please empty your brain below

Fascinating read. Thanks for the effort.

If converted completely to the present tense, paragraph 5 could have been straight out of Crowther & Woods' "Adventure".

Blimey the places you go to in search of "London"!!

I used to live in Hounslow which was west enough for me. You could set your clocks by the arrival of Concorde every night at 18:02 and 22:02 precisely!

"Overheard" - excellent typo! (whining drone of jet engines)

dg writes: Ssh, they'll never know. Ta!

Excellent post - blog entries like this where you explore bits of the capital which I have never heard of are my favourites.

Thanks DG.

I used to hurtle around this roundabout quite frequently on my way from my home and office in East Sussex via the clockwise M25 to the Colnbrook Industrial Estate to reach a perishable goods freight broker, housed in quite the biggest warehouse full of apples, pears and Canadian lobsters (live) that you'll ever see. But I don't go that way any more, since the broker seemed to think that it was ok to shove my consignments in the corner of the warehouse and leave them there for a week (you'd think the word "perishable" would be a clue). I hadn't realised that this was part of Boris's empire - I'm surprised he hasn't visited.

Fascinating.

Posted at 00:04. This suggests the westernmost spot is .4 of one degree west of the meridian

As well as being one of four compass points obviously.

Iain Sinclair would be proud of this piece DG. Thank you.

The Berkshire/Surrey/London/Buckinghamshire intersection is a curious area. From 1965 to 1995, Buckinghamshire and Surrey touched here. Then the bit on both sides of that border formed a new parish, Colnbrook with Poyle to be in Slough in Berkshire. So since then Bucks and Surrey no longer have a boundary, and Berkshire and Greater London touch instead.

(On a more pedantic note, that isn't an Act of Parliament, it's a Statutory Instrument, which is a type of secondary legislation made by minsters and approved of Parliament under a much laxer process than an Act.)

You would never think you were crossing Greater London's westernmost point at Junction 14 of the M25, would you? A fascinating post.

Surrey? I would have said Middlesex surely as it is north of the Thames?

Debs - Middlesex County Council was abolished in 1965 with the creation of Greater London, the GLC and the 32 London Boroughs. Spelthorne district, the remaining part of west Middlesex not included in Greater London, was consequently arrogated to Surrey County Council. Hence older residents of Staines refer to it as being in Middlesex while anyone under 40 usually thinks of it as in Surrey.

I think I need to get out more...

Oh, memories. I used to live in Stanwell Moor 20 years ago. Stuck in the middle of nowhere as a teenager, when the bright lights of Staines beckoned and the last bus left the village at 6pm. Sometimes sitting on the swings in the park at the northern end of the village, you could just make out people in the windows of Jumbo's. As they took the longest to take off and were often still very low over the village. You soon devloped the skill in stalling conversations while a jet roared overhead. The twice daily concorde was always on time and it acted as rather noisy village clock.

I'm pretty sure you don't mean 12 carriageways. There are 12 lanes on four carriageways.












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