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ed: a very mean bird ooh la de da, look at me with my fancy sauce and mushy peas in their own separate pots instead of smeared all over the plate and running into each other. gently caress you CoolCab posted:how many of us are retreating back to academia lol also need a topic and funding, but details details CGI Stardust fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Sep 2, 2020 |
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Sep 2, 2020 22:12
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Gonzo McFee posted:Retweets with comments. I love Twitter are just too stupid and allow this, freaking rules
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Sep 2, 2020 22:33
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Gonzo McFee posted:Retweets with comments. My lack of Twitter understanding exposed for all to see!
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Sep 2, 2020 22:35
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Why does he only have, like, five chips
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Sep 2, 2020 22:36
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Because he's a tory so he presumably went to some blighted hell restaurant that does le haute poisson avec petit pomme de terre et pois puree en englais du merde.
OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Sep 2, 2020 |
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Sep 2, 2020 22:39
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feedmegin posted:Why does he only have, like, five chips 6 chip twat, see previous page for details.
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Sep 2, 2020 22:49
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so uh the uk government is apparently pushing for polygraph tests? i was under the impression those were kind of bollocks https://twitter.com/MrHarryCole/status/1301257364067188738
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Sep 2, 2020 22:52
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/who-invented-fudge Thanks, that was hugely interesting  Now to see if I can hunt down accurate versions of their recipe and see how it compares to mine.This month’s fudge order meanwhile is all boxed out and will be shipped out tomorrow morning.
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Sep 2, 2020 22:52
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Yes it's basically saying "hey this guy seems kinda shifty" except you stick wires to them to quantify various ways in which they're shifty, therefore it's scientific.
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Sep 2, 2020 22:53
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feedmegin posted:Why does he only have, like, five chips Could be taking seriously the government’s advice that being a fat bastard is strongly correlated to negative outcomes from Covid infection?
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Sep 2, 2020 22:54
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feedmegin posted:Why does he only have, like, five chips cause they need to print calories on menus now, and fries wind up being the majority of the calories in the dish. this happens a lot - fish and chips!* *fish and chip
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Sep 2, 2020 22:55
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OwlFancier posted:Because he's a tory so he presumably went to some blighted hell restaurant that does le haute poisson avec petit pomme de terre et pois puree en englais du merde. From the logo on the plate it's one of Westminster's restaurants.
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Sep 2, 2020 22:56
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Angepain posted:so uh the uk government is apparently pushing for polygraph tests? i was under the impression those were kind of bollocks Give Harry Cole a lie detector desk and just badger him about how much of a worm he is to do so much work for the guy who stole his girlfriend
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Sep 2, 2020 22:56
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The sun's just mad that the psychic testimony of are diana isn't admissible as evidence.
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Sep 2, 2020 22:59
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the only legitimate reason to have just 6 chips on your plate is if you've already eaten several dozen chips and there will soon be none
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Sep 2, 2020 23:06
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that's even less chips than you get in a box of microchips these days  FEWER fewer i mean fewer
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Sep 2, 2020 23:11
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Regarde Aduck posted:I think the whole thing was a bit of a purposeful farce to get the gammons riled up. For what? I'm not sure. To remind them why they vote tory possibly? The world is a scary place full of antifas and leftistists and corbryns and if you don't vote tory you'll have to pay reparations to *looks at note* everyone!? Someone in the last thread made a good post about how it was just obviously contrived culture war dogshit, just like all other culture war stuff is to be fair, but it was more obvious this particular time.
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Sep 2, 2020 23:14
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:the only legitimate reason to have just 6 chips on your plate is if you've already eaten several dozen chips and there will soon be none Or they're actually six massive roasties.
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Sep 2, 2020 23:15
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Camrath posted:Thanks, that was hugely interesting You can get the book they linked to from Amazon: Oh Fudge!: A Celebration of America's Favorite Candy which might or might not contain that recipe! Maybe you could do an 'International Women's Day' special if you find the recipe!
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Sep 2, 2020 23:16
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The crest on the plate of that hugely disappointing fish supper suggests they were served in the palace of Westminster, which means we paid for that monstrosity.
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Sep 2, 2020 23:18
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Lie detector tests are just horoscopes for cops only all the entries say 'don't trust this criminal scum' for some unknown reason.
