When I was making plans for Six Things in 2026, it occurred to me that it might be quite fun to do a podcast version. So once a month, instead of the regular Six Things newsletter, I’ll invite a guest to chat about six things of interest to them – things they find joyful, amusing, fascinating, comforting, magnificent, or just downright bizarre.
My third guest is Matt Brown, London explorer and main contributor to Londonist’s excellent Time Machine newsletter, which provides a weekly look at London’s history from unusual angles.
You should have the option of downloading the podcast or copying and pasting the RSS link to play it in your usual podcast app (click the three dots to the right of the 30-second button above).
The music for the podcast was written and recorded by Oliver Parikian.
Lev Parikian: Hello, and welcome to Six Things, a podcast for the curious. I’m Lev Parikian, and every month I invite a guest to bring six things that they find joyful, amusing, fascinating, comforting, magnificent, or just downright bizarre. And I’m delighted to welcome Matt Brown to this episode of Six Things. It’s fair to say that Matt is London-obsessed. In the cause of exploring London, he has waded along the buried River fleet twice, spent the night in a haunted plague pit, crawled through the little-known tunnel beneath the deck of London Bridge, and walked along the tracks beneath Leicester Square at 2am. Matt is the main contributor to Londonist Time Machine, a newsletter about the history of London. He’s also the author of 12 books, not all of them about London. There is, for example, the award-winning Atlas of Imagined Places and its sequel Atlas of Imagined Cities. And his most recent book, The Boroughs of London, explores the history and peculiarities of London’s 32 boroughs. Matt, thank you so much for coming on Six Things.
Matt Brown: Oh, thanks for having me, Lev. Big fan, big fan.
Lev: Oh, thank you very much. Well, we like big fans. And I’m also likewise a big fan of your work because I get the Londonist, the many Londonist missives into my inbox. And there’s always something that’s going to take me away from something I should actually be doing. So thanks for that. Just briefly, before we go on to your things, where did this London obsession start? I mean, you’ve lived in London all your life, have you?
Matt: No, so I’m actually from the Midlands originally, from a town called Grimsby on the East Coast, near the River Humber. But I’ve been down here now 27 years, so I’ve got this weird hybrid accent that’s partly Grimsby, partly London. And my love for it, I don’t really know, I think it’s… I’m a scientist by training, so I did chemistry and biochemistry, and that kind of scientist training, the brain you get as a scientist to explore, to be curious... to look into everything… it makes me… wherever I go I want to explore the city in minute detail, maybe catalog it and build spreadsheets of different places and things, so it’s… I approach the city from that scientist perspective, I guess. I still do even though i’m a recovering scientist these days. I don’t quite go to those geeky lengths anymore but it’s that combined with just the sheer magnitude of the history here, the different layers… it’s infinite, as Peter Ackroyd once described it. There’s… just any street has got a thousand stories. And I’ve been covering the city now for over 20 years, and still every time I walk the streets, I discover something new every single day. It is infinite.
Lev: That’s absolutely so right about noticing things. And I think… I would suspect that the majority of people who live in London, even people who visit it, don’t spend that much time doing anything like that and noticing all those things. One particular thing, local to where I live… I’m in West Norwood in South London, as you know, and there’s a series of lovely little plates in the various bits of the pavements. In fact, in the cemetery, there’s one as well, marking the course of the River Effra. These lovely things, they’re like manhole covers and they’re embedded in the pavement and they’re a beautiful design. And they say, you know, underneath your feet runs the River Effra, which is just a lovely little thing. When you notice it, you start looking for more. All sorts of things like that. Excellent. So let’s get on to these things.
Thing 1 – Tube Station Smells
Lev: Thing one. It is a London thing, as I partly expected you might. And I’ve got the title of it, Tube Station Smells. Perhaps you could elaborate on those three words.
