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