Stokey Press Watch
By Victor Ardern
Question for you: which of London’s 150 odd postcode districts commits the most traffic offences?
Believe it or not, it’s us lot, according to the Croydon Advertiser, which reported on a recent Transport for London study. ‘Based on the number of penalty charge notices issued in the first four months of this financial year… the worst drivers were those in Stoke Newington where 2,792 drivers flouted the rules.’ Can this really be true? Surely everyone – man, woman and child – round N16 cycles, take the bus, walks or is three-wheel buggied everywhere?
 Ironically, our Miss Abbott’s regular Evening Standard column the same week was entitled ‘Putting the brakes on the speeding lobby’. She saw the ‘anti-speed brigade as largely white, male, middle class and middle aged’. I suspect that her perceived demographic may well be moving a little more in line with her constituency, if these numbers from TfL are to be believed.
Whilst we’re on the subject of league tables and our esteemed MP, her steady mid-table position (26th out of 63 London MPs) for total annual expenses and allowances should be applauded. According to the Evening Standard, her office spent £114,968 last financial year. That’s a hell of a lot of stamps, envelopes and photocopying.
I’ll wager that the Milly character from This Life wasn’t one of these auto anarchists. What’s she got to do with it, I hear you cry? Well apparently she’s ‘left the law and is living in Stoke Newington with her environmentalist partner and their baby Josh’, the Independent reported.
As ever, local minor media ‘celebs’ could be found tucked in nationals. One piece in the Daily Mirror entitled ‘You don’t have to be a model to look sensational in your undies’ rather caught my eye. In it, an ‘actress from Stoke Newington’ discussed how ‘I usually find a thong uncomfortable but this one was lovely. The stockings were great too.’ On more N16 Terra Firma, the Sunday Mirror’s ‘We live in a real green house’ showcased the house of a local morning TV ‘regular’, in which she stated that ‘the big things we’re looking into doing include getting a wind turbine for the roof and… to get double-glazing fitted, but for now we’ve had lined curtains made for from organic linen and cotton’. I wonder if the thong was organic.
Here’s a joyous thought to finish on. The Evening Standard reported on a study from the Government’s Economic and Social Research Council that ‘analysed health in poor areas. It found that North Southwark, Bermondsey, Hackney North and Stoke Newington were the healthiest places for poor people to live’. I assume that the chap writing in the Sunday Times who felt ‘Stoke Newington’s full of clever posh people’ hadn’t seen this report, unless he was talking about those hundreds of unpublished writers and ‘resting’ actors in our midst, of course.
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