Going shopping
Nov 5, 2011 17:14:29 GMT
Post by patricklondon on Nov 5, 2011 17:14:29 GMT
It occurred to me, as I cycled to the supermarket, that it might be interesting to show you what I can see on this most mundane of journeys (it will be obvious that these photos weren't all taken on the same day or with the same camera: this was the last of our recent warm and sunny spell - it wasn't at all like that this morning!).
One of the advantages of using my bike is that I can go along the riverside for most of the way. There's usually something to see on the river, whether it be one of the "pods" from the London Eye being taken past Greenwich for some sort of maintenance or repair:
or some people out sailing:
or just London's refuse going down to the landfill sites right out in the desolate marshes of the Thames estuary:
The low dark brick buildings that you can see in that last picture are the remains of the old naval dockyard of Deptford, which lasted a couple of hundred years. The names given the modern housing estate round about remind us that here, Samuel Pepys was busy as a civil servant building up the Royal Navy; Peter the Great later came to study shipbuilding, and (like any modern rock star) trashed the house he was staying in, which belonged to the other great 17th century diarist, John Evelyn; Captain Cook set sail from there on his great voyages to the Pacific and Australasia.
A sign of more recent social history is that the tower block nearest the river in that photo, initially public housing, was eventually, after a long campaign of resistance by some diehard residents, sold off to private developers for "luxury housing", so as to raise money to do up the rest of the social housing in the area.
Here I have to leave the riverside path and come back to the main road. There are still some commercial premises using the land all the way to the river - in this case, a storage company that believes a sense of humour keeps the burglars away:
Their particular piece of riverside is rented out as a landing pad for someone who commutes in by helicopter from time to time, which must be fun for the people who live in the flats next door.
Carrying on up the main road, there's the typical London palimpsest of not so ancient history:
The Italianate building to the right was built as a Presbyterian chapel, in the days when the working class needed to be saved from drink and sin; now it's an arts centre and performance space with a nice bar and café upstairs. To the left you can see modern housing. Nowadays every new housing development has to include a certain amount of "affordable" or social housing: those blocks go on the boring and workaday side, by the road - the river views are for the "luxury" part of the development. In the distance is an old-style, 1940s, "council estate": social housing as it used to be done.
A little further, and the road is squeezed between a slipway to the river (now only used for the occasional boat race) and the docks which dominate the middle of the Isle of Dogs - here a few cranes are kept to show what was here, but now it's used as a sailing and boating centre. The backdrop is still industrial, however - in those buildings, large numbers of newspapers are printed:
Now I can come back to the riverside, beside a park much used in the sunny weather, but the rest of time only for the devotees of jogging and fitness training. It's named for the local bigwig of the early 1900s, of the Macdougall flour company (they had a flour mill on the docks here), who was also a great figure in local government. Here you can see (the towers with pointed roofs) some 1960s public housing, and beyond, the office and residential towers of Canary Wharf, our "Manhattan-on-Thames" (or, given the origins of its developers, "Montreal-on-Thames", complete with underground shopping centre):
From here on, planning requirements allow the riverside blocks to become taller and more cliff-like. It's a wonder the seagulls haven't completely colonised them:
All the new housing estates round about are given nautical-sounding names - So-and-So Wharf, or Quay, or Harbour, or Anchorage, and the like - as a nod to the area's heritage. I think the projecting roofline of the red building above is a deliberate echo of the building that was there until about ten years ago, a container unloading terminal.
For a time, every new estate tried to look more striking than its neighbours:
and this one is a famous example of the relaxation of planning requirements that was allowed in the early days of regenerating the area after the docks closed and local industry started to move away:
From here, as you look across the river, you can see the taller buildings in central London:
but to do so, your gaze has to meet the city farm on the other side of the river, and the cormorants unimpressed by the shiny new glass tower ("The Shard") at London Bridge:
I once overheard a guide explaining that a cormorant needs to eat one and half times its own bodyweight in fish to keep going: in which case, there's an awful lot of fish in the Thames nowadays.
Now my route turns away from the river towards our own gleaming towers at Canary Wharf:
That pumping station inlet was once a full-scale lock allowing ships into and out of the river - there's a companion lock on the other side of the peninsula that we call the Isle of Dogs, so that at times, it really did become an island. Indeed, one of the last desperate suggestions to save the inner London docks as an industry was that the main channel of the Thames should be driven across here in a straight line, to make it easier for ships to come up to the Pool of London.
I turn in to Canary Wharf itself, at "the most expensive pub in London":
Behind it, you see one of the latest new housing developments (the premium price kind, as you can imagine). Just before the credit crunch, someone came up with a plan to do something similar on the site of the pub (with their "affordable housing" component on an old industrial site down our end of the Island). Rumour has it, they had a rush of blood to the head and paid £32 million just for the site of the pub. Mind you, rumour had it, on three different occasions in the first couple of years I lived in the area, that Robert de Niro was "thinking" of buying a flat in whatever new development was being heavily marketed at the time!
I haven't taken any photos of actually doing the shopping - one supermarket is much like another, and they're not too keen on people snapping away in case there's some commercial espionage going on. But just to prove I do indeed use a push-bike to carry my weekly shop:
One of the advantages of using my bike is that I can go along the riverside for most of the way. There's usually something to see on the river, whether it be one of the "pods" from the London Eye being taken past Greenwich for some sort of maintenance or repair:
or some people out sailing:
or just London's refuse going down to the landfill sites right out in the desolate marshes of the Thames estuary:
The low dark brick buildings that you can see in that last picture are the remains of the old naval dockyard of Deptford, which lasted a couple of hundred years. The names given the modern housing estate round about remind us that here, Samuel Pepys was busy as a civil servