Pootler

       The idea of suburbs is not new. Cicero used the word. Chaucer too, and Shakespeare, both quite disparagingly. I doubt that either ever visited Colindale. In their day, the suburbs lay beyond the city walls and the inhabitants were ne'er-do-wells and rogues. Scroll forward. Most of us, even reputable types, live in a suburb at some stage in our lives. The British version seems to have a built character all of its own and hereabouts the prime examples are the undistinguished and indistinguishable towns of Metroland. Our relationship with them seems to me to vary from ambivalence to dull resignation.  I want to explore that relationship.   When I told people that I was going to do a post on the suburbs, quite a few broke into half remembered lyrics of the The Members song ' Sound of the Suburbs'. It opens with "Same old boring Sunday morning / Old man's out washing the car / Mum's in the kitchen, cooking Sunday dinner" and ends with "Johnny stands

  Who?  Sir Edward Watkin has perhaps single-handedly made more difference to North London and the northern Home Counties than anyone else.  He was a fully paid up, Elon Musk style, bulldozing megalomaniac entrepreneur from the days when railways were tech stocks.  Sir Edward Watkin Our Ed liked to think bigly big, as a much less endearing businessman turned politician might say. His grandest vision was to create a rail network stretching from Manchester to Europe around the spine of a ‘Great Central Main Line’.  A 'Channel Tunnel' would make the connection and in 1880 around a mile of that was actually built. It came to ‘nowt as he might have said at home; Parliament were insufficiently impressed by the submarine champagne parties arranged to promote it and got windy about the security implications. Theirs was the nightmare of Gallic Dragoons marching on the Ashford Designer Outlet. But a stretch of the tunnel survives and its entrance can still be seen at Abbot's Cliff ne