockles of a Greenwich heart, a young man's (and several young women's) fancy turns to...

...beer. We're quite well-served in this part of the world for microbreweries - the excellent Mean Time (another time) in Charlton and the highly entertaining Zero Degrees in Blackheath.

What could be more civilised than a brisk stroll across the heath on a sunny Sunday afternoon and sitting around a Montpelier Vale pavement with a pint of Lovely? Zero Degrees brews their own Lovely in giant copper vats that look like something out of Professor Brainstawm's lab, which you can view behind glass windows. It's all very clean and clinical (which frankly you'd want if you were going to drink the result) and I never tire of actually seeing it all happening (slowly) before my eyes.

They do various types of beer several of which are 'specials' - usually the fruit ones which I'm told can be a bit on the sickly side - but I guess it's horse for courses...

Inside it's ok - but can get a bit busy and noisy, mainly due to a combination of the giant screens which either show music vids or sport - and the sheer number of folk in there.

In the two eating areas - one with low chairs and tables, the other much more formal - they make decent pizzas and pastas which are good for group meals and outings where you don't need to discuss anything important. It's very sociable - and most of the occasions I've been there have been birthday party/work outing type things for which it's perfect. I wouldn't recommend it for a first date, unless you realised as soon as you'd said 'yes' that it was A Bad Idea. In that case it's ideal for a first date - you can eat nice food, drink nice drink and smile politely before making a quick exit. Around the bar itself there tend to be more of your traditional beer drinkers, which sometimes makes it difficult to get to the bar, but is generally worth the wait.

Many people chose the 'takeout' option where you can buy a 5 litre keg ( £ 15.50)to either take home or enjoy on the heath. These are metal and heavy, with plastic handles which although seem easy enough to transport across the heath on your lovely evening stroll, will soon start to cut into the strongest hand. Get a bus. Really.

I only realised that the Blackheath Zero Degrees wasn't the only one (I'd assumed a clever pun on it being cold beer and at the Meridian) when I looked at the website. There are also branches in Bristol and Reading. Pah.

But the beer still slips down nicely, I understand, on a lovely sunny afternoon in July...

Thames Gateway Bridge

I was talking to someone just now who's been talking to someone in the loop about the new Thames Gateway bridge. Apparently it is most definitely coming - largely funded by tolls at the Dartford Crossing, and the thing that's been holding it up has been delicate negotiations between The Port of London - who want the bridge as high as possible so ships can get under it and London City Airport who want it as low as possible so that aircraft don't crash into it. Things have been tense, I understand, and the agreement they have come to gives the bridge a mere six metres leeway either way...

And in case anyone was holding out for the rumoured extra tunnel at the Peninsula (where the David Beckham Tomato Polytunnel is) going over to Canning Town, forget it. It ain't happening. I'm not surprised - it's a possible tunnel - but with no way to get traffic to it - or from it the other end, it's largely pointless and would only add to the Blackwall queues.

The Tfl site reckons that work will begin in 2010 and the bridge will open in 2013. The public suggested tolls are £ 1 for local residents. Hmm.... we'll see.

That's all the news that's fit to print just now, folks. I'll keep my ear to the ground for any extras.

Preview: Open Gardens Day

The Pagoda, Pagoda Gardens, SE3
28, Granville Park SE13
12, Eliot Vale, SE3

15th June 6.00pm - 9.00pm

I'm sure that many people will know about this already, but I thought I'd give the rest of you a heads-up on one of the great opportunities-to-be-nosey of the year. Part of the National Gardens Scheme, three of the best private gardens in Blackheath are open for one evening only for the public to enjoy, the proceeds going to various good causes. It's an evening that I normally would not miss, though sadly I can't make it this year.

The great thing about these particular gardens is that the owners have got together and made them open on the same evening at the same time, so that, in a very civilised move, you can wander between the three of them, enjoying a glass of wine at each as the sun sets. So very civilised...

The Pagoda is probably the most famous of the three. I will come to the house itself another day - it warrants an entry on its own - but the garden is wonderful - totally in keeping with the house's history. An English interpretation of an oriental fantasy, the half-acre includes shady walks, a water garden with a suitably red lattice pergola and some truly lovely country-style planting. There is some fabulous old stonework, and a great mix of jungly/tropical and old English plants.

28 Granville Park is a long, narrow garden with separate 'rooms' - right next to the house there is a sunken area with giant ferns and palms. My overwhelming memory is of a splendid circular lawn and intense planting. There's a pond and, right at the far end, a dry garden. Plenty of shady nooks and interesting corners.

12 Eliot Vale is completely different. Designed for access (presumably there's someone with disabilities in the family) the paths are long, wide and winding, and the planting is low. The pond is raised - I assume to avoid accidents, and there's an enchanting little summerhouse in the centre. It's an odd shape - just when you think you've got to the end, it turns a corner in an extra bit that they presumably bought off the neighbours. Lovely and shady. This garden seems younger than the others to me - an extra year on, it may well have established much more. The sculptures that are dotted around may not be to everyone's taste, but it's certainly a bold idea and they add interest, mingling in with the plants.

On the surface, it's not a 'cheap' evening. Each garden costs £ 3.50 entrance fee, which notches up if you have a family, but if memory serves, this includes a glass of wine, and, let's face it, it's all for charity and it's a lovely evening. Somewhere in my mind it costs less if you go to all three. My suggestion would be to give up on the savings front and book a nice restaurant in Blackheath Village afterwards.

Enjoy - let me know what you think if you go.

BTW, I'll be coming onto the other Open Gardens - for Bexley Cottage Hospice, and in the centre of Greenwich for GreenwichAlive another day...

Rathmore Benches

The corner of Troughton and Rathmore Roads, SE7

Who needs to go to Barcelona when you have Charlton on your doorstep? If you're not expecting anything more than some rather sweet Victorian terraces when you're walking along Troughton and Rathmore roads, the first time you see the (still) fabulous Rathmore benches is one of those wonderful experiences that Life gives out for free every so often.

In a style strongly reminiscent of Gaudi's dazzling Park Guell, this extraordinary structure of concrete benches wrapping its way around an old (1901, if memory serves...) chapel (now Rathmore Youth Centre) winds like a length of colourful satin ribbon gently undulating and forming two long, continuous benches for the Youth of Charlton to enjoy. All along it, in minute detail, are mosaic images - people, flowers, sun rays, crashing waves, boats, motorbikes, cornfields - and what looks suspiciously like a detonator of some sort.

