Wartime London on Google Earth

I spend far too much time in Google Earth. I look at where I've been and where I'd like to go. I look at where I grew up and where I live now. I follow roads, rivers, canals and railway lines. I even collate libraries of placemarks of great places I visited abroad, and send them to friends who ask me for recommendations of where to stay/eat/drink/party/relax in those far flung places.

My name is Another London Blogger, and I'm a Googleearthaholic.

One thing Google introduced in one of the last updates was the ability to go back in time, imagery wise you'll understand. This was moderately cool, for example I could go back from 2008 to 2003 for the imagery of where I grew up, and see how much of the local wood has been chopped down, how many acres of hop gardens we've lost recently. Yes, it was quite depressing, but interesting nonetheless.

Now though, there is a far better option available to us for historical viewing. In London, you can rewind the clock to 1945. Not satellite imagery of course but pictures from an end-of-the-war aerial photographic survey. This is fascinating. It is brilliant, and it's already cost me several hours. For all those buildings you suspected were built in the place of bomb sites, you can now see the actual bomb crater.

Less morbidly, you can see the dying days of our city's industrial past - the docklands that were such a German bomb-magnet are, in these pictures, actual docklands, not a glass-and-steel agglomeration of shagpads and highrise office blocks called "Docklands". And what's that in White City, where the BBC is now? It's the Olympic Stadium! The actual Olympic Stadium, from the 1908 Summer Games. We see parks still "under the plough" as giant Dig For Victory allotments along with now-vanished infrastructure such as Holborn Viaduct station and myriad gasometers.

The pictures take a little getting used to, but perseverence here really pays off. Generally, white space is a bomb site, though there also clouds across some of the areas! Have a go!

Phony Figures?

An interesting piece from BBC London news has appeared in the Video and Audio section of the BBC News website today.

If you don't have time to watch the video, it basically makes the point that TfL's official performance figures do not include the time lost to upgrade work. This means that while in reality the Jubilee line has only run something like 78% of the trains it should have run were it not closed most weekends, the TfL performance figure says that he Jubilee line ran 95% of services.

There is a short piece in the film by Tony Travers of LSE who is an impressive academic on the subject of local government - I used his publications with frightening regularity for my own MA. He makes the point that London Underground sees things from its own point of view, which is that the railway is an engineering concern, and neglects to think of how the passengers are affected by all this work.

If Tony can find any organisation in the world that doesn't see things from its own particular point of view, I'll give him a hat. In some ways he is right of course, engineering concerns hold a great deal of sway in LU, but there are a couple reasons why I think this criticism of those performance figures is unfair.

The main reason is that TfL is not trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes here. The performance figures are actually called the Scheduled Train Kilometers. Clearly, this only covers the scheduled services. So, if something unplanned happens to close down the railway and wrecks a normal day, like one of the failed trains we're hearing so much of on the Jubilee, this negatively affects that measure. But the engineering works, which are planned in advance, do not affect the figures because the number of km run is scheduled to be lower or sometimes of course, zero.

As a sub-element to this, TfL also publishes the figures covering the amount of disruption the upgrades closures cause and supply these raw data to organisations like London First, who then monetise it and tell everyone how much in pounds sterling the closures cost, so it's not as if TfL say "look everyone, the Jubilee line is so fantastic that 95% of all trains run, we're amazing and the line is never closed".

Finally though, this is an internal performance measure. One of many, believe you me. If you thought the NHS and education were excessively target driven, you should try working at London Underground. It makes sense to measure the number of scheduled kms you run because it shows how effective you are at running the day-to-day services. If the figure is low, it shows that at the first sign of trouble the trains management teams start to cancel and turn trains short rather than try to fix the problem, and that kind of inept incident management is something that needs to be flagged up and fixed. It also makes sense to measure how much disruption you cause due to engineering works, and we do that too. All of this data is then collated and our performance is measured on that as a whole. The statistics for how badly the upgrades have been managed are out there and certainly should be discussed, but the Scheduled Train km measure is for something entirely different.

Picking one statistic out of the bunch and using it for something that it is explicitly not designed to be used for is one of the oldest tricks in the journalistic book. It's what I'd expect from local media, but it's a shame someone like Tony Travers was foolish enough or that eager for facetime on TV to appear on the piece.

Finally though, the upgrades need to happen. Sorry to harp on about it, but it's true. Even the slash and burn Coalition Government have looked at the business cases for the upgrades and at the audit reports of TfL and London Underground and guaranteed that every penny for the upgrades will be protected. How many public bodies can say that?

Guerrilla Marketing

There is barely a single surface on the Underground that is not smothered in advertising. From the giant posters looking at you from across the track in the deep Tube stations to the little cardboard rectangles above your seat via the ripped off promotional front cover of this evening's Standard, nowhere on the system is safe from people trying to sell us stuff. And why not? After all, over half the world's population travels on the Tube every year. (Of course, that's nonsense. First of all, it's not individuals, it's journeys. Secondly, it's not just the Tube, it's all TfL modes of transport. But hey, it made a good headline)

It's not just advertising for products that makes it to these hallowed advertising spots though you know. Sometimes people are trying to change our opinions rather than change our spending habits. Nor is it just paid for ads that end up in your eye line. Oh no.

It started with the odd sticker, aping London Underground's style of notice with messages such as "No talking during rush hour". Now though, someone has gone to a new level. Two drivers told me on Tuesday that they had seen some above-seat advertising that, at first, they had just walked past. Then they noticed swear words, and realised that something was not as it seemed!

It turns out that some trains on our line have had the above-seat advertising changed to a leftie rant about the Coalition government. This was no half-arsed effort either, entire cars have had all their advertising slots changed to this message! I love the fact that someone has gone to the effort of measuring the adverts and making their own version, then changing them when no-one's looking.

When do they do it? At the dead of night? Or, is it one of our drivers? They don't have much time in sidings all alone, but occasionally they have just enough to change a whole car. I haven't seen this yet, though I haven't been looking that hard yet. If anyone sees one of these ranty adverts, take a picture and let me know!