Exploring

We’ve bought a set of books of London walks and walking up here in ’the smoke’ reinforces the ‘country mile’ and ‘town mile’ difference.  A country walk may have wonderful views, fresh air or an unusual flower or tree now and again but they do tend to be spread out somewhat.  In town, certainly using a book, it seems quite normal to stop every few yards to look at something.  At home it’s nearly a four mile journey to the paper shop (and 4 miles back).  Four miles here would take you from The Tower of London to about Marble Arch. 

The books do add a lot to the interest of a walk but annoyingly also contain some errors.  However there are some great little known facts (little known to me at least).   For instance, the former church of St Mark’s in Silvertown (well in the East End on the river) caught fire in the 1980’s and was saved from complete destruction when huge amounts of accumulated pigeon droppings on the roof fell and extinguished the fire.   In the rather more expensive area of Highgate in north London lived the wife and son of Hitler’s older brother.  So Mrs Hitler lived in Highgate with little Billy Hitler before they moved to the USA and he presumably changed his name to Trump.  Oh, and Jerry Springer was born in Highgate tube station during an air raid.

As a lad growing up here, many areas which were considered ‘rough’ or ‘very rough’ and not even worth visiting are now highly sought after areas.  It has to have a lot to do with closeness to the centre and transport links but I think the major point is that all those old buildings which were pulled down in my part of the East End in the 60’s for tower blocks just survived in other areas.  Even when not cleaned up it’s possible to see their architectural merit and when a bit of TLC is lavished on them many of the old wrecks look magnificent.  There are lots of Georgian and huge numbers of Victorian and Edwardian housing.  So, Hoxton, Shoreditch, Bermondsey and the Isle of Dogs are very fashionable.  Spitalfields, just east of the City is highly regarded and eye-wateringly expensive.  In the early 1970’s I worked in a computer room fairly close to Spitalfields which at that time was a wholesale fruit and vegetable market.  Street lighting was sparse and piles of rotting fruit and vegetables would litter the cobbled streets while in the evenings there was always a collection of derelicts around a bonfire of wooden crates on a corner or two.  Then the drink of choice would have been cheap cider or methylated spirits, now the area is littered with wine bars.  In the late 1880’s this was Jack the Ripper country.

In the late 1950s from about ten years old I used to explore London with a Red Rover, a ticket which meant free bus rides for a day for half-a-crown (12.5p in today’s money or about 15c).  A Twin-Rover for bus and tube travel was 5 shillings.   The linkage for the exploring was collecting bus and train numbers.  London was a great place for a train-spotter with a terminus for every main line service here in the capital.  Strictly speaking of course I was never a train spotter.  A train is a set of carriages and a locomotive, whereas the number was on the engine.  So really I was a locomotive spotter!  They were almost all steam locos in those days.  My big problem was that I was very short sighted but managed to hide it at home and school because I didn’t want to wear glasses.   I could see the buses but not the numbers, even for the route so I relied on friends to tell me, just as at Junior School it was my friend John who would tell me what he could of what was written on the blackboard.  We sat in the back row which in the circumstances seems just deliberately perverse but I wouldn’t have seen the writing on the board from the front.   I became friendly with the teacher years later and he was absolutely horrified that he had never spotted my vision problem.  One other thing that amazes me about the change in London is the volume of traffic and parking problems.  When I got my first car in the mid-1960s I used to drive into town and park it next to Fleet Street until it was going home time.  Unbelievable.  Anyway enough of this reminiscing.

On one day in town we took in possibly the oldest and one of the newest buildings.   The oldest was the Tower of London and it was probably a little over 55 years since I’d been inside it.  As I believe is quite normal when visiting a childhood haunt it was smaller than I remembered.  In Arizona last year we regularly smiled when we stayed in an ‘historic’ hotel, so called because it had been built in the 1930s.  The White Tower, the original building, was constructed around 1070 to 1080 and has recycled stones from the Roman wall with roman graffiti included.  The Roman wall was built about a thousand years earlier.   Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, a pub just off Fleet Street has a sign saying that it was rebuilt in 1667, that’s historic.   The Tower was very impressive and of course is the site of a small number of famous historical figures becoming suddenly shorter.  The Crown Jewels look like the sort of bling that Elton John or Liberace would swoon over and then you have to remind yourself that the two inch by one inch diamond is real and all that shiny stuff is gold.   

