Aladdin's Cave demolition threat

From the Murky Depths reports that a planning application has been submitted to build flats on the site of the Aladdin's Cave' second hand shop.  (72 Loampit Hill SE13).


The streetscape would never be the same without its assortment of statues and furniture, but the locally-listed building is a rare slice of vanishing  railway history. It was once a railway station on the lost Greenwich Park line (1871-1917) which ran between Nunhead and Greenwich Park, via Lewisham Road and Blackheath Hill.

View from the railway line, from Abandoned Stations (2003)

Image of proposed flats

You can read the planning application here. The Heritage statement has lots of information about the history of the site, even if this developer funded document unsurprizingly concludes that there's nothing worth saving...


[insert your own rant about blandification of London and the squeezing out of quirky,  'marginal' spaces by identikit developments]

Telephone Box Library

It's taken me a while to get round to posting these photos of the telephone box library on Loampit Hill SE13 (near to the junction with Tyrwhitt Road). Essentially it's a book swap - people are invited to come along and choose a book and leave one behind.

There's some lovely remarks in the comments book. I agree that as someone says, libraries are the 'the heart of civilisation'. In fact why do we stop at just having libraries for books  - why not have libraries for all those other things (most things) that we only use once or twice and don't really need to all have as own separate possessions? Tool libraries, maybe even clothes libraries...

All in all a good idea, though my experience of other book swap schemes is that there is a built in entropic tendency for quality to decline over time unless somebody is actively weeding out the books that nobody really wants. What tends to happen is that people take the interesting books and leave behind less interesting ones - eventually Jeffrey Archer and '50 Shades of Grey' take over as surely as bindweed on a neglected allotment. So please help out by taking down some good books and maybe taking out your share of the rubbish.