Another Elephantine pothole

Impressed by this mighty pothole over the weekend. It's on Newington Causeway, just off the Elephant and Castle, and if it rained you'd need a causeway to cross it.


The mobile phone - visible to those with good eyesight in the picture here - gives you an idea of the scale.

We use a mobile phone because, if the hole really is big and we lose sight of it, we can call the number to locate it again.


Potholes on Transport for London roads should be reported to TfL's pothole web page. (For potholes on non-TfL roads try FixMyStreet.com or the CTC's FillThatHole.org.)

You can tell a TfL road from a normal borough-run road because borough roads have taxis parked on double yellow lines, whereas TfL roads have licensed minicabs parked on double red lines.

Potholes meet their Waterloo (loo, loo, loo...)

Goodbye snow, farewell ice, congratulations on your retirement frost. Hello potholes [on the radio version of this blog, you now hear a comedy echo, followed by studio laughter].

Anyway, Waterloo Bridge is swamped by traffic cones at the moment. From space or the top of Strata, whichever is the higher, it must look like a tube of toothpaste. At last they're resurfacing it and 'reseating the ironworks'.

It's a comprehensive reskinning for a bridge whose recurring pothole at the north end was suspected by some geologists to have been the crater from an ancient extinction-event meteorite.


So it's currently down to single-lane both ways. Northwards (above, right) it's too narrow for a car to pass, which isn't too much of a problem in rush hour as the traffic is crawling anyway. Still, it can get pretty claustrophobic as you jostle with all those buses.

Southwards (right) the traffic goes in quicker pulses, released from the traffic lights like spawning salmon from a sluicegate.


I've had a couple of unpleasant fast-passes from buses, but most of the car drivers pay no attention to the CYCLE LANE CLOSED sign and give room for bikes. For once I'm glad they ignore a sign.

Still, at least it's goodbye potholes. [Comedy echo, followed by studio laughter]

Hole story

More of the cold snap's tectonic aftermath today. Potholes galore: lots of this sort of thing.

Craters thrown into sharp relief by the sun. Hopefully nothing gets thrown into the craters.

Bike Monopoly 31: Regent St

Every single building in Regent St's mightily grand three-quarters of a mile is at least Grade II listed. They're clearly keen to not to spoil the magnificent early-19th century streetscape by putting in, say, cycle parking.

The street runs north (one-way to begin with) from Carlton House (down near St James's Park) up past Piccadilly Circus, and crosses over Oxford St up to the BBC rocket-launcher at Broadcasting House in Langham Place. You're then only a peach-stone's throw from a picnic in Regent's Park.


It's a useful but often hectic cycle. You grapple with buses, taxis and cars desperate to get to that red light 50m away as fast as possible.

The street boasts such upmarket names as Café Royal, Hamley's, Dickins and Jones, and the Apple store. It's something of a shopper's parasite. Er, paradise. Every Christmas, the focus is on Regent St's famous illuminations, or if you're using a cheap digital camera like mine, on the back of someone's head in front of you.


Regent St has its own website, run by the Regent Street Association, with tips on how to spend the most money possible. Curiously, its 'Frequently Asked Questions' section omits 'Why isn't there any effing cycle parking'. No doubt the answer would be, We're fed up of telling people - there's no demand.


Monopoly's Regent St costs £300. What could this buy you there? It won't quite get you the cheapest iPhone (£342.50) from the Apple Store, which is a shame, as you can get nifty little apps for it that enable you to report potholes or post amusing pictures of bad cycle facilities to Twitter.

The Black Hole of Waterloo

I enjoy feeling the rhythm of the seasons, so I'm getting quite fond of the pothole on Waterloo Bridge. Every three months they fill it up, and over the next twelve weeks, as surely as the moon doth wax and wane, back it crumbles like a slow-motion England batting collapse.

Yesterday morning it was big enough to warrant swerving around (right), so we're probably near the end of another cycle.

That Waterloo pothole is back: Hippos take note

It's nice to get back to work after the Easter break and see old friends. Such as this pothole at the north end of Waterloo Bridge. It hasn't been this big since, oh, as far back as February.

They patched it up then, but it's back. Following the torrential rain last night, it could serve as a watering hole for African megafauna again.

So I'll be engaging with another old friend: TfL's pothole-reporting web page. (For non-TfL roads try FixMyStreet.com or the CTC's FillThatHole.org.)

Holy roads, Batman

London's streetscape changes, exhilaratingly, from day to day. New buildings go up; new roadworks take you to excitingly unfamiliar routes; new potholes form. The streets have an entire tectonic system of their own.

I've been keeping my eye on this growing monster on Waterloo Bridge. It's on the northbound side, near the north end, by the bus stops. It's been patched and filled before, but it's a losing battle. The rock-cracking temperatures of the Snow Events last week, and the sledgehammer bus wheels, keep quarrying away at the Waterloo lithosphere.

It's a whopper! An opencast mine. An extinction-event crater. A rift valley lined with fossils of uncharted taxonomy. It took me five minutes just to clear out the geology field trip from inside it, so I could take a picture.

Well, it's quite big, anyway. Large enough to drown a small mammal in, at least. And I've reported it.

You can report this sort of thing online quite easily. The CTC have a pothole site for example, fillthathole.org. Alternatively, FixMyStreet.com is another high-tech general-purpose reporting website, and allows you to upload photos (always a help).

FixMyStreet also apparently offers an iPhone application: point the iPhone camera at the pothole, fill in a short form, and the iPhone's GPS senses where you are and which council area you're in, and magically sends the complaint with the photo to the relevant officer in the council. Then creates a Facebook group and organises a party to celebrate.

However, according to people who know about these things on Southwark Cyclists' e-group, you're likely to get quickest action on a 'red route' (controlled by Transport for London, usually denoted by red instead of yellow lines at the side) if you report it directly to the TfL website - otherwise it might go to the council instead and involve a delay.

It's a shame the road is so busy, as otherwise it could provide untold adventure-leisure opportunities - boating, bungee jumping etc. Though actually, maybe cycling over Waterloo Canyon is enough of an extreme sport, thanks very much.