Ruislip: What is it good for ......?

Yeah, it is. ;)

The green bit. Is it Ruislip Woods? Maybe Ducks Hill Road?

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Mad+Bess+Wood/@51.5949574,-0.4416416,17.75z/data=!4m12!1m6!3m5!1s0x48766c70b4f09e33:0x9665fd854d13cc1e!2sRuislip+Woods+National+Nature+Reserve!8m2!3d51.5970418!4d-0.4357761!3m4!1s0x48766c769040a185:0x679c1cdf93c49473!8m2!3d51.5949605!4d-0.4423103

Good to see Ealing catching up with the connections (West & South) Ruislip has had for a generation;
Chiltern Line to Marylebone for the Paddington development, from 20 minutes.

While looking...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxWhi4R_NYM

Seems to be a lot of crashes around here, confirming my opinion of the driving standards. Just far enough out of London for the speed to go up and numbnuts really show their inability to drive.

I'm not interested in country trains. How long does it take Ruislip to City?
Central, District and overground and soon Crossrail. No contest.

Ruislip Woods National Nature Reserve, comprises 726 acres of woodland.
Four individual woods;
Park Wood, (broadly to the south of Ruislip Lido),
Copse Wood, (broadly to the north of Ruislip Lido, western boundary Ducks Hill Road),
Mad Bess Woods, (eastern boundary Ducks Hill Road, western; Breakspear Road North),
Bayhurst Woods, (western boundary Breakspear Road North).

Was this collision recent?
Ducks Hill Road is not well lit, has some false summits, and most drivers approach the roundabout by the BP petrol station far too fast,
unless it is a sunny weekend, and the roads are blocked with visitors trying to all park at the Ruislip Lido.

@skydancer & @moorhen can confirm there is a pleasant, (non-competitive), soft-offroad ride along the bridleways.

We rode out to Berkamsted on Sunday and there were two cars there. One had the arse end smashed in, the other had the windscreen smashed in. I ride a lot of DIYs from there and I try and get out early because the whole route from Greenford out through Northolt and Ruislip is super busy with dickheads.

The woods do look nice. Maybe I should try and find an off-road route out there and blat around them for a bit.

Yeah, had a look at the route and we went out Ruislip Road, Ruislip Road E basically the A4180. It was actually pretty good last weekend but I did take the new bike path to avoid the Ruislip Road E dickheads near Greenford and maybe with the timing fewer people were out so we didn't get the usual rudeboys squeezing through the single-lane islands .

new bike path to avoid the Ruislip Road E

Yep, LB Ealing have done well with that new shared bike/predestrian path.
It is pretty smooth, but still unmarked, so pedestrians just wander all over it.

Have you ever taken the bike route adjacent to the A40?
You have to use the footpath of the A40 to cross the canal,
(or go way into the park to find the footbridge),
then past the Four Hills,
to the little known foot/bridge over the A40 at the Target roundabout,
then along the north side of the A40 to the Polish War Memorial?
Take care here, just before the end of the filter lane for A4180 to A40 eastbound,
there is a dropped kerb/entrance to a field with steep approach & exit angles.

pedestrians just wander all over it.

Yep. But even the one near Ealing Common has peds wandering over the clearly marked/coloured bike path bit.

Have you ever taken the bike route adjacent to the A40?

Yeah, it sucks. Well, the outer bit nearer Denham is ok, if noisy with traffic. But get closer to town and you're constantly looking for where to go, it's skinny, you get slowed down at junctions, etc. I prefer Uxbridge Road.

I hate slowing down, so if cycle infra slows me down, I stick to the roads.

LB Hillingdon are pretty much bike blind.
They have supported childrens cycling courses at primary schools.

They are inhibited by the broadly unimproved Victorian-era farm track-based road system.
There is a Hillingdon-wide policy not to widen roads, (to sacrifice grass verges), so painted bike lanes are the best we get.

I agree.
Cycling to (even further east) Wests Beers, that bit is a slalom course around unthinking predestrians.

On a morning stroll, noticed a couple of blokes clutching cameras on the bridge over the Chiltern Line at West Ruislip.
They cheerily told me I had blundered into this;
https://www.railadvent.co.uk/2018/10/steam-locomotive-9466-where-and-when-to-see-in-princes-risborough-this-saturday.html

I never thought of Ruislip as Foxton's territory.
Neither, now apparently, do Foxton's:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/nov/13/foxtons-closes-london-branches-estate-agent-sales-brexit

Ha! But you're in with Park Lane. Posh git :P

As a Domesday Book village, we would prefer to think of Park Lane as being 'in' with us.
Wrong end of the High Street.
If Ruislip has a posh section of High Street it is down the bottom by the 3-legged roundabout at the Manor Farm complex, in the Conservation Area.
Of course, these properties have none of the space, wide pavements, or rear parking,
of the '30s & '50s extension down to the Tube station.

Ruislip unfortunately finds its southern zone gerrymandered into Uxbridge ignoring the traditional border of the railway line that was originally the route of the Grand Central line. These days it carries the Chiltern Line into Marylebone, and the Central Line.
Despite the journalist gaining a bonus for using the correct name of the constituency, I doubt the electorate of South Ruislip will see this bus as it zooms down the A40 past Ruislip International Airport towards Uxbridge town centre thence to Maidenhead.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/nov/25/bollocks-to-brexit-bus-to-tour-constituencies-of-may-and-corbyn

The glory that is Ruislip, you will all be aware, is the major high street and village in the north part,
(above the A40), of the London Borough of Hillingdon.
Apparently LB Hillingdon has too many Councillors, and, too many in the north of the borough, as population growth is only forecast in the south, partly due to the CrossRail effect.
LB Bromley has already slimmed down and the electorate have not been rioting in the streets,
so the Electoral Commission has commenced a review.
https://www.lgbce.org.uk/media/have-your-say-on-new-political-map-of-hillingdon