Matt: Yes, I think even the least observant Londoner or visitor to the city, when they go down on the Tube, will notice smells. They’re rarely unpleasant, but there are smells. I think I noticed particularly on the Bakerloo line, there’s this strange smell through the central section, particularly as you get down sort of Waterloo-Lambeth way. I think it’s a sort of smell of rodent, a mousy smell, not in a particularly horrible way. I associate it with mice. I think that’s what it is. A few years ago, I thought, what other smells are there down there? What else can I detect? So I actually spent a few weeks going around town into each tube station in the central area, having a good sniff of the air and writing down what I thought that station smelt of. Now, unfortunately, I was interrupted by the COVID pandemic. So I had to finish that map because I turned it into a tube map of smells. I had to finish it after the COVID pandemic. So I was there in 2021, 22, going around sniffing tube stations, which was a slightly scary, dodgy thing to be doing at that time, sniffing the air too heavily in tube stations. But anyway, I’ve produced this map. It’s available online. And it’s my impression of what each Central tube station smells like.
Lev: What it immediately made me think of was the first time I visited Paris. Because it felt to me… I was about 13… and Paris… the whole Metro has a distinctive smell of Paris Metro, not particularly any different stations with their different smells, but it smells so different from the London tube that I knew. And even now the modern tube, I think smells different from what it smelled like when I was a kid. I think.
Matt: Well, that’s an interesting angle. Yeah. How it’s changed over time as well.
Lev: I think, I think it’s, I think a lot, well, certainly the Jubilee line smells kind of fresher in a way.
Matt: Yeah. And there’s a vague ozone, a tincture of ozone on the air as well about it from the sliding doors on the platform guards.
Lev: Possibly. I wonder, I’d like to think they pipe it in like the supermarkets pipe in the bread smells. Just to give everybody an idea of the kind of things you smell, I’ve jotted down a few samples from your map. So Warren Street, it smells like “sooty milk”. I like this one. Marylebone – Marl’b’n – whichever way you prefer to pronounce it, is “Scalextric sparks”, which will probably only mean something to anybody who played with Scalextric as a kid. And that’s a niche subset. You can Google it if you want. Marble arch is just “toast”, which is admirably succinct. I wonder, were you having a stroke when you did that? If you smell burnt toast, you’re having a stroke. Notting Hill Gate, and this is on the nose, “coins”.
Matt: I don’t know why, it just did.
Lev: And then this one I’m going to just needle you with a little bit, which is Embankment, which you say smells like “sweaty cardigan, but not mine”, which feels a little bit like protesting too much.
Matt: Well, the thing is, I don’t own and have never owned a cardigan, so that one’s slightly more objective. So it definitely isn’t my cardigan. I’m not sure where that one was coming from, to be honest. There are a lot of common smells. The toast one, I think, you can detect in various places. I think what it is, in a lot of cases, it’s street food above the station wafting down. You often get a waffle smell, like Belgian waffles and things like that.
Lev: Yes, it’s a Westminster smell. Yeah, Westminster and those nuts, the caramelised nuts.
Matt: They always smell so nice, but you know you shouldn’t buy them. I’ve never actually bought them or tried them, but they smell so good, don’t they?
Lev: Yeah. So have you had any pushback? I know you published this on Londonist. Did you get green ink letters saying, “Sir, how dare you say Warren Street – my favourite station of all – smells of sooty milk of all things”.
Matt: It’s milky soot. Got it the wrong way around.
Lev: Yes, exactly.
Matt: No, I mean, I deliberately made it… It’s got to be a subjective exercise. I was hoping that people would push back with their own suggestions and amendments and observations. With any of these things we put on the Londonist website, we always put them on social media as well. And of course, then invite feedback through Facebook and X and things like that. So we’ve got a long thread of other people’s opinions on there as well. I could compile those into maybe an average smell that people get… 20 different opinions about one station and see if there’s one that is overwhelmingly the most popular.
Lev: Yeah, I think it’s… obviously it’s a bit of silly fun, as so many useful things are, because I think what it might do, of course, is encourage people to go around and notice the smells of London, even if it’s not a smell that assaults the nasal membrane, that they actually go, “OK, what does... I’m getting cinnamon, I’m getting plums and, you know, that kind of thing to remind us that we have, you know, it’s not just looking and hearing things, that places have their distinctive smells.
