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  • London – Kensington and Chelsea (Borough of) – Brompton Cemetery (Richard William Shimes)

    London – Kensington and Chelsea (Borough of) – Brompton Cemetery (Richard William Shimes)

    This grave in Brompton Cemetery commemorates the life of Richard William Shimes, the son of William and Edith Elizabeth Shimes (nee Green), who lived in Chelsea, London. Richard was born in the final quarter of 1918. The 1921 census won’t be released until the beginning of 1922 and Richard doesn’t appear on the 1939 register, perhaps because he was already in the military. Edith appears as a housewife, living at 297 Guinness Buildings in Chelsea with her son Charles who was a gas-fitter and another person whose details have been redacted.

    Richard joined the RAF as an aircraftman and his service number was 534975. He died on 20 March 1941 at the age of 22 and was buried on 28 March 1941.

    And there’s little more story I can find to tell on this one, he’s even listed on one site as one of the few airmen that further information isn’t available on. Until his military records are released, this grave feels just that bit anonymous. Unless I’ve missed something obvious (which is always highly likely).

  • London – Kensington and Chelsea (Borough of) – Earl’s Court Pret

    London – Kensington and Chelsea (Borough of) – Earl’s Court Pret

    I was slightly humoured (it doesn’t take much if I’m being honest) when popping into this Pret this morning, next to Earl’s Court underground. I ordered a spiced pumpkin latte and with some noticeable annoyance, the staff member said they don’t sell that. I ordered something else, but then the next person ordered the same, then the next one and then the next one. One staff member was politely explaining the options, whilst the staff member who served me was busying herself being grumpy at customers.

    The staff member snarled, so customers could hear, at a colleague “I don’t know why people think we sell this”. She seemed to have forgotten that the external poster board and the menu board poster above the counter are both advertising the Pumpkin Spiced Latte. It is the only drink that this Pret store is promoting.

    OK, this isn’t as fascinating as Alan’s Funny Stories (from Alan Partridge, although I diminish that by having to mention that) but I suspect that the staff are fed up with this Pret subscription as the customers ordering from it seem endless. It’ll be interesting to see how Pret proceed with this coffee subscription, their stores (or the ones that I’ve seen) are clearly under some considerable stress from it at the moment. The staff used to be excellent at engaging with customers, but from my experience this week, they just don’t have the time with the size of the queues forming.

  • London – Brent (Borough of) – Wembley – JJ Moons

    London – Brent (Borough of) – Wembley – JJ Moons

    I have to confess to another little trip to JD Wetherspoon for breakfast, since it’s cheap on Mondays to Wednesdays and also much cheaper than anything that the Wembley Ibis was offering.

    I last visited this pub in 2012, so have managed to forget everything about it. It’s a much larger pub that I expected (I’m not sure why I expected anything since I’d forgotten everything about it, but I digress) and it wasn’t particularly busy either. The interior is all inoffensive and clean and JD Wetherspoon opened here in 1989, so this is one of their earlier projects. Before it was used as a licensed premises, this was the shop which was run by William Perring & Co Ltd, House Furnishers.

    Another photo of the interior. The staff here seemed friendly and welcoming, so it was a comfortable environment. I don’t know if they still do it, but I know a few years ago that surge pricing was in operation here, so prices were higher on match and event days, since it’s near to Wembley Stadium. It must be challenging running a pub like this so close to Wembley, as the volume of customers would be potentially huge in a short period of time.

    The pub has this display about John D Barrow, a cosmologist who was born and educated locally. He died a few weeks ago, on 26 September 2020, aged 67.

    And the £2.99 traditional breakfast, which was all as expected. Not more to add about these, they’re cheap and cheerful, with the quality of the ingredients being OK.

    So, a perfectly nice pub, and they’ve also handily made sure that there are plenty of power points for customers, which is always useful (well, for me). Friendly staff, clean environment and a suitably interesting range of beers.

  • London – Kensington and Chelsea (Borough of) – Ibis Styles Kensington (Fifth Visit)

    London – Kensington and Chelsea (Borough of) – Ibis Styles Kensington (Fifth Visit)

    If my blog had a higher readership then I probably wouldn’t post about this hotel, but it hasn’t, so I will. The reason is that this Ibis Styles is offering continually cheap prices, whereas their fellow Accor hotels are charging more again. It seems they’re keen to fill the hotel, whereas other hotels are trying to stabilise pricing, but I don’t know. Either way, this is what I think is my fifth visit to this hotel and I’m hoping that these lower prices continue.