Maybe this is a darker vision than it at first appears. This was made by the excellent Greenwich Mural Workshop (You know the drill, 'more about them another day') in the heady days of the 1980s when there was the money around to do that kind of thing. There is some doubt about exactly when it was executed - The Public Monument and Sculpture Association, thinks 1989, but I have found evidence of a publication about it as far back as 1983 (it's by Greenwich Mural Workshop themselves and just 12 pages long, so I guess it could be a proposal. I am sure one of you long term residents - Inspector Sands, perhaps, can tell me the date?) but this is a period when CND and the Greenham Women were still very much at the forefront of the news. A time when even Tony Blair was still against nuclear weapons. In other words, more politically volatile times.

Sadly the colourful mural that accompanied the project and which may have explained more about the meaning of the remaining benches has been painted over - in battleship grey, of all colours. A more miserable, dampening colour would have been difficult to find, but could have rather symbolic subtext if my theory is correct. I have no idea whether my fancies about these benches having political resonance are anything more than mere whim, but if it is, it might explain the grey paint and general condition of the work...

If you've never seen these remarkable constructions, my advice would be to see them for the very first time by night. The sodium streetlamps are far kinder to them than the harsh sunlight which shows just how badly they have worn. By night, they are a magical sight, the colours a little subdued by the lighting, but the general view much more akin, I suspect, to how they were originally conceived.

The money just isn't around these days to look after exciting sculptures in backstreets in Charlton. The Public Monument and Sculpture Association has recorded them as being "At Risk" - and they're absolutely right. They are. Flakes and tiles of mosaic are missing almost everywhere you look, and in places the wire mesh that forms the foundations shows through. Even the little flowerbeds carefully integrated into the design are looking distinctly bare. But it is not too late to save this wonderful piece of late 20th Century art. If the will is there, then they can be preserved, perhaps even by their original creators. Listing would even be an option. Sadly I don't think that grey paint is coming off any time soon...

Mary Evans Picture Library

Tranquil Vale, SE3

I have been passing this odd and rather beautiful building for some time now, wondering what on earth who Mary Evans was, and what a picture library bearing her name is doing in Blackheath.

In my head I had images of some doughty Edwardian lady, somewhere along the lines of an Emily Pankhurst or a Gertrude Jekyll. Perhaps she was a writer - a Sitwell - or a painter - a Gwen John. In my fertile imagination she had grown up playing in the fields around Blackheath, learning to love every blade of grass, every leaf of tree - the butcher's boy's whistle, the postman's cheery greeting. That extraordinary house had been commissioned by her slightly bohemian parents in the style of that nice Mr Morris down the road at Bexleyheath and now she lived in it, the collection of paintings she had amassed with care and sensitivity visited by members of the fashionable London Set, her name as a woman of taste and elegance assured right through until the 1920s, by which time she had created a bit of a New York scandal by being painted in the nude by John Singer Sargent at the rip old age of 87. She was, of course, a spinster - a beautiful bluestocking who scared off a multitude of suitors with an acidly-accurate tongue, her only true love her painting collection...

I guess I could have been more wrong, but it's safe to say I couldn't have been much more wrong...

The Mary Evans Picture Library is, at least, the brainchild of a Blackheath woman of taste. But rather than grand paintings housed in the strange Arts & Crafts (? - as regular readers will know my knowledge of architecture isn't always spot-on) 'cottage' at the top of Tranquil Vale, it is a collection of images ranging from the great and powerful - international events and famous people - to small, seemingly insignificant pictures that enrich our lives and decorate everything from TV programmes to newspaper articles.

They're just over 40 years old as a company - and it's a family-run business. So much for my sturdy Edwardian spinster. Mary and Hilary Evans started it in 1964 and have recently been joined by their daughter Valentine. There's a great photo on the website from the early years of the three of them in front of the filing cabinets where the images were (and possible still are) stored, little Valentine merely playing with the bottom drawer. It was, like all great businesses which last, founded on a personal passion, Mary's vast collection of prints, engravings, drawings and photos.

It's a commercial collection, so unless I pose as a picture researcher for some magazine, it's unlikely I'll get to see inside this amazing-looking building (there is a very small pic of the inside on the website, the lovely, simple lines of the staircase and the splendid circular window in nearly-full view) but there is a service where private customers can buy online prints for framing in their homes, many of which are local. I have not seen most of them before.

www.prints-online.com

They claim to have over 200,000 images online and be adding pictures at a rate of 500 a week. No wonder they need a staff of 20. They don't say when they moved to the fabulous building they inhabit now, or what it was originally built as - if you know or, indeed are, anyone who works there, I'd love to know more.

So another of my own personal mysteries cleared up. Shame about my Edwardian spinster fantasy but hey - the truth is just as fascinating.

www.maryevans.com

Strange Erections...

(Thought that would get your attention, fnaar, fnaar...)

DarrenBentBent asks:

Any clues what the strange looking thing being built at the north end of Brookmill Park is? It could be anything from a funky new Arts space...

The Phantom replies:

I have a horrid feeling that what you are talking about is something we discussed a little while ago and have to bring you the bad news that it is a development of - wait for it - luxury flats.

Is this it?

http://www.silkworkslondon.co.uk

If not, maybe someone has some better news for Darren. Maybe it actually IS a funky new arts space. Don't hold your breath, though, Darren...

The Paragon

When he designed Gloucester Circus, architect Michael Searles was really only warming up. Admittedly, units weren't exactly selling like Mrs Miggins's pies but that didn't really bother Searles - he'd already set his sights on another piece of land, the site of a massive house. It was part of the Wricklemarsh Estate - on the edge of Blackheath - and Searles was busy chatting up the guy who was buying it, one John Cator, whom I'll talk about another day. Another potential buyer who came to have a look round, apparently, was Clive of India but in the end, Cator nabbed it.

The Paragon (Searles was not one for subtlety when it came to titles) was to be a row of fourteen houses (seven pairs,) but instead of boring old terraces, he fancied joining them up with little Tuscan-colonnaded conceits (Coadestone, actually - I promise I will get onto Coadestone one day...) which housed the entrances, thus leaving the main buildings to enjoy gigantic arched windows for the best view - both looking in and out. To make it all look nice and neat, he put a lodge-house at either end.

