I spent the weekend thinking about the value in the unwanted. Yesterday I went on a foraging course at Horsenden Hill where my eyes were opened (and my palette introduced) to the delights of edible ‘weeds’; weeds being plants in the wrong place. Today I took a fabulous group round Mudchute, Millwall and Greenwich on A Rubbish […]
What a year so far! Lockdown, of course, put a stop to our walks. It also completely changed Central London. Things that we would usually marvel at – the noise and pace of the West End, the bizarre theatre of hearings in the Royal Courts of Justice, bells ringing out across the City – ceased. And core […]
I had a fascinating afternoon yesterday taking a group of Russian journalists on A Rubbish Trip. It was part of a course run by Thomson Reuters Foundation on waste and recycling. And finally a chance to share one of my favourite London rubbish stories. It concerns this Dust Heap at Battle Bridge (now the area […]
If you ever get the chance to visit a waste transfer station, go! I went this morning to my local facility at Southwark on a tour arranged for Open House. I left feeling that I had both satisfied my inner geek – I’ve been talking about MRFs on A Rubbish Trip for years, but never visited […]
In the week that saw the launch of a 600m long floating barrier to clean up the Pacific Garbage Patch, we’ve been thinking about all the litter in London’s waterways. We’ve featured below three projects to tackle the problem that anyone can get involved in. Trash is, of course, something we talk about on A Rubbish Trip. We’re next […]
It’s been a hot few weeks here in London. Above-ground, things have been made worse by the heat island effect: all the reflective hard surfaces and heat from cars and air conditioners, which mean that temperatures in the city centre can be up to 10C warmer than in the countryside. Things have been pretty steamy […]
The Thames Tideway tunnel – also known as the ‘super sewer’ – will be the biggest infrastructure project ever undertaken by the UK water industry. I first heard about it in 2003. I had recently joined the legal team at the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), and was about to take on […]
There was a time when Londoners weren’t that fussed by water. Gin and beer were far more popular, and – dissipation and alcohol poisoning aside – safer to drink. It took the Victorian temperance movement coupled with terrible cholera epidemics for people to realise that free, potable water might be a good thing. So, in […]
There’s so much of wonder about Crossrail, the new railway under London that will link Reading and Heathrow with Shenfield and Abbey Wood when it opens in 2019. First off, there’s the staggeringly ambitious engineering work to construct 42km of tunnels through the centre of a city already riddled with holes from the tube network. The real joy […]
So wrote the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier in 1774, summing up his discovery that although matter can change its state in a chemical reaction, the total mass of matter remains the same. ‘Everything is transformed’ could also serve as the motto for the Circular Economy: the idea that we can produce stuff without waste or […]
