The Big Putney Quiz 2025 results are in, and they reveal something fascinating about what sticks in your minds and what doesn’t. Spoiler: drama registers, details vanish, and cynicism appears to be Putney’s default setting.
Just under 100 of you took the quiz, with an average score of 8 out of 15. Congratulations to Isabella Martin who topped the leaderboard with 13/15, while drstrange@avengers.com – an unlikely visit by a superhero – scored a very respectable 11/15.
The cynicism gap
When we asked if new traffic signals had (finally) been installed after a tragic death at the crossing near East Putney station earlier this year, 53% of you chose “they still haven’t been installed.” Amazingly, you were wrong. They went in after seven months i.e. earlier this month.
We can’t blame you for the cynicism. TfL reckoned it might take until the end of the new financial year, so assuming the worst had some basis in reality. Still, over half of you missed that this actually got done. Good news, it turns out, travels poorly.
That cynicism, curiously, didn’t extend to the Putney Bridge junction, where you gave the council too much credit. When we asked how many seconds of green time were lost per cycle from the redesign on Putney Bridge Road, most of you guessed nine seconds. We wish that were true. The correct answer is 21 seconds. Only 14% of you got it right, making it the lowest scoring question.
You thought we were exaggerating about how bad the new junction is. We weren’t, it really is a mess. We shall see what the newest set of changes brings, but there’s a long way to go to get back to what was already a pretty bad junction.
Speaking of the Junction from Hell: two-thirds of you overestimated its cost, guessing £1.25 million when it “only” cost £1 million for this non-functioning splatter of concrete, bike lanes and traffic lights.
Did you know, incidentally, that they based the design on traffic patterns measured just a few days before “Liberation Day,” when the impact of Covid was declared over and people were tentatively encouraged to go back to work?
The remarkable coincidence
Some of you may have noticed our sly dig in the questions about Simon Hogg’s narrow leadership victory for Council Leader. We asked both how many deputy cabinet positions were unexpectedly created in May (most of you correctly answered five) and how many votes shifted to give Hogg his victory (here you split between three, one, and the correct answer: five).
Five new positions at £9,314 each. Five votes that shifted. Not that we’re implying the entire scheme, which had never been mentioned prior to the crunch vote, was untoward; merely a remarkable coincidence.
Perhaps the answers suggesting a gap between the two questions reflects how little we think of our local politicians: that they might not only agree to a dodgy deal in the first place but might not then support their Dear Leader anyway. It’s a cutthroat world, local politics.
What you knew and what you didn’t
Most of you aced the easier questions. You knew about Cambridge winning the Boat Race (83% correct), the E. coli contamination that stopped the traditional cox-tossing (93% correct), and the SUV that got swallowed by the Thames (86% correct). We suspect those that choose “138 Lime bikes swept away by the tide” exhibited more wishful thinking than genuine belief, given the unbridled joy that these green chunks of metal left across every public path bring to us all.
Fulham’s record transfer fee for Kevin? Most of you got it wrong, but let’s be honest, it was a question designed for failure. Only a football nerd remembers signing fee quantities. In case you’re interested, Kevin has injected a lot of energy into the side, especially with his runs and dribbling, but despite an extraordinary opening appearance, he’s still not been able to convert that magic (and money) into goals.
As for underwater rugby, we suspect more people would have got this right if our quiz graphic hadn’t featured underwater players with a round ball. That was our cheeky joke. But we love that people were paying attention.
Still fighting the 1980s
Finally, the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher.
When we asked which former Prime Minister Councillor Jenny Yates blamed for Putney’s gridlocked junction, 54% of you correctly identified Thatcher. The logical answer, if you can call it that, would have been Boris Johnson, seeing as he was in power most recently. But no, this is not the world our local politics live in. They’re still fighting partisan battles from the 80s. Literally.
Still, come May you’ll all have an opportunity to let your views be known.
What the quiz reveals is simple: you remember that something happened and why it matters, but not the precise when, how much, or what happened next. Drama sticks. Spreadsheet details don’t. And when councils actually do follow through, that good news gets lost amid the dozens of things done wrong, or not done at all.
Maybe we need to make our follow-up stories more dramatic.
You can still play the quiz incidentally – and now you know most of the answers, you’ll have the pleasure of doing incredibly well!