Because he also took the financial risk, Searles had to make a bit more effort at selling The Paragon, so he made sure they were 'substantially-built.' He managed to flog the lot off by 1805 but it had taken him 13 years to finish them due to a few, ahem, financial embarrassments. Once they were nearly finished, though, people snapped up accommodation which not only could include large, modern interiors including Gentlemen's rooms, eight bedrooms, servants quarters and water closets, but were also only a cough and a spit from what is now the A2 but at the time would have afforded them a speedy trip to enjoy the splendours of London.

Searles must be a bit of a hero of the current developers at the Millennium Village. They do much the same today as he did two hundred years ago - sell an empty shell, which the purchasers model to their own wishes. Ok - he did it with bricks & mortar, they do with sliding metal walls, but the idea's much the same.

Although most of The Paragon's residents were city businessmen, it attracted all sorts of intriguing residents - from two Lord Mayors of London to another (far more interesting) couple. They were both women, but one dressed as a man. It's said that they came from Gloucester Circus and the 'lady' half of the pair informed everyone she was going to marry a Lord. She gadded about all over town buying lovely things for her trousseau - everything from trinkets and baubles to clothes and furniture and was the darling of all the merchants - for about ten minutes. After she ran up £ 20,000-worth of debts, the pair scarpered, never to be seen again.

There's one thing about the Victorians - they just couldn't resist dickering. Sundry dodgy 'embellishments' were added over the next hundred years or so, few of which, apparently, added much charm (of course the 1970s got their own back, adding 'improvements' of their own to Victorian buildings. What goes around comes around...) The Paragon started the 20th Century in a rather sad state as boarding houses.

A lot of the gaudy Victorian additions were quietly lost by Charles Bernard Brown when the Luftwaffe gave him the opportunity to restore The Paragon to its original beauty by bombing the poor place to buggery. Brown's is not a name people conjure readily today - but the guy deserves a medal for standing up for what could have just ended up as another demolition site back in the 1950s.

The houses today are divided up into flats and consistently go for staggering sums when they come up for sale. I've never seen the back of them, but I'll wager they no longer come with nine acres of land each, vegetable gardens, fishponds, dairies, coach houses and stabling. As long as I don't see them, though, I can at least dream that someone in Blackheath still keeps cows in their back garden. The private road outside, with its little white-painted fences and cute lamp posts plus the leafy-green that surrounds it, is, I believe, paid for in what cannot be insignificant service charges (or maybe they share the chores - "ok, whose turn is it to mow the lawn this week, then...?")

The Paragon is one of the truly sumptuous parts of Blackheath - and fitting tribute to a local architect whose work is dotted around the area, and still much-loved.

Chapter Two

43-45 Montpelier Vale, SE3

What can I say about Chapter Two that most people don't already know?

If you're a fan don't bother reading any more of this entry - I'll be telling you nothing new. If you don't know the place, read on.

Chapter Two is the sister restaurant of Chapter One in Locksbottom which has a Michelin star, but some I've spoken to actually prefer the Blackheath version. I can't say - I've not been to Ch1 (yet...)

The two don't share an exec chef. While Andrew McLeish resides at Ch1, Trevor Tobin is CH2's chef and he has designed a Modern European menu ( I call it 'small food') that includes a mix of seasonal and classic dishes, all beautifully presented (miniature piles of food, exquisitely arranged with dibs and dribs of sauces in artistic patterns) but inexplicably filling.

What I like about the way these foods are balanced is that when they arrive, they don't look much. They're pretty enough, but don't look like they're going to satisfy. However, they are cleverly assembled so that they have a filling effect despite their size.

Here's an example. I ordered the mackerel as a starter. It looked lovely - a small, rich, pan-fried slab balanced on something with an interesting pattern of something else arranged as a sauce. The something that the mackerel was balanced on was, I believe, based on Puy lentils and the sauce a reduction of aubergine. All three of these ingredients are rich and filling on their own. They arrived on my plate in exactly the right amounts to take up exactly the right amount of room in one's stomach, to appetize, but leave room for the main course.

My companion's Pea Veloute was even more unpromising to start with - a tiny lump of fried haddock balanced on top of mushy peas (I think they might have called them 'crushed' - that's posh restaurants for you...) But as the waitress poured the bright, spring-green veloute around the haddock, it created a fabulous-looking dish - as well as a small theatrical experience.

The red onion tatin I chose as a main fulfilled a similar function - as much a feast for the eye and nose (and ear - the crackle as my knife pierced the outer layers sends a frisson of anticipatory excitement up the spine) as the mouth. Delicate flavours of baked onion with overtones of pastis and roasted salsify went a long way to the slight disappointment I felt as I reluctantly bit into the last mouthful, but once again, Tobin's expertise in knowing exactly how much to supply on a plate was almost perfect.

I say 'almost' because, in the absolute perfect world of the chef's expertise, one would actually be able to manage a pudding too. Sadly, there just was no way I was going to be able to fit in any more, but we studied the dessert menu anyway. I suspect we may have studied it a little too much, since it was an absolute delight - a nit-picker's feast of grammatical error - spelling mistakes, wandering apostrophes, typos - you name it, it was here. Not something one would expect from a place as smart as this (though admittedly I had not noticed similar howlers on the main menu.)

The desserts themselves, however, looked divine. For once not relying heavily on chocolate as an ingredient (just two of the options included it, which was a welcome relief for me. I love chocolate - but not at the exclusion of anything else, and frankly after a meal, I usually prefer something a little lighter.) I was particularly attracted by the delightfully old-fashioned lemon posset and the baked vanilla yoghurt with rhubarb. Some of the dessert wines also looked fabulous.

In fact the wine list as a whole was excellent. There wasn't a sommelier in sight when we went, but there was a condensed 'sommelier's choice' list on the wine menu, which included some superb bottles, including Decanter award winners.

The decor has a smart, 1990s feel to it - if it doesn't hail from then, it certainly feels like it - but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's in no way anything other than immaculate - wooden floors, dark blue high-back chairs, lots of white linen. The smoked mirrors do a great job of making the place look richer - and larger - than it actually is - they work especially well downstairs in the much larger space (more room, no natural light, so better for winter meals.)