Thing 2 – Parakeets
Lev: This is very much in my area as a bird lover and a nature writer. Let’s go straight in and just say the single word – and it’s a very contentious word for many people – parakeets.
Matt: I love them. I know people hate them. I love them. I think they’re a flash of colour. I like colour. We’re too grey and black in the city sometimes, there’s too much dark shades everywhere. I see both you and I are wearing black shirts as I’m speaking, but a splash of colour is always welcome and the parakeets add that. And the noise can be a bit over the top, kind of a bit too much, depending if you’re too close to a roost. But I quite like that as well. It’s just all part of the thing that London is. It’s a place of immigrants and people coming here to make their their living and parakeets are an example of that because of course they’re non-native species from Asia originally, I think, and so it’s great to have them here I think.
Lev: I write for the guardian every few weeks in the Country Diary, and usually there’s about six comments underneath the thing saying “oh this is nice” or “I’ve got my own story about this”… when I wrote about parakeets it was the most contentious thing – it’s the one thing that people do have opinions about in the bird world is parakeets, and they do divide people. There are those who like you say, it’s a lovely flash of color and a bit of sound, and otherwise we have drab lives. And then there are other people who will say they are even worse than the feral pigeons, you know, even more disruptive and rowdy. We have them on our feeders occasionally. They’ll come every few weeks, not mob handed, but four or five and they do raise a ruckus. And occasionally a bold great tit will get up on the feeder next to it and go, “Yeah, what are you going to do about it, pal? But they do… for the context, they’re not, as you say, they’re not a native British bird. They have… invaded is such a horrible word… but they have… a population has sprung up in the last 40 or so years, I think it is, maybe 40 or 50. The first time I encountered them was…I play… occasionally, I play cricket for a side that plays in southwest London. And we play our games in the grounds of the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington. And one day I was just idly fielding and was distracted by a squawk behind me. I thought, well, that’s odd. That’s not a bird I know. And there was this green parakeet. Unfortunately, the arrival of the parakeet also coincided with the arrival of the ball, which I then dropped. At least I had an excuse that time. Usually I drop it and I’ve got no excuse. “But the parakeets got in my eye, honest”. So that was probably in the early 1990s. And I think anybody with any kind of observation of London wildlife will have noticed that they have grown and spread since then. They’ve spread quite a long way. Reports now, even up in Scotland – Edinburgh and Glasgow, as far as that, and certainly into the north of England. Do you know where they came from, how they came to be here?
Matt: Well, there were all these urban legends, aren’t there? There’s one that Jimi Hendrix released them on Carnaby Street in the 60s, which is nonsense because there were reports of them long before then. There’s the theory they escaped from the set of The African Queen, which was filmed… that was over in West London somewhere, wasn’t it?
Lev: Shepperton, yeah.
Matt: Shepperton, yeah, which... which would make sense in that there are large populations in Richmond and over to that part of town and Twickenham and Teddington, as you say. Most ornithologists and scientists would say that they were just gradually released piecemeal bit by bit over the years from different aviaries, or escaped. There was… the Great Storm is another one. The 1987 Great Storm destroyed lots of aviaries, apparently, and they all escaped then. But again, they were already quite common before that.
Lev: Yeah, I’m not buying that one, although I haven’t heard it. The Jimi Hendrix and African Queen stories are the ones that I’ve seen and heard the most, and I wonder now if they’re actually being more repeated more often by people like you and me seeking to debunk them than anybody actually saying, “Oh, that’s where they came from.” But they certainly, as you say, the geography works for the African Queen story because that… southwest London was... as far as I know, that’s where the original population took hold. So that would make sense. But the timeline doesn’t really make sense. And it’s all, you know, it’s kind of, it’s a lovely idea, but it’s just kind of implausible.
Matt: I actually had the pleasure of asking… so Hendrix’s girlfriend, Etchingham, Cathy or Julie Etchingham, I’ve forgotten her name. She was reopening the Handel Hendrix Museum. There’s this wonderful museum. It’s a museum, well, you know, as a musician, Handel and Hendrix lived next door to each other, obviously at different times.