We are part way through.
A previous review resulted in the nonsense of Ruislip being divided between 'West Ruislip' and 'Eastcote and East Ruislip'.
West Ruislip is the terminus station of the Central Line. People may well live adjacent, but 'West Ruislip' is not a community, there is no church, (excepting that Jehovah's Witnesses building), no village green, not even a double sided shopping street.
No-one has ever claimed to live in 'East Ruislip'.
There is the separate ward of South Ruislip, (and the 'Manor' ward of Ruislip Manor),
and over enthusiastic estate agents claim some properties are in 'North Ruislip', where typically they cannot claim the price-enhancing views over Ruislip Woods National Nature Reserve.
The inanity of 'East Ruislip' stems from the misnaming of western Ruislip as 'West Ruislip'.
Even the staunchest inhabitant of Eastcote would acknowledge the primacy of Ruislip,
but no, we have the historic heart of Ruislip, the Norman motte & bailey and the Edwardian Great Barn, officially in the 'Eastcote & East Ruislip' ward.
The complicating factor is that the Metropolitan Police organises itself by aligning with the electoral wards. Somebody who has happily lived in Ruislip for say 25 years, (even if you find this implausible, please bear with me), can attempt to contact the Met by using the '101' service, and when asked to identify the area, be told by a (geographically) distant responder, 'I can't find 'Ruislip', do you mean 'Ruislip Manor'?'

The (Tory) Council and Labour opposition both made submissions to the Electoral Commission that would have perpetuated this nonsense of splitting Ruislip asunder. Fortunately the residents associations of Ruislip, and Eastcote, cooperated and made a joint submission, that had to aim for a certain number of electors per Councillor, and maintain communities.

On Tuesday, the Electoral Commission reported its deliberations on the various submissions,
(any one on the Electoral Register was allowed and encouraged to make a submission).
In a moment of clarity, they supported the joint Resident Association submission, with the proviso that there needed to be some finessing at the Ward bondaries.

'On balance, we consider the proposals of Eastcote Residents’ Association and
Ruislip Residents’ Association to be best evidenced and we are persuaded to adopt
them as part of our draft recommendations. We note that these were the only
proposals that split Ruislip between two wards* – all the other proposals split it
between at least three wards ....'

(There is an acknowledged boundary, between Ruislip & Ruislip Manor, the Metropolitan Line,
and Ruislip Manor has been the 'Manor' ward for many years).

s3-eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/lgbce/Reviews/Greater%20London/Hillingdon/Draft%20Recs/Hillingdon%20Report%20web.pdf

At this weeks committee meeting of the Ruislip Residents Association, attended by a couple of (Tory) Councillors we received (verbal) confirmation that the Council will not be appealing the Electoral Commission's draft recommendations.

Localism at its best/worst? Or parochial busybodies?
Either way, it does show that it is worth being involved in your community, in whatever way you can, and, that seemingly faceless bureaucracies can be swayed by persuasive, logical reasoning.

You can check if your local Council is being reviewed here:
https://www.lgbce.org.uk/all-reviews

Just in case all you metropolitan elite hipsters thought this was only relevant to 'the countryside',
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/06/adders-now-active-all-year-with-warmer-uk-weather
we have adders in the Ruislip Woods National Nature Reserve!
No definitive surveys in the last couple of years,
but,
definitely stil a breeding population.

Ruislip as we all know is the pre-eminent suburb in the north of the London Borough of Hillingdon,
with the unnatural dividing line being the A40, passing Ruislip International Airport,
(also colloquially referred to as RAF Northolt), Hillingdon Circus, (miles from Hillingdon), and the underpass of the Uxbridge roundabout, (again not that close to Uxbridge town centre).

It was a sad day when the Ruislip & Northwood UDC was merged with Hayes and Harlington UDC, Municipal Borough of Uxbridge, and Yiewsley and West Drayton UDC to form the London Borough of Hillingdon, but some 54 years on the locals are little more accepting of the hegemony of the elite in Uxbridge with their office blocks, ring roads & Express Bus service to Heathrow.

The Hillingdon AQAP, (Air Quality Action Plan), is out for discussion and comment.
Broadly it tells us that diesels are bad in the urban, (slow moving to gridlocked), environment,
and you don't want major trunk roads or airports in your back garden.

So what can residents do?
Due to the always impressive array of contributors to LFGSS,
(@jupiz @ewanmac)
a half-remembered article about conifers adsorbing the PM 10/2.5s of diesel emissions,
will soon be a fully referenced, citation-rich basis to a (minor) plan to plant some Yew hedges alongside some metal railings around the (Duck) Horse Pond of the Manor Farm Complex.

Why Yews?

The glory that is the Ruislip Woods National Nature Reserve has a 5-Year Management Plan that is signed off by Natural England. In order to maintain the Oak and (aged) Hornbeam coppice, we are obliged to remove household escapees, (Spanish Bluebells), and native invasive species, including Yew. (We allow them as dense boundary specimens, but remove them from the interior of the woods and grasslands).
If our recommendations are agreed by 'the Council', this Autumn, you could join us, out on the western end of the Metropolitan, (Piccadilly, rush hours only), and Central Line, in planting about 50 metres of microspeciated Yew hedge.

Disproportionately buoyed by the disclosure that a forum member actually reads this thread,
there will soon be a further update,
typically,
given the curtain-twitching nature of local politics,
based upon dog faeces.

It's only the one, all of us others only come for the pictures.

Yep,
if only I could determine the fault preventing this laptop on Firefox uploading pictures,
there would have been a gallery of spiling exploits.

Chrome uploaded pictures of the River Pinn spile

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And the completed spile

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