The service is friendly. The waitresses spoke a little more English than in most places around here, but ours still had to get the manager to answer an extremely basic question about the menu.

The prices aren't cheap, but they are good for what you get. You're expected to have at least two courses, though you could either choose a starter or a dessert as your second choice. Presumably if you have a large appetite you could have a third, too. Main courses are £ 12.95, starters and puds roll in at £ 5.50 each. On Friday and Saturday evenings you have to have the special deal at the special price of £ 24.50 for three courses.

We return to Chapter Two on an irregular-but-always-much-anticipated basis.

www.chaptersrestaurants.com

Chew and Chow

Peter asks:

This is a little way off your Greenwich patrol, but do you know anything about recent changes at Chew and Chow ?

Chew and Chow has been a small licensed Spanish cafe in Charlton Church Lane, just up the hill from Charlton station, serving simple but good quality food for the last 10 years or so. The interior and furniture define basic, but its always been a treat to have a neighbourhood cafe providing authentic Spanish fare using excellent ingredients. Charlton Church Lane probably isn't the best location for an enterprise of this type and in recent years the cafe scaled down to weekend only opening.

We went there for lunch today first the first time for a few months. The menu still offer the same tapas dishes and salads as before, but there is also a "Thai Tapas" menu. The Spanish breakfasts have gone from the menu, as have the omelettes and filled rolls, but there is a new short listing of Thai curries on the menu. We ordered our favourites from the tapas menu and the quality of ingredients and cooking was pretty much the same as before.


So my questions are;

Has anyone else eaten there since these changes and what was their experience ?

What's the storey behind the changes ? Is it now a partnership between the previous and new operators, or has the previous owner sold on the business and recepies ? And if so has the previous owner set up somewhere else locally that would be worth knowing about ?

Peter, I don't know this place, but it sounds intriguing. I will review it asap and find out what I can...

In the meanwhile, I bet someone else here has tried this place and can give you an opinion...

Hand Made Food

Cafe/Deli/Traiteur

40, Tranquil Vale, SE3

It's part of that funky row of interesting shops that we'd give our eye-teeth for in central Greenwich - just two doors down from Boulangerie Jade and round the corner from several other fabbo stores, but let's not be mealy-mouthed - it's still largely walkable - and a worthwhile destination indeed.

I'd heard good things about Hand Made Food, but the place was always so darn busy that I had shied away from actually trying to eat in there - or even to queue up for a takeaway. It looked great. That slightly bohemian, busy interior with splendid-looking tarts and pastries, cakes and buns, quiches and salads filling the windows made my mouth water as walked past. But those queues...

Still. Queues are part of the whole phantom-gig, and after yet another rave review from friends I finally tackled it. No room outside of course, but I was determined to sit-in if I could so we nabbed a couple of stools at the side. The service is very friendly and fast - considering that you can't just choose a dish - you have to answer all kinds of questions about how much you want, what you want it with and how you want it done. It reminds me a bit of that bit in You've Got Mail where Tom Hanks explains how Starbucks allows people who are bad at decisions to feel better by having to make fifteen decisions over a cup of coffee before work. Not, of course, that I'm in any way comparing this wonderful place to Starbucks. Sorry guys...

Still - there are a lot of decisions to be made and that's before you get to the drinks. The choice is large - and, obviously, all home made. Large, organic fishcakes, huge slices of tart of the day, well-composed salads, a whole fridge full of toothsome-looking meats.

Our fruit juices were wonderful. They arrived separately, as they were individually prepared and they tasted like it too. Tangy, fresh and substantial in themselves. My Tart of the Day (leek and Gruyere) had fresh, crumby pastry, not too thick, not too thin, and a tasty, deep filling, well-balanced and good-sized. The side salad was a disappointment - exactly two leaves of lettuce, and with the dirty bottom bit still gritty. Perhaps that was my fault, as they had offered me the selection of salads from the chiller and I had been concerned that it would be too much, so opted for a small green salad instead. I don't blame myself for the grit...

I am the only person in the world who doesn't seem to be turned on by bacon - even vegetarians seem to miss it. Not me. So I left it to my companion to test out what I had heard called 'the best bacon sandwich ever.'

He is a big fan of the bacon sandwiches you get from the van in Blackheath Farmers Market - and confesses he likes the immediacy and floppiness of the bacon - a dripping, juicy, wet experience. He had to admit that the Hand Made Food version was clearly extremely good quality, but it wasn't quite to his taste, its being very very crispy indeed.

I suspect this is a case of basic personal choice. If you're a fan of crispy bacon (and I know there are a lot of crispy fans out there) then you'll be in heaven here. The bacon looked good and crunchy even to me who doesn't like it. But if you like the floppy, juicy style, then go to the market, where the juices will dribble happily down your chin as you wander round, bun in one hand, napkin in the other. My companion said he would have liked a little butter on the Hand Made Foods bread, to balance-out the dryness.

I guess the best bit is that everyone gets to be happy - both styles are available.

The sweets are to die for - big plates of beautifully-iced cupcakes (I'm SO glad they're fashionable just now - I just love them) tarts, slices of interesting large cakes and big slabs of yummy biscuity-type things like millionaire's shortbread. I'll have to test them another day though. My slice of tart was far too big to allow a sweet.

As you sit around waiting for the food to arrive (and it is a short wait - they prepare everything on the spot) you can look at the lovely food they sell. Montezuma's chocolate (My favourite is the Geranium flavour, but I couldn't see it there) yummy honeys and spreads, Burts crisps, interesting pasta - the selection is small, but exquisite.

Their coffee comes from the Monmouth Coffee Company - which I like a lot. (My own personal favourite coffee company is Union Coffee Roasters, based in Docklands, where the owners personally hand-roast every batch, but Monmouth is also good.)

I can only assume that Hand Made Food's delightful shop in Tranquil Vale is the 'public front' of their catering business, since even at the healthy prices they charge, a couple of tables out and a few bar stools inside can't really pay for rents in Blackheath Village.

I can't speak for Hand Made Food as a traiteur - I have not knowingly eaten any of what I suspect is extremely splendid buffet food. But their menus look wonderful - everything from finger food for parties at £ 1.50 a mouthful - not actually bad for corporate prices - to cold buffet menus and what they call 'little dishes for receptions.' Has anyone used Hand Made Foods for their 'do? I'd like to hear about it.

