Last Chance Behind the Hoardings

Crossrail will be opening its doors for a final time in 2018. The events will be your last chance to get behind the hoardings…

Crossrail will be opening its doors for a final time in 2018. The events will be your last chance to get behind the hoardings, see the new landmark stations under construction and experience this major infrastructure project at work.

The events will be self-guided open days at the future Elizabeth line stations in central London, held between February and June 2018.

Tickets will be limited to two per person and will offer you free, dated and timed entry to one of Crossrail’s station sites.

Crossrail’s Events Subscribers will get an early booking opportunity in advance of the public release of tickets. Terms and conditions will apply.

Join us for a final time in advance of the launch of the Elizabeth line in December 2018. These events are part of the Year of Engineering, a year long campaign which celebrates the world of engineering and looks to inspire the next generation.

Sign up for advanced ticket information

W9W2 Book Club/ Little Venice Literary Society

W9W2 Book Club/ Little Venice Literary Society – new members welcome…

W9W2 Book Club/ Little Venice Literary Society – new members welcome

Established since 2006; meets on the first Tuesday in the month from10:30 or 11:00 am at the home of one of our members. Meetings normally last about two to two and a half hours, depending on the liveliness of our discussion

We take it in turns to bring a selection of books from which by a show of hands we decide which book we will read that month. The person who brought the books then introduces the discussion. We are a friendly, informal Group.

Interested? Please contact Maureen at: [email protected]

Postal Services in W9

From Royal Mail: Customers are no longer be able to access Royal Mail services at the Dhigs convenience store in Formosa Street, W9, London for operational reasons…

W9W2/ PWMVS received the following information today from Royal Mail.  We have encouraged them to work swiftly with the Post Office to find a solution that allows residents to continue to be able to post parcels and other items that can’t simply go in a post box at a location within the heart of the W9 residential area.  However, this will not be resolved before Christmas.

“From Royal Mail: Customers are no longer be able to access Royal Mail services at the Dhigs convenience store in Formosa Street, W9, London for operational reasons. We are very sorry for any inconvenience caused.

As a matter of urgency, we are working with our colleagues at Post Office Limited  to identify suitable, alternative locations to ensure customers continue to have convenient access to Royal Mail services.

In the meantime, the nearest Post Office branches are located:

 
Other nearby Post Office branches are situated at:

Maida Hill – Harrow Road

St Johns Wood

Paddington Quay/ Merchant Square

2017 Carol Concert

Save the date: PWMVS/ W9W2 2017 Carol Concert at St Mary’s Paddington Green

December 12th 2017

6:30pm – doors open @ 6:00

St Mary’s Paddington Green

In the presence of the Lord Mayor of Westminster, Councillor Ian Adams

All welcome for a seasonal occasion reflecting the diversity of the area and supported by the Choir and Musicians of St Saviour’s School

Refreshments will be available afterwards

The Cultural Legacy and Popular Appeal of James Bond

The Popular Literature and Culture Research Centre and the University of Roehampton present “The Cultural Legacy and Popular Appeal of James Bond”

The Popular Literature and Culture Research Centre and the University of Roehampton present:

“The Cultural Legacy and Popular Appeal of James Bond”

– Public Forum and Discussion

Thursday 12th October 2017, 6-7:30pm

City of Westminster Archives Centre

10 St. Ann’s Street London SW1P 2DE

Booking Essential.

Telephone 020 7641 5180 or email [email protected]

Development of Highways, Drainage and Public Lighting Schemes – 2018-19

The Council is developing its proposed maintenance works for highways, drainage and public lighting for delivery during the 2018-19 financial year, using a prioritisation process to identify those streets most in need of repair….

The Council is developing its proposed maintenance works for highways, drainage and public lighting for delivery during the 2018-19 financial year, using a prioritisation process to identify those streets most in need of repair.

We would welcome your input into the process, by sharing any knowledge of defective areas of the network and submitting details including the following:

  •   The name of the street, location and the extents
  •   The problem/defect, for example, poor condition of the carriageway/footway, drainage issue or lighting problem. Please provide photographs where possible
  •   Any suggestions you may have for improving or fixing the problem/issue

A Highways Review Panel has been created to scrutinise the selection of proposed works with panel members representing a cross section of amenity societies and residents associations. The panel will ensure that the prioritisation process is robust and transparent. For ease of reference, please find attached the proposed works list for the current 2017-18 financial year.

