Have you been over to St Ratford since the redevelopment? Or down into St Reatham? Are you thinking of buying a little pad over in D’Agenham? Very up and coming, they say.

 London’s place names have always been fluid. Old names are squeezed out by the new and, without fixed borders to work from, your views on where one place ends and another begins are as likely to be about age and class as they are about geography.

You can read the whole thing here.

Every Tuesday night a crowd of us would meet up in a pub in Peckham and drink several pints of beer in the optimistic belief that we were having an editorial meeting. We’d talk about the week’s news, discuss unusual angles we could take on things, and go away in cheerful ignorance fact that many of the great ideas we’d come up with were never going to get written.

But plenty of others did – and the result was rather lovely. We had a trends column, a list of words plucked from the ether and placed at random under headings such as “drifting” as if it were a Day Today sketch. We had Marketing Mike, a fictitious brand consultant who’d suggest ways of re-branding difficult subjects. To improve Al-Quaeda recruitment rates, for example, he suggested a pair of new kids channels, Wahabibies and Al-Qids. (Mike ended up doing rather well for himself. His byline later described him as the Minister of Brand for Estonia, I seem to recall.)

We’d try to reconcile politics and finance long before it was fashionable; come up with silly top ten lists (“Reasons why the War on Terror is a dead ringer for the Godfather trilogy”); or simply run with entirely lunatic notions. I once wrote an essay explaining that, if you really wanted to understand New Labour, all you needed to do was follow the career path of Four Weddings and a Funeral writer Richard Curtis. It was 2,000 words long.

We had no money, minimal advertising, and most of our number had very little time either, but still we managed to build something that was, briefly, good. The hits were climbing, its reputation growing, and one rather lovely review described it as like all the best bits of the Sunday supplements.

Not long after the 2005 election, ak13 stopped publishing. The lack of income, and various other things going on everyone’s lives, simply made it impractical to continue. Also, I think, we were doing something that, in retrospect, looks a bit ill-timed. Back then, the new new thing, the toy all the cool new media kids were playing with, was the blog. We were trying to create a magazine, publishing chunks of material in a weekly burst, with issue numbers and everything. We were trying to do something new and somehow managed to make it look incredibly old.

I don’t care. It was great, and it was ours, and for one bright moment I thought it was somehow going to make our fortunes.

A couple of weeks ago, after sitting there doing nothing for nearly seven years, the site finally went dark. I entirely understand the reasons for the decision, and looking back most of the stuff I wrote then is nowhere near as good as the sort of stuff I write now. (That’s not going to stop me reposting it in some dark corner here, of course.)

All the same, though, ak13, remains one of the most exciting things I’ve ever worked on. For years afterwards, strangers at parties would occasionally ask if I were the Jonn Elledge who’d written for ak13; I know at least one of the others have reported a similar experience. Maybe, just maybe, we’d been on to something.

Anyway. This week over at Shinyshelf I reviewed James Marsh’s Project Nim, a  documentary on an experiment to create the world’s first TALKING MONKEY:

Despite what Disney cartoons and breakfast cereals may have taught us, animals cannot talk. This is a more profound statement than it at first appears.

It isn’t just that they can’t make the vocal noises required to form words. There’s some evidence that speech and intelligence are intimately related, that it’s only language that allows us to formulate abstract ideas. There is a reason why your dog is quite capable of telling you it’s hungry, but has yet to reminisce about that walk in the park last Sunday.

You can read the rest here.

• For the love of god, can everyone please stop trying to triangulate everything Labour does against the ghost of Tony Blair? (Liberal Conspiracy, October 6th)
• A cheap and effect solution to the problem of online misogyny (Liberal Conspiracy, November 8th)
• And, sticking with all the big issues: why a Doctor Who movie is a horrible idea (New Statesman, November 17th)
• Also, not really a rant, by a result of my rage nonetheless: Want to damage David Cameron? Go after his friends (Liberal Conspiracy, August 3rd)

• Once every few months, a report comes along explaining why the private finance initiative represents a sort of embarrassing skidmark on the national accounts, and suggests we’d better scrap it, pronto. Here’s me at Liberal Conspiracy explaining why that’s never gonna happen. (Liberal Conspiracy, August 22nd)
• Health secretary Andrew Lansley recently promised to ban minimum waiting times in the NHS. It probably won’t make any difference (New Statesman, 15 November)

So I wrote the story up for Londonist, went about my day, and then spent the rest of the afternoon watching, vaguely dazed, as it went viral, spreading further and faster than anything else I’ve ever written. That night I was in a pub, and could hear the people at the next table discussing the thing. That doesn’t happen to me a lot.

Problem was, the next day, Cortiglia got in touch, and denied the lot. Whether he was misquoted, whether Galtieri’s army turned him down, or whether he’d simply bigged himself up to La Nacion to impress the Argentinians, was never exactly clear. But nonetheless he maintained that he had never been in the Falklands in any context. His official rebuttal (on the BNP’s website, to which I have no intention of linking), implied that the paper had simply made the lot up. Why, I have no idea.