They also do hampers - chilled delivery for London, ambient delivery for the rest of Britain.

www.handmadefood.com

Gambardella

Balckheath Royal Standard, SE3

An unreconstituted caff, Gambardella's has been here for what seems like ever. A family-run greasy spoon, what I like about it is that they realise that they have a 1950s classic here, but they don't milk it by overdoing the decor and adding extra things that would make it more 'themed.'

It's a caff of two halves - on the one side what is clearly the original shop, complete with its original sign outside, A. Gambardella, High Class Refreshments, chrome strips holding faux-marble wall panels and groovy 1960s swivel seats at the front, black & red shiny panels at the back. On the tables can be found the usual bottles of ketchup, mustard, vinegar etc - though you don't get tomato-shaped ketchup dispensers. That would be a kitsch too far.

The other side of the cafe is clearly a more modern (though we're still not talking last year) extension. This is much plainer, though there's a hole in the wall so that the business-bit where they do all the actual cookery faces both ways. In this room the only decor is a few framed 1950s adverts and covers of Picturegoer magazine - a nod to the past but not a slavish refit.

There always seem to be "characters" in Gambardella. Builders, families, harmless fruitcakes, slumming toffs, all human life is here. The staff are friendly and up for a joke - often at their own expense. After reeling off all the different varieties of coffee they do, they'll admit it was all so much easier when all they did was instant - so much for the fantasy of the ancient Gaggia in the corner...

The tea is pleasingly orange, the fried food pleasingly greasy and the atmosphere pleasingly unpretentious. It could so easily teeter - either with an ill-advised modern refit or taking an equally dodgy trip down Theme Lane. As it is, Gambardella works as a real caff, not a plastic imitation of what we might like to imagine 1950s cafes were.

There seem to be a lot of references on the internet to local council people called Gambardella. Presumably the same family?

BTW Glenn Tilbrook and Jools Holland met Chris Difford for the first time after his placing an ad in the window of Gambardella. They formed Squeeze and the rest is R&R history...

Hall Place

Bexleyheath, Kent

It's a traffic black spot. An unexciting post-war pub plonked gracelessly in the middle of a grisly intersection where the view consists of parked cars, pedestrian walkways and poplar trees. The pollution level hits "high" and the hard-shoulder is packed with overheated cars and their even hotter owners.

It’s a good bet that 99% of the stationary vehicles' occupants will not think beyond four-letter words when gazing across at the erstwhile Black Prince Public House (now a Holiday Inn,) much less that they will harbour romantic daydreams as to its name.

Which is a shame. For whilst they are staring gloomily across the road one way, they could take a break, turn off in the opposite direction, and two minutes from the hell that is the A2 find a heaven that is one of the great hidden treasures of London. A country estate that once entertained royalty - from the Prince of Wales to the medieval Black Prince himself...

Hall Place is all that remains of what was a flourishing enclave of wealthy Tudor social climbers, who saw the area around the River Cray as being the next up and coming area for literal gentrification. But whilst Woollett Hall and Mount Mascal, Foots Cray Place and Bourne Place have all gone the way of the world, Hall Place has survived, virtually untarnished, hidden from four lanes of traffic by nothing more than a few trees.

Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Champneis, saw his opportunity for redevelopment of an old 13th century house around 1537, and, reputedly appropriating some choice masonry from a local dissolved abbey, started a Great Hall. Following the classic style of the time it was exactly what it said - one giant hall that served all purposes.

His son, preferring a little (but frankly not much) more privacy, added wings to the Hall over the next few years and the family stayed there for over a century until it was sold to a wealthy London merchant, Robert Austen. By that time the black and white chequerboard effect of stone and flint that the house was built in was no longer fashionable, and it was extended using new-fangled bricks. To this day, the house has two distinct sides - the old black and white versus the new red brick, mellowed with age to an appealing patina.

Entering from the roundabout serving the A2, the first thing that strikes a visitor is the astonishing 18th Century wrought iron gates. Curling and scrolling, blacked and gilded, they provide a tantalising glimpse into the inner garden, and a first, exhilarating sight of the trademark chequerboard walls that make up the oldest parts of the house. The place looks as though it has been ripped up from the deepest rural countryside, and set down hap-hazardly into a random space between motorway and housing estate.

Within those gates, a timeless air of peace lures the visitor to seek some calm from his tarmac torpor. Turning into the grounds, however, the weary A2 escapee might be tempted to run for cover after all. A tiny car park, serving a restaurant, nursery and sports centre bustles with turnover - cars jostling for spaces that seem to have been reserved at birth.

A little perseverance pays off. The relief on wandering into the grounds of Hall Place is nigh-on palpable. The ancient stone seems to soak up, absorb, even, the modern stress and the pace drops to a saunter. Decisions are simple - and depend largely on nothing more sinister than the weather. To explore the award-winning formal gardens first - or to step through the stone entrance into the house itself before venturing further...

The sun is shining - for now - and the 63-hectare park beckons, the gentle murmur of the river Cray and the squabbling of Canada geese drowning out the now seemingly distant A2. With every turn something new beckons - a secret garden, a rose garden, a somewhat municipal-feeling but nevertheless delightful sunken garden. A turf maze - created for no particular reason other than it seemed a good idea at the time – appears beneath the feet and – for no particular reason other than it seems like a good idea at the time, the visitor feels compelled to follow it to its grassy centre without cheating or stepping on the cracks.

Of course, all this was just part of the estate before the 20th Century, and walking the land to the rear of the property, left more as it would have been, it is easy to imagine, lurking behind scrubs and shrubs, one of the estate’s less welcome visitors. For this area - a flood plain and hence undeveloped - was the gateway to Dover and then Europe. It was a favourite haunt of highwaymen, and the most notorious of all, Dick Turpin. It is unlikely, however, that his horse Black Bess managed to leap over the iron gates as local legend tells. They are 16 feet high.

Hall Place’s owner by that time was no stranger to notoriety himself. None other than the glorious 18th Century rake and scoundrel, Sir Francis Dashwood, had bought the house, though it is unclear as to whether he ever held any meetings of his saucy Hell Fire Club there. He spent most of his time raving it up at the family seat, West Wycombe Park and before long was just renting out Hall Place, as a school.