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Sep 2, 2020 23:21
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Angepain posted:so uh the uk government is apparently pushing for polygraph tests? i was under the impression those were kind of bollocks They're totally bollocks but they're already in use for men convicted of sexual offences who are assessed as high risk by the National Probation Service. Our guidance pretty much treats them as bollocks though and failed tests can't be used as grounds to recall someone to custody. The TACT thing is just an extension of that scheme.
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Sep 2, 2020 23:30
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Someone in the cabinet has probably got a Scientologist cousin who needs to shift a few hundred surplus E-meters.
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Sep 2, 2020 23:32
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Axing Jeremy Kyle probably put a significant dent in the lie detector market imo
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Sep 2, 2020 23:34
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crispix posted:Axing Jeremy Kyle God that sounds like a fun team-building away day activity.
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Sep 2, 2020 23:35
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Dentist chat: Do you have to live within a certain catchment area to get an NHS dentist or can you (try) to register with anyone? The only NHS dentist round here has a humungous waiting list. But there's one about 5 miles from my mother's house that is apparently taking on patients (though I'm not 100% sure of that). Also, I'm in Wales and she's in England.
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Sep 2, 2020 23:42
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^^^ I called NHS 111 and they advised me of my nearest dentist that was taking on new NHS patients. Retreading from the shitposting thread, but I would like to thank this thread for giving me the tools to better defend leftist viewpoints. I just had a video call with some old uni friends, one of whom is a Lib Dem supporter, and he went a bit lib about people on welfare having big tellies and not wanting the jobs migrants and refugees are currently doing post-brexit. Thanks to various things I have seen or read through this thread, podcast, discord and twitterverse, I was able to make some nice points and defend my opinions in a way I'm not entirely sure I would have been able to beforehand. So thankyou.
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Sep 2, 2020 23:43
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Had my PIP tribunal today. The judge correctly identified that the DWP had made contradictory decisions by awarding me zero points for everything in my PIP assessment and then, 2 months later, putting me in the highest support category for universal credit. The DWP did not address this decision in their package of evidence for the tribunal. So, presumably, this should mean that, as well as re-evaluating my application on its own merits, the statements from the DWP should be considered by the judge in light of their contradictory decision making. Right? Nope. The DWP "have to be given chance to submit new evidence" and my hearing that I've waited 16 months for gets adjourned after 3 minutes, putting me to the back of the queue for tribunal hearings and sentencing me to another year+ of poverty. Working absolutely as intended.
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Sep 2, 2020 23:47
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Tarnop posted:Had my PIP tribunal today. The judge correctly identified that the DWP had made contradictory decisions by awarding me zero points for everything in my PIP assessment and then, 2 months later, putting me in the highest support category for universal credit. The DWP did not address this decision in their package of evidence for the tribunal. Sorry to hear that  I wonder if the judge has a clue as to how this sort of nonsense actually affects real life people.
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Sep 2, 2020 23:50
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There's a whole body of jurisprudential criticism dating at least back to the mid 19th century that says that, no, the people who become judges and prosecutors do not. (As to whether that's a good thing, because they're less likely to be "whip 'em and then string 'em up and then whip 'em again for good measure" than the man on the omnibus, or a bad thing because they're less likely to understand where the people before them are actually coming from, is a whole other part of it.)
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Sep 3, 2020 00:04
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Angepain posted:so uh the uk government is apparently pushing for polygraph tests? i was under the impression those were kind of bollocks I thought you could gently caress up a polygraph by clenching your anus? Seems like a bad test
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Sep 3, 2020 00:20
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Well yeah, if you close up the hole where all the results come out it doesn't work.
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Sep 3, 2020 00:22
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gently caress judges and gently caress lawyers, bastards all.
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Sep 3, 2020 00:30
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OwlFancier posted:gently caress judges and gently caress lawyers, bastards all. Not all. The poster ITT isn't 
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Sep 3, 2020 00:32
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Tarnop posted:Had my PIP tribunal today. The judge correctly identified that the DWP had made contradictory decisions by awarding me zero points for everything in my PIP assessment and then, 2 months later, putting me in the highest support category for universal credit. The DWP did not address this decision in their package of evidence for the tribunal. I had a pip tribunal in December and it was worse than the original assessment, even though i won, It took me until at least march before i stopped bursting in to tears during the day, every day because i was stuck in the living hell of 4 cunts (judge, specialist, doctor and dwp) belittling me, laughing in my face and scoffing, scorning and talking over me going round and round in my mind. It still upsets me. i went from zero to 14 points in on one side. I still want to scream at the world but no one cares. I hope you do well and don't dwell on it because 9 moths later im still not any happier. gently caress the world, burn it all.
