Local bits and bobs: trial, theft, archives and trams

The murder trial of Matthew Fagan has opened at the Old Bailey. Fagan is charged with throttling Catherine Marlow in the offices of Research Now at 66 South Lambeth Road (opposite Vauxhall Park). More detail at ITN. More at Daily Mail.

Stockwell nearly went boom the other day when scrap metal thieves broke into a house on South Lambeth Road and stole the piping, according to the London Daily News.

What's under that circular building on the Stockwell roundabout? Documents, of course.

But thanks to Stockwell News for alerting me to the fact that it apparently contains the Guardian archive, among other things. More on the shelter here.

Apparently:

The shelter opened in 1944, offering protection from V-1 flying bombs, and was later used as a camp for soldiers en route through London. It isn't open to the public, and stepping into the two main tunnels, each nearly half a kilometre long, is unsettling: you get the irrational but distinct feeling that the voices of its wartime occupants might only just have died away. Today, the shelter is operated by the archiving company Recall Total Information Management, which houses many of its customers' boxes of documents on the original six-person metal bed-frames. Among the collections are around 250 leatherbound volumes of the Guardian and Observer, dating back to the early 1800s. (Other volumes are stored in the Newsroom, the paper's archive and visitor centre.)

Finally: Cross river tram not looking promising.