Keeping up the scandal-aspect, the last tenant of Hall Place was the colourful Lady Limerick. Living with her female "companion," she was a popular and gregarious local figure. She held lavish parties throughout the 1920s and 30s for the great and the good, including the Prince of Wales, the future George VI.

It was her idea to initiate the quite extraordinary topiary garden to the west of the house. She planted enormous "chess pieces," a concept that was taken to a quite bizarre degree during the 50s when a row of somewhat tubby heraldic "Royal Beasts" was planted to celebrate the coronation. What is remarkable is that whilst in virtually any other setting this could have been tacky in the extreme, somehow these chubby bits of hedgerow seem to fit and are delightful in their absurdity. Heaven only knows what the US servicemen who inhabited the place during the war on a secret code-breaking detail must have thought of giant chess pieces in their garden.

Immediately after the war, cheery locals happily wandered round Hall Place unchecked for some time. The reason for the property being left unlocked for so long only became clear relatively recently when a rather red-faced ex-GI came back on a visit, returning the giant iron key that he liberated along with the rest of Europe.

Inside, the house is still largely open-plan, as it was throughout the centuries. The great hall is surrounded by a balcony leading to the upper rooms and somehow it has escaped the fate of so many - being split into separate rooms for an easier domestic life. Lady Limerick removed many Victorian "additions" to the place, leaving it with an older feel than others of its age. There is a wonderful oak staircase and a minstrel's gallery.

In the older parts especially, it is easy to believe ghost stories of a wispy woman wringing her hands in grief for her husband’s demise by the White Tower (the top of which has been sealed off "to stop the ghosts," - not a method I've ever heard of working) spectral serving wenches searching for lost children in the corridors or even the Black Prince himself - whose sighting foretold dire news to the witness - but in reality no tales have ever been substantiated.

More tangible are the ghosts of the WWII airmen celebrated in a small exhibition upstairs; one that requests items from local people to create a permanent museum in the future. One local resident - an eleven year old fisherman - has already lent a sword that he found in the Cray dating back to Victorian times, but the appeal runs mainly to rather more mundane items - shrapnel, uniforms and other bits and pieces...

After a few more years languishing as a girls' school, Bexley Council took over and Hall Place is now run by a not-for-profit trust. Some concessions have had to be made - there is now an unexciting restaurant residing in the Jacobean barn - though at least it ensures that the stunning original rafters are being looked after and can be seen by the public.

The decor within the house itself is plain, and ever-so-slightly "civic;" possibly because it has found a new career as a venue for weddings, functions and conferences, though it retains its charm through simplicity.

There is an extensive nursery that feeds those enormous gardens, which is a revelation in itself to wander through. With a number of "model" gardens and display allotments, the nursery is inspirational without being evangelical.

Preparing to face reality once more, the visitor is again confronted with the prospect of the Black Prince. Could he really have wooed Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent within these grounds? Who cares? The A2 needs all the romance it can get...

Buenos Aires Cafe

Royal Parade, Blackheath, SE3

The Good News:

At last! Somewhere I can wholeheartedly recommend.

The Bad News:

It's not in Greenwich.

A couple of weeks ago, whilst out and about in Blackheath with some pals, we noticed a new restaurant being fitted out. It looked as though it had some time to go, it was still a bit of a building site, but the name intrigued us. Buenos Aires? Could it be a sister branch of the deli/cafe in Royal Hill?

Last night we thought we'd toddle across the heath and see how it was coming on. Little did we know that Buenos Aires had actually opened that night a couple of weeks before. The owner told us a very entertaining tale of his desperately trying to get it ready for the first punters. But that's skipping ahead.

It's got a great location - looking out across the heath (past a Lamborghini whose orange-skinned owners had parked up and gone elsewhere - more fool them) in a row of Latin-y themed restaurants - Mexican, Spanish and now Argentinian, but it also looks great, its black-painted window frames and simple mis-matched wooden furniture a particularly favourite look of mine. There are two chaps serving, one of whom is the owner himself. Both are friendly (the other guy is wonderfully sardonic without being at all cruel)

There are tables outside which I will take advantage of later in the year, but last night was a bit parky. We were greeted with a delicate, light, foody aroma - and the splendidly sardonic waiter, informally dressed and looking ever-so-slightly roguish. I liked him immediately.

He confirmed that this Buenos Aires is the sister of the Royal Hill cafe, though it is different in that there are only one or two items for retail sale and the food is much more substantially a sit-down menu than just a place to have coffee and cake.

On the tables were small jugs of good quality olive oil and proper pepper mills. I was liking this place more and more. The menu had the expected - much sausage, steak and other Argentinian meaty-type dishes, and the unexpected - am I the only person on earth who didn't know that 55% of the Argentinian population is Italian? Home-made pasta dishes and other Italian staples were a welcome addition to the classic Argentine fare.

While we were waiting for starters, the owner saw that we were discussing the photos on the wall and came over to chat - it's that sort of place. We ended up talking about one of the national heroes, Che Guevara. Apparently one of the waitresses in the other branch is a bit of a fan and he gets shirtless pics of him for her. Aaah...

The photos are actually pretty random - including Princess Diana in shorts and some youths shouting at each other - presumably the work of one particular photographer. I couldn't tell if it was a temporary exhibition or a permanent collection and by that point the owner was seating another family - with two small children who, by the way, seemed to have a whale of a time.

The food is simply served. The kitchen is clearly small (with a smile-ly chef who waves at you instead of scowling) but I don't think that's the reason. These guys actually know what they're serving. The chorizo was firm and hearty, and a good-sized portion. The simple baby mozzarela and tomato salad was tasty, and supplied without dressing - they brought some balsamic vinegar to the table and left it to us to drizzle either that or the olive oil ourselves.

We wanted Argentinian wine, so we got our waiter to recommend one for us. The Tapiz Riserva at £ 16.95 is not the most subtle red I've ever drunk but it went absolutely perfectly with what we were eating. Its blackberry tones and blueish-purple colour seemed to pervade right through, a good chewy mouthful.

The mains were just as good. A veritable housebrick of steak (the mid-price choice) was perfectly cooked, exactly as my companion had ordered, the chips melt-in-the mouth wonderful (I should know, I ate most of them.) My own butternut squash raviolo (slightly oddly described as Oscar Wilde's favourite) was clearly hand-rolled, the filling delicate and light.

