Friday 30 April 2010

More faded London and cycle lanes

Life has taken me up to Whitechapel a couple of times in the last week.  There is a cluster of fascinating buildings around the Royal London Hospital, many of which ended up being swallowed up by the hospital over a very long period.  This hospital appears to have had a talent for expanding since very long ago.  The brand new all-in-one building to the east has been conceived to capture it and put it all in the same place and must be due to open shortly.  But I doubt whether the hospital has it in its genes to stay put for any period of time.

This old wall sign is on one of the buildings incorporated into the hospital and I wonder what it said and how long ago it was painted.  My best guess for the text: JUVENILE CLOTHIER, though I can't make out the arched word at the top beyond an H to start with and an S to finish.  As for its age, well...very old.

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Down by Limehouse basin there's a very odd cycle lane.  They've dispensed with the normal traffic to the left principle, made it one way and put a contra-flow cycle path on the wrong side of the road.  I'll now have to go back and try to figure out why they've done it like that.  It is confusing - I ended up cycling towards an oncoming cyclist in the same lane.  I was correctly on the wrong side of the road, the oncoming cyclist was incorrectly on the right side.  So I veered over to the left which in nearly all situations would have been correct but it meant going out head first into oncoming one way traffic.

The important thing with such eccentric road layouts is that they are signed very very clearly.  Though how you're supposed to cycle along this path is a bit of a mystery...

Presumably the bins are there for putting broken bikes into

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