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I hope the 18 year old of today has somewhere as grotty, decrepit & awesome to hang out a those dirty arches & the gentrification hasn’t ruined their formative experiences.
May they find somewhere for sweat to drip off the ceiling & to get seven shades of fucked up in the city as we did back then.

Considering how many weekends I spent in the arches under these railway lines off my nut, it’s strange to have not been back here for the best part of a decade and 90% of it having been erased as it existed. But its current version is way more useful to me today than before.

Had flashbacks to the vanished escalators up form the colonnade - themselves quite new compared to the decrepit version I first remember now replaced by little more than a shopping mall, then out in to the vast concourse, through ticket gates and up an escalator to the new platforms.

Very aware walking through it was different and part of it was a club I got far too fucked up in a couple decades ago - part of me felt disappointment at the loss of the dirty dingy club that gave me so much joy, most of me was happy to just catch my train to the airport on time.

Weird thing about living in an ever changing city - sometimes something changes & you miss it happening, then don’t experience it for years later, but when you do it just works and was like it was always there as it is now.
Case in point 2 weeks ago was London Bridge station.

I’m will never tire of people being confused that I’m from the UK.
Tonight I’ve had an American think I was Australian, a Filipino think I was American and a Brazilian ask me if I was Portuguese?!?!?
Unlocking whole new levels of mid-Atlantic over here.

Alright room service and the rooftop bar both get a 10/10 so far.
Like I used to be weirdly scared of ordering room service - mostly because of the prices, but holy shit getting a steak delivered to your bed?
This shot makes me I understand why celebrities lived and died in hotels back in the day.

Decided not to fly home this weekend because I’m away again next week anyway.

Expectation: Exploring cool bars and roaming the city…

Reality: Bed rot and room service.

Honestly not mad about it. I needed this.

Am I the the only weirdo who immediately forgets which hotel room I’m in & just remembers by its location on whatever floor I’m on?

Bartender asked if I wanted to charge to my room & I’m like my guy, if I could remember what that was, sure. Took 3 guesses for us to find it. Been here 3 days…

Sunset though a palm tree shaped window

Came back to the room just in time to catch the sunset out of these weird-ass windows.

Filled bottle with carbonated water, popped it in the side pocket of my bag, went to grab suitcase, came back to a catastrophic failure of the bottle, a soaked backpack and laptop.
Happy Monday, y’all. 🤦🏽‍♂️

Police put two day dispersal order in place over horse and trap racing on A127 The order was put in place at 11am today (Sunday September 28) and will run until 11am on Tuesday (September 30)

Another headline for the 'didn't have that on my 2025 bingo card' list

Oh great, it's spider season again.
On the plus side, I didn't know I could still move that fast in my old age. That big bastard scuttling across the floor was like a shot of adrenaline that's gonna keep me up half the night now...

I never thought the leopards would shoot MY neck

I swear the more batshit-racist immigrant-hating headlines I've read over the last few weeks the deeper this dumb Zack Fox track embeds itself in to my brain.

I think reducing migration numbers dramatically by the time of the next election will. I do t think anyone will remember today’s statement by then so it won’t matter but the numbers will.

Cool, so an easy victory for the government to crow about and spank the Tories with, while also undercutting some of the Reform narrative.
Win/win.

It’s not unreasonable to say net migration hitting almost a million after Brexit was unsustainable & lowering that is a good idea.

But addressing things like dental deserts where services don’t meet need of current populous will do more to assuage concern than any specific migration reduction.

Nah, the Spanish golf resorts have special protected status from ‘eating all that foreign muck’

Yup.
The unwillingness of the media to separate immigration from asylum, while whipping the reform types in to a frenzy is more of a problem than any immigrant.

The economic destruction of Brexit stole more jobs than any immigrant.

Covid fraud by tories impoverished more people than any immigrant.

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills this morning reading all the hot takes.

Maybe I am genuinely out of touch, but the government tackling net migration which 5x’d under the last lot doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. I’d go as far as to say it’s sensible, even to push back to pre-Brexit levels.

Or, ya know we could just look at dumb historical planning like Fairlop Station in the middle of a bunch of fields & say, you know what it’d be a great place to plonk 5,000 homes instead of 18 trains an hour serving only football pitches & a farm shop, & still have acres of green space left over.

Nonsense.
That plot is in Tottenham Hale, next to a tube station, in an area with primary schools closing due to a lack of pupils, next to a retail park and a bunch of brownfield developments which delivered new supermarkets, shops, cafe’s & doctors surgeries already over the past decade already.

Can you explain why you think it’d be a bad thing to explore building on ‘greenbelt’ land, when in London those sites are often not actually green anyway, like this former petrol station.

Why is this worthy of ideological protection from development to residential use?

Very welcome change, it’s ludicrous that for example Fairlop station is surrounded by nothing much but fields, you could slap ~5k homes down there losing nothing of value and still having acres of green space leftover on Fairlop plain.

I look forward to it.

Ah yes, the devastating blow of losing designated green belt sites like this former petrol station in Tottenham.

LOL. No it really doesn’t.
London isn’t full of racist nut jobs thankfully. There’s as much chance of a Reform Mayor of London’s as there is the late Queen being reanimated and going on a zombie rampage through the streets of Windsor.

NGL I kinda dig them, make me feel like a teenager again, I might be about to do a fashion hate crime up in this bish.