To view our agreed list of works for the 2017-18 financial year, please access our website:

https://www.westminster.gov.uk/carriageway-and-footway-planned-preventative-maintenance-programme

To maximise the likely receptiveness to the suggestions for our area, please send your suggestions to Paul Newman, our society’s Highways representative who will consolidate them as well as ensure individual responses are visible. Paul’s email is: [email protected]

Portobello Disjunction

When Crossrail finally emerges from its tunnelling we will have a revolutionary new transport system…

When Crossrail finally emerges from its tunnelling we will have a revolutionary new transport system. But at the moment, as Roger Thompson discovered on a visit a while ago, there are unexpected bonuses to learn about.

It was a glorious Sunday afternoon in late summer when we emerged from Westbourne Park tube station looking around for this mysterious site. We were early and we knew we were in for something special when a high-visibility clad young Ethiopian greeted us just beside the bus garage.  Today he was guiding visitors down the ramp to the site itself.  But only a few years previously he had made a perilous journey ‘without a plane’ by land and sea to become an asylum seeker in Britain.  He was proud of his work for Costain, helping to build the new elevated bus deck which will eventually straddle the Crossrail tracks.

Our site turned out to have only a few trophies from the dig: one or two battered tools used to rake out the embers from the engines and a GWR embossed oil and gas cover.   There had been earlier versions of Paddington Station of which there is very little trace beyond names like The Lawn. When the existing station and Brunel’s GWR proved such a success, there was need for expansion.  In 1853 the Locomotive Department opened.  The archaeology team had been digging since April and had exposed the footprints of some fascinating structures: a huge locomotive shed for Brunel’s 7 foot broad gauge locomotives.  This had a200 metres long inspection pit all lined with beautiful hard engineering bricks. Oxford Archeology was working with 3D laser scanning to create complete computer simulations of the structures because within a week of our visit a massive ’35 tonner’ would rip out everything that they had found.  This seemed draconian until it was explained that leaving fragments of built structures underground could lead to disastrous settling of the surfaces that would become the foundations for the new tracks and the associated buildings.  Standing so close to the mainline tracks hearing the train hooters blare it was impossible not to hear also the steam, the shouts and commotion and the mechanical clankings of Brunel’s day when hundreds worked on this site.

One of the most romantic structures was the turntable.   There had been three at Westbourne Park and unlike the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm these were all outdoors.  The dug out structure had only a day or two previously been jet-hosed down to reveal the intricate brick foundations.  This is not the archaeology of toothbrushes and light touches, but of gigantic mechanical diggers and vast water hoses.  The levels of the walls and the circular floors indicated that there had been two different turntables on the same site one inside the other.  None of the mechanical equipment had survived when the site was demolished in 1906.   But so complex had been the gearing that large standard gauge locomotives could be turned around by hand and taken into the nearby standard locomotive workshops that accommodated six tracks.   Again the inspection pits with drains were clearly visible along with some small brick structures whose function was unclear.  If there were time more digging there might give an answer.

But the archaeologists were working against the clock.  They still had a sand house and a lifting shop to explore.  They think that instead of inspection pits this building had means of lifting locomotives above the heads of workmen for investigation and repair.  The deal is that only in exceptional circumstances can the archaeology team hold up the Crossrail project, which is on schedule.   Thus once the 3D lasering has been completed everything will be destroyed. Just as it had been, though fortunately not completely, when in 1906 the Chief Mechanical Engineer moved the whole operation to Old Oak Common which still houses many workshops and sheds for Eurostar and other locomotives.  The Portobello Junction site then became part of the extensive goods yards which continued to work until they in turn became buried under Paddington Central’s office blocks and hotels.

By the time you are reading this, no single physical trace of the former traces will exist.  But there will be a virtual record thanks to all the lasering and a comprehensive book of photographs and plans which will eventually document all the findings of one of the most comprehensive archaeological investigations ever undertaken in the UK. None of that will perhaps have quite the thrill and the romance that 400 visitors shared on that Sunday, seeing actual fragments of the past with their own eyes and conjuring up the ghosts of the hundreds who had originally worked in that heyday of the railways.

