|
Pistol_Pete posted:Yeah, the genie's out of the bottle here: after 6 months of this, it's utterly undeniable that for a huge swathe of the population, there's absolutely no need for them to be in the office every day and that can't be wished away again. I wonder if the clamour to get "back to normal" will fade now that we're in September? Commercial leases generally run September-August, and I can absolutely see the Tories trying to put their thumb on the scale to at least limit the amount of companies deciding not to renew. Obviously a lot of these renewals are negotiated starting in March and April and suddenly another part of the fuzziness around lockdown becomes clear.
|
#
¿
Sep 1, 2020 09:46
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 17:42 |
|
|
Jaeluni Asjil posted:I remember those from about 35 years ago Nope, stopped a while ago and now goes Hammersmith - Edgware Road - Aldgate - HSK - Paddington (so it visits Paddington twice). Allegedly this is to improve train frequency to Shepherd's Bush and environs, but I prefer the theory it's because it was too much effort to remember to swap trains between inner and outer lines so they were all getting worn down on one side like a wild Haggis. My angry letters to Sadiq Khan explaining that "Circle Line" is now a breach of the Trades Descriptions Act and demanding the line be renamed "Partially-Straightened-Out-Paperclip Line" have, so far, gone unanswered. Jaeluni Asjil posted:And telex - does anyone still do that? Yes and no - most telcos will no longer offer a dedicated telex line and the international network has been shut down, however point-to-point networks (especially in developing-world banks and governments) are still in use, and telex-over-modem and telex-over-IP both exist and some company somewhere probably still bases their entire operation on a Heath Robinson assemblage of 1950s telexes running into 1960s serial links into 1980s modems into Windows 3.1 machines into the internet then back down again at the other end. I did once work at a place that still had an old teletype input-output module that one of the greybeards had hacked together to be able to access the internet and I have to say it was the single most satisfying piece of electronic equipment I have ever used, although Youtube ended up using up a *lot* of paper.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 1, 2020 14:31
|
|
|
justcola posted:Something I was wondering about this chart: I assume through modelling the spread of other, similar viruses - October's the start of flu season, and also when colds and other winter maladies start to kick in.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 1, 2020 20:07
|
|
|
Julio Cruz posted:bin men always smiling when they had to retire at 45 from chronic back complaints Funnily enough it normally wasn't back complaints that did for them - one of the very first applications of time-and-motion studies was on corporation bin men in (I *think*) Birmingham, which led to the bin sizes being substantially reduced and the handle situated so that they could be lifted to the shoulder. Previously bins were almost twice the size and were dragged or carried two-handed because the belief was that was the quickest way of getting them collected, but when it was actually examined it was discovered it was quicker for them to make multiple trips rather than trying to manhandle something they couldn't comfortably lift, especially on uneven ground - this coincidentally vastly reduced the amount of workplace injuries and (because it hadn't apparently occurred to any boss previously in the history of employment) proved that at least trying not to cripple your workers was substantially more efficient). It did however lead to a (harmless) muscular/skeletal abnormality in the elbows of dustmen, like a big pad of muscle just below the joint, that was basically a badge of honour for them. e: Oops - forgot my final paragraph - the most common injuries/post-retirement health issues were knees and hips, but they generally did better than most manual labourers goddamnedtwisto fucked around with this message at 15:08 on Sep 2, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Sep 2, 2020 15:03
|
|
|
Borrovan posted:Old timey binmen did have some p natty outfits tbf The world needs more gorblimey trousers.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 2, 2020 16:29
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 3, 2020 00:50
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 3, 2020 00:52
|
|
|
Goldskull posted:@goddamnedtwisto outstanding post/work. Kingsway has been up for sale a couple of times - Claranet got as far as negotiations with TfL for use of the Chancery Lane entrance in 2005, because without a second exit there's no way to get a fire safety certificate. The basic problem with using the station exit is even if you *can* get around TfL's security restrictions for having access to one of their stations you'd need to pay them to keep the station manned 24/7 otherwise your fire exit just leads to a locked station. Clara also enquired about potentially running a new shaft from their HQ on Kingsway itself to the exchange, only a hundred yards or so away, and apparently everyone went "NO YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO DIG THAT WAY NO REASON AT ALL AM I TALKING TOO LOUD?". It's possible that they misinterpreted the normal reaction to trying to dig under London but the impression they got was that there were very specific reasons they couldn't do that. Ultimately between restoring access and dealing with the asbestos you're looking at something like 25 million quid just to get it to fit-for-human-habitation levels, kitting out a data centre down there with all the additional cooling and power requirements would be the same amount again, meaning you'd be paying out something like the budget for Telehouse West for less than a tenth of the floor space. Any kind of conversion will run into the same kind of problems - that CHAP station was probably the most practical use for it but even then the fire exit was an open question they never resolved in the outline planning application.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 3, 2020 09:57
