Litter

The infection is spreading! The first hire bicycle has appeared in Manor Green Road.

As it happened, more or less the very same day, we read of irate residents of a block of flats near Norbiton Station have taken an angle grinder to one of such bicycles which had been dumped in their car park by people on the way to the station. Apparently it took such direct action to get any action out of Lime.

Yet another case of a company being reluctant to take responsibility for the collateral damage in the public space which results from their activity.

Possibly the building snapped above, although what it started life as is hard to say. More or less opposite the station. Very grand for a house, even for Norbiton. A school of some sort? A home for a gentleman artist?

And at least one of the flats is home to an operation called Aranstruck. To be found at reference 1. And to think that covenants on the deeds of dwellings sometimes used to forbid any sort of trade, other than that of doctor or dentist, for some reason exempt. Also exempt, as I recall, from certain restrictions on domestic building after the second world war. Restrictions down to the shortage of building materials.

Google tells me that the building used to be owned by the council and that the ground floor used to be the Register Office. But it does not tell me what it was before that. A house that got too grand for the times? See reference 2.

PS: stop press: we managed to break through to a score of more than 600 in this afternoon's game of Scrabble, the first time since April, as noticed at reference 3. A respectable combined score of 608, only flawed in this occasion my my losing by more than 40 points. Helped along by the move from the elderly OED to the relatively new Longmans dictionary, so 'moo' is not marked as slang and 'axil' is present. I might also say that while 'zo' was marked as dialect in OED, and should have been excluded, it is present in Longmans as a sort of Tibetan cow, so that way of getting rid of otherwise awkward 'z's stands.

References

Reference 1: http://aranstruct.com/.

Reference 2: https://moderngov.kingston.gov.uk/documents/s55761/35%20Coombe%20Road%20Report.pdf.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/04/a-flawed-victory.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/hammond.html. The arrival of Longmans.