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Anything fun to do in Croydon?

ErichKeane
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I'm going to be spending a week in Croydon UK at the end of the month, though most of it in meetings. I might end up having an evening or two to hide out on my own, and was wondering if there is anything nearby that might be an entertaining/fun way to kill a few hours!
 
Spruce
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I occasionally visited Croydon for work and my commute was solely between the Rail Station and the criminal courts so I can’t really recommend anything.

That said, Croydon Airport was Britain's first commercial airport (it closed in 1959) but, according to the WWW, it now has an airport museum. Whether or not it’s worth a visit I can’t say but here’s a link to the website

https://www.historiccroydonairport.org.uk/

There is or was a large auditorium called Fairfield Halls, which may have something on and there is a quick regular train service from East Croydon station to London Victoria station which takes about 20 minutes so Central London is pretty accessible.
 
ErichKeane
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That is an interesting museum! I do love aviation, i might check that out, thank you!
 
Peemacgee
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A week in Croydon?
What did you do or who did you upset?
 
ErichKeane
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Peemacgee Peemacgee
A week in Croydon?
What did you do or who did you upset?
Even worse, I'm going with a programming language standards committee, so I'll be in a junky conference room the whole time. We were promised London...
 
Peemacgee
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Unfortunately Croydon is counted as a London borough, even though it is a long way from the centre of London.
So technically…..
 
sheepdoll
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ErichKeane ErichKeane
Even worse, I'm going with a programming language standards committee,
They still have program languages??? I thought everything these days was scripted and coded.

Still think Postscript is the perfect programing script. It can parse anything. I had some old tokenized BASIC programs from the 1970s/1980s. Wrote a quick script to delist them. Trying to avoid actually using PS to see if I can run them. So tempting. Especially that they were graphics plotting programs.

When the college upgraded the computers in 1981, there was no BASIC interpreter, So I wrote one. Found the listing printed out, I thought it was written in PL/1, but it looks like it was written in Pascal. Some of the floating point stuff was in FORTRAN. I had an electronic copy, so the paper went into the recycle bin over the weekend. Should have trashed it 50 years ago! Was pretty much a dead end, since the micro computers like Apple, Commodore and TRS-80 had it built in, although no Matrix functions or complex number support.

I also found a copy of C80 or 'Tiny C.' It was always so fun that it could compile itself. Not a lot of bloat, although it does not do much parallel pipelining or optimization. (edit: I could convert it to postscript, which could then generate code which could then be emulated to run in the interpreter and it could compile itself. Postscript is Turing complete after all. )

Never a fan of the 'Brute force' and 'Black box object' methods programming went into. I still find it amazing what could be done in the 1970s with processors less powerful than a modern smart thermostat.
 
T
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i would love to say croydon is a great place, but i cant its a SH.

its the only place i have ever been around LONDON where they have security guards in Greggs ( a famous bakers in UK)

we worked in the town hall which is right in the city centre and three nights on the trot our vans were broken into. eventually we decided to drive the 60 miles home every night just too protect our sanity.

maybe the airport museum, if you get some free days then get the trains into central LONDON and see the sights
 
Spruce
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Peemacgee Peemacgee
Unfortunately Croydon is counted as a London borough, even though it is a long way from the centre of London.
So technically…..
It’s actually closer to Central London than London Heathrow airport 🙂
 
GuiltyGear
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ErichKeane ErichKeane
Even worse, I'm going with a programming language standards committee, so I'll be in a junky conference room the whole time. We were promised London...
C++?
 
sheepdoll
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T Tu13alcane
get the trains into central LONDON and see the sights
+1
One time I went to London I took a pre WWII tourist guidebook. Quite fun to find the stuff that survived. There is some really wacky stuff to seak out. like 'The monument.' or the 'guildhall.' Even the foundations of Shakespeare theaters. (under the buttresses of Southwerk bridge.) Can one still find the 'London stone?' Or visit Jeremy Bentham at the University College, London. (by his will they have to show him when asked.)

The good news is I was going to recommend Greenwich. I took a day trip to there. Excuse to meet with one of the curators who stood me up, so I wound up waiting for hours in the back offices. Still there is a lot what can be seen in the Museums. I would nip in and out waiting to see if he had returned.