One of the newest buildings was ‘The Walkie-Talkie’, less well known by its official catchy name of 20 Fenchurch Street.   My understanding is that as part of the planning permission a public open space had to be provided and this has been achieved in a remarkably impressive manner.  The three top floors, some 500 or so feet up is one open area called the Sky Garden, planted with mainly tropical plants.  There are stunning 360 degree views, cafes, seating and an open balcony area.   You book online and it’s free.  It should be top of anyone’s list when visiting London.  

We brought our folding bikes with us on this trip because we can take them on buses, trains and even the cable car across the Thames from Silverton to the O2 Area, so a trip anywhere in London becomes less effort than starting with a long bike ride.  We decided on a bus to Greenwich and a cycle back along the Thames Path to our campsite.   We just got to the bus stop as the bus arrived and had to handle bikes, bus passes and panniers.  So I just managed it and boarded with a folded bike.  Unfortunately, in the rush, Heather had undone the wrong clip and her handlebars came off.  So she boarded with what could be described as not so much a folded but a dismembered bike.  There wasn’t a cracked face on the bus though, everyone just sat there with that sort of bovine indifference stare that everyone adopts on public transport.   It was a good ride back past the O2 area and we met someone taking a robot for a walk.  Well a roll really because this one was six-wheeled and was a prototype delivery robot.  It was about two feet long, 15 inches wide and about the same in height.  Maximum speed 5 miles an hour, fitted with cameras and sensors to stop it bumping into people and able to carry about 20 pounds.  So it can deliver your groceries or that parcel you’ve ordered on the net.  This particular one was being controlled from Italy.   We stopped and talked but everyone else seemed to just go straight past it and then turn around and look from a safe distance. 

On a trip to Greenwich earlier in the week, the Thames was so high it was flowing over the Thames Path at Greenwich, making it impassable.  At one point the water was seeping through a wall between us and the river a foot or so higher than the path we were walking on and we found out later that the Thames Barrier had been closed that day to stop even more water flowing towards London.  So a spring tide and a surge up the Thames.  What we’d seen of course was the Thames rising because the water could not flow eastwards towards the sea and was backing up behind the barrier.  I was surprised to find out that the barrier reaches the end of its design life by the mid 2030s but I haven’t heard of a replacement being built, so it will have had a life of about 50 years.  Compare that to the Victorian Bazalgette’s London sewer system which has been handling London sewage for 150 years, a bit of real crap building.

The Chinese decided to hold their New Year Celebrations while we were in town and we took ourselves off to a relatively traffic free west end whose roads were populated mainly with dragons.  This was a Sunday morning and the place was heaving with people.  Very colourful with a lot more than just oriental features operating the dragons and taking part in the displays.  All very impressive covering Chinatown, Charing Cross Road and Trafalger Square.   You may not all know that I like to spot what I consider to be odd signs, often poorly punctuated and therefore conveying a variety of messages (e.g. ‘Dogs must be carried’ on the tube escalators and of course I never have a dog and have to walk up instead).  In Trafalgar Square there was a good one.  I know what they meant and you will know what they meant but it read ‘For toilets, use lift’.  It’s good to know that it’s now official.

We’ve done a lot of walking on this trip in areas I don’t know much.  Belgravia, where you can smell the money, is full of huge houses with private central squares for the residents and is seemingly not really lived in but has an air of a museum and lots of Blue Plaques for house where notables have lived.  The plaques in Belgravia tend to be for Prime Ministers, Generals, and various Lords and Ladies.   In Camden which we also walked round (grotty area when I was growing up) it tends to be Playwrights and Media People.   The area I particularly took to was Notting Hill with seemingly many more attractive areas than Camden and a feeling of being a place where people actually lived.

Apparently the official blue plaques only go up a minimum of 20 years after someone has died.  I like the idea of getting one with ‘Watch this Space’ on it.