Lev: It’s that magnificent connection, isn’t it?
Matt: It’s amazing, yeah. And so she was reopening this museum about 10 years ago, and I asked her in the press conference, did you know about this story of Hendrix releasing the parakeets on Carnaby Street and she’d never even heard the story before so I think we can safely say that that one’s just made up by somebody
Lev: Yeah i think so… I think the truth is, as you say, rather more mundane and birds escape and sometimes they establish a little foothold and the climate is fairly conducive to them nowadays… they’ve found it easier. And they are adaptable. They’re also… they nest quite early in the year, I think. So they’re hole nesters. So they’ll build their nests in the holes made by other birds – woodpeckers are one example. And they do make these large roosts in big public places. Near us in Brockwell Park, there’s quite a large one, I think. So you wouldn’t necessarily want that in your own garden, and if you back onto Richmond Park near the roost then I could imagine that’s quite disruptive. There is a photograph of you… I found… one of the first hits actually. Put it this way, you’re 75% Matt and 25% parakeet.
Matt: Yeah, this is a spot in Kensington Gardens, I discovered, which has actually been cordoned off now. I don’t know if it’s because of the publicity from this article was getting people to go there. But the parakeet seemed particularly tame. They were pecking around on the floor, which you don’t normally see. And I went up to them. I had an apple in my bag. I got it out of my bag and held it up. And three or four of these things landed on my arm and started pecking away at the apple. So I came back a few weeks later and repeated it with my camera so I could get a nice article and video out of it. And they did the same thing again. And they were really tame. I actually got this passing guy to hold the camera for me and take the photos. And he turned out to be some kind of Buddhist monk. He was over here from Nepal or somewhere like that. And he was terrified of these things. He wouldn’t get close to me to hand the camera over. Eventually gave it to him. But he found these birds really threatening and scary. So I don’t think everyone loves them quite to the extent I do. I can’t speak to the point about them endangering native birds, but in all other aspects, I love them. I think they’re gorgeous.
Lev: There’s one other little aspect of them which I love, and as I said, I could go on forever about this. But if you look closely at a parakeet, they’ve got the red beak, but they also have a matching, accessorised, beautiful little red eye ring, very slender ring around the eye. And the noise they make, of course, is the familiar squawk. But get one that’s sitting on a branch above your head just by itself, and you’ll find it’s sort of burbling to itself. So it’ll have done the [IMPERSONATES PARAKEET SQUAWK] and then it lands and it starts to go [IMPERSONATES PARAKEET BURBLE] to itself. So that’s something to look out for. I can’t speak to the smell of them, though. I don’t know about that.
Thing 3 – Wetherspoons Carpets
Lev: So we’ve got two fairly already contentious things, I think. We’ve got the smell of tube stations, which people will disagree about. We’ve got parakeets that people will disagree about. Do you think people will disagree about thing three? Wetherspoons carpets.
Matt: I think most people in this country who are pub goers will know about the Wetherspoons chain. They’re famous for their very cheap beer. I found a pint of beer in there recently under £2, which I don’t remember even in the 1990s being able to get a pint that cheap. They’ve got quite a nice range of beer. They’re very large. They do nice food. So there are all these things going for them. But the best thing about them, they’ve got these extraordinary carpets. Every branch has got its own unique design, which is custom made for that branch of Wetherspoons. And quite often things are woven into the pattern to represent the local history or the local area. One example, for example, is in Paddington, a newly opened one on Paddington Basin. It’s named the Alexander Fleming because penicillin was discovered around the corner in St Mary’s Hospital. And they’ve woven kind of penicillin spores into the carpet, which is slightly off-putting if you’re trying to eat food, but it’s kind of nice and historical at the same time.
Lev: Were you the first person to notice this or were there other people engaged in the carpet hunt?
