Around 2-and-a-half miles from home...

These radial routes take me in all directions.  Monday I was by Tower Bridge, where there was a lot of diggery-pokery going on and the shore beneath the Tower of London.  Surprising that it's possible to dig up artefacts at such a shallow depth in the heart of London.  I would have thought that they'd all have been whisked away  many years ago.

Wednesday I was over by the Excell centre where this fairly well-known faded sign is (Junction of Boxley Street/North Woolwich Road).  I wonder whether the old telephone exchange was ALBany or ALBion. 

And today I was completely in the opposite direction near Horniman's Museum.  I was quite impressed to see a road sign for an 18% incline - I didn't know gradients got that big in South East London.  But I resisted to urge to take a picture because I was already at the top of the hill and downhill at 18% represents no challenge.  I'm going to have to come at it from the other side.  (There was no way if I'd gone down that I'd have managed to turn around and go back up again.)  Still, down the west side of the hill I passed this sign that I've been meaning to snap.  It doesn't really need much information because it tells you pretty much where and what it is...

Does the fact that it's no longer a Post Office make it a post-Post Office?

Curiosycles...

Spotted at Tescos early this bank holiday Monday after a beautifully car-free morning ride (but, my, was it cold!)...

This bike certainly wasn't built for speed, with its big road-hugging motor cycle tyres and its absence of gears, and neither was it built for doing the shopping - no baskets or pannier racks - yet shopping is what its owner appears to have been doing.  I particularly like its straight-V handlebars.

Though they have been making odd-looking bikes for quite some time.  Here's one with an early suspension system that I have had lying around on my hard drive for a while

The outer rim is sprung, and it would apparently have worked like serial shock absorbers as the wheels went round.  I was surprised to see a penny-farthing with drop handlebars.

(I would say where I found this photo but I can't remember apart from the fact that it was in a bike museum somewhere in the Netherlands.  Or was it Denmark?)

And when it comes to complicated-looking engineering, how about the bike park at Silkmills?  I still haven't quite worked out how this thing works - how do you get your bike onto the upper level? Note that the resident cyclists don't seem to be using the 2nd tier. But it's got to be the  most fiendish bike park I've ever seen.

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Just because I happened to be passing with a camera, here's the Ladywell ghost sign.  There is a better photo of it on the ghostsigns.co.uk site, taken I believe by Caroline of Caroline's Miscellany.  Bolton Corner, where Ladywell Road reached the north end of Rushey Green.  Bolton & Co also had a shop on The Pavement, Ladywell.  And I don't know where that might be, or have been - presumably down by the station.

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

From Chemist to Pharmacy

An old sign that I saw yesterday in Nunhead...reminded me that Chemists, or Dispensing Chemists, no longer call themselves Chemists. I'm not quite sure if it happened all at once or slowly over a period of time any self-respecting chemist is now a pharmacist. This sign - on Evelina Road at the top of St Mary's Road, SE15 - Green(-e or -es?) Chemist had been established over 50 years when it was painted. Today it calls itself a Pharmacy. No change in use over the years, but a subtle change in terminology. Perhaps it avoids moments of temporary confusion at dinner parties when a dispensing chemist gets introduced as a chemist and the intellectual guest starts asking questions about the periodic table. Perhaps it simply sounds more formal - the medical profession are a little prone to choosing the most imposing title they can. I had an unresolved kidney problem, but I didn't get referred to a kidney doctor, nor even a renalogist (which I would have understood). No, it had to be a nephrologist - a title very few punters will readily grasp.

The Bakery photo in yesterday's post, became a Duncan's Chemist, now it too is a Pharmacy.
Meanwhile, back to Nunhead. Green's chemist-cum-pharmacy has another sign painted up over its entrance.
The end of ''Nunhead'' is still visible, as is the postcode, SE15, down on the bottom right. It seems to read ''Nunhead nr St....'' and I thought perhaps it could have been the nearby St Mary's. But, because there is an overlay of different writing - for example, the word ''OFFICE'' is legible on the lower level and the ST seems just a little too big, I'm inclined to think it was simply ''ST'' for Street. What appears to be a B at the start of the second line, could quite conceivably be a P - was it once, a Post Office? All in all, the still-discernible letters seem to give an obviously false message:

NUNHEAD NR STABUT
BXOFFICEA SE15

Faded New Cross

I seem to have been avoiding New Cross on my wanderings. I think this is mostly because it's so unfriendly to cyclists. But I did notice the other day that there were a lot of faded wall adverts along New Cross Road and the Old Kent Road.

I don't recall ever having noticed this one before:Clutton(?) Swan & Co, Artistic Ticket Writers. It's behind the Amersham Arms in Amersham Road.

Just opposite the Bryant and May safety matches advert in Alpha Road, at the end of Mornington Road, there's another one peering out from under a couple of J C Decaux hoardings:From underneath the competing Telecom adverts the words ''The finest the...'' are visible and the original advert appears to continue upwards almost to the top of the Vodafone boards.

Further on towards Peckham, I noticed that wall adverts seemed to come in pairs of sites, like the Bryant and May/The finest the...'' ones, over the road from each other. Just before New Cross Road changes into the Old Kent Road, there's a fairly recent undertakers sign:
To judge by the Google street view, this is only visible in winter when the trees just in front of it are leafless. And just over the road, there's this one:
''Nestlé Milk, rich in cream.'' And underneath that, are the traces of a previous Bryant and May advert. Maybe there's also a suggestion of a third advert, starting with an ornate outline of the letter R, which starts just before the N of Nestlé and and continues - beyond my deciphering powers until it finishes with an S just after the final letter of Nestlé. ''Redfern's?'' is my best shot, whoever they might have been.

Some of them are even harder to work out. This one, just opposite New Cross Gate station may as well have been written for the Enigma code.I fancy I can make out the words ''Film Cinema'' in the second line down, and also the word ''TOWER'' in large capitals at the bottom. But there again, the word after TOWER appears to say ''scream'' and that makes absolutely no sense at all.

Using the ''now you've stopped to take a photo, look the opposite way'' theory - I can imagine the signwriters also thinking, ''now we've stopped, let's see if they might be interested over the road'' - there's this:Again there's a degree of overpainting and I can barely make anything out apart from ''orders promptly'' down by the graffiti.

Finally, here are a couple of indecipherables:

Greenwich High Road, next to the Prince of Wales Pub, latterly the St Christopher's Inn, super-latterly Belusha's, there's a chemist which was a bakery at one time. The Greenwich Phantom has a photo of an advert for Justice Pies. What I only recently noticed was that up top the word ''bakery'' is still visible. The name though is beyond me.
And down alongisde the Sainsbury's in New Cross, at the corner of Hart's Lane and Hatcham Park Road, there's this. Though the lower word is not legible from the photo, when you're up close, it seems to read ''Corn''. But what words that end in -OUS could the first word be?