When I put map Croyden to Greenwich into giggle it shows they are on the same side sort of of the Thames river watershed. Just remember that to the locals 100 years is like 100 miles to Americans, both are definitions of 'short intervals.'
 
sheepdoll
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GuiltyGear GuiltyGear
C++?
die language die!!! (what happens when one attempts to cross FORTRAN with PL/1 and COBOL.) Well wee need to have measurable productivity, along the lines of monks illustrating a manuscript in Latin with Greek annotation.

I do not care integers and pointers are 16 interchangeable Bit Word indexes !!!!! Nothing to do with hardware. And NEVER 32 bit longs what just waste space. Records are always 512 bytes and pages are 64K.


(and do not get me started on library incompatibility and management. If it compiled in 1996 it should compile NOW. Without another 18 months of study on some obscure deprecated API, because the intern who coded it was fired decades ago. )
Edited:
 
T
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sheepdoll sheepdoll
+1
One time I went to London I took a pre WWII tourist guidebook. Quite fun to find the stuff that survived. There is some really wacky stuff to seak out. like 'The monument.' or the 'guildhall.' Even the foundations of Shakespeare theaters. (under the buttresses of Southwerk bridge.) Can one still find the 'London stone?' Or visit Jeremy Bentham at the University College, London. (by his will they have to show him when asked.)

The good news is I was going to recommend Greenwich. I took a day trip to there. Excuse to meet with one of the curators who stood me up, so I wound up waiting for hours in the back offices. Still there is a lot what can be seen in the Museums. I would nip in and out waiting to see if he had returned.

When I put map Croyden to Greenwich into giggle it shows they are on the same side sort of of the Thames river watershed. Just remember that to the locals 100 years is like 100 miles to Americans, both are definitions of 'short intervals.'
More people died building or commiting suicide of monument than the event its actually there for. The great fire of london .

The monument also gave rise to the smallest monument in london " the philpot lane mice "
 
T
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If you want a list of things to do in london city from a londoner.

Not in any particular order.

Museums ( all of them )

Tower of london with guided tour by a yeoman warder ( beefeater to visitors)

Mudlarking ( google it .. just dont do it on your own the tide comes in really fast)

Regents park open air theatre.

A real english pub not the tourist ones

London eye

Imax cinema

Houses of parliment and house of lords.

British library

And on a watch theme The clockmaker museum
 
TimeODanaos
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sheepdoll sheepdoll
Just remember that to the locals 100 years is like 100 miles to Americans, both are definitions of 'short intervals.'
Thanks, I enjoyed that - a very neat summary!
 
R
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Mudlarking metioned - nope, you need a licence

Fairfiled Halls mentioned - yes, although they are postwar concrete they sometimes have some very good orchestral concerts, sometimes dreadful stuff as well

If you can get an evening in London - have a look at Ronnie Scotts, one of the best Jazz clubs in the known universe, and it's smaller cousin Upstairs at Ronnies.

A lot of classical concerts don't sell out so you can get tickets: Royal Opera sells months in advance but Barbican, South Bank and suchlike normally easy. LSO at the Barbican? Dvorjak on 25th, perfect antidote to a coding conference

Public transport is pretty good and all the safety scares are massively overstated by right wing agitators who want us to be afraid of our own shadows and of other people, be sensible like in any other place, its a safe city. If you hold your $1500 iphone at arms length in front of you as you exit a station someone might snatch it - just like almost anywhere.

Have a look on tfl.gov.uk website - transport for London - its really easy to use London transport and if you do travel no need for fancy tickets and apps - on the underground touch in and out with a credit card - make sure it sthe same one at each end - and it calculates the fare and caps it. On a bus you just touch in, not out as they are all standard fares

Best almost-free thing to do? Catch a bus, £2, turn on the public transport layer in google maps and find a route that goes past Westminster, St Pauls, a park or two .... etc etc. I live an hour or so north and often go in for things like galleries and music, I wonder why most tourists use the underground when for the sake of taking a little longer (OK, lots longer at some times of day) you can get an above ground top deck view of the city.
 
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