Matt: There’s a whole community out there, I think, who photograph these things and look out for them. There’s a book came out maybe 13, 14 years ago called simply Wetherspoon’s Carpets. And of course, the chain has massively expanded since then. So there’s scope for a sequel, I think. But yeah, it’s a well-known phenomenon. And yeah, so each new opening, they go to extra lengths now to even put penicillin spores in there. So it’s quite special.
Lev: That’s really nice. And I think that the incongruity of it is, as you say, this is a cheap chain known, and actually sometimes kind of derided and dismissed, I think…
Matt: That’s right.
Lev: …for its cheapness. And yet they’ve gone to this extra cost and extra length for something that you would associate more with some sort of gastropub or some kind of beer parlour place, you know, “and look at our bespoke carpets as well”. And I think this is an excellent thing. And it’s not cheap the way they’ve gone about it, because this isn’t just any, as you say, they’re all individually designed, so that’s one thing. But apparently they are really nice Axminster carpets chosen because they have a wider range of colours available to them so they can really go to town on these on these carpets. The websites devoted to them, I think, are particularly enjoyable because there’s quite a few of them, there’s several ones I’ve found. The one I like the most is the one where they’ve taken a photograph of every one they’ve been to, and there’s quite a lot, upwards of 100, and in every single photograph, the photographer’s feet are also included in the photograph. So they haven’t cropped the feet out.
Matt: I do that too. I don’t know why. I’ve not even seen those websites. It just feels like the natural thing to do. You need a focus as well as the background.
Lev: It’s proof that you were there. It’s not just generic photograph of the carpet. And I think the other thing is that the designs being related in some way to the pub or the area, or as you say, the person, is a particularly nice touch. Is it always detectable? I mean, if you look at the carpet, can you go, aha, that is a penicillin spore? Or do you have to sort of read…
Matt: Some more than others. I think it’s relatively new that they’ve made an effort to do that. I think some of the older ones are just interesting designs. It’s only in more recent years they’ve been more clever about it. There’s one, I think in Cambridge, I found one. It’s an old cinema and that’s, you can see reels, film reels built into the design. it’s things like i think ones that are out in more woody places or a place on the edge of the country you often get pine cones in the design or that kind of thing and even if there isn’t something it’s good it’s a good exercise to sit there and try and imagine how it might relate to the local area even if it’s just pareidolia or something that you’re not there’s nothing actually there but also I mean carpets in pubs are a good traditional thing which we almost lost. There aren’t many central London pubs where you can still find carpets on the floor because, of course, they’re difficult to maintain and keep fresh in the pub environment when drinks and food are being spilled all the time.
Lev They do have a relationship, therefore, to thing number one, which is the smell of carpets.
Matt: That’s right. There is a very distinct smell, isn’t there?
Lev: Yes, yeah.
Matt: Do you remember the Bree Louise pub up in Euston? They’ve demolished it now for HS2. That was a very much loved pub that specialised in craft ales or real ale. And it was great. I mean, the beer selection was wonderful, but their carpets really stank. There was like almost a toilet smell about them. Otherwise, that pub was brilliant. So there are hazards to having a carpet. They have to be looked after very well. But when they are, it really adds something homely to the pub, doesn’t it? Welcoming.
Thing 4 – Wazzbaffles
Lev: Very good. Well, we’re assailing the nostrils with smells, which leads us very smoothly on to thing number four, which is a word I had to Google. Inevitably, when I Googled it, it took me to something that you’d written. So I’m going to, again, say the word and then you can explain what the hell it means. The word is… I feel like Robert Robinson in Call My Bluff… the word is wazzbaffles.
Matt: These are the sort of thing… I like these because most people walk past them and never notice them in their lives. And once you do notice them, you see them everywhere. It’s one of those kind of things. And these are the angled surfaces you sometimes see along walls or in the corners between two walls. Forty-five degree angle and they’re there to stop gentlemen urinating against the wall, because the idea is that the wazzbaffle, it makes the expellation drip down onto their shoes, it comes back at them, bounces off the wall and off the slope and hits them, either in spray or in torrent… so these things are typically put down alleyways or in quiet corners the sort of places that drunk men might go to relieve themselves. And they’re a Victorian invention. So they’ve been around for, well, well over a century. I can give you one or two examples if you want to go check these things out.