Anyway – in the name of fairness, I withdrew the story. I remain, however, oddly proud, both of my carefully worded retraction, and of the whole mess leading up to it. You can read what’s left of it here.

Mapping London’s educational divide

Last week, the University and College Union found an exciting new way of illustrating the north-south divide. The union’s researchers used government figures to rank mainland Britain’s parliamentary constituencies by the percentage of their working-age population without a qualification to their name. The resulting coverage focused largely on the notion that there are ‘two Britains’: one smart, educated and go-getting; the other, well, not.

But if there are two Britains, there are two Londons, too. So we decided to use the same figures to locate the city’s educational blackholes.

You can read the whole piece here.

• On the surprisingly good US remake of the one time darling of the Channel 4 schedules, Shameless (June 30th 2011)
• On the un-surprisingly awful waste of coloured ink that is Gnomeo and Juliet (June 10th 2011)

Why the New College isn’t a New Oxbridge

It’s a private university for the products of private schools

An Oxbridge education has a lot of advantages. You are taught by some of the top people in your chosen field. You get to live in one of the most beautiful cities in England. And for three glorious years, you can live in the happy delusion that one day you’ll grow up to become Stephen Fry. 

Now a group of academics is planning to open their own elite college. And at least one Oxford product is, rather prematurely, hailing it as a third Oxbridge..

You can read the whole piece here.

End of the line
Jonn Elledge argues that the demise of the Routemaster is no bad thing.

I have to confess something that, in London these days, seems to be roughly on a par with admitting to pig molestation: I don’t like Routemaster buses. They pollute; they’re uncomfortable; in winter they’re freezing cold by the open door, yet coma-inducingly hot on the top deck. Worst of all, the ceilings are so low that any passengers over six foot tall are in serious danger of ending up locked in a permanent Quasimodo pose.

My distaste is partly because of a lack of emotional attachment. I grew up in a zone 6 suburb served mainly by ugly modern double deckers that were not even guaranteed to be red, and which were timetabled so infrequently that you were generally grateful to have found a bus at all. Despite having moved into town in 2002 I have always lived in an RM-free zone. As a result, no matter how many times I read that the Routemaster is an icon, a key part of London’s heritage, I can’t muster any more than a shrug.

Yet everywhere the demise of the curvy red one seems to have been greeted by an outpouring of antigonean proportions. MPs are begging for a reprieve. BBC4 is broadcasting “Routemaster Night” on the 10th of December, while Last Stop!, a website documenting the buses’ last days put together by photographers Jet and Ralf Obergfell, has become a cult hit. Tributes have popped up in the Times, Telegraph and Observer, as well as newspapers as far afield as India and Pennsylvania. It’s like Princess Diana all over again: you half expect to see people weeping as they take the 159 for the last time, or hear of a candlelit vigil at Streatham bus garage.

The RMs do have their plus points, of course. There’s always a conductor on hand to help the older passengers onto the bus, and discourage younger ones from defacing each other. What’s more, the open deck meant that when stuck in traffic you could jump off and walk, rather than endure the frustrating experience of being within sight of your destination but in the hands of a driver who seemed mysteriously unwilling to let you go.

But nonetheless, Transport for London has argued that these qualities were outweighed by the buses’ very real problems. The presence of a conductor made them disproportionately expensive to run. The open deck is near inaccessible for the disabled, and there is a nasty tendency for people to injure themselves while attempting to board an accelerating bus. Getting up the narrow, twisting stairs to the top deck was little safer. Like that game with the twisted wire and the buzzer designed to test how steady your hands were, you were always aware that if you made one wrong move you were going straight back to the start. The thing was, here the result wasn’t an annoying noise but an unexpected trip to A&E: according to TfL, five times as many passengers are injured per Routemaster per year than on other types of bus.

A couple of years ago TfL ran an advertising campaign involving posters that cheerily proclaimed, “Buses are getting better!” The thing that makes this campaign stick out in the mind was that it is, as far as I can tell, true: there are more buses, the congestion charge and other measures have made them faster, and better information at bus stops has made you less likely to inadvertently find yourself in Dulwich. Buses really have got better – and the replacement of the Routemasters with newer, safer, more comfortable alternatives is a necessary part of that process.

Those who long for a ‘real’ London bus can still take a trip on one of the “Heritage routes” now running in central London. Personally, I’ll settle for a bendy bus and the ability to stand up straight.

The last Routemaster in regular service ran on route 159,leaving Marble Arch for Streatham at noon, on Friday December 9th 2006.

Eighteen months later, Boris Johnson was elected mayor under the impression that’d it’d be a pretty neat idea to blow £7.8 million failing to bring them back again. Can’t win them all, I suppose.