I took these two Photosynth panoramas of the inner courtyard and the front area:

I took the picture and the ones below in mid-October 2012, and the shop was still going strong in December 2012, but by then a note had been taped to the windows saying that it was going to close in January 2013. I went back today (7 January) and it was finally closed, with everything gone from inside.

But the closing-down sale didn’t exist. I went in to look at some cricket gear for next season, but the prices didn’t seem much different to their normal levels. If you’ve patronised Sports Direct before you’ll know that it specialises in selling cheap sport gear at a discount. The company, owned by Newcastle United FC owner Mike Ashley, also owns a bunch of brand names, including Dunlop, Slazenger, Kangol, Lonsdale and Donnay (there’s a handy list on the group’s corporate website). So while you might see those names on sale elsewhere, the chances are they’ll always be cheaper at Sports Direct where for obvious reasons there’s a permanent sale.

I checked online and sure enough the in-store ‘closing down’ prices were exactly the same as those on the website. I asked one of the shop assistants what the closing-down discount was, and he laughed and said that there wasn’t one. I asked him why there were posters all over the place advertising what appeared to be an extra sale, and he pointed out that the posters say ‘all stock reduced’ and all the stock had been reduced, just to the usual ‘discount’ price from the ‘full’ price. If you look carefully at the photos, you’ll notice that the wording is designed to never explicitly link the two phrases, “closing down” and “everything reduced”. They appear on the same posters, true, but it never says there’s a “closing-down sale”. He also pointed out that there’d be no need to have a closing-down sale because all the stock could just be put in a van and sent to another branch.

Interestingly, Sports Direct has some form in this area: in May 2008 the company was told off by the Office of Fair Trading for running misleading ‘closing down’ sales, and it signed an undertaking not to mislead customers in future:

The OFT announced yesterday that it had received complaints from members of the public that Sports Direct had displayed “closing down” adverts for months at a time. The stores that carried the notices, however, never closed down or were only temporarily shuttered.

The watchdog investigated the allegations and concluded that Sports Direct had created the incorrect impression that the shops were closing permanently. The OFT said this could make consumers believe they had little time to buy goods or that only limited stock was available.

The complaints related to the firm’s Sports World chain of stores, as well as its Hargreaves and Gilesports operations. Sports Direct’s chief executive, Dave Forsey, and its finance director, Bob Mellors, signed the OFT undertakings on behalf of the company, which is 70% controlled by the billionaire Newcastle United owner Mike Ashley.

That’s slightly different to what’s going on here, which is really a bit of clever marketing – make sure the words ‘reduced’ and ‘closing’ appear close to each other, and your customers’ minds will do the rest for you. We’re so used to the idea of closing-down sales that we’ll assume that’s what’s going on. And the psychology of discounts and sales means that even the perception of a closing-down sale is enough. Our brains are primed to go in there and bargain-hunt, even though the bargains may be exactly the same as they’ve always been.

*Let’s not get into the missing apostrophe in the name of the shopping centre.

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But actually, the oldest part of the underground network is 20 years older than even that ‘original’ line – Sir Marc Brunel’s Thames Tunnel was built in the 1840s, originally as a foot passageway. It wasn’t until 1869 that the builders of the East London Railway bought the tunnel and refitted it for rail use. It’s not something that seems to be widely known, although TfL does acknowledge the fact on its abandoned page for the East London Line.

So this is as good a point as any to re-post something I wrote a long time ago, as part of my dissertation for a diploma in journalism at City University. My project looked at the controversy over the redevelopment of the East London Line and how the project might look when it was completed. This was back in 2003, and the line with which we ended up looks quite different to what was presented to me at the time. In fact, the biggest change is that it ceased to be part of the Underground at all and became the backbone (if such a metaphor is appropriate for one side of a very irregular polygon) of the new London Overground.

Which means that, technically, the Thames Tunnel has once again ceased to be part of the Underground, though for my purposes I’m still going to claim it as part of the Tube network. The introductory piece follows – bear in mind that I wrote it in 2003 and haven’t changed anything, so much of it is outdated. Incidentally, it has nothing to do with the New Statesman – the brief for the project was to write and present it as though it were going into a major publication, and that one seemed to fit. Click here to view it as a PDF.

