| By Ant The Rant
You wait for ages then two
Come along at once
Buses copulating
One’s head up the skirt
of the one in front
A saviour of the commuter classes
Greenhouses in which
to crush the masses
With all their fetid morning gasses
The corrugated, elongated,
House of Wendy, Bendy Bus
Introduced by people with nothing upstairs
But they don’t use it, so they don’t care
It’s the bus that leaves others standing
And that’s where you’ll be…left standing
Mercedes Benz? I beg to differ
It’s like a snake in splints,
and a neck brace,only stiffer
Two mobile homes stuck together
With cheap chav grey patent leather
It lumbers as it creaks as it
Whines as it crawls
It’s a futuristic dinosaur
A single-decker on dodgy steroids
With a mutant pile of hemorrhoids
It’s fare dodging paradise but
We’ve all been taken for a ride
Half a billion down the drain
For a tinpot, two-bit, toytown train
The Bendy bus articulated
In a four letter word, x-rated
A C at the front and
A T at the rear
Full of faceless Euro cheer
Fluoro, neon plastic tat
It can’t even reverse, so we can’t
Send it back
It’s got no heart, it’s got no soul
It corners like two scaffold poles
The front’s on time but the back’s overdue
Creating its own traffic queue
Fulfilling Its primary function
to stop oncoming cars
And block off junctions
A metal dragon you can’t trust
As it spontaneously self-combusts
Next time do us all a big turn
Let the overgrown robot dildo burn
The overrated, universally hated
Very untrendy, Commuter unfriendly,
So not very bendy, bendy bus.
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By Jaqi Clayton Church
One of Stoke Newington’s most distinctive
buildings – and one of its oldest – is The Round House
in Lordship Road. Prominently situated at the apex of the triangular
island just behind Church Street (known to many as ‘the pointy
bit’), this local landmark, with its semi-circular frontage
and curved roof, attracts all manner of epithets. Likened to a lighthouse,
a ship about to cast off down the hill, and even a fondant fancy
cake, it is in fact the old parish Watch House, which was built
in 1824 as part of the vestry’s drive to implement better
law and order.
As far back as the 1780s there was a sizeable problem
in these parts, with ever-increasing numbers of vagabonds, vandals
and drunkards. Not so very different from today, then, except for
the presence of stocks and a whipping post, which came in for frequent
attempts at destruction. Forty-odd years later, the Lord of the
Manor, Joseph Eade, granted the parish a lease of land behind the
Red Lion public house on Church Street for a shilling (5p) a year,
for a ‘cage’ or lock-up to be constructed. Three years
after, a brand new Watch House was built on the adjacent land for
the sum of £107. On the assumption that costs double every
decade, millions would have been spent on such an enterprise now.
1824 was the same year in which the Vagrancy Act was
passed, giving more punitive powers to all the parish-run constabularies.
In that pre-industrial age, with few dwellings north and south of
Church Street, the unimpeded vistas across open marshland and along
the ancient drovers’ route of Lordship Lane (sic) must have
been useful to the duty watchmen looking out for signs of trouble.
When the Metropolitan Police was founded in
1829, individual parishes were no longer responsible for maintaining
their own law and order, and the Watch House became a police station
until 1870. One occupant was an Irishman called Daniel Leahy, recorded
in 1832 as the resident Constable. In a later 19th century Census
the house was called Myrtle Cottage and a Mrs Charles was in residence.
Her son went on to establish the Lordship Dairy on the premises
and the property remained a dairy for the next eighty years, with
four successive generations of Welshmen in charge. It has also been
a grocer’s shop, a squat, an office, an artist’s studio
and possibly even a mortuary. Fully restored in 1988 by local surveyor/architect
Jonathan Shattock, The Round House is now a private residence which
has gained Grade II listing and Hackney brown plaque. A hundred
and eighty-two years is a long time to be around: what tales it
would tell, if it could.
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