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Sep 3, 2020 00:35
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Continuity RCP posted:I thought you could gently caress up a polygraph by clenching your anus? Seems like a bad test It is, its easily foolable/subjective. Conspiracy theory: They label you as a terrorist so they can treat you to this, and keep you in forever as they can say whatever they want on the polygraphs. There go your immigrants, poor, irish, and anyone foreign the Tories don't want.
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Sep 3, 2020 00:41
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Angepain posted:so uh the uk government is apparently pushing for polygraph tests? i was under the impression those were kind of bollocks As I understand it, polygraph tests only measure stress levels. So if you're nervous, for example because your release from prison is wholly dependent on not failing the test, you are much more likely to fail.
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Sep 3, 2020 00:41
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London’s deep level shelters - part 2. Part 1 is here The post-war life of these deep-level shelters is far more interesting than their service (or lack thereof) during the war. Working from the north to the south: Belsize Park Perhaps fittingly for the most boring of the locations these shelters were installed in, it was also least-used of the shelters (they only even bothered to install 4,000 bunks of the 8,000 capacity and never came close to filling them). After the war the Underground quickly sold it on to a warehousing company (who had a plan to use late-night and early-morning tube trains for freight, alas which never came to fruition). It’s current status is somewhat murky - although the sign at the southern entrance says it’s owned by Abbot Datastore Ltd, Companies House says that they’ve not filed accounts for two years and narrowly avoided a winding-up order. A 2015 planning application claimed that the underground portions were no longer in use while requesting permission to demolish the southern surface buildings for redevelopment. However gossip is that there is still frequent traffic in and out of the northern entrance (including maintenance of the lift and ventilation plant). Certainly although overgrown and graffitied, the entrance itself is clear with a suspiciously shiny lock on the door:  Belsize Park shelter northern shaft, August 2020. There was a bloke sitting in that Merc so I chose not to get in to get a picture of the door itself, being a massive coward (and theoretically trespassing). The southern entrance, which is the (official) pedestrian entrance, is also surprisingly clean for something that’s supposed to have been out of use for at least 5 years:  Belsize Park shelter southern shaft, August 2020, from the main road. I originally got quite excited when I saw the TV aerial, as possible evidence of habitation, but it’s actually on the terrace behind.  From the side road. A bit of Google Street View archeology shows the windows and doors were replaced and the exterior repainted between June and October 2015, again interesting for something supposedly not in use. It’s possible that the site has been acquired and is back in use as storage - but it’s certainly strange. Camden Town Probably the most-used of the deep-level shelters, reflecting the lack of space for other sorts of shelters in the area, Camden Town also continued in use long after the war. Originally signed over to London Underground who used it as storage space for the extensive re-signalling work on the Northern Line above, LU then sold the space to a storage company which used it for archival storage for film and television studios and various businesses. It also - perhaps inevitably given Camden - found use as a film set, being at various times an air-raid shelter (imaginative), tunnels deep beneath Pluto, a tube station (also imaginative) and, ironically, Down Street shelter. The northern shaft surface buildings looks suitably Camden-y:  Camden Town deep shelter northern shaft, August 2020. Say hi to my bike - red and on the left, of course. Interestingly the entrance door at the top appears to be open:  Unfortunately I couldn’t get to the southern entrance (closer to Mornington Crescent than Camden Town, funnily enough) because it’s obscured by hoardings for a new building. Officially both goods and pedestrian access is from the southern shaft, but it’s possible that this has been modified because of the building work around it - possibly not coincidentally, the box park next to the northern buildings has quite high hoardings around the staircase next to the shaft. There was more evidence of activity though, with a generator or compressor loudly working away from somewhere in the area. The site is owned by Iron Mountain but (as with the other deep shelters they own/co-own) is not listed on their website, presumably because it is only available to large corporate or government clients. Goodge Street As mentioned above, Goodge Street station was never used for sheltering, instead being commandeered for Eisenhower’s HQ and other assorted wartime duties. This is perhaps for the best, because unlike all the other sites where the ventilation and plant shafts were at opposite ends of the tunnel, at Goodge Street they are either side of it, separated by only 150 metres - given the blast radius of a V2 was 180 metres, one lucky shot could have had some pretty severe consequences. The eastern entrance is probably the most well-known of all of these surface buildings - anyone who’s been to the West End has probably seen them tucked away just off