On Saturday I got hopelessly and gloriously lost in exactly the way I like. I was trying to get to Beckenham, but ended up just following my nose. Fortunately for me, I found a bus heading straight back to Eltham. On the bus I set to work on my daily blog entry, but looking up from my iPad I noticed that the bus was heading past an interesting looking area I didn’t recognise at all: it seemed to be quite a new town centre I had yet to explore.

I headed back that way again today to check it out. I’d been there before, but not for some time. Bromley seems to have been redeveloped quite recently and appears to be flourishing. As I wrote here a couple of years ago, perhaps the mall there doesn’t quite rival the one at Stratford, but I would say it is approaching it in terms of commercial lavishness. I noticed there is an Apple store there, which could be useful the next time I have a problem with my computer. It just strikes me as strange, though, that all these lavish, high end shopping arcades are appealing all over south London, but they are still rather difficult to get to using public transport. The bus there and back today took at least half an hour. There might well be an overground train route, but that isn’t really on the cards for me. If London is building all this lavish new commercial space, you would think they would create the transport infrastructure to go with it. More to the point, it still troubles me that so much of this lavish new commercial space is being built in London, while the rest of the country is still being relatively neglected.