£10m cycling investment

The Department for Transport has announced funding for Cycling Demonstration Towns (Blackpool, Cambridge, Colchester, Chester, Leighton-Linslade, Shrewsbury, Southend, Southport, Stoke-on-Trent, Woking and York), a demonstration project in the Peak District National Park, and some extra funding for Sustrans to install cycle parking and cycling links to schools.

I don't think this is new money, it's just putting flesh on funding that has already been announced. That's not a reason for knocking it though.

The nearest projects to us seem to be links to the Basingstoke canal in Woking.

They've also produced a guide to best practice for local authorities, which claims that walking and cycling schemes can deliver cost/benefit ratios ranging from 18.5 to 38.4 (for every pound spent the benefits can be worth £18.50 to £38.40).

There is a lot of information on the DfT web site, and I haven't read it all yet: the press release, an assessment of the first wave of cycling towns, and the guide for local authorities.

House rules

Connoisseurs of the unique Daily Mail take on the world ought to examine the house rules for commenting on their web site, before reading this article on cyclists (link provided by Real Cycling).

• “We want our readers to see and understand different points of view”
• “You can express a strong opinion but please do not go over the top”
• “You must not make or encourage comments which are: defamatory, false or misleading; insulting, threatening or abusive; obscene or of a sexual nature; offensive, racist, sexist, homophobic or discriminatory against any religions or other groups"
• "You must not pretend to be someone else (e.g. an expert....)"

Ashmolean, Oxford

The Ashmolean museum in Oxford has been one of my favourites for a long time. Recently it has benefitted from the investment of a lot of money and effort, and this week it re-opened to the public.

Off we went, and we were delighted. We feared that it would be too busy, but it easily absorbed the influx of visitors, and the new displays are wonderful. It would be hopeless to try and describe everything, so I will just say that if you get the chance you should go and see for yourself.

After a few hours we had taken in all that we would cope with, so we went for lunch, had a long walk, and then dropped into another favourite (Pitt Rivers Museum), before heading home.



It was a very good day.

Utterly depressing Flickr group

Another collection of bad cycle lanes, from the Guardian.

The original is here

And there's a poll on cycle lanes here. Please treat it with respect.

Argleton

From todays Guardian -

"Argleton doesn't actually exist. It is a phantom village that appears on Google Maps. You can search online for Argleton's local weather forecast (10C yesterday), property prices (not much for sale at the moment) or for the number of a local plumber, but in reality the village's coordinates point to little more than a muddy field."

View Larger Map

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Good things here

Banquet in the iguanodon

I couldn't resist adding this picture to yesterday's post about the dinosaurs at Crystal Palace.

Dinosaurs

The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs are sculptures that were commissioned in 1852 and unveiled in 1854. When the Crystal Palace was moved to Sydenham Hill after the Great Exhibition, the new Crystal Palace Company commissioned Benjamin Waterhouse (a sculptor) and Sir Richard Owen (a biologist and palaeontologist) to build life-sized models of extinct animals. In the end, the funding ran out, and some of the planned sculptures remained uncompleted.

The reconstructions were based on fossils from the Natural History Museum, and skeletons of modern animals. They predated the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species by several years, and at the time were controversial. Within 40 years, science had moved on, and the models were recognised as being unrealistic. They fell into disrepair, but were restored in 2002, and were grade-1 listed in 2007.

When I was a child I had a dinosaur book with pictures of these, and I have waited for almost half a century to see the real thing. Today I finally made it. After all that time, I was prepared to be disappointed, and slightly surprised that I wasn't.

There's more here, here, here, here, and elsewhere.