Tottenham Court Road:  Goodge Street shelter eastern shaft, August 2020. poo poo, now my bike’s on the far right - it’s done a Brendan! Goodge Street, perhaps because of its central location, has the most urban legends and conspiracy theories about it but actually has probably the most boring post-war story of all the deep-level shelters. After the Americans left in 1946, it was used as a muster point and transit camp for the London regiments (the 12th London Infantry had coincidentally used the building behind as their recruitment centre in WWI - their war memorial was carefully built around and is visible in the picture). However in 1956 a fire led to the evacuation of almost a thousand troops billeted there - while there were thankfully no serious injuries it was realised that the inherent risks of sleeping that far underground made no sense when it wasn’t being counterbalanced by the risks of several thousand tons of high explosives dropping on the surface every night. Goodge Street (and the other shelters) were barred from use for living quarters. The same company that had bought Belsize Park to store film and tape were, naturally, delighted to take it off the MoD’s hands, with the location massively handy for the media industries surrounding the area. The only real mystery is the name - The Eisenhower Centre obviously harks back to the wartime use of the site (although there’s some disagreement over whether Ike himself spent any time there) but nobody’s quite sure *who* gave it that name. One common theory is that it was renamed by the MoD, possibly to coincide with the visit of by then President Eisenhower to the UK in 1952, but the name doesn’t appear in any MoD documents, and the facility was still semi-secret at the time - contemporary news reports of hte 1956 fire talking only of a Central London barracks, not even giving the location. The most likely explanation is simply that the storage company, when they took over the site, needed to call it *something* and so just chose a name to associate their new possession with its most famous inhabitant (or not - like I say, although his staff and communications were based there, there’s no actual evidence the man himself ever even visited the place). That odd combination of vagueness and very concrete (hah) existence is probably why Goodge Street accumulated quite so many conspiracy theories and urban legends. Len Deighton named it (or rather hinted very strongly that he was naming it) as “YELLOW SUBMARINE”, a secret government computer and communications centre. Duncan Campbell claimed (in the articles that led to the infamous Post Office Tower trial) that it was used by MI5 for document storage (*probably* erroneously - they may have used it, and Museum station, for storage during the war, and their HQ was just around the corner in Gower Street, but by the 70s the Registry was at Curzon Street, of which more in another post) Most famously, at least among the tinfoil-hatted persuasion, Goodge Street was long-rumoured to be a major node in the Post Office/BT “Q Network”, the government secure network first started in WW2. Geographically at least it makes sense - the network (which gets its name from the nodes on the network map, which all have a code beginning Q - the letter is coincidental, being assigned before the first Bond books hit the shelves, and also has a non-coincidental coincidence with the GPO tunnel network, of which more in another post) is known to use tube tunnels for trunk connections, particularly between the centre of town and the Post Office special facilities in north London, and Goodge Street is conveniently located between Kingsway Exchange (below) and Museum Exchange (the BT Tower), and was held onto by the MoD for far longer than the other sites. While there’s a chance Q cables do run through the shelter (for obvious reasons they’re not marked any differently from any of the other telecoms and power circuits that do run through the tube) there’s no particular evidence of any attempt to connect to Museum exchange - apart from the fact that the Mail Rail system that connected all of the London head-end sorting offices goes directly under both stations and the exchange… While we’re on coincidence, that too-close western shaft is in the yard of a rather nice little church:  Goodge Street shelter western shaft, August 2020. Hurried pic from across the street for multiple reasons, but the surface buildings should be fairly obvious if you’ve been looking at the others. The church is just out-of-frame on the left. The Grafton Memorial Church - an odd little nonconformist Victorian church - was sold in the 1960s to the US Navy to be used by American GIs and diplomatic staff after they outgrew their quarters in the embassy itself. Why the Navy? Because apparently the Navy runs the chaplaincy service for US embassies, because America. Now run independently, still by Americans, as the American International Church, they seem completely oblivious to the history of the rather chunky building taking up a big portion of what should be their churchyard… or are they? Chancery Lane/Kingsway Exchange Perhaps the most important - in terms of post-war history - of the shelters was another one never actually used as a civilian shelter. Chancery Lane shelter was taken over by the Government before it had even started being dug. One oddity of Chancery Lane shelter was that - thanks to the lack of surface space - it actually had 3 surface buildings, as well as an actual permanent connection to the running station - 2 in fact, a stairway and a small goods lift. This decision was taken early in the process, given the lack of space for the large rotundas, combining staircase, lift