I was gutted that I'd been so greedy with those chips, as I'd had my eye on at least two of the dessert dishes - the creme caramel with dulce de leche and the hand-made ice cream which is made daily on the premises. I guess I'll just have to go back to test them another time.

We decided to just have a coffee but were intrigued by the menu's invitation to sit downstairs in the lounge area. We went down the stairs, past the tiny inset white-wine fridge decorated with a picture of the Mona Lisa wearing a Che Guevara beret, to a little bar area. There's a good leather sofa, some other comfy chairs, four bar stools and what must be a somewhat lonely table and two chairs, presumably for overspill diners. The bar has quite a selection of liqueurs, but we stuck to coffee - the wine was beginning to take its toll.

This must all read like one of those local paper reviews which are not allowed not to enjoy a restaurant, but I have no axe to grind with anyone on this site. I genuinely loved this place. I need to go back a couple more times with more people (to be absolutely, sure, you understand) but if it continues the way it has started, I may well have found, at last, an eaterie I can genuinely call a Greenwich Phantom Favourite Haunt...

PS

Having visited the other day and been turned away (in the most polite, friendly and apologetic manner possible) I heartily recommend booking:

020 8318 5333

Crossness

Abbey Wood, SE2

The Crossness Enginehouse is quite simply one of the most wonderful "secret" sights of London. Its origins may be in the gutter, but it is most definitely looking at the stars.

What is it? A sewage pumping station. But oh, WHAT a sewage pumping station. Looking more like a Gothic cathedral than a piece of industrial history, this wonderful building is a supreme example of Victorian engineering at its most flamboyant.

It was built in 1865 as part of the great sewage network designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette as a response to the serious health problems caused by the influx of people migrating to The Big Smoke during the Industrial Revolution. Things had got pretty bad - if massive cholera outbreaks and dysentery weren't enough, The Great Stink of 1858 which literally stunk MPs out of Parliament was. Something Had To Be Done.

Bazalgette designed a clever system that took all the capital's effluent out through massive drains to the Thames Estuary by gravity, but by the time it reached the places where it was to come out - Abbey Mills in the North, Abbey Wood in the South, it was forty feet underground.

With typical Victorian chutzpah, engineers thumbed their noses at complexity and designed enormous steam pumping houses which brought the effluent up to the right level to catch the out-going tide and be carried away to sea. The house at Crossness had four gigantic pumps, each one named after members of the Royal Family, which were miracles of their time - and are still pretty marvellous today. They were designed to be viewed and the building itself is entirely decorated in gaudily-painted cast iron flamboyance. Corinthian columns topped with acanthus leaves and pear drops, floral motifs, sweeping arches and encaustic tiles offset the marvels that are the pumps themselves, and the great Norman-style arches carved in stone on each of the entrances ensure the visitor knows that they are in the presence of greatness.

Over the years it was adapted and improved until it stopped being used in the 1950s. Then began a period of shame. Neglected and abandoned, the engines fell first into disrepair, then into ruins. The great iron engines first seized then rusted, and it became a haunt for vandals and thieves. Much was lost.

Then in 1972, the story took a more hopeful turn, when what would become The Crossness Engines Trust was founded. A dedicated team of volunteers started to clean, rebuild and replace the crippled carcasses of the engines, to scrape away the years of rust and literally chip-out the deep underground pipes which had been filled with sand (a deeply unpleasant job.)

They de-rusted and repainted the frilly ironwork and started the mammoth task of saving the building itself. A few years ago, they re-fired the first of the great steam pumps, The Prince Consort, and now they open the building on high days and holidays for the public to enjoy the gigantic flywheel churning round, the whopping great engine arm pumping up and down and the steam released in a little "toot toot" every so often. Young visitors are sometimes allowed to start the engines, though Health & Safety is quite an issue and most have to watch from a safe distance.

They still have far more to do at Crossness than they've finished. Everywhere you look, decay is still in action. They're not hiding that - and it is part of the whole experience to see the almost romantic ruin of the massive pumphouse, and to marvel at the dedication of the volunteers.

There is a small exhibition of photos and documents, plus an entertaining display of all antiques lavatorial - including some wonderfully-named early loos - fancy reading the paper sitting on The Shark, Le Symphonie or The Closet of the Century? How about flushing with the patent Deluge?

I was expecting to enjoy Crossness, but I was in no way prepared for the sheer grandeur of the place. Go. Do go. Really - you won't be disappointed. It is secret, rare and One of Our Own.

Next "Public Steaming Day" is June 2nd.

http://www.crossness.org.uk/

Danson House

Danson Rd - between Bexleyheath and Welling.


Whilst driving along the A2 yesterday, I caught a glimpse of a splendid-looking Georgian Mansion, and realised that it must be Danson House which I'd read had reopened last year after a total restoration.

Danson House is in the unlikely geographical position between Bexleyheath and Welling - not very encouraging if you don't look at the historic context. But when it was begun in 1762, it was deep in the countryside, a cough and a spit from The Old Dover Road and yet very convenient for its owner, John Boyd, to get to the office - one of London's first commuters, it would seem...

Boyd had cash - but it was 'new money,' inherited only from his father Augustus, which automatically made him nouveau riche. Augustus made his pile through sugar plantations in the Caribbean - hardly something to shout about this year, the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade (more about that on another day) but enough in those days to allow his son to lead the life of a gentleman.

John Boyd had studied theology and loved the arts, but ended up working for his father, living in Lewisham - again a tad nicer then than it is now. He had had his eye on the park at Danson, but though he'd snapped up the lease it took an act of parliament for him to be able to rather sneakily buy-out the Almshouse trust that its previous owner had left in his will. He purchased it for £ 100 and kept acquiring land piecemeal up to 600 acres.

Danson House was completed in 1766. It's a charming palladian-style villa, and not gigantic like so many of the country piles of the day. Neat, economical and with a clear box-like design, it feels like a home you could actually imagine people living in, though it has the sanitised, risk-free feel of a 'house open to the public' these days (if you're not into that kind of thing, the only place I know of to really get down and dirty with history is the incredible Dennis Severs House in Spitalfields.)

Danson's had its ups and downs over the years, and in 1923 Bexley Council bought it - then did bugger-all to it save selling-off the surrounding land for housing and implementing some atrocious 'repairs' in the 1950s. Eventually it became derelict, and, arguing that it was beyond repair, the council decided to pull it down. Central Government, however, had other ideas and the resulting stalemate meant that it just got worse and worse.

