offpeakfang

All the candidates in the Ipswich constituency sent me leaflets for the 2024 General Election, with the exception of the Heritage Party. I'll archive the leaflets here from each party, in order of the election result.  Notably, Labour were the only party to knock on my door or have any kind of ground game that I was able to see.  Overall : 52.1% of voters voted for left-wing parties: Labour / Green / Communist 5.1% of voters voted for the sole centrist party to stand: Liberal Democrats 42.7% of voters voted for right-wing parties: Conservative / Reform UK / Heritage 42% of the total electorate didn't bother turning up at all. Labour Co-op: Jack Abbott (Elected)   Conservative: Tom Hunt (Incumbent since 2019, unseated)   Reform UK: Tony Love Green: Adria Pittock Liberal Democrats: James Sandbach Communist: Freddie Sofar   Heritage: Terence Kevin Charles No leaflets or contact at all. I'm very pleased that the Communist Party beat the Heritage Party.

  The tiny hamlet of Hemley, Suffolk, March 2020. When the UK went into Covid-19 lockdown in spring 2020, with only one daily outing allowed for walking/running/cycling exercise, I gave myself a small project to make the most of my limited cycling allowance: a medium-term project to cycle to and take a film photo of every church-with-tower, church-with-spire, and any other architecturally-interesting place of worship shown on the Ordnance Survey map of the local area (OS Explorer 197). It was a very fun combination of my cycling, history and film photography hobbies, and it was an excellent excuse to exercise responsibly during the pandemic and to explore lots of scenic rural Suffolk along the way. Here are the churches I visited, split into the three rolls of film that I used: 2020-03-22/2020-05-16: Roll 1 2020-05-20/2020-06-13: Roll 2 2020-08-07/2020-11-29: Roll 3 After visiting a total of 106 churches, here are some of my observations: It took me the entire year to get round to ...

East Anglia is a very flat part of the UK, and Ipswich is accordingly a very flat town - so what are the highest points of the town?  A look at a topographic map of Ipswich and the surrounding area doesn't show very many hills. There's a plateau around RAF Wattisham that curves around to the Newmarket area containing the 136 m Great Wood Hill, the highest point in Suffolk. It lies on the same fold of hills that eventually becomes the Chilterns around London, but Wattisham is well outside the Ipswich town boundary.  Within Ipswich itself, the highest point is at the Park Road / Elsmere Road reservoir and water tower, just at the top of the Constitution Hill road and just north of Christchurch Park. It lies at the great altitude of 57 metres.  57 m, at the base of the water tower. The 1924 water tower is now disused.  It's not much of a mountaineering achievement, but it's at least nice to know that I've cycled up to the top of the town. Water towers form a common pa...

In this age of social distancing, towns and cities all across Europe are making changes to their local roads to help encourage active travel such as walking and cycling - makes sense, given that the roads will simply clog up with congestion even worse than in normal times if more people are driving, as well as all the savings to the NHS when people exercise more (especially within the context of obesity-related health conditions).  Suffolk Highways has made a small number of changes to the roads around Ipswich, with several more planned   [PDF] , but how useful are they in practice? I went cycling around them to find out.  Ipswich Waterfront Less space than in April/May, but still better than in the before-time.  The shared-space byway along the waterfront was never particularly busy with car traffic anyway, but for a while during the height of the Covid-19 lockdown it was completely closed off to motorised vehicles to maximise space for walking and cycling.  It...