Welcome to the London Borough of…, part VI

Last time: I concluded that trip to London having got selfies with signs for about three-sevenths of the boroughs. I then cruelly left you on a cliffhanger that I presume has been torturing you for the past three weeks. What problem has I found that could blow up the whole thing?

On the train ride home, I started mapping out the location of every borough sign in London. In doing this, I quickly realised two things. The first was that making the map was not a task that I had the patience to complete. As we’ve discovered, the signs aren’t always actually on the boundary line,¹ so compiling this involves going on Street View along every street a few hundred metres away from every border. No thanks. I decided I would stop once I had found a sign for each borough that I could plausibly get to, preferably one where the stars had aligned and both councils had put them up at the same place.

The second realisation came when I tried to find a sign for some of the boroughs. For some boroughs, signs are scarce: for example, the only evidence I could find of one for Hackney was a single photo, which had few-to-no identifiable buildings in the background for me to use to work out where the heck it was. For three boroughs—Camden, Hammersmith and Fulham, and Islington—I came to the conclusion that there are none at all.

That had certainly put the cat next to the little old bird woman on the steps of St Paul’s.

But I couldn’t stop now. So I decided, on the next trip to London, that I’d have to improvise. I decided to try Hammersmith and Fulham—leaving the other two for another time—and bet on Hammersmith and Fulham Council’s headquarters to have a sign that said both “Welcome” and the borough name on it.

My bet came up. Indeed, there was a sign by the door that said “Welcome to Hammersmith and Fulham”, so it was the next-best thing to a real sign. Well… almost. You see, the slight issue was that I was doing this on a Friday when I was on leave. But that didn’t mean that the good people who work for the council were also on leave. So if I’d stood by the big glass door and taken a selfie, they might have spotted me through it and thought me weird.²

Eventually, after pacing back and forth trying to work out how to do it—which I’m sure didn’t look suspicious at all—I found a place to stand where I was far enough away that I could have just been taking a selfie because I thought I looked pretty,³ but where I could angle the camera to just about fit it he sign into view.

Here is the result:

What do you mean, you can’t see it? It’s right there. Here, I’ll circle it for you.

No, still can’t read it? Fine, I’ll zoom in.

By the way, the reason I picked Hammersmith and Fulham out of the impossible ones to start with was that, on the previous trip, I’d all but completed the boroughs south of the river.⁴ I therefore figured I could start there, head west out of inner London, and then begin an arc around all the northern boroughs. At this point, you see, I still had it in my mind that I could maybe finish the whole thing with just one further day. Yes, including the two further ones that didn’t have any signs. No, I don’t know what I was thinking.

I mean, it’s obvious why this wouldn’t have been a good idea: if my first day doing this was anything to go by, it would have been an incredibly boring way to spend a day in London. And so it panned out, something for which I have direct evidence.

Strictly speaking, I have direct lack of evidence.

See, in most of the other posts in this series I’ve included a gallery of the photos I took that weren’t photos of me.⁵ You might notice I haven’t done that today. The reason should be clear if I itemise every photo I took from 9:47am to 10:54am. That might not sound like a long time, but bear in mind that I’ve been known to take up to a thousand pictures on a day in London—assuming 12 hours of photographs, that’s about 93 in that time span.

On this particular day, there were 14. The subjects of these photos break down as follows:

• This sign, as I entered Hounslow:

• The (entirely unremarkable) street sign for Chiswick High Road—three times.
• A poster in Stamford Brook tube station, for the open days taking place that weekend at the London Transport Museum Depot.
• This sign at the other end of the tube journey, for Ealing:

• A Superloop bus, presumably because it was the first time I’d seen one—four times.
• A sign for Harrow—three times, of which the following was the least unflattering:

• Finally, this sign, for Hillingdon:

Between those last two bullets, incidentally, was the one thing I remember from this particular hour of my life: a ten-minute walk down the most mind-numbingly dull street I’ve ever walked down. No shops, no green spaces, no junctions to cross; just half a mile of identikit suburban houses relentlessly thrust onto my retinas. I’d love to show you a photo to show you how boring it was, but it was so very uninteresting that it seems I didn’t take any.⁶

I did consider giving up at this point, especially when I realised I wouldn’t be able to get back to Northolt Park station, at the other end of the dull street, to be able to catch one of the infrequent⁷ trains that were my only quick onward journey option. And, after all, five signs is a perfectly respectable total for a day, even if one is a cheat.

But presumably, by now, you know where this is going.

To be continued…

London borough count: 19/33
London borough count without cheating: 18/30

1. Actually, it’s worse than that. Sometimes the signs are near places like tunnel entrances, which aren’t necessarily near the edge but are the first point in a borough where a motorist will see daylight. And sometimes, like one of the ones next time, they’re just in the middle for no apparent reason. ↩︎
2. Admittedly miscellaneous passers-by might have spotted me and thought me weird while I took any of the selfies in this series. But they didn’t have scary things like desk phones and lanyards. ↩︎
3. Although that was also true. ↩︎
4. The holdout, Southwark, was the one that I had had a false memory of near the Horniman Museum. It’s another of the difficult ones. ↩︎
5. I know what you’re really here for—see footnote 3. ↩︎
6. As further evidence: in my initial draft of this post I had this as a 20-minute walk, because that was how I remembered it until I double-checked the timestamps on my photos. ↩︎
7. Alright, hourly, but that’s infrequent for London. ↩︎