    I booked a single room, but it was again upgraded to a double room. I’ve still yet to get the same room twice in my game of room bingo that no-one else is going to be interested in. The room isn’t overly large, but it’s clean and comfortable. The bathrooms in this hotel are generally small, but the rooms have been carved out of former residential properties which didn’t used to have shower facilities in every room and space is at a premium.

    The Tiger was the welcome drink I went for (I won’t tut again that the hotel could do more here), which isn’t high on my list of favourites, but it adds some variety to proceedings. There’s a rather more decadent kettle in this room than in the other ones….

    My room was on the third floor which offered some quite decent views, mainly of pigeons flying about.

    The basic breakfast is included and hasn’t much changed over recent weeks, it’s all acceptable given the low room rate. This sort of set-up is quite simple for guests and the hotel, it’s a fair compromise to the whole breakfast arrangement.

    Anyway, although I’ve written about this hotel before and can’t add much, it’s served me well over recent weeks. It’s a short walk from Earl’s Court underground station and is near to numerous shops and restaurants. There’s a 24-hour reception and a bar area which has a basic range of drinks, crisps, noodles and the like. And the staff here have always been friendly, so although I haven’t had any challenging problems for them, I suspect they’d be happy to resolve them.

  • Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – Day 208

    Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – Day 208

    The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the current health crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored….

    Mite

    This is a new one to me, Grose defines this as “a nick name for a cheesemonger; from the small insect of that name found in cheese”. Horrible as it sounds, cheese mites are used deliberately in the development of some cheeses, although I’m not sure how controlled this process was during the eighteenth century. This term for a cheesemonger dates from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, but I suspect (with no evidence, just one of my random guesses) that it pre-dates this. I’m not sure that cheesemongers would have particularly liked the term though, it doesn’t really highlight their work.

  • London – Kensington and Chelsea (Borough of) – National Army Museum (Captain Sir Tom Moore)

    London – Kensington and Chelsea (Borough of) – National Army Museum (Captain Sir Tom Moore)

    The museum is quite proud of this new addition to their collections, an official painting of Sir Tom Moore (or Captain Tom) by the artist Alexander Chamberlin, himself a former British army officer. Moore became famous in 2020 for his fund-raising efforts in walking 100 laps of his garden to raise a little money for the NHS Charities Together. This attempt to raise a little money ended up being just under £40 million, perhaps slightly more than he had initially anticipated. Moore, who is 100 years old, joined the British Army in 1940 and served in India and Burma.

    Moore said about the unveiling of this painting in August 2020:

    “It is wonderful to know that the portrait will be displayed at the National Army Museum to connect the public with this history, and I hope it continues to help tell the history of the British Army for decades, maybe even centuries, to come.”

    All rather lovely.

  • London – Kensington and Chelsea (Borough of) – Brompton Cemetery (Geoffrey Donovan Hadley)

    London – Kensington and Chelsea (Borough of) – Brompton Cemetery (Geoffrey Donovan Hadley)

    Located at Brompton Cemetery, this is the grave of Geoffrey Donovan Hadley. Geoffrey was born in Brixton (then in Surrey) in 1893 and he served in the 4th Dragoon Guards (Royal Irish), with service number D/7987. His sign-up papers have survived, he was working as a clerk when he volunteered to join the army, but this was before the First World War, on 19 March 1913 having completed his medical on 17 March 1913 and he went to Seaforth Barracks near Liverpool on 20 March 1913.

    The records give lots of information about what he looked like, he was 5″7′ tall, he was 11.6 stone in weight, his waist was 35 inches, he had blue eyes and brown hair. He was Church of England, he had a pulse of 100 and he had a linear scar on his face, on the left-side of his forehead.

    He died on 12 November 1914 at the age of 21 at the First London General Hospital in Camberwell, so he must have been injured on the battlefield and transported home although the records don’t give information about this. He was in the military for a total of one year and 249 days, which was carefully worked out by the authorities. His next of kin was listed as his father Edwin James Hadley and his step-mother, Mary J Hadley, who lived at 37 Comyn Road in Clapham, a residential property which is still there today.