Lev: First, I want to ask you, did you workshop the word wazzbaffle? Because I think this is something that you’ve coined yourself.
Matt: The formal phrase was urine deflectors or words to that effect.
Lev: That’s terribly bland, isn’t it?
Matt: Yes.
Lev: Utilitarian.
Matt: Yes. I think I woke up with the word in my head one day. I don’t know what kind of dreams I was having. But for those overseas, wazz is a kind of colloquialism for urination. In English, British English, we say wazz, have a wazz. And baffle is a sloping surface, an architectural feature, usually to balance light or heat. But here I’m using it to deflect urine. There’s some argument about whether these things would actually work. I mean, every time I post about these things, there’s people saying, “Well, that wouldn’t stop it. You just take it slowly and it would gradually drip off.” So I’ve never done the experiment as a former scientist that maybe I should, but I think I could be arrested for doing such an experiment.
Lev: You say the Victorians, as with so many things, they invented them. They also brought in the widespread use of public toilets, didn’t they?
Matt: That’s right. Yeah. I mean, there have always been some form of public toilet. Dick Whittington, or Richard Whittington, was famous for many things. And one of them was he built a massive toilet in the square mile in the 14th century. So even in medieval times, they had… Whittington’s Longhouse, I think it was called, and that had space for 30 or 40 people at the same time. And it had a men’s section and a women’s section. So it was very forward thinking. And of course, the Victorians, as you say, went to town on this, literally, and they built urinals all over the place, nearly always for gentlemen. You’ll see two or three designs that… there are quite… most commonly the subterranean toilets, many of which have been converted into cafes, or one was a nightclub for a while. So there are various uses. Some of them are still toilets, increasingly rare, but one or two of them you can still go in. And then you get standalone cubicles as well, which are quite rare, these green painted things. There’s one hiding in the woods in Twickenham in one of the parks there. There’s another one off Chancery Lane down an alleyway, and you sometimes find these dotted around
Lev: And is there also not a fairly recent invention… the pop-up urinal, which is a sort of tubular thing that comes up out of the pavement?
Matt: Yeah see I think they were only designed for instagrammers and tiktokers to stand on top of as they’re rising it’s to get an interesting video…
Lev: So, you could… i interrupted you when you were about to tell us where we might find a good example of a wazzbaffle…
Matt: Yeah, so there’s quite a few in central London, and any anonymous corner or alleyway is likely to have something like this. It’s not always metal, so sometimes they’re metal slopes, sometimes it’s built into the structure of the wall itself. The longest wazzbaffle in London that I’ve spotted… If you know Charing Cross Station and you go up to the sort of, there’s a back exit to it, which leads out to a very long footpath, a raised footpath over Villiers Street towards the river. And you go along there, you go inside an old brick structure, which is part of the original Charing Cross Station. And in there, there’s some sloped surfaces that I think were put in there to stop people having... weeing, let’s say it’s a nice word for it, against the walls. So that’s the longest. But my favourite wazzbaffle in the whole of London is just off Fleet Street. Anyone listening to this who’s never walked down Fleet Street, do it because there’s so many wonderful alleyways off to the north side and some to the south. Always go explore those, you’ll find all kinds of things. The best one of all is Clifford’s Inn Passage… it leads to an old legal building called Clifford’s Inn, and down there they’ve got these exemplary wazzbaffles… they’re made of stainless steel I believe, and they run the length of the passageway… and they’re gorgeous big chunky metallic things which once you spot them, you can’t ever not spot was baffles again because you get it in your head that these things are down there…
Lev: That’s the picture of the wazzbaffle. All of your things, they come from close and detailed observation, I think, or just being interested in the curious. Is that something you’ve always had? Have you always been interested in odd things and out of the way things?
