Penguinpost

Hi James, I'm hoping you can help us residents out with today's Southern Rail timetable announcement. As I'm sure you will know there is a new timetable being implemented by Southern from ED to LB from Monday. This basically leaves one train an hour in the morning rush and about one train every 50 minutes in the evening rush hour. I've emailed Southern (as I am sure a number of residents have) but they take 20 working days to respond. We really need to know how long to expect this disaster to continue. this is a really serious situation for local residents as many commitments will not be able to be met. It's not like we have a plethora of alternatives (have you seen how long the 40 takes in rush hour, and frequently it's full by the time it reaches Goose Green before this train announcements was made). Please can you as our local representative get in touch with someone at Southern and ask some questions: 1) why were they allowed to decimate our service but keep other services with very little change? 2) how long will this last? 3) is there a action plan to remove this service from southern and hand it over to a competent rail company such as TfL overground? Many thanks Laura

Hi, we moved ours about 2 years ago from inside the house, under stairs to outside as we wanted an under stairs loo. It was around ?900. It actually was fairly easy to arrange. We had to contact Southern Gas Network (I think that was the name - got the contact from our gas supplier). We just booked a slot, with 3 or 4 weeks notice. If I recall correctly they won't provide any new pipe work in your house so you have to arrange for your own plumber / gas engineer to come that day to make sure it all works. What I would say is we thought it was going to be a total nightmare doing this but in the end it really was not (except for the price).

In the loft we have 2.2m (still need carpets fitted). It feels decently roomy above head height (I'm 6ft and husband is 6'3 so was v important to have decent height up there). On floor 1 we have really high cellings - guessing 2.8m (no way I could reach the ceiling even if I stand on a chair). Honestly you can't even notice the ceiling are lower. We were given 3 options - 1. Classic said do without lowering ceilings on floor 1 and it would be fine (weren't convinced about that, they insisted it would be fine) 2. Someone else said to us to lower more than we had and the Windows on floor 1 would get in the way so we should have some weird step thing in the ceiling ( I HATED the sound of this and was no way going to do it) 3. Lower ceilings to the top of Windows (15-20cm) and take The height difference into the loft as a result We did the 3rd option and I'm really happy with our choice. Yes it's messy (very) but I think worth it to get 2.2m in the loft.

Sounds like you are in a very similar position to where we found ourselves at during the initial stages of investigating loft conversion. We are now just about finished a loft conversion where we have lowered the ceilings on 1st floor. We lowered them between 15-20cm (as much as we could without interfering with the windows on 1st floor). We were told there was no chance of raising the ridge being accepted for planning...I have seen a number of houses where they have "Nudged" the ridge but you can only get about 5cm doing this. PM me if you want to ask any more questions.

If you look on the main website for myn properties you also see a new development on Landcroft Road...a new 4 bed house in the back garden of the current Victorian house. No details are given as to the planning application status. I know you can search on Southwark website but not really sure how you go about that.

Paul would be a fabulous addition to the Lane! It needs another quality cafe down there.