I took these complementary photos yesterday to round out the context: Looking W from S end of Waterloo Rd, across Swan Wharf Business Centre's car park, the traffic lights restrict fraffic flow over the evidently-weak hump-backed bridge. The slant-topped brick wall in Clive's photos is directly behind the black car while just out of sight, off the RHS, is a yard-wide gap in the hedge ... ... leading to the offside moorings for hands-on box inspection while, back out in the car park, the still-used doorway is easily seen puncturing the normally-leeward E wall ... yes, as a Business Park worker told me the week before folks, it's currently still in use as some bloke's storage shed - though not apparently qualifying as a spiv's 'lock-up' unless that plywood sheet behind those van doors is a lot stronger than it looks ! But my main interest is in the tactical thinking in its placement which - as inferred by the attached photo of the box it faces ~540m up the canal - most superficially seems to be a far-from-universal co-operative cross-firing arrangement with nothing special enough to justify it for this particular inter-bridge stretch of the outer London stopline across Uxbridge Moor AFAIK. The only thing of strategic value, hereabouts, seems to have been the Uxbridge Gas Works then SE of bridge 187 and therefore arguably partially protected by it. Now, I suspect it's also far from coincidental that both bridges had adjacent boatyards and that each of their boxes was positioned to fire across the entrance to its respective boatyard who's workers were presumably expected to man the boxes as HG volunteers. FTR, bridge 187's boatyard, as the modern Business Park's name implies was Swan Wharf to its NE side whilst bridge 186's boatyard was Waterloo Wharf to its SE side where waterside flats will soon be complete if not already so. Apart from all that, it seems a great shame that neither of these boxes seem to have been officially recorded as WW2 defence artefacts - though Hillingdon's planners have unaccountably gone on record as wanting to protect the bridge 186 box despite its not even being 'listed' locally. Thus at least I, for one, am grateful for Clive recording them here. I recommend reading Stoplines: Some tactical notes (PSG) Steve
PS: I'm just kicking myself for not having read the witness marks on the N-facing LH wall of my last photo before - at some point the doorway seems to have led off a white-painted room within what was probably one of the original boatyard buildings. How very handy in case it happened to be raining when Jerry came knocking !