and ventilation, used at the other shelters. Instead one surface building on High Holborn (in fact the ground floor and basement levels of an existing building) would be used for pedestrian access and ventilation, with goods and backup pedestrian access and ventilation split between two buildings and Chancery Lane station itself. This complication, and the realisation that it still would not be as safe as the other shelters, is almost certainly why the shelter was chosen to be handed over for Government use early in the process. The government needed the space because It wasn’t just people being made homeless in the Blitz - several important bodies, from the Port of London Authority to the Ministry of Works, had been doing the institutional equivalent of sofa-surfing after bomb damage and wartime expansion left them without permanent headquarters. Also, while the dispersed, per-borough emergency service and civil defence system made sense before the war, the experience of the Blitz had shown the need for a London-wide body able to coordinate fire and medical response to bomb damage. All of these would be based in the eastern end of the Chancery Lane shelter. At the western end were some rather less salubrious housemates. The dull-sounding Inter-Service Research Board was in fact the mad-scientist lab of SOE, where exploding cigarettes, poisoned needles hidden in coins, and complete prison-escape kits miniaturised sufficiently to be carried in the old back pocket were developed and built. The equally beige-named Government Communications Bureau was responsible for the use of intelligence intercepted and decrypted by the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park and other places - the two would be merged after the war into Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, the most secretive of the UK’s intelligence agencies. Sandwiched between them - and no doubt hoping not to be used by either end as a spare pair of hands in the docks or a test subject for one of those inventions - were officers from the Forces and the nationalised train companies coordinating troop movements around the country - a boring but absolutely essential job.. Happily that strange layout meant it was possible to isolate these three sets of tenants from each other, each having their own entrance. After the war, the Public Records Office - based just along High Holborn from the shelter - took over the shelters for temporary storage. They had desperately needed space even before the war, being required to keep a copy of just about every official document produced by the Government. During the war, they had dispersed the documents to repositories from Cheddar Gorge to a Scottish castle, and with the end of the war the documents they kept - from a copy of Magna Carta, through the divorce papers of Henry VIII, to the criminal records of the Kray Twins - were loaded into the old shelter, in total filling almost five miles of shelves. Even this wasn’t enough space though, and so they instead moved the whole lot to an old bomb factory in Middlesex that eventually became (a mere 50 years later) the National Archives at Kew. Empty again, the shelter came to the attention of the Post Office. Their original International Switching Centre at Blackfriars - through which all international calls were routed - was being massively overloaded by the increase in international phone calls after the war - not (just) because of a new Internationalism after the horrors of Nationalism, but because the massive technological gains in long-distance radio, as well as the tens of thousands of miles of copper laid down by advancing Allied troops across Europe, had made international calling something within the budget of at least the very upper classes, if not an everyday thing just yet. They needed a new site, preferably a solidly-built one to accommodate the chunky electromechanical equipment of the day. Being in proximity to existing trunk lines would be a distinct advantage too. Well, during the war, the GPO had installed huge amounts of new trunk cabling in London Underground tunnels - particularly the Central and Northern Lines - because it was cheap, secure, and of course the tunnels already went where people and their phones were likely to be. Chancery Lane shelter, on the Central Line and only a few hundred yards from the interchange with the Northern at Tottenham Court Road, was perfect. It became considerably more perfect - and rather more urgently so - within weeks of the PRO moving out, when the Soviet Union detonated their first atomic weapon, years ahead of the confident predictions of the West, and it became clear that if there were a WW3 sandbags and tape over the windows was not going to cut it for protection of national infrastructure. Kingsway Hardened Telephone Exchange was commissioned 3 years later. Despite the roominess of the shelter, the GPO expanded it considerably, adding four new tunnels between the shelter and the southern and eastern shafts, and expanding the “alley” cross-tunnels.  