At least one 53 bus has aircon!
Categories: uncategorized
Tags: london southlondon
Date: 07 July 2009 01:22:51
I've been walking round the Peckham Triangle in the last few weeks. That is the area bounded by Old Kent Road, Walworth Road/Camberwell Road, and Peckham Road/Peckham High Street/Queen's Road that my mate Dave used to call "Barad Dur" back in the 1980s because of the view of the Gloucester Grove slab blocks from Burgess park. In those days about a kilometre of brick-clad slabs, connected by round towers at the corners, like a curtain wall defending North Peckham from Walworth.
Most of that's gone now, but about half of the slabs are still there, much cleaned up:
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No long walks just four or five strolls of an hour or so each on different days, taking a few pictures mostly of churches and blocks of flats, seeing how things have changed. Some of the pictues are on the Flickr linked from here. There will be more. Basically I just break my journey home somewhere in the area, walk a bit, then get on another bus. And - oh glory! - that was how I found that at lest one 53 bus has airconditioning upstairs. I hardly wanted to get off it. Let us all praise Scania!
Sunday's walk took me right by Lakanal on the Sceaux Estate, in which six people had been killed in a fire the day before. I could still smell the fire - house fires have a distinctive smell I might never forget. You could see how the fire went along the corridors and out the windows at the end, which I imagine is how the people got trapped.
They were calling them "tower blocks" on the radio on Monday morning, which conjours up the wrong idea in most people's minds. These are not point blocks they are slab blocks. "Streets in the sky" as they used to say, with flats opening up onto internal corridors. I've never been inside any of these blocks, though I have stayed with friends in vaguely similar buildings on the Pepys estate in Deptford and Doddington in Battersea (before they were done up) I think they are two-story flats with more than one internal entrance each.
From the outside it looks as if there are seven or eight flats in a row but only one stairwell or liftshaft. So its not obvious how you could escape if the fire was between you and the stairs. There was a smug patronising architect on the radio this morning blaming the residents for not escaping fast enough. He didn't seem to get the point that the fire spread up and down so even if you had two entrances to your flat both accessible corridors might be blocked by fire.
I didn't take any close-ups of the burned building, it felt a little ghoulish. Also I'm knackered & not really into getting all the URLs and re-arranging them onto the page. So the pictures can stay on Flickr for a bit longer.
Though I did take one of it seen through a gap between buildings on Peckham Road just to show how close it is to the Town Hall - the counil offices and the Art College back right on to the estate:
Whatever else they can be accused of, they certainly knew what these flats were like because they look at them every day out of their office windows.