These are a few of my favourite things

The talk by Alison Kenney, Archivist, will showcase the weird and wonderful items noticed over 35 years of working for the Westminster Archives Centre…

City of Westminster Archives Centre
6-7pm
Tuesday May 2017

The talk by Alison Kenney, Archivist, will showcase the weird and wonderful items noticed over 35 years of working for the Westminster Archives Centre.

It promises to be a very interesting and entertaining talk, taking in the earliest document of 1256, William Blake’s Book of Job, the Java Sparrows performing in 1820 and the beautiful catalogues from Liberty’s and Jaeger shops.

Call or email Westminster Archives Centre to book your free place.

Westminster City Archives
10 St. Ann’s Street
London SW1P 2DE
020 7641 5180
[email protected]

The Days When Music Played at the Metropolitan

The reasons why the word Metropole or Metropolitan appears in the names of buildings by the Edgware Road flyover go back across the last two centuries…

The reasons why the word Metropole or Metropolitan appears in the names of buildings by the Edgware Road flyover go back across the last two centuries. It harks back to fun, boozy camaraderie, and the days when music halls, and the Metropolitan in particular, were the fun palaces of their time. Christopher Cook here provides the history and some memories of his visits from the days when just a lad.

If there’s one thing that is sadder than a lost theatre, it’s a theatre that’s being pulled down. With the roof off, the seats torn out and the balconies half gone who would believe that this was once a place of escape, of make believe and theatre magic? There’s a photograph taken on September 20th 1963 and published in the old London Illustrated News of the Metropolitan Music Hall on its last legs. In the foreground a pair of the handsome cast iron pillars that supported the interior are heaped up like broken limbs while at the back of the photo the balcony and the gallery are on their last legs. The theatre architect Frank Matcham’s grand old lady of Edgware Road is about to take her last curtain call.

I remember looking at the theatre with its faintly Indian twin domed towers on either side of an imposing pediment from the top of the 16 bus as my grandmother, who lived off George Street, took me up to Maida Vale for tea with a nattering old friend. (They were both very Irish). And I also recall an evening in the theatre, an ‘Irish evening’ as I remember it, with theatrical colleens in fetching emerald green satin. I think they were more the Tiller Girls than Michael Flatley’s hoppers and skippers but maybe I am wrong. And did the comic have a shillelagh? I am more certain about the electrical numbers on either side of the stage that told us which act we were watching. I must have been about 12 years old and I suppose that the theatre was already a bit down at heel, but my strongest memory is of plush and comfort, and knowing that it was an infinitely more exciting place than the world beyond the foyer.

The Metropolitan had excited audiences from Paddington and beyond for over 120 years. Once there was a pub on the site, the White Lion rebuilt in 1836 as Turnham’s Grand Concert Hall, just in time to entertain the men who were building Brunel’s Great Western Railway. A quarter of a century later it was turned into an altogether grander building at a cost of £25,000 and with seats for 2000. But it didn’t become the Metropolitan Music Hall until 1864 and before long it was just the ‘Met’ and home to a generation of High Victorian popular entertainers.

In April 1896 the demolition men took to the stage and on the 17th August 1897 the foundation stone was laid for a brand new theatre, to be designed by Frank Matcham, perhaps the greatest theatre architect of his day. (Matcham’s masterpiece, the London Coliseum, home now to English National Opera was gloriously restored a few years back.) With fifty three theatres and music halls to his credit Matcham was already a veteran when he began work on his Met, which was to be bigger and much better than its predecessors. Paddington was going up in the world. As one newspaper reported it, “The nobility and gentry of Paddington are well cared for in the matter of entertainment, and the Met, as their local variety temple is called, has for many years applied the discoeuvrement (sic) so necessary to every class of the dwellers in this great metropolis. The neighbourhood, however, has very much extended since the hall was first established, and for some time it has been felt by Mr Henri Gros, the latest proprietor of the Edgware-road establishment, that his property needed reconstruction.”

Reconstruction meant an enlarged stage, improved dressing rooms and a new facade facing Edgware Road and all within the footstep of the original building. The balcony and gallery were to be ‘built on the cantilever principle’ so there’d be no pillars to restrict views and on either side of the stalls there would be white marble private boxes. This was indeed a ‘palace of varieties’ with a capacity of nearly 3000. How blessed were the nobility and gentry of Paddington, and even more so the ordinary men and women of the neighbourhood as they luxuriated in the new auditorium decked out in a Flemish style having made their way into the theatre through a white marble foyer ‘surmounted by Indian ornamentation in rich colours’. As at the Coliseum Matcham seems to have turned the British Empire into theatre.

