beatnic - just wondering

Thanks to my neighbour John for pointing me towards Charles Booth’s Inquiry into the life and labour of the people in London, 1886-1903 (available online thanks to an award-winning project run by the LSE Library in 2002).

It’s a fantastic catalogue of observations, including comments on leisure, migration, employment of women, poverty, class, crime, public houses, prostitution, servants and the police force.

Here are the “General Remarks” at the end of Walk 53, the entry for the part of East Dulwich where I live:

This walk completed the East Dulwich section so far as the area included in the Paris map is concerned. As a whole East Dulwich may be described as a working class district with a fringe of middle class on each side. This is emphasised by contrast with West Dulwich which is entirely middle class. All the West Dulwich constables live in East Dulwich said Jones. They cannot get accommodation in their own district.

Very little crime in the district, practically none of a serious character. The number of charges is small and they mostly arise out of drink. Thinks the public houses are fairly well conducted and there is very little, if any, collusion between the police and publicans - certainly not in East Dulwich. He would not like his Inspector to know he drank whilst on duty for £20, nor would he like to be seen entering a public house. The Supt is very sharp upon men for this “and rightly so”. One man lost his pension a while ago.

Very little prostitution. Only place where prostitutes live on the ground is Rye Buildings. Some women from the Borough come to Peckham Rye. Very low class but not many of them.

PD Jones has a very good knowledge of East Dulwich and is thoroughly reliable there. Did not know Peckham and Denmark Hill so well and in this district his opinion is not so good.

George Arkell with PC ‘Taffy’ Jones
Friday 8th December 1899

You can see scans of the original notes and sketches for this walk here.

Several times recently I’ve been describing walks and runs to people and thought wouldn’t it be great to be able to plot them out on the amazing Google maps service.

It already does a great job with routes from A to B (say East Dulwich to Marylebone High Street - my current daily bicycle commute).

Imagine being able to put a shape (circle, say) on to a map and then drag its edges to particular co-ordinates or landmarks until you’ve mapped out your route.

Then you could save this route and send it as a link to someone or link to it from your website.

I was just wondering if anyone has any info on anything like this being developed anywhere?

Thanks to John Watson who’s behind flagrant disregard (he’s got some other flickr stuff there too)

I’ve just spent 10 minutes filling in Cameron Marlow’s weblog survey for his phd at MIT

I’m looking forward to seeing his results

…Richard Whitely

Channel 4 afternoons will be a strange place without you

Count down

If you’re looking for somewhere to have a cold beer or a bloody mary in East Dulwich, here’s a useful guide on the Lordship Lane page of the Open Guide to London.

The great thing about the page and the site is that if you have something you want to add or edit you can register and edit the page, as it’s running on a wiki (a collaborative web authoring and editing environment).

If you want to know what the drinking establishments look like I’ve started adding photos to my Flickr site.

The Eaton Arms, a dodgy looking pub opposite the top of Rye Lane in Peckham disappeared in double-quick time early this morning due to some poor scaffolding work.

Last orders

The scaffolding had been erected around the and recently derelicted Cooperative Buildings which has a listed facade and the adjoining pub.

On my cycle journey to work in central London this morning I noticed the police had cordoned off a large part of the area around the pub and the adjoining old Cooperative Buildings.

According to a police support officer the scaffolding gave in to the weight of the pub wall which had collapsed, and it fell across the pavement and in to the road.

Thankfully it sounds like no-one was hurt, but if it had happened a couple of hours later in the morning rush hour there could have been a tragedy.

Time gentlemen please

Think I’ll be giving scaffolding a wide berth wherever possible from now on…

After completing online transactions I often find myself in a cul-de-sac.

There are some notable exceptions, but most sites I’ve used are missing a trick. Often the only options are to return to a previous page or close the window housing the application.

This has always struck me as an ideal moment to let me know what else is available.

Most importantly, tell me I’ve successfully completed the transaction. If it’s repeatable allow me to do it again from here.

Having taken care of that, why not take advantage of that “what next?” moment?

What else is there I might want to do here? I’m not talking cynical marketing ploys here but something that might be genuinely useful to me and enhance my overall experience.

This must be especially important as we move to using smaller handheld devices to access the internet where typing in search terms or web addresses is still very cumbersome.

Offer a couple of (ideally contextually related) interesting choices.

Keep it simple, snappy and easy to follow through.

Life and Times of the EDT, se22 [well spotted mr. price]

The EDT is an impressive landmark pub on the Goose Green in East Dulwich, South London. Minutes from the East Dulwich British Rail Station [10 minutes from London Bridge] - The EDT has a 1st floor restaurant, DJs on the weekends and All the things that make a ‘local’ pub great.

Makes sense to have the blog - keeping events listings and menus up to date and getting comments from punters.

The title of the blog has been - temporarily I guess - updated since I emailed them a postcode change from SW22 to SE22 :)

I haven’t been yet, but I know people who like it.

Apparently they do good pizzas upstairs.

Massive thanks to Ben O’Neill for the superb Technorati tagging plug-in for Wordpress.

I’ve been wanting to use something like this for ages, but my technical ability doesn’t cover php in enough depth yet.

So it was great to find this plug-in which is working a treat and is straightforward to install.

It took me a moment to understand the instruction about “creating a custom tag in my post” until I realised it’s just something I haven’t used before and is not complicated. If you’re looking for this too, you’ll find it in the Advanced section in the Create New Post page.

I’d been trying to use Categories as tags since writing a post about tagging a few months ago but found them too cumbersome as they’re designed to provide more of a rigid organisational structure than tags (well that’s my interpretation anyway).

So now I’m starting to go through my previous entries and tag them. Having done this I’ll take a look at my category structure and decide what to do with that.

FORESTER, C.S. (1899-1966),
Novelist, lived here.
58 Underhill Road, Dulwich, SE22
Southwark 1990 [+]

KARLOFF, BORIS, (alias for) PRATT, William Henry, (1887-1969),
Actor, was born here.
36 Forest Hill Road, East Dulwich, SE22
Southwark 1998 [+]

OLIVER, Percy Lane (1878-1944),
Founder of the first voluntary blood donor service, lived and worked here.
5 Colyton Road, SE22
Southwark 1979 [+]

If you know of any blue plaques in the East Dulwich area please let me know.

I’m going to start collecting photos and details here and in the East Dulwich Flickr Group.

Thanks to Lawrence for the idea.

Get more info on Blue Plaques on the English Heritage site.

…after a great family holiday to the Adriatic coast in northern Italy, including a boat trip to Burano (the island famous for its lace) and Venice

Encouraged by Robert Perkins comment on an earlier posting, I’m thinking about gathering more info on the local area.

I’d like to start collecting interesting tidbits about the past and present of the East Dulwich area and also other peoples stories, memories, links to sites, photos etc.

I’m happy to scan and host photos relevant to this project on my Filckr site - if anyone’s interested the best thing to do is comment and I’ll get in touch.

Also, if anyone’s done anything similar anywhere else and has any advice to offer I’d be very grateful.