Industrial chic comes to Clapton

The new pedestrian footbridge by the river Lea is officially... open! And a thing of beauty it is, too - and wider, more accommodating than the last one. No more forcing pedestrians to the wall as you cycle past. No more dicing with lorries as you dash across the Lea Bridge Road. Smart.

Clapton to Dalston is go!

This, two days after my recent post, from the Transport for London website:

"From Saturday 4 June bus route 488 will be extended from Clapton to Dalston." Read more here.

For a map of the new route, click here.

Now arriving in Clapton: the 488 bus to Dalston

It's been on the cards for years - Transport for London held a consultation back in 2009 - but all the signs suggest that the 488 bus will finally be arriving soon in Clapton, destination Dalston.

Look, the bus stops have finally been installed. I took this picture of a new bus stop on Rendelsham Road this morning. Yes, I felt a twit doing it.




Of course, the 488 bus has been a Hackney fixture for years, starting and terminating around Clapton Pond. But from there it only used to head in one direction, through the badlands and backstreets of Homerton and Hackney Wick on its inexorarable (read: 29-minute) journey to Bromley-by-Bow.

But from next Saturday, June 4 - if the whispers are to be believed - the route will be extended the other way, all the way to Dalston Junction station. I'm giddy at the prospect. You can't beat a new bus route.

Or can you? I'm not interested in the rights or wrongs of the new multi-million-pound bus terminus at Dalston Junction that, according to reports at the time, will only cater for passengers on the 488. (It's done, it's built - time to use it or lose it).

I'm more interested in whether the new bus will be more frequent and quicker in getting to Dalston Junction station than the 56, which goes via the Pond, down Cricketfield/Pembury Roads and past Hackney Downs station. Along busy, fast-moving main roads.

My big bugbear is that 488 is a good idea in principle, but the chosen route - along Kenninghall Road, Rendlesham Road, Downs Road and Shacklewell Lane to Dalston Junction - will mean it meanders through backstreets, and create problems.

As someone who cycles along the Rendlesham Road rat-run every day - around the time that school-run mums drop off their kids at the various schools along it - I know how tight it can get, with room for little more than traffic in one direction.

Getting past the parked cars at the best of times is a challenge when there's oncoming vehicles. The variegated speed bumps lining the road only seem to encourage white van drivers to hit their accelerators, in an attempt to beat you to the humps and make you swerve out of their way.

Traffic also gets stuck behind the lorries and diggers building the new flats in the area. Stick a few buses-an-hour onto the route, and I wonder how far the tailbacks will be - and how long before a child goes over the bonnet of an angrily-driven van.

I wonder if the lollipop guy by Hackney Downs minds the sound of beeping car horns, and is any good at mouth-to-mouth?

Putting north east Hackney on the map

A few things that would make Hackney (but my part of Clapton, mainly) a bit nicer

More pubs and cafes
Venetia's is nice, Biddle Bros has its charms, and I'm fond of the Princess of Wales. In fact, what I really, really want* is a music pub quiz on a Monday night somewhere cosy. (*Bzzz: "Wannabe by the Spice Girls")

A landmark restaurant
Yes, there are dozens of wonderful ethnic eateries (hate that word) around the borough – just none that I really look forward to eating in, if I’m honest. I’ve been known to hit Shanghai on Kingsland Road when I fancy overly salty dim sum (love the butchers-slab décor), and Yum Yum in Stokey is occasionally wonderful in a weird, overblown, carved-wooden-fittings-galore kind of way. But a proper, sit-down, wallet-busting place that non-local people will cross town for – where are you?
Chatsworth Kitchen is nice, in a neighbourly, home cooking kind of way. We’re not there yet. And as I think of it…

…a decent Turkish take away that delivers
I often fancy tucking into some squeaky halloumi and falafel, instead of dial-a-pizza, an Indian or Chinese. But can I find one in my manor?

A few new bus routes that go somewhere useful
I do not need to go to Walthamstow on the bus (for one, it takes for ever). Nor Whipps Cross (unless I’m in an ambulance). A bus that runs from Clapton Pond to the Tottenham Hale shopping park, or even the Ikea Edmonton would be nice.
The new 488 route, which will soon be running from Clapton to the new Dalston overground station, is a good start. But I bet it won’t be long before a driver comes to grief on Rendelsham Road – it’s packed tight with cars on both sides, and during term time school-run mums double park, van couriers use it as a rat run… Disaster, honking horns and tailbacks to Upper Clapton Road await.



Another new train line
Forget about ever getting a new Tube station. It’s ain’t ever going to come to Hackney. (Pedants note: I realise that Manor House on the Piccadilly Line is just about inside Hackney’s borders, but its postal address is in Haringey, ackcherloi).
So London Overland is the way forward. For purely selfish reasons, I would like “them”, whoever they are, to make better use of the train line that used to stop at a now disused station on the Lea Bridge Road, running south to Stratford and North Woolwich, and north to Tottenham Hale and “Palace Gates”, another long-forgotten station.
How about an extension of the East London Line from Stratford that serves those of us in Hackney’s north east? The railway from Stratford to Tottenham Hale still exists, and trains regularly run across Walthamstow Marshes – it just doesn’t have anywhere to stop in between. Rebuilding the station on the Lea Bridge Road would suit me just fine.
If that’s unlikely – and it is - a Liverpool Street train that stops at Clapton AND Tottenham Hale wouldn’t go amiss.
Read much, much more here, trainspotters.

What else could Clapton do with?