Kingsway Exchange as commissioned - the two east-west tunnels are the original shelter, straddling Chancery Lane station itself, the new extensions are in the south-east. As well as the connections to the Central Line-carried trunks, additional tunnels were built out from the western end of the original shelter. These linked with deep-level trunks headed to Whitehall, forming part of the almost-legendary GPO Secure Communications Tunnels (often - erroneously - referred to as the Q Tunnels). As well as all of the technical upgrades, the comfort levels were considerably upgraded in the conversion. A new canteen and dining room capable of seating a hundred people, and a “recreation area” - read “subsidised pub” - were installed at the western end of the shelter tunnels, as well as a rest area and 24-hour tea bar in one of the cross-tunnels. Of all the thousands of cables in and out of the exchange, the most important one was hooked up three years after it opened. TAT-1 - the first transatlantic telephone cable - ran from this hole in the ground to a Bell exchange in Manhattan. Well technically the cable ran from Scotland to Canada, but the actual lump of copper wasn’t that interesting - by that point we’d been stringing bits of copper across the Atlantic for a century - the magic was at both ends. Multiplexing - putting multiple streams down the same wire - was another war dividend, originally played with at GPO Research in Dollis Hill (from where a startling amount of basic building blocks of the modern internet, from packet switching to the computer, also emerged in the immediate pre- and post-war era) and given impetus by wartime copper shortages. Now it was to be used to carry 35 voice channels, plus a data channel carrying 30 telex channels, on one bit of copper instead of 36 (or rather, because nobody was willing to pay what it would cost to reserve an entire 4,000 miles of copper just to make one call, 36 unreliable and noisy radio links). It seems a trivial achievement these days when a single cable can carry thousands of calls just in the spare space between the gigabits of porn but this was the biggest and most important achievement in telecomms since Marconi first demonstrated transatlantic radio transmission. The massive valve- and relay-based computers required to run this technological marvel required almost 200 metres of one of the tunnels, and the supporting power, ventilation and cooling infrastructure almost as much space again. And just in case you think I’m overblowing the importance of what seems a fringe, nerdy achievement - a few years after going live, TAT-1 carried the first hotline conversation between Washington and the Kremlin, meaning this weird little tunnel a hundred feet below what is now Holborn Pret a Manger possibly helped prevent nuclear war on more than one occasion. Over time the equipment at each end of the cable was improved, increasing capacity, and a dozen more transatlantic cables, as well as major trunks to the rest of the country and the rest of the world, came in - by its height Kingsway handled almost 100k international lines, plus an intriguingly undetermined amount of “local” lines - but we’ll come back to those in another post. With the coming of digital networks and fibre optics the need for the space (and security) of Kingsway faded, and functions were gradually moved to other facilities. By the late 90s, when large amounts of asbestos was “discovered” (they knew it was there but pretended not to) it was little more than a particularly roomy cable conduit, and it was officially decommissioned. The High Holborn entrance was sealed over and a new building built on top of it, and in 2010 the backup ventilation shaft and entrance in Tooks Court was likewise sealed. Now only the Furnival Street goods entrance remains:  Chancery Shelter/Kingsway exchange, Furnival Street entrance, August 2020. The crane mechanism over the door has been removed, but there’s still a noticeable noise of ventilation plant - BT still use it for access to their cable tunnels, and obviously they need to keep it habitable. Numerous schemes have been put forward to re-use the tunnels, from storage for the local law firms, to a data centre (my previous employers got quite a way along the path to doing exactly this), to a hotel and conference facility. All run into the same problems though - the tunnels are lined with asbestos, making any work hideously expensive, and now there is only one entrance (or more importantly, exit) there is no possible way of getting a fire safety certificate. (The link to Chancery Lane still exists, but is bricked over; London Underground have flatly refused to allow it to be used as even an emergency exit though, for safety and security reasons). Unfortunately for TfL, who now find themselves in charge of the shelter, the obvious solution of just bricking up the last entrance and forgetting about it isn’t an option. It’s below the water table and so will quickly fill with water if allowed to sit, and the cast-iron tunnel linings, without maintenance, will start to fail within a few years, to the extreme discomfort of buildings above and the running tunnels of the Central Line. The next obvious solution - stuffing it with concrete, or even just clay tailings from whatever the next big tunneling project in London is - runs into the immediate issue of the very limited access to the site. Even if you could upgrade the goods lift, as you can see in the picture above Furnival Street is barely wide enough for cars, let alone the hundreds of HGVs that would be needed to move that amount of material. Several plans, of varying degrees of… ambition… exist to bring the shelter back into use. Perhaps the most interesting is to use it for a combined heat and power station for a new development north of High Holborn, building a new tunnel inside the existing one to seal in the asbestos - however the development itself stalled with the GFC, and Camden were reluctant to have a power station, no matter how clean, in an area that already has startlingly poor air quality. For now, TfL will just keep paying for the pumps to keep the old shelter dry and ventilated, and maybe think in the next few years a massive armoured citadel in the middle of town might suddenly be worth a lot more to the right buyer. Stockwell I know I said Goodge Street was the most famous of the deep-level shelters but Stockwell probably gives it a run for its money. Anyone coming in to London up the A3 can’t fail to see the northern shaft buildings, with their murals designed by local children:  Stockwell shelter northern shaft, August 2020 - the First World War memorial is to the right.  