People in free papers shouldn’t draw maps

OK, so this particular spot is only going to appeal to the London transport buffs amongst you, but I thought it was quite a good example of what happens when media outlets cut their journalism and research budgets to the bone.

There’s been a proposal doing the rounds for some while for a radical re-configuring of the way that the Circle and Hammersmith & City lines work – having lots of trains on varying routes conflicting at lots of flat junctions doesn’t make for a reliable or efficient service, as anyone who has ever waited for a Circle Line train will know. The erstwhile London Connections blog reported in July that the decision had been made for the re-configuration to go ahead, by 2012 at the very latest. The proposal is that trains will start at Hammersmith, head up what is now the Hammersmith & City Line via Ladbroke Grove, joining the Circle

Get back to your sink estates, serfs!

Highgate - not for the likes of you

The newspapers of the past couple of days have carried some interesting headlines, of the type I wasn’t sure I’d ever see: ‘Top bankers tumble as state steps in’ on this morning’s Financial Times was a particular example. One paper, however, has decided to take a different tack: in the week when it suddenly became fashionable to bash the obscenely rich, The Evening Standard has decided that now is the perfect time to…er…bash council house tenants. Yesterday, the day of possibly the greatest sea-change in the British financial system for at least eleven years and probably much longer, the Standard’s billboards across London instead carried the headline ‘London’s £2m council house’.

This particular type of story looks like it might be developing into a trend for the Standard – they recently got Tory-run Ealing Council to summarily sack three temporary staff who were about to receive the rights that go with a permanent contract in order to appease the paper’s tabloidesque rage that a seven-person family was housed in a seven-bedroom house by the Council, in a nice area of Acton. Of course, the key issue for the Standard, never quite explicitly stated but happily mentioned at every opportunity, was that the family in question were Afghan refugees who were in receipt of benefits. By constantly describing just how well-off and desirable this particular area of Acton is, the paper’s underlying message was that such a family simply had no place in this sort of neighbourhood.

Having read through that particular story, it is possible that something had gone slightly wrong with