Matt: Yeah, I think so. I think, as I said at the start, that my scientific background makes me want to examine everything maybe that little bit more carefully. Walking the streets today, I just don’t notice the people. I’m almost bumping into people and I won’t spot a crime on the other side of the street. Not that much of that happens, but because I’m looking at wazzbaffles or plaques or interesting doors.
Lev: Stink pipes.
Matt: Yeah, stink pipes, another good one. There’s some very good ones in your part of town as well.
Lev: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah, I just don’t notice the people. I’m forever looking at the walls and the floors and the rooftops. And I think that’s a good thing and a bad thing. I probably miss out on a lot of human interaction.
Lev: It strikes me as a very good way to live. You’re taking an interest in the world around you.
Thing 5 – Diamond Geezer
Lev: Because you’re not the only person who’s interested in London… I wouldn’t like people to think that you have a monopoly on London-based stuff. And thing number five is not a thing but a person. And it’s a person who goes by the name Diamond Geezer.
Matt: Yes, so that’s not his real name. I don’t actually know his real name, even though I’ve met him on maybe 20, 30 occasions. I always want to keep it a mystery. So he blogs under the name Diamond Geezer. Now he’s, in my opinion, the Samuel Pepys of our day. He started blogging 22, 23 years ago, so he’s been going all that time. Still uses the original blog template, so reading his blog is like going back in time.
Lev: It’s a wonderful throwback to the 90s, isn’t it? Fantastic.
Matt: Yeah. And he does that deliberately. He wants to maintain, like in aspic, how blogging used to be. And he blogs every single day, has done for all of those years. And the minutiae he observes the city in goes way, way beyond what I do. And for example, I mean, not just what he observes, but where he goes. Last year in 2025, he... kept a tally of every time he went to every single London borough, of which there are 32 or 33 if you include the square mile. He’d been to every single borough 40 times at least which means you’d have to go to three or four boroughs every single day, and that’s extraordinary… that takes real real effort. I mean he is retired so he’s got a bit more time on his hands…
Lev: …but also the dedication and the relentless interest in the subject. Recently he started doing an alphabetical tour of I think what he describes as unloved London suburbs. So places that people who don’t live there don’t know about. His restraint is that it mustn’t have a train station or a tube station or even a tram stop. So these are real local pockets of London, which, as you say, there’s… it’s an infinite subject.
Matt: It’s a double-edged sword in a way for the reader, because do you necessarily want to read about a tiny suburb that you’re never going to go to, you’ve got no personal interest in? But yes, you do, because he always writes it with such verve and such wit. And he’s always right. He gets all his facts right. He’s like a machine. And he’s so readable as well. So I always say to him, we have to make sure your blog gets preserved, because this is an artifact. It’s how London has changed over 25 years or whatever and beyond. And he talks about subjects nobody else will talk about. He’ll pick a bus stop in one of these places you mentioned and write a whole 2000-word essay about what’s going on around the bus stop, which can sound really dull, but it never is. It’s always very well done.
Lev: As you say, the Samuel Pepys of our age...
Thing 6 – International Space Station
Lev: We leave London now for thing number six, your final and possibly defining thing, the one that will sum up everything, and it is the International Space Station.
Matt: Yeah, I’ve been entranced by space from a young age. I think a lot of people are. It’s one of those romantic topics. It’s about technology, human progress, what’s out there. And it also speaks to fundamental philosophical things like where do we come from? What’s the universe here for? Going out into space is one of our ways of trying to solve those questions. So when I was a teenager, I used to have posters of the space shuttle on my wall, whereas all my friends had Cindy Crawford and people like that on the walls. Mine was always different. I could tell the four space shuttles apart by their tiling patterns. That’s kind of the level of geekery I was getting into. And I’ve maintained that into adulthood. I still love the space program. I mean, I’m aware of all the kind of pros and cons and the financial reasons and the dangers and all that. But just the sheer romanticism of it and the thought of exploring and getting out there and what’s beyond still appeals to me. And the International Space Station is a real symbol of that. I think it’s underappreciated now. I think historians of the future will look back at it with wonder and think, wow, they put that together with primitive early 21st-century technology. But it’s huge. I mean, this thing is the length of like five or six double-decker buses. It’s got the capacity of two or three jumbo jets. It’s got loads of space up there. It had to be launched over 40 or 50 different missions and then all bolted together in orbit. Absolutely massive. So large, in fact, you can see it very clearly when it passes overhead at night time. There are websites that will tell you when it’s coming over London or your part of the world.