A newer addition to the mural, commemorating Violette Szabo GC  Stockwell shelter southern shaft, August 2020 - buried away behind some lockups in a post-war estate that I’ll admit I’ve been down the k-hole for the last couple of days trying to research because the buildings seem like a weird elephants graveyard of immediate post-war styles. Stockwell had a peaceful retirement from shelter duty - it was used as a transit camp for soldiers after the war until the Goodge Street fire, and was temporarily used for storage by LUL in the sixties, and is now owned by Iron Mountain who use it for document storage. There is an intriguing loose thread about Stockwell though. As the original southern terminus of the City and South London Railway (now the Northern Line) there was a steeply-inclined and curved tunnel running to a surface building and sheds just north of the station This tunnel is the reason why the Stockwell shelter only just overlaps the station itself and was delayed in handing over - it was considered too large a risk, if a bomb were to drop at the portal to the tunnel, which would have been directly over one of the shelters as originally planned, that the shelter might have collapsed. The loose thread is that this tunnel, and the attached yard, were kept open by LUL long after the war, despite being officially sealed off. Prior to the war the yard was still used for stabling trains for rush hour surge service, but the post-war rolling stock was too long to use the tunnel. Why keep hold of it? The plot thickens when you realise the surface buildings were demolished only in 1994, coincidentally (?) at the same time as BT decommissioned Kingsway Exchange and the MoD formally closed all of their RSG and area command shelters. It’s entirely possible that this is all just south London property prices finally rising enough for it to be worthwhile putting in the work to finally seal off the side-tunnel, but it just strikes me as weird that a facility that would potentially allow vehicle access to the shelter complex was kept open for so long... Clapham North Clapham North is the only one of the south London shelters in an area with (pre-war) housing without any easy place to put domestic shelters in. The station itself, with a narrow island platform, is also useless for sheltering, so I will partially withdraw my angry class-based ranting about the positioning of these shelters *for this one only*. If anything though, the big roomy terraces around the other stations convinced me that they were definitely taking the piss putting them here and not in the poorer inner-London areas.  Clapham North shelter north shaft. Interesting non-LCC pre-war mansions behind, and most of the buildings in the area are of a similar style - like I say, no space for a shelter in those blocks so a deep-level shelter actually makes sense here Interestingly there are almost no details about the post-war use of Clapham North. This may be because of the awkwardly-placed shafts - there is no road access to the northern one, and the southern one is buried away behind the station (and seemingly integrated into the existing building), possibly because of the close proximity of the arches to the south of the station. Using it for storage, or anything requiring more than on-foot access, would be impractical, so it’s probably just been dormant all this time. A few hundred yards from that potential vehicle access to the Northern Line tunnels. Hmm. The first recorded post-war use of the shelter comes in *2012*, when a startup company established a trial hydroponic farm in one corner of the shelter. For reasons that are unclear, after this trial they decided to go to full scale one station further down at... Clapham Common Okay I’m going to admit to a little bit of starry-eyed admiration for the idea of turning these shelters into hydroponic farms. Clapham Common was in use by Iron Mountain as just another of their underground storage units until 2015, at least according to Street View (as I say, Iron Mountain don’t list their shelter facilities to the general public as they’re only available to very large institutional customers, so it’s hard to tell when they actually stopped using it). As I said it’s unclear why Zero Carbon Food chose to use Clapham Common rather than Clapham North - if forced to guess I’d assume that Iron Mountain had already done a lot of the work on installing and maintaining upgraded lifts, ventilation etc for them so they could save a lot of cash by moving there. As to the economics of farming 200 feet underground - it’s not as silly as it sounds. The basic idea is that the water comes basically free (in fact *stopping* it coming is one of the main expenses of running one of these shelters) and while of course they have to use power for lighting and ventilation that would be free in a boring ordinary farm, this is offset by the use of renewable energy and the fact that the food doesn’t have to be driven across the country (or shipped around the world) to arrive fresh in London. Obviously it’s not going to save the world on its own, but I’d love someone to do a bit of back-of-the-envelope estimation of how many lives are saved just by the reduction in direct pollution, because with 4,000 excess deaths a year attributable to poor air quality in London it’s possible this shelter is actually saving more lives than it did during the war. ZFC have an option to lease the entirety of Clapham North and are said to be investigating other shelters (both the WW2 deep-level ones and Cold War-vintage nuclear shelters) for space to expand.  