|
|
|
Payndz posted:I walked the Thames Path with my wife and then two-year-old son a few years ago. Took a photo of the MI6 building in Vauxhall just to go "Look, it's where James Bond works!" Thirty seconds later, we were stopped by two armed coppers "for a chat". How much do you and your family look like terrorists? Fell free to use either RGB or Pantone numbers. I have a couple of anecdotes like that, that I'm going to put into the post. It's really surprising (except not really) just how variable the level of paranoia and response is about certain places even for constant levels of pastiness.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 3, 2020 13:01
|
|
|
Guillotine-em-up We The Revolution is on sale at the minute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLEfdfdZmjU It's also in the current Humble Bundle with a couple of good sims (911 Operator is weirdly addictive, Elite: Dangerous is, well, Elite) and a couple of interesting-looking other sims including weird cult fav PC Building Simulator.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 4, 2020 00:05
|
|
|
Jaeluni Asjil posted:fish n chips chat: It's entirely possible that there just wasn't the technology available until then. Deep-fat frying as we know it basically requires a proper, controllable heat source otherwise you're just going to be burning your face off, so we're into mid-Industrial Revolution before wood-burning stoves become cheap enough to be affordable to non-kings. I guess you could probably rig up something using embers rather than an open flame, but (expensive, scarce) good-quality fat would probably have been better used for pastry. You could probably shallow-fry stuff like salmon in it's own oil, but it's not the same thing at all. Also until we had boats big enough to haul ice down from the Arctic nobody was eating (saltwater) fish in the major cities because they'd have been more than a bit ripe by the time they turned up, so cod would have been something they ate in Grimsby or Padstow, but the majority of the country would have either been on freshwater fish or stuff like mussels that could be delivered live(ish) to inland areas.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 4, 2020 17:19
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:I'm not entirely sure i buy this. You can control heat levels simply by having your frying container closer or further from your heat source, as one does right now on a charcoal barbecue for example. And you don't need a massive vat of oil or fat to get comparable results, an inch of lard and flipping the fish halfway through would work fine. Pan frying fish goes at least as far back as Pliny in the literature. That's why I specified both "deep fat frying" and "as we know it", and I would still be pretty unhappy about shallow-frying over an open flame. Also shallow-frying won't cut it for batter, you need the heat hitting the batter in 3 dimensions or it'll all just run off. For fish and chips as we know it, you need: a) Cheap, high-quality animal fat (late Agricultrual Revolution) b) Cast iron vessel and controllable heat (early Industrial Revolution) c) Refrigeration - I know cod isn't the only fish, but all of the other fish suitable for frying don't live close enough to the big cities for me to want to risk it, so late-18th century. I don't dispute that if you found yourself thrown back in time to the Dark Ages you could probably knock up some battered fish (have to wait a fair few centuries for the chips but you might be able to improvise with parsnips or swede) but the point is that until those three things exist you ain't getting fried and battered fish as anything other than a regional dish. Like I say the refrigeration is the real killer; pickled or salted fish, and local freshwater fish would have been the extent of seafood anyone not living on the coast is likely to have bothered with.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 4, 2020 18:16
|
|
|
Jose posted:For someone with good knowledge on lots of things the idea of frequent flipping to ensure the batter cooks or a tagine to seep fry in being alien is funny to me  I'm pretty much thinking out loud, but flipping and shallow-drying just won't work with battered fish, and the fact that we didn't have fried fish at all until the late Renaissance and battered, deep-fried fish until the mid-19th century does suggest that I'm on to something.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 4, 2020 19:28
|
|
|
CBA rehosting it and typing the caption again: https://twitter.com/CouncilCulture/status/1301960809136955392
|
|
#
¿
Sep 4, 2020 20:11
|
|
|
Kin posted:A home made saline. Dioralyte or the supermarket knockoff versions are a much easier and more palatable version. Personally my hangover cure is take two paracetamol and a pint of water up to bed with me, the moment I wake up neck both (I find all drinking the water *before* bed does is make me wake up for a piss), then use cheap energy drinks to mop up the remainder.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 5, 2020 12:34
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/marvelle/status/1302342259870892032/photo/1 Meanwhile the writers of America Season 244 are just going "gently caress it".
