Oil Drum Lane

  This weblog  isn't a diary or a diatribe. Rather, it is  a scrolling collection of notes, in no particular order, from the  periphery of relevance,  on offbeat places, real and imagined, and the events and people that shaped them. The content wanders but has a London bias. My gaff, my rules.  To see if there is anything that interests you, check the 'Contents' index above; all the posts are linked from there.    Now with  FEWER TYPOS AND MORE COMMAS.   Why Oil Drum Lane?  The boomers among you might recall the TV comedy 'Steptoe & Son'.  They were Rag & Bone men, living and working in an imagined scrapyard in West London. Just the place to go looking for gems in the dust!  If you are looking for my bike routes with their detailed notes on places to go & see, go to    Pootler If you are looking for the  reliquary of my former professional involvement in planning and development, focusing on...

  Brass Point nr. Beachy Head More on the chalk country I introduced in the previous post. This is a continuation of the story of why the landscape came to look like it does, but also some more impressionistic notes.  Geologically, England has a long strip of chalk  running from Dorset to the Yorkshire Wolds. The purest, white stone underlies the  rolling green 'Downs' surrounding London, the Thames Valley, and alongside the Channel coast.  These are  the primordial 'bleached clean bones of old England', and the name comes from  the Old English 'dūn', which simply means hill .   Chalk Hills & Streams Nowhere else on Earth has as much chalk countryside, and it is wo nderful stuff. I f you are walking, it is usually dry and springy underfoot. On foot or on a bike, the slopes are merciful. Moulded through time, the chalk shapes our landscape.  William Blake was living in Sussex when he asked, "And d id those feet in ancient time....Walk upon...

Thursday, September 6th 1666. The King was Charles II, and much of the City of London was a smouldering heap. To the West, saved by the open fields in between, were the palaces, gardens and grander houses of Westminster. Events are events; in this case, you know the story about the fire, so my interest is in the seldom-told story of the rapid redevelopment that followed it, and in particular, what happened in the ‘in-between’.  The organisation of the feeding and rehousing of the population after the fire was commendable. Meanwhile, souls could not be neglected! Sir Christopher Wren got to work on rebuilding St Paul’s Cathedral while also devising one of several plans to use the opportunity to straighten out the winding streets and let a bit of air in. You can see some of them here:  Rationalising London in the 1660s Unfortunately, Charlie wasn't a French-style almighty monarch and had neither the will nor the unchallengeable authority to dictate the necessary reallocation of...