London Bridge

A trip to London was indicated at the beginning of the month to stock up on cheese against a week in the wilds of Dartmoor, a place which has a lot going for it, but where supplies of decent cheese are very unreliable.

A new departure was the decision to take a train to London Bridge rather than to Waterloo, the plan being to cycle back from London Bridge to Vauxhall, possibly using something called Cycling Superhighway No.7.

With the snap above giving the general idea of the Superhighway network, even if it is not much use for navigation. I have failed to find out why No.3 and No.7 are coloured red, rather than blue, a colour scheme which looks to be conserved across most of the maps on offer. Notwithstanding.  No.7 looked to run from Southwark Bridge Road to Albert Square which was promising.

The northern stretch at least is the northern end of the A3.

But on the way, on the train, which was fast from Croydon, we passed what looked like a large incinerator. A helpful map provided by a group which appears to campaign against incineration generally, revealed that the place in question was probably SELCHP, for the south east London combined heat and power operation, opened in 1994 by no less a luminary than the heir to the throne. I like the way that incinerator and incineration have been left out of the name of the place. See reference 1 for the campaign, reference 2 for the incinerator.

With a neat line of dustcarts queueing up to get in on the day that I passed by. 

There was then an idle wonder about the distinctive silhouettes of these places, with this one reminding me of the one that there used to be on the Marsh Barton industrial estate, to the south of Exeter on, what was the west bank of the River Exe, presumably at one time marshy and fairly useless. A secondary wonder being the origin of the word silhouette which turns out to be the name of one of Louis XIV's Ministers of Finance, Étienne de Silhouette, notorious for trying to extract money from the rich to pay for his master incessant wars. See reference 4.

And so to Borough Market, which seemed much bigger and busier when I went in from London Bridge, rather than from Brindisa Corner, by the Southwark Tavern.

Then at the cheese shop I was able to admire the pleasantly Heath Robinson contraption for providing humidification, a contraption involving a wooden barrel and a large rose shower head which looked very like our own.

The Superhighway worked out very well, at least for me on a Bullingdon. Clearly marked in blue on the road, despite being marked in red on the map. Lots of interesting old buildings, including fire stations, town halls and public houses, mostly repurposed.

One supposes that the stable stuck onto the side of a house, snapped above, would not have been allowed more recently, although such a thing might be allowed again now, with the dismantling of much of the planning system.

Lunching pigeons, with the Bullingdon stand in South Lambeth Road visible top left. Lunching on what looked like the remains of a rice based ready meal.

And so to the Estrela where I lunched of some rather good lumps of beef, perhaps two inches by one inch by one inch, suspended on a large skewer. No bits of vegetable on the skewer, no red goo on the meat. Au naturel. Served with rice and salad. Very good it was too, with the chef having got the medium rare just right for me. Taken with a drop of vinho verde - in the course of choosing which I noticed a significant hike in wine prices since my last visit, perhaps a month or so previously. I guess we just have to pay up if we want these places to keep going after what must have been a rough couple of years - with more to come.

Followed by a slice of almond tart. Yellow sponge below, glazed almonds above. Also rather good. Taken with a drop of aguardiente.

Warm enough to sit outside, sporting my sun hat, common enough in Surrey and Surrey flavoured beach resorts, but probably uncommon in Vauxhall. The sort of thing turned up by Bing above, known to people who care about their clothes as a bucket hat. I should add that mine is not from Karrimor or any other brand that you might have heard of. 

What used to be the Wheatsheaf. In its current form, the place where I learned about slow roasting oxtail rather than boiling it.

It being local election day, I wondered whether all the flat dwellers now in and around Vauxhall were going to disturb the presently solid Labour vote. I decided that I had not got a clue, confused by the surprisingly lefty tone of the Financial Times. There was also the thought that many of them will either be students or foreigners, who may not bother to vote, even if they are eligible. Not got a clue about that either.

Given that I was on an Epsom train, passed up on the Half Way House on this occasion. 

Large car park at Ewell West about half full at 15:30. So plenty of its before-the-plague customers are still spending quality time at home.

And so home, where I was able to compensate for missing out on the Half Way House.

PS: perusal of the Internet suggests that the incinerator in Exeter that I knew has been decommissioned and replaced by a new facility a little to the south. A replacement which involved a great deal of green angst and a collapsed proposal to provide some district heating, apparently because the housing developers involved objected to the increased up-front costs. A replacement which appears to generate rather than consume energy. All terribly complicated with one comment being: '... The councils had promoted the [district heating] scheme on the basis it would reduce carbon emissions from the new homes by up to 2,500 tonnes of CO2 equivalent each year, compared with every home instead using gas-fired domestic boilers. This figure does not, however, account for the carbon emissions generated by the waste incinerator, which were nearly 51,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year in 2018 according to the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, making the Marsh Barton facility the city’s largest single source of carbon emissions...'.

References

Reference 1: https://ukwin.org.uk/incinerators/.

Reference 2: https://www.selchp.com/.

Reference 3: https://www.cobaltenergy.co.uk/our-projects/exeter-efw/.

Reference 4: https://www.geriwalton.com/silhouettes-etienne-de-silhouette/.