|
|
#
¿
Sep 6, 2020 00:50
|
|
|
I'm at a new level of decadence here - two cups of tea, one for drinking, one for dunking shortbread in. No king or emperor ever approached this level of luxury.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 6, 2020 17:05
|
|
|
TACD posted:I asked the Irish girlfriend “have you ever heard of Guinness and blackcurrant” and she looked at me as if I’d asked had she ever heard of chips, so I guess it’s pretty popular over I assume there must be goths in Ireland so this checks out as a localised snakebite and black.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 6, 2020 19:20
|
|
|
Mebh posted:God tartrazine, sunset yellow and quinoloine yellow had my mum yelling at me in the 90s to check for e numbers in everything we ate and blaming everything on them as they gave me 'hyperactivity' I think I was just a child reacting to sugar which I had never really had. A kid I went to school with had grown up in that sort of household - he'd basically never had processed sugar or caffeine until we dared him to down a can of Jolt (in the days when it had like 200mg of caffeine, more than double what Red Bull et. al. have nowadays*). The results were mixed - his performance in our lunchtime football game was definitely energetic then he puked a genuinely impressive distance just as we walked into the school gates and spent the rest of the afternoon laughing hysterically and vibrating slightly. After that he used to use cans of coke the same way Popeye used spinach, and with pretty similar results - a generally quiet and timid kid he'd turn into a Berserker halfway through the second can, at which point we'd point him in the direction of kids from one of the other schools and wait for the fireworks. * Red Bull's actual innovation was *reducing* the amount of caffeine in their product to be roughly equivalent to other caffeine-containing drinks (300mg/l compared to 400mg/l for black coffee or 200mg/l for strong tea) - not coincidentally right in the addiction sweet spot. Jolt and the other first-wave energy drinks were far too strong, to the point where even fairly experienced coffee drinkers could feel ill after drinking one, but Red Bull can be a "lifestyle" drink while keeping the serious side effects much less perceptable. Actually of course their real innovation was convincing people to pay £1.50 for a drink that tastes like carbonated cough medicine. Follow the lead of this man and treat their pricing with the contempt it deserves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRF4uQG5W-k (What they don't tell you is he's actually 27, that poo poo's not good for you)
|
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2020 00:58
|
|
|
BalloonFish posted:My partner runs a 7-year old Mazda 2 - so a pretty standard modern supermini - and she estimates that it costs £1200 per year to run (when there's not a pandemic on and she's working from home): This is one of the Nice Things we weren't allowed to have from the 2019 manifesto, a publicly-owned car sharing scheme - Zipcar meant i could abandon any idea of "needing" my own car*, the few times a year a car is essential it costs me between 7 and 12 quid an hour (depending on exact case). Obviously this is skewed by how good London public transport is, but of course I'd have trusted Corbyn Labour to sort that out for everyone else too. * Yes I know I don't technically "need" a motorbike either, certainly not the one I have compared to a smaller-capacity one, but we can start casting out the moto in my eye (geddit????) after we sort out the beam of private car ownership.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2020 13:28
|
|
|
Miftan posted:gently caress offffff you poo poo The only people engaging with Breath Ray are telling them to gently caress off and it's actually way worse than their posting.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2020 16:51
|
|
|
Okay, a very, very tentative dip of my toe in the water here - would you (the generic you) be interested in a podcast that was a self-guided walking tour? Sort of like the little player things they give you in museums, but, you know, for out on the street? Or is this a niche that's already been filled? The only things I can find are like conventional paper tour guides that have been chopped up and digitised (sometimes integrated into a not-at-all dodgy app). The idea i have in mind is basically an hour or so walk (paced out for a relatively slow walking pace) with specific waypoints where the history or interesting trivia was pointed out, then directions to the next waypoint and general chat - about what you've just seen, where you're walking, what you're about to see, etc - until that point. Obviously there's quite a few potential hurdles there (and TBH I think an app with some sort of GPS integration might be the best way of doing it instead of just an MP3 just because of the massive possible variations in walking speed and an unwillingness to send people careening off into Crack Alley instead of to the interesting Georgian water fountain) but as a general principle, what do people think?
