london

Finding London’s Most Central Sheep

Posted on February 11, 2025February 11, 2025

London blogger Diamond Geezer (see 6000 miles… passim) located London’s Most Central Sheep in this post. And the rules were pretty simple:

I’m only interested in live sheep, so not a cuddly toy in Hamleys nor lamb cutlets at The Ritz. I’m not interested in temporary sheep like those that get driven over Southwark Bridge in September or shorn at the Lambeth Country Show in June. Also by ‘most central’ I mean closest to the centre of London which is generally agreed to be Trafalgar Square, specifically the statue of Charles I at the top of Whitehall. Hopefully that’s clear.

And using some traditional foot-based detective work and some internet sleuthing, he found London’s Most Central Sheep:

Here she is. She’s in the sheep enclosure at Vauxhall City Farm, lapping away at a bowl of water resting on a spare tyre.

And all was well with the world.

Except…

That isn’t London’s Most Central Sheep. In fact, it seems likely that it might only be London’s Third Most Central Sheep. DG had overlooked Oasis Farm Waterloo, less than a mile from Trafalgar Square.

And so he has revisited the question. And he found two sheep there. So those would be London’s Most Central Sheep.

Except…

There may be an additional issue.

…they might have been goats. Their heads were hidden so it was hard to be 100% sure what kind of cloven animal they were. The Oasis Farm Instagram feed has a number of photos of sheep but also some of goats so it is possible I saw the wrong animal.
Their website also says “our farm animals rotate from Jamie’s Farm in Wiltshire”, suggesting they’re not always here, and also that “we usually have a ewe with her lambs”, which before lambing season may mean they currently don’t. Alas this isn’t cut and dried.

At the end of the day, it’s reasonable to say that he has accomplished what he set out to do.
He has found London’s Most Central Sheep. It’s just that it is either 0.8 miles or 1.4 miles from Charles I statue in Trafalgar Square. And if it turns out that he was correct in the first post, and it is 1.4 miles, then he’s also managed to find London’s Most Central Goat.

Bonus points right there.

I’m sorry?
You’re saying that no-one would ever need to know where to find London’s Most Central Sheep?

Well, that just sounds like a ewe problem.

And so to London

Posted on July 14, 2023June 25, 2023

Probably the best city in the UK beginning with L. OK. Lincoln isn’t bad.

But from there, it’s a disastrous list: Dirty l**ds, Liverpool – “The City of Victims” – and Leicester.
And Luton isn’t a city, but would only drag the letter further down if it were.
L got a raw deal in the UK.

Heading worldwide, there’s a surprise Italian entry.

But I digress (often). We’re London-bound today for the last – and shortest – leg of our brief trip back up North. London City airport is the landing strip of choice – a new one for me – and I’m looking forward to grabbing a window seat and hopefully snapping a couple of pics as we come in over… well.. the city.

At the time of writing, I’m not 100% sure I’m even going to be in London for half the time we planned to be in London. More on that later, if and when plans develop.

For now, it’s goodbye to the Isle of Man. Until next time.

Meanwhile…

Posted on September 23, 2022

I’ve been saying.

What a wonderful world we live in.

Day 677 – London-centric Weather Experiences

Posted on February 1, 2022

Don’t be fooled. There’s much more to the UK than just London.

After a weekend of stormy weather in the UK, in which Storms Malik and Corrie brought winds gusting to 150kph, killing at least two people and leaving tens of thousands of homes without power, residents in the South East of the country are still harping on about their hurricane back in October 1987.

And that was a very windy day, but it’s always interesting to note that it’s the storm that most people remember, even though there have been many, many worse storms in the UK during the intervening 35 years. The difference, of course, is that those storms didn’t affect London, and so ended up way down the list of things that the news programmes reported on. Even the events of this weekend only made it into this morning’s BBC radio bulletin after articles on politics and covid, politics, covid, and house prices. You can be damn sure that if the storms had been in London, it would have been a different story.

This sort of thing leads people to believe that storm warnings in the UK are blown (no pun intended) a bit out of proportion. But they get that impression because they live in London. If they lived in Newcastle or Belfast or Inverness, they’d maybe get a bit more of a genuine UK experience (especially weather-wise!), but for many people (much like the BBC) the UK = London = the UK. And talking/reporting about the weather is often a really good example of this London-centric approach.

“The UK has completely closed down because of the snow, but it was ridiculous, because there was only a tiny covering,” exaggerated one Saffa friend living in – you guessed it – Putney. Never mind that there were 20ft drifts on the Pennines, and Hexham was cut off for a week. Those places don’t exist to people living in London.

I guess it’s the same in SA. We hear about all the stuff in Cape Town, Joburg and Durban. Less so Gqeberha, Upington and Bela Bela. Is it because nothing happens there, that they don’t think we’ll be bothered, or that it’s just too much effort for the news crews to get out into the wilderness?

Having lived outside London for all my UK life, I can tell you that it’s almost certainly that third reason. And I do think that the BBC are getting a bit better, now that at least some of their operations have moved to Salford in the godforsaken North.

But once again, that improvement was sadly missing in today’s order of stories.