But Frank Matcham was an eclectic borrower. So as the wide-eyed local reporter who was present at the opening night on December 22nd 1897 told his readers, ” Of the two saloons for the convenience and refreshment of the ground-floor occupants, one is charmingly decorated in Burmantoft faience, and the other in walnut panelling, with alternate mirrors and tapestry of an original decorative character, the ceiling being treated in the style of Louis XVI.”

And what of the performers on offer in a theatre that was not lit by gas but right up to date electricity? Their names are almost as dim to us now as that of Mr Harry Smith of Garrick Street who had installed the electrical equipment? Tom White and his Arabs, Princess Pauline, Miss Cora Cardigan, Miss Alexandra Dagmar, Mr G. W. Hunter, Mr Harry Atkinson, the Dumond Parisian Minstrels and etc belong to a world of entertainment that has completely disappeared. And when we fast forward to the 1930s and 40s the entertainers still seem to be ghosts from a forgotten theatre world that was vanquished by television. Alfred Thripp, ‘The Popular BBC Blind Vocalist and Pianist’ or the ventriloquist Chas Hague ‘Two Heads with a Single Mind’. Mind you Max Miller appeared on the same bill, and ‘the Cheeky Chappie’ has never gone away. At least in the form of the loud suits and the battered trilby.

What finally did for the Met wasn’t just the growing popularity of television. It was the Metropolitan Police who, having lost Paddington Green Police Station under the new Marylebone flyover, bought the music hall which was then struggling on as a wrestling hall and built a new station on the site. So the Met is buried under the Met’s concrete fortress by the flyover.

Before they pulled down Matcham’s theatre there was one last musical hall night. It was Good Friday, April 12, 1963 and the all-star bill, compered by Tommy Trinder, included Hetty King, Issy Bonn and Ida Barr from the old days, and in contrast Johnny Lockwood, Mrs Shufflewick, Dickie Valentine and Ted Ray. They were turning them away as the curtain went up at the Metropolitan Music Hall for the last time.

The fight against childhood tooth decay in Westminster

Westminster City Council has launched a new initiative to improve children’s dental health with a conference featuring representatives from local schools, dental services and relevant community groups…

New initiative to win the fight against childhood tooth decay in Westminster

Westminster City Council has launched a new initiative to improve children’s dental health with a conference featuring representatives from local schools, dental services and relevant community groups. The initiative aims to improve children’s dental health in Westminster, and tackle a situation that sees the area have the 4th highest level of child tooth decay for 5 year olds in London. The aim of bringing together the key groups with influence over children’s oral health builds upon existing practical schemes including promoting fluoride varnishing  and providing a free toothbrush and toothpaste to all primary school reception pupils.

The conference heard from Professor Hunt, Dean of the Royal College of Surgeons, who underlined the scale of the challenge nationally and in Westminster. He revealed that in Westminster 59 per cent of children did not see an NHS dentist in 2016 and emphasised that tooth decay was the top cause of admissions to hospital amongst 5 to 9 year olds in 2015-16.  He concluded that change was possible as tooth decay is 90 per cent preventable.

There was also local inspiration from Colville Primary School,  a ‘healthy school’ gold award winner. Colville described using initiatives like permitting only water and milk to be drunk at school and ensuring that parents include details of their children’s dentist on their admission forms. Their efforts have dramatically cut the number of school days lost to poor dental health.

The meeting marked the start of a campaign that will see the development of an educational video aimed at local families. The coalition of local stakeholders also committed to further work around cutting sugar consumption in children, promoting effective brushing and encouraging regular visits to the dentist.

Cllr Heather Acton, Cabinet Member for Adult Social Services and Public Health, said:

“This is an important campaign to tackle a serious challenge for Westminster. We know the misery that poor dental health causes and we know it increases hospitalisation of children. A few easy measures, including visiting a dentist regularly, brushing twice a day and cutting down on sugary drinks can help children keep their teeth healthy. I’m committed to bringing together local schools, businesses and health professionals to ensure every child and parent in Westminster knows and applies these simple steps.”