  • London – Tower Hamlets (Borough of) – Limehouse – Craft Beer Co

    London – Tower Hamlets (Borough of) – Limehouse – Craft Beer Co

    I’ve been to a couple of other pubs in this small chain, notably the Brighton and Clerkenwell ones and I’m going to make an effort to tick all them off my list over the next few weeks. This one is located pretty much under Limehouse DLR and railway station, indeed the rail bridge is visible in the above photo.

    I arrived shortly after it opened at 17:00, which is a little later than before the current crisis when it opened earlier on in the afternoon.

    The pub was formerly known as the Railway Tavern and was operated by Charrington’s, a larger brewery who became part of Bass.

    The beer menu, which is different to what is listed as the latest one on the web-site. On checking, this is because they haven’t updated their web-site since July, which isn’t perhaps ideal. Anyway, there’s a decent list of beer styles here, although a few of these beers aren’t particularly well reviewed, many are from smaller breweries and so it’s good to support them. The Mexican Cake which I had a couple of weeks is on there, but although it’s a quite brilliant beer (one of the best that I’ve had), I felt I’ve tried it enough in 2020 at that price.The Pentuple from Hoppin’ Frog sounds amazing, but it’s nearly £30 per pint and I wasn’t feeling that decadent.

    I went for a third of the Strip and Drift from Polly’s, a small brewery in Wales, and the staff member apologised that she had over-poured it, although the pub didn’t charge for that. This wasn’t a problem for me. It’s not my normal beer style, but experimentation is the key as I’m sure someone once said, and this was delightful. I’m not used to the flavours in this kind of beer, but there was a sweetness, pineapple (which isn’t in there and no-one else noticed, so I’m likely just wrong on that), citrus and even some biscuit. OK, I think I’m going overboard here again, but there was a decadence and richness to this that was rather lovely.

    The staff member was friendly and engaging throughout, although she got a bit behind as she was trying offer table service, which meant that two tables walked out without ordering. I felt that the atmosphere was relaxed though and I felt really welcome, this is definitely one of my favourite pubs in this area. It’s not a large pub and Monday is the day that they don’t serve food, so I imagine that it’s often quite hard to get a table. It was also clear that many of the customers were regulars, but the pub didn’t have a cliquey feel.

    So, I liked this pub and I very much like this chain. It might not be the cheapest, but I like the innovative choice of beers that they have. Nice.

  • Internet Archive – When a Library Closes

    Internet Archive – When a Library Closes

    I like this latest update from the Internet Archive. Their news release read:

    “‘For a poet, the library is life’, mused Valerie Deering, Marygrove College Class of 1972. So when her beloved alma mater in Detroit closed for good in 2019, Deering worried about what would happen to Marygrove’s 70,000-volume library. For more than a century, the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, who founded the college, had been curating a one-of-a-kind collection of books about social justice, African American history and Detroit. How could these precious books do the most good in the world? Marygrove’s solution: donate the books to the Internet Archive to be digitized and preserved. Now, less than a year after the physical library closed, the Marygrove College Library Digital Collection is open for borrowing.”

    The collection of books can be found at https://archive.org/details/marygrovecollege. I’ve noted that the book ‘Called Up, Sent Down : the Bevin Boys’ War’ by Tom Hickman is available, so I will peruse that today. There’s some question about the legality of this, but I hope they find a way forwards at the Internet Archive, this is a wonderful contribution towards literature.

     

  • London – Kensington and Chelsea (Borough of) – National Army Museum (The King’s Man Film Set)

    London – Kensington and Chelsea (Borough of) – National Army Museum (The King’s Man Film Set)

    This post is mostly just photos and it’s of the set of the King’s Man film, which is the third film in the Kingsman series and also the prequel, just to make things more confusing. The film is meant to be released in February 2021, although I’m not sure that anyone knows what is happening with the world of cinema at the moment. The film was initially meant to be released in late 2019, so the production team are probably quite fed up with the whole thing at the moment.

    Anyway, it was evident from the displays at the National Army Museum that a lot of attention and care has gone into the clothing and sets, they’re detailed even when standing close up. And now that I’ve seen these props in real life, I might actually watch the film. I have seen the first in the series, but not the second, with this prequel being from the time of the First World War and the run-up to that.