Clapham Common shelter northern entrance, August 2020 - “Growing Underground”, the hydroponic farm, is based out of the old entrance building behind the shaft, alas a van parked in the alley meant I couldn’t get a decent pic. I also allowed myself to get distracted by my first McDonalds in almost six months and… completely forgot to get a pic of the southern shaft.  Fortunately Google is here to save me. Clapham South Clapham South station is closer to Clapham Common than Clapham Common station is (even if it’s only by a few metres, and that irritates me far more than it should. Anyway the northern shaft surface buildings of Clapham Common (which is, admittedly, actually on the Common) are the easiest to see in more-or-less their original setting. I realise only as I type this I should have done the shelters south-to-north just for this reason, because it gives a much clearer picture of how they worked, but meh.  Clapham South shelter northern shaft, north side, August 2020. The low structure on the left is the inlet for mains power and electricity, and also contained a small office for use by the ARP marshals who controlled access to the shelter. The next structure to the right is the main entrance (the door is on the other side, obviously). The big circular “pillbox” - the most distinctive feature of course - is the top of the shaft itself. A spiral staircase leads down from the entrance to the shelter itself. Fresh air was bought in from here down the middle of that staircase, along with power and water down conduits in the walls. The top of the shaft also had a block and tackle for carrying heavy equipment down the centre of the staircase (replaced by a lift in the sites used for storage). Just to the right of this image (again for some reason, possibly cholesterol overdose from said McDonalds, I forgot to get a pic) is a concrete cap over a supplemental shaft that ran alongside the main one - this had the power generators at the bottom of it, and was used for exhausting air through a small building just to one side).  Clapham Common shelter northern shaft, south side, August 2020. That green door was the main access. Another door on the left (which had a bloke sitting in it enjoying a bottle of cider, hence the awkward framing, he didn’t need me getting all David Bailey on him) was for access to the plant in the top of the pillbox itself. At the Iron Mountain sites at least this door appears to be the main entrance, presumably because it allows direct access to the lift rather than the stairs. The southern shaft is quite an interesting one, too. Presumably not wanting to leave themselves with another unusable Chancery Lane, TfL refused to allow the demolition of the pillbox and the emergency staircase and ventilation it contained, even though the shelter wasn’t in use. The result is certainly striking:  Clapham South shelter south shaft, August 2020, integrated into a block called “The Drum”. I sincerely hope the architects went for that grey concrete facade for the Cold War brutalist aesthetic to match the whole “shelter” thing, but the fact they then covered the pillbox itself with enameled tiles like a Victorian toilet suggests that it was just a happy coincidence in the Wheel Of Confusing Styles that they presumably spin every time they throw up another of these shitbox “luxury” developments. The shelter itself saw almost no use during the war other than for homeless people. Immediately after the war it was used as a hostel, and among the people who stayed there were 200 passengers from the Emperor Windrush while awaiting proper housing, up to a thousand workers on the Festival of London site, and several thousand visitors to the Festival, before being closed after the Goodge Street fire. For whatever reason the shelter then laid almost entirely unused. This is fortunate, as it’s now available for tours - forums poster and very cool person Goldskull has visited and was kind enough to upload their pictures here And so this post, which lasted longer than the Blitz itself, finally ends. Next up - assuming I don’t get nicked while taking the photos - the GPO Secure Communications Tunnels, my head injury outside the MI5 headquarters, and the GCHQ building that literally everyone knew about but nobody ever talked about.
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Sep 3, 2020 00:50
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happyhippy posted:It is, its easily foolable/subjective. This post being directly under Fumble talking about their PIP assessments gives me a very unpleasant idea about what the next use will be for these electronic dowsing rods.
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Sep 3, 2020 00:52
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Fumble posted:I had a pip tribunal in December and it was worse than the original assessment, even though i won, It took me until at least march before i stopped bursting in to tears during the day, every day because i was stuck in the living hell of 4 cunts (judge, specialist, doctor and dwp) belittling me, laughing in my face and scoffing, scorning and talking over me going round and round in my mind. It still upsets me. i went from zero to 14 points in on one side. I still want to scream at the world but no one cares. That's awful, I'm so sorry you had to go through that. Thanks for the words of support, friends
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Sep 3, 2020 00:52
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