Blood on the tracks

You think getting to work on National Express's joke of a railway is murder? Hackney was - somewhat inevitably - the location for Britain's first train killing, in 1864, the gory details of which are detailed in a fascinating new book.

Historian Kate Colquhoun has picked through archives recently released after 100 years spent gathering dust in the Kew archives to write 'Mr Briggs' Hat'. It unpicks how the murder of Thomas Briggs, late of 5 Clapton Square, came to scandalise the whole of Victorian society.

It's a rollicking story, involving his body being thrown from a first-class compartment of a North London Railway train onto the tracks somewhere between Bow and Hackney Wick; a societal fear of foreigners (the suspect, later convicted and sentenced to death, was German); and class war. In those days, carriages were not adjoining, so the first class compartment was a sanctuary inaccessible to the hoi polloi.


So affronted by the murder and its implications, the Daily Telegraph asked: "If we can be murdered thus, we may be slain in our pew at church or assassinated at our dinner table." Or, today's equivalent, shot randomly outside a Turkish social and sports club.

A coda. If you're wondering about where the railway in question ran before it was decommissioned in 1922, click here for more - much, much more.

Hackney coolsters

If there's a funnier YouTube clip about East London "types", I haven't seen it.



(Fedora-tip to the fabulous Urban Woo for spotting it).

North east Hackney - what ELSE do we want?

An independent cinema
Come on, dilapidated Legends niteclub near the Lea Bridge roundabout. It’s high time you reopened as a cinema – the purpose for which you were originally built - showing independent and foreign films, selling imported bottled beer and black pepper popcorn and attracting classier element to the hood. Where else can all the BBC producer types who live around here frequent? Sign up for the petition here.

A sculpture garden
Springfield Park has some marvellous grassy slopes used mostly by dogs needing a poop. Could they not also become a temporary sculpture garden in the summer months – just like at Chatsworth House? It’d be an eye-catching way to harness the talent beavering away in the local art workshops even the Clapton Tram Shed lot - as well as a way to showcase big pieces by world-class names: Antony Gormley, Marc Quinn, etc.

A food festival
Had enough of the glut of summer festivals with booming sound stages filled with overtly preachy performers (yes, I mean the One Festival on Hackney Downs). Instead, let’s showcase the cornucopia of world food found in the borough with an open-air Taste of Hackney event. Admittedly, it won’t be all to my taste (see previous post about the borough’s lack of a decent Turkish take-away that delivers), but I’m happy on this occasion to bite my tongue.

More allotments
Who do I have to fork around here to get an allotment? Such is the demand for a plot that Hackney’s waiting list was closed several years ago and never reopened. Rosie Boycott - she who advises Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, on food issue, notably sustainability – can you help? There’s plenty of brownfield sites around the borough and along the River Lea, and I’ve got a couple of shovels.

All suggestions that will prettify north east Hackney are welcome. Any more for any more?

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?

Another rider down

Another London cyclist was knocked off her bike today.

According to reports, a thirtysomething woman was hit by a black cab at the corner of Graham Road and Navarino Road shortly after midday. It's a relatively fast stretch of road, one that takes you from the snarl-ups in Hackney Central, a place you might reasonably want to get away from as fast as possible. Trouble is, the road is criss-crossed by bike lanes.

Cycling in London – and its safety or otherwise – has been playing on my mind lately, not least because of the launch last month of the new bike hire scheme, which is bringing thousands of under-experienced riders onto the roads. How long before the first 'Boris Bike' goes under a bus?

Soon, if the statistics are anything to go by. On average about eight cyclists per year are killed by lorries in London, accounting for about half the cyclist deaths in the capital.

But lately - in the couple of weeks since the bike-hire scheme was unwrapped, and London's ludicrous cycle superhighways were declaed open – I've noticed the roads have become ever-so slightly angrier.

Are drivers frustrated by all the attention that's been given to the cycling cause of late? Does the sight of people on two wheels merrily weaving through traffic (and, in certain cases, jumping through red lights) get their blood up? Do they, perhaps, just feel that they're missing out?

It could be the unexpected/unusually/unseasonally (delete as appropriate) warm summer that we've been having causing road users to be that little bit tetchier with each other. But on my daily ride to work, I feel more, shall we say, targetted than usual.

Now, I am one of those pious cyclists who uses lights after dark, wears a helmet and flourescent gubbins, indicates when turning, stops at lights... you know, good-practice Highway Code stuff. But in recent weeks I've had a saloon sat in traffic in a turn-left lane pull out on me as I passed along The Mall. I've had an arctic accelerate behind me on Upper Street and bib me out of the way. It's now a daily occurence for oncoming cars to swerve dangerously into my path as they go between the bumps of sleeping policemen,.

Speaking of which, today I was so incensed by a police car stopping at the lights full-square in a bikes-only Advanced Stop box in Trafalgar Square that I rode to the front, positioned myself ahead of it, and in full view of the driver, took down the registration. (I've no idea what to do with it, but I think he got the message.)

All of which is why I've bought myself a new piece of kit - a mini cycling camera. It's call the Veho Cam Muvi, costs about £75 from Cycle Surgery, and when worn on a shoulder strap of your rucksack, records your journey. Just like this guy. Might be handy in case I *do* have an accident.

Smile, idiot drivers.

Keep Hackney Tidy

I was cheered to read in the Hackney Gazette of a near-neighbour of mine (hi, Peter Dixon of Woodmill Road, E5!) who confronted a worker at the Olympic Park throwing a plastic bottle into the River Lea. He’s a man after my own heart – and a Hackney cyclist too - but in fronting up to a litter-bug, a braver man than I.

Mr Dixon was recently cycling along the towpath when he saw a female worker, in her hi-viz jacket (!), toss her empty into the river. When he stopped his bike and asked her what she was doing, she said: “I’m throwing it away. It’s rubbish.” She was 100m away from a litter bin.

It’s the kind of thing that makes my blood boil – but which also reminds me of how impotent I feel as an admittedly scaredy-cat individual to do anything about it.

I can count on one hand the times I’ve shouted “Oi! Pick that up” - often from a safe distance. Each time, I’ve been greeted with an earful or ignored.

Is this where the Big Society comes in? Mr Dixon reported the Olympic employee to the contractors’ depot – but I very much doubt anything will happen. And ticking off a lazy, anti-social civil servant is not the same as confronting a group of kids who drop crisp packets in a park, or the driver who pulls up behind you at the lights and tosses an empty plastic bottle into your cycle path. A filthy look gathers no litter.

So what am I doing wrong? I wonder if hamming it up and over-doing the politeness – picking up the litter and handing it back with an “Oh, I’m *so* sorry, but you just dropped this…” – would have a different effect. But, I suspect, rather than being given the usual teeth-kiss, I’d have them smacked in instead.

Given that Boris Johnson wants us to put an end to the walk-on-by society by encouraging us to become more active citizens - or "vigilantes", as they used to be called - how do you successfully shame a litterbug without it requiring a trip to casualty?

Of course, there's always this approach. But any more ideas?