No Londoner would argue that public transport in the capital is adequate. Despite the success of the congestion charge since February the buses are still stuck in traffic jams, and far below, the trains are stuck in their tunnels awaiting signal upgrades and track refurbishment. The solution seems, as always, to be investment. Since the late 1990s, when capital expenditure on infrastructure was split from day-to-day running costs in the Tube’s annual budget we have been able to watch just how public money is being spent on the public works projects we hear about so often.

Since the completion of the Jubilee Line Extension in 2000 there have been five rail projects dangling in front of Londoners’ eyes. The most talked-about, and most expensive is Crossrail, the underground link from Paddington through the West End and the City to Essex, which would allow railway trains to travel across the city. Then there is the Thameslink 2000 project, which promised to upgrade the ailing and overused Thameslink service that runs north to south across the capital. The Channel Tunnel Rail Link promises to cut journey times from London to the Continent by thirty minutes, and – uniquely among current major transport projects – is running under budget and to time. The Hackney-SouthWest line, also known as Crossrail 2, is the current incarnation of long-discussed plans – some of which date back to before the Second World War – to bring the Underground to densely populated areas of the city that currently have no easy Tube access.

Finally, the East London Line extension plans to extend a nine-station line that runs through parts of East London and Docklands, to form an orbital railway connecting with the existing overground South, West and North London railways. The line would be a boon for commuters who work in outlying areas, who could avoid having to travel into central London and back out again just to get somewhere that may be just down the road. At the moment, the East London Line runs through some of London’s most deprived boroughs. Tellingly, it doesn’t actually connect them to anywhere else. The extension, shown in the map opposite, would connect the line, north and south, to existing railways, over which trains could run to a far greater array of destinations than is currently possible.

The oldest part of the London Underground actually predates the rest of the network by almost 20 years. Sir Marc Brunel’s Thames Tunnel, which runs between Wapping and Rotherhithe, was built in 1843 as a passenger tunnel, and bought out 26 years later by the builders of the East London Railway, who converted it for use by passenger and goods trains. In the meantime, in 1862, the Underground as we know it had come into being with the construction of the Metropolitan Railway. The plans to extend the line centre upon an even older structure – the 1839 Braithwaite viaduct. This remnant of an earlier railway, when the East London Railway continued on into Liverpool Street from the south, will be demolished under current plans for the railway. Campaigners say it’s a historic building and it would be “an outrage” to demolish it. Moreover, they say, the whole plan as it stands, is “just a shady property deal masquerading as a railway”.

London Underground hopes to have the line built within six years. They first need to reassure the people of the East End that their vital local heritage and amenities are not going to be bulldozed to make way for big businesses.

*TfL itself seems to be celebrating the anniversary on Wednesday 9 January, the date of the limited official opening, but a day before passenger services started which has caused some consternation. The estimable Christian Wolmar and Diamond Geezer both take up the story.

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Apple charges £529 for the sim-free iPhone 5 16GB, £599 for the 32GB version and £699 for the 64GB – if you’re considering buying it direct and using it with your existing talk plan, see if that’s cheaper than with a network by adding the following to your monthly bill: £22.04 for a 16GB handset, £24.96 for a 32GB handset and £29.13 for a 64GB model.

I think it’s all correct – contact @phowax for questions, corrections etc. Note that it doesn’t take into account any variations in benefits from the various tariffs – the chart assumes that your minimum requirements (inclusive text messages, data etc) are met by every tariff. I left out the Vodafone 12-month tariffs because they skew the data, and I couldn’t find 12-month pricing from any other network. Also, the O2 pricing refers to in-store sales; if you buy online it’s cheaper. The table doesn’t take into account customer service, availability of Visual Voicemail (O2 only, as far as I know) or the colour of the sky.

The sortable table below shows the important figures; click the image below for the full-size version which includes all pricing data for each talk plan, and which is coloured to show the cheapest plans. The colouring works per-line, so for the 16GB phone, the green boxes are the cheapest overall, and red the most expensive, same for the 32GB, and so on.