Lev: Incidentally, just a very nice mention there for the classic unit of measurement, the double-decker bus. Full points there. If you’d managed to get Wales or Belgium in there somewhere or Nelson’s Column, that would have been...
Matt: Tennis court.
Lev: Yeah, tennis courts. The fact that it’s so visible as well, because it is in near-Earth orbit, that you can look up and it is this slow-moving, quite shiny, really bright object. It’s a connection. I remember hearing an interview with Chris Hadfield fairly shortly after he came off the station talking about the world and the way it changed his view of the world. And he said something like, the interesting thing was that on the first few times when it went round, the astronauts would be looking down and pointing out, “there’s my village”, looking out for their village or their town where they grew up. And then the next few times they’d be saying, “Well, there’s my county” and then “There’s my country”. And then gradually they just expanded, “Well, there’s the world and we’re all in it together.” It’s a beacon of hope in a way, isn’t it?
Matt: Well, it is. It’s for two reasons. I mean, it’s been up there a long time. It’s been up there 25 years. It’s been permanently occupied. So if you’re younger than 25, which I don’t think either of us are, but some listeners may be younger than 25, you’ve never lived a day of your life where there haven’t been people in space. And before the turn of the century, that wasn’t true. There’s always been long gaps between space flights permanently occupied. But its real resonance is the way it brings international groups together. It’s always crewed by at least people from the USA and Russia working together up there still, despite tensions here on Earth, but also crews from Europe, from Japan, and various visiting countries as well. It truly is international. And it’s one of those few spaces that is kind of outside the bounds of the normal territorial system. It’s where people come together, a bit like Antarctica, to do research and to live the human experience in a challenging environment and to learn from it. For all those reasons, it’s a beacon of hope. But also a beacon of now, it makes us realise what humans can do when they get together, when they’ve got massive amounts of money as well, because that’s also important to be able to build something like that. But what a triumph. And they are talking of de-orbiting it in four years now, so not long at all. Four years’ time, as plans stand, they’re going to de-orbit it into the, I think it’s the Pacific Ocean, which would be a real shame. I think there are calls in Congress to preserve it for longer. I think it should be preserved as a museum up there. Whenever people can go visit, I mean, the challenges to that, you’ve got to keep boosting its orbit and things to keep it up there. But it would be like trashing Westminster Abbey. It’s bigger than that. It’s bigger than that. A thousand years from now, the International Space Station will be of absolute importance to our history and we should preserve it, I think.
Lev: Yes, I think that’s really interesting. What you said about the technology felt very insightful. Years from now, people will look at that and think what primitive technology that was. Certainly when it was launched, We thought this was obviously the most cutting edge and the most amazing thing in the same way that in 1969, the moon landing, the moon rockets were the cutting edge technology. And of course, famously – I’m not sure this is really a very good analogy, I’ve been told it’s not a good analogy – but it is that, you know, the computing power that that powered the moon landing was equivalent to the computing power of a greetings card that plays Happy Birthday to you. There are reasons why that’s a bad analogy, but it gives you an idea of the scale of it. And that we think that, you know, even in the time that it’s been up there, it has… obviously it’s aged and technology has moved on. Thank you so much, Matt. Those are six wonderful things, very much in the spirit of Six Things. I will put some links into the notes so that people can explore and look around the internet and find out more about all of the things that you’ve discussed. And I hope all of these things bring you as much pleasure as they’ve brought me. So thank you so much, Matt, for being a guest on the Six Things podcast.
Matt: Thank you. I’ve really enjoyed it. Thanks.
Lev: Thank you for listening and we’ll see you next month for six more excellent and fascinating things. Bye.