Things came to a head at Christmas 1995 when burglars stole all the fixtures and fittings over the holiday period, and bundled them into containers to be shipped abroad. They were actually recovered but not until English Heritage declared Danson Park to be London's "most significant building at risk." EH, somewhat belatedly, took over the remaining dogs dinner of a building and started an extraordinary programme of repairs which finished a couple of years ago.

And it's an amazing piece of work. Looking at it now, it's nigh-on impossible to imagine what it must have looked like beforehand. God-only knows how much it all must have cost.

The fabulous dining room has had all its paintings restored and carpets have been rewoven to fit the octagonal salon, which overlooks the remaining parkland and the lake. The library has a totally-restored organ - though the books are fake. Downstairs the kitchens are bright and airy and filled with items from Bexley Heritage Trust's collection.

The house was in such a state that virtually nothing was left in some rooms - and literally just the studs from the walls at the very top, though one or two of the charming ceilings and fireplaces remained. A major help was a series of eight extremely detailed watercolours of the interiors painted by a young girl in the 1860s which appear to be remarkably accurate.

Up the delicate oval staircase which snakes its way up the centre of the house like some kind of exotic snail, lit by an oval lantern at the top, there are rooms which though once bedrooms are clearly meant to help supplement modern Danson's financial future - set out as meeting rooms for corporate events and weddings. On the very ground floor the tea-rooms look out across the lake, though sadly the little doric temple was removed to St Paul Waldenbury in Hertfordshire in 1963, which I can't find much out about, save that it seems to specialise in removing garden features from endangered properties. Whether it specialises in returning them is less certain.

The only bit of the restoration I'm not really convinced by are the ultra-modern inset lights in the bedroom, but I'll give EH the benefit of the doubt and assume "they had their reasons" for this extraordinary anachronism.

It sort of feels wrong that a country estate like this isn't miles away - it's a fifteen minute drive from Greenwich at most. But it really is a lovely little place and I'd say well worth a trip on a sunny day. The old stables are now a pub that does food - we didn't eat there but it looked fine.The park looks like a pleasant walk, but the wind was blowing us about so badly our ears hurt and we gave up.

They have some interesting events though you'll have to call or drop in to find out about them - the website is "under construction."

http://www.historicdanson.com/

Woolwich - Bargain City

Yesterday, in a 'proper work' avoidance move, I trotted over to Peggy Middleton House to check out the Olympic Proposals, which were only there until today.

They're very much Info-lite - lots of pictures of random smiling people and artists' impressions of joggers running through non-specific parkland and a few indecipherable maps. They included nothing at all about anything this side of the river, which was most disappointing. I was told that since they haven't had any plans submitted they don't officially know about any Olympic plans for Greenwich - despite another artist's impression of the equestrian events in Greenwich Park in the council's own newsletter.

I had particularly wanted to see the plans because I am mildly worried about any long-term damage the events in the park will cause - such as the loss of any ancient trees, planting patterns or that superb, mature herbacious border by the Queens House wall. No such luck.

But I digress.

On being thwarted in my efforts to save Greenwich's flowerbeds (ahem,) I decided that a spot of retail therapy was needed, and went for a wander down Woolwich's pedestrianised high street.

I'd forgotten what a fab place Woolwich is for genuine bargains. Forget poncy out-of-town outlet parks, if you can get past the fact that it's a bit on the scruffy side, Woolwich is the home of REAL factory outlet shops.

Marks & Spencer, for a start. They do proper reductions on real last-season stuff - and since most M&S stuff is hardly cutting-edge anyway, going for the 'classic' market instead, it's frankly just as good this year as last. Men's, women's and children's - as well as the odd homeware, smelly or novelty good. At the back there's a food store (not sale stuff, natch.)

If you carry on down towards the river, you'll pass various cheapo outlets - from brand-name makeup and tolietries at rock-bottom prices to bedlinen and housewares, games and stationery.

Another real find is the Clarks Factory Shop - right down the end. This is a real free-for-all - with Clarks usual quality-footwear at ridiculously low prices - again, men's, women's and children's - a real plus if you've got kiddies with growing feet and not an awful lot of cash - you get good quality at low prices. Take a pal with you as they often do offers where you get one pair for a low price, two pairs for even less, and they practically pay you to take away three pairs. At the moment they have boxes and boxes of party shoes - but they always carry other stuff too.

I guess it's down to individual conscience whether the basement-bargain stores such as Primark, Peacock and Poundland (all the 'p's) are a great way of keeping low-income British families within a reasonable standard of living or a middle-class guilt-trip as stories about third-world sweatshops fill the papers, but if you're with the former camp, they're all here too.

Also to be found - Boots, WH Smith, New Look...you've got the picture.

Whatever you think of Woolwich - it's certainly worth a trip - if only to enjoy the buzz of activity that a sunny day and a few special offers produces.

Sayes Court

Deptford

Poor old John Evelyn.

He was arguably the most refined character of his day - a man of taste, education and compassion who campaigned for the welfare of elderly seamen, liked to plant sweet chestnut trees in people's gardens and kept a diary which though perhaps not quite as 'entertaining' as that of his friend Samuel Pepys, is ever bit as illuminating to us today. Pepys mentions him several times in his journal, though reading between the lines, although the diarist admired Evelyn he sometimes found him a bit dull.

Evelyn lived in times that just weren't as sophisticated as himself. Although he kept a fine house in Deptford which attracted all the learned men of his day and held soirees which discussed the important issues of the times, his hospitality wasn't always treated with the same respect.

Evelyn's most passionate love was his Deptford garden at Sayes Court, upon which he lavished attention, planting it carefully in the formal European style with walks, vistas and intimate groves. He collected rare plants which he cared for like children - even visiting them in the middle of the great Frost Fair to check they were alright.

Trouble is, that when, in 1698, the young oaf who would later become known to the world as Czar Peter the Great came to visit Britain, ostensibly on the 17th Century equivalent of a student exchange trip to see the sights of London and learn about shipbuilding, he ended up staying at Evelyn's house. Evelyn had let it to Admiral Benbow, but Benbow got elbowed out of the way. Evelyn didn't get a look in.