|
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2020 21:09
|
|
|
Jaeluni Asjil posted:There are some apps around that do self-guided walking tours of London. I haven't used any of them so no idea if they are any good or how they match up with your idea! Yeah, those are the not-at-all-dodgy ones I was talking about - the first one is Freemium and you have to pay for each tour (which is just a text file they run through google speech engine), the second one just reads out stuff based on your location and has a pretty eye-watering permissions list: quote:This app has access to: which means it definitely has one of the shittier ad engines integrated to it even if you do deny it all those permissions. Also I have the feeling both of them (and apps on the stores generally) probably have a content policy rather more restrictive than "chuck an MP3 up somewhere".
|
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2020 21:33
|
|
|
Bobby Deluxe posted:I think there's a way to save routes on google maps and then link to them, which means you could put a clickable route in the description. Alas that's now dead, which is a pity because they killed it as I was halfway through a loving *epic* post on my blog about Mile End Road that relied pretty heavily on that functionality. You can still do a shareable custom map layer for Google Maps the website, but not for Google Maps the app, but neither allow you to tie it to a route the way you used to. Obviously the user can click each thing in turn, but that's pretty much worse than just printing stuff out IMO.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2020 21:37
|
|
|
Guavanaut posted:I want the version that tells me where I can buy crack and then tells me about the interesting Georgian water fountain while I'm high. Actually... that's not that bad an idea. I've been trying to think how it could be done so it wasn't just one voice going on - I know it's hackneyed but the "one person explaining something to someone else" format is one I actually like - and was thinking that either a Google Earth timeline vid (assuming they've not killed *that* functionality for no loving reason as well) or something like the 360-video-converted-to-flat thing that I did here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF30jf1KkJU would be a handy guide track for that, so the person/people I'm talking to can see what I'm talking about, but there's no reason at all it couldn't be released in both formats.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2020 21:46
|
|
|
Red Oktober posted:If you make a route and click the ‘share’ function from the app you can send it to someone, which means that you can click that link to have a version yourself. It then promptly resets itself the moment you step foot a millimetre off the route (or your GPS farts) and at random will either delete all the waypoints and direct you to the end, or direct you back to the start of the route to start again. This is on top of the normal Google fun of deciding that you haven't arrived somewhere because you weren't at the exact to-the-metre location, so endlessly routing you in circles around and around the place you're supposed to be - e.g. this 22 minute catastrofuck where it managed to route me around the Camden one-way system three times, with a random detour all the way back to Belsize Park, because the GPS coordinates for the motorcycle parking bay I was going for were very slightly off so it never told me to turn off for it:  Google's ability to remove useful functionality for literally no reason is positively Tory at times.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2020 22:32
|
|
|
happyhippy posted:1. Self preservation, and to angle it early that it's everything being the EU's fault instead. All along the UK has been trying to 'square the circle', an impossible set of demands that are contradictory. What would the situation be if we *did* keep the NI/ROI border open, and not do any checks on stuff crossing the Irish Sea? Would Ireland be forced to "close" the border by the terms of their EU treaty commitments?
|
|
#
¿
Sep 8, 2020 00:05
|
|
|
Lady Demelza posted:Yes. Borders have two sides, and just because we choose not to check anything on our side, doesn't mean the Irish wouldn't. The government have already admitted the border controls won't be ready for January, regardless of wherther they're at the ROI/NI border or in the Irish Sea, so they're really forcing Ireland to take responsibility. The Irish would be within their rights to check not just stuff coming *into* Ireland (and thus potentially the rest of the EU) for quality, but also stuff being exported *out* of Ireland and into NI/rest of GB. I'm thinking more of the Good Friday Agreement commitment to keep the border open - checks, even if they're cursory "Is this milk or is it white lead paint?" glances at the border, are a breach of the GFA, which was the whole point of all of the finagling and chest-thumping over the last few years. I wonder if the Big Brains are thinking "Hmm, what if we made the Irish the bad guys breaking the treaty and not us?"