It’s a fascinating deal, given that until now the British government, through the FCO, has funded the World Service fully. A recent 16 per cent cut in the grant has led to 650 job cuts and the BBC recently ‘volunteered’ to fund the World Service itself from 2014 so that it’s going to be paid for entirely by license fee-payers in the UK.

That’s got to be a bad idea. The idea behind the FCO funding (which incidentally left editorial judgement to the BBC) was that the World Service promotes British culture and values abroad. It’s something I’m happy to support but it’s entirely fair for license fee-payers here to ask why they should have to pay for such things.

The World Service is the best thing about British broadcasting. It’s informative, erudite and entertaining, and it would be a great shame to lose it. If the American money allows it to continue doing what it does, and without becoming like the turgid Voice of America, that ought to be a good thing.

There was a time when Queen were just another band. This was before the hype, the coke, the helicopters, the enormo-gigs, the controversial sexuality and the end. Before all that happened, there was the music. ‘A Night at the Opera’ was their fourth album, and by the time of its release in December 1975 the band had picked up a reputation as solid glam rockers. Expectation was building after their previous album, ‘Sheer Heart Attack’, had climbed to number 2 in the charts, and expectations were sated with the release of the ridiculous first single from the new album, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.

But that’s not really a good place to start. It’s overblown, overplayed and much hated. But let’s take it in context. I’m still not sure whether it was good fortune or misfortune to have been just entering the world of music at the point that Freddie Mercury died. When you’re at that stage your tastes are largely dictated by the charts and what everyone else your age is into, and at that point Queen were back at number 1 with the re-released ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and the entire class (even the really cool kids) was listening to Queen.

And so to the album. The music is of a uniformly high quality, but it flits and skips from four-on-the-floor rock to odd folk-country, classical balladry and out-and-out-weirdness. You can’t fault the quality of the songwriting, as you might expect from a band on their fourth album, and in fact their third in eighteen months.

‘Death on Two Legs (Dedicated to…’, which opens the batting, is one of the best vitriolic hate-songs to be found anywhere, and showcases some of Freddie’s best lyrics to date, alongside a formidable guitar, bass and drum line. The album is entirely without track spacing, and so this venomous rant jumps straight into a very short old-style close harmony number, followed by the gloriously silly ‘I’m In Love With My Car’, which is drummer Roger Taylor’s ode to his, er, car. Which he loves, so much so that the song was deemed worthy to be the b-side of that monster opening single.

There’s plenty of folklore on this album, whether it’s the twenties homage of ‘Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon’ and ‘Seaside Rendezvous’ or the transplanted sea-shanty of Brian May’s ”39′. ‘Sweet Lady’ and the second single ‘You’re My Best Friend’ seem fairly nondescript set against the rest of the album, but are still fine songs.

It’s not until we flip the record over that we realise that it has all just been a prelude to the four (and a half) titans herein. ‘The Prophet’s Song’ dwarfs ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in scope, being an epic rock folk tale of storms and death and wise men, and its 145 second a cappella harmony section has to be heard to be believed. The string madness outro segues into the truly beautiful ‘Love of My Life’, a hurt and sorry tale of love gone wrong set to sparing and sympathetic instrumentation.

The final three tracks on the album are ‘Good Company’, another old fashioned ditty from May ;’Bohemian Rhapsody’, which needs nothing further said about it, other than that it somehow fits here at the (almost) end of this headcase of an album, and the now famous Queen rendition of the National Anthem, which is tame by today’s standards, but must have sounded positively rebellious 27 years ago.

It’s carried all along by a solid band who really work well together (and did so in an unchanged line-up for the next sixteen years), pinned to Freddie Mercury’s unique voice and range. It’s not my favourite album. To pick just one out of so many greats is a daunting concept. But it is a truly great album, and it’s one which any music lover should own. The breadth of material is astonishing and even if you can’t abide the bombast of the later years the raw emotion still shines through here. It’s camp and it’s bloody silly, but it’s hard to resist falling under the spell.