|
|
#
¿
Sep 8, 2020 01:34
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/LastQuake/status/1303256555220086785
|
|
#
¿
Sep 8, 2020 13:09
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/status/1265375154055544832/photo/1 Huh, so they did have the same idea as I did of testing blood donors for covid antibodies to give a baseline picture of the infection rate. Slightly baffled as to why they haven't continued it on past Week 22 (end of May) or if they have why they're not published the numbers.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 8, 2020 20:01
|
|
|
thespaceinvader posted:I... assume they have a way of stopping you getting COVID from blood donated by someone who had it right? Or is it not transmissible that way? Apparently it can't be transmitted via blood which doesn't make a huge amount of sense to me but there's cleverer people than me that might be able to weigh in on why - maybe some kind of life cycle thing? They're very interested to find out if you've got it at the time of donation but obviously that's about not transmitting it to the staff and other donors, and also interested if you might have had it in the past because of the possiblity of using your plasma with all its lovely antibodies to treat patients (although I've not heard anything more about this lately - presumably there are other treatments with less risk/availability bottlenecks now?)
|
|
#
¿
Sep 8, 2020 23:22
|
|
|
Miftan posted:They're probably right in that you get it off one person at work/the pub and immediately give it to everyone you live with because of the very close proximity (but then they also give it to someone at work). YOU don't infect people at work/the pub because someone else already did. But not going to work/the pub is how you break the transmission chain, unless the govt wanna spring for covid hotels like China. That sounds like it'll hurt GDP, much better to stop people transmitting it at home by banning going home. Conveniently your employer can deduct your rent for the 1947 Army surplus sleeping bag under your desk directly from your pay!
|
|
#
¿
Sep 9, 2020 07:36
|
|
|
crispix posted:I believe when government ministers hold them they are called bungabunga parties If anybody needs a catsnipe in future feel free to use this: https://twitter.com/rmldraws/status/1301708884294295552
|
|
#
¿
Sep 9, 2020 08:36
|
|
|
Nothingtoseehere posted:Yea this isn't any proof there's something wrong with the vaccine - it might be unrelated, might only be a risk to those with certain other conditions, might be a 1/100,000 event that doesn't make the vaccine useless - and has no bearing on it's effectiveness. You just can't continue to inject people with it till you know the answers to those questions, which is why vaccine trials take time. According to the news this morning this isn't even the first time the trial has been paused, and the expert (who might admittedly have been a pharma sales rep, it was fair and balanced Radio 4 after all) said this was just a thing that happens, and noted that it's almost always something completely unrelated or at least very unlikely to be related, and that the delays for this sort of thing are factored into the timetable for testing. Which, if true, makes you wonder why this got so much publicity and would (in a world where actions had consequences) might lead people to investigate any large movements in AstraZeneca's shares over the last few days (or those of their competitors, for that matter)
|
|
#
¿
Sep 9, 2020 15:26
|
|
|
SpicePro posted:Or spotted dick Mincemeat.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 9, 2020 16:07
|
|
|
Guavanaut posted:Avocado toast could be a drink for lawyers or a Latin American dish involving testes. I'll look past the gulags, we should have nuked the Soviets for what they did to Laika. At least the septics *tried*, and mostly succeeded, to get the monkeys back.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 9, 2020 16:09
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:It took me until I was about twenty eight before I realised mince pies did not have minced beef in them. It's the fact that they specify "meat" for the thing with no meat, and omit it for the things that do. English is a very stupid language.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 9, 2020 16:09
|
|
|
Danger - Octopus! posted:Going into a bakery like Greggs in Scotland and asking for a mince pie near Christmas usually results in getting asked if you want a meat or a sweet one. Just don't ask for sweetmeats.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 9, 2020 17:43
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/lincnotfound/status/1303519122907688961 Who was worrying about taking their mask off to eat earlier?
|
|
#
¿
Sep 9, 2020 18:26
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 17:42 |
|
|
Jaeluni Asjil posted:Wouldn't that be a haggis pie? It's the bits the Scots won't put in a haggis and the English won't put in a pie, but the French will base an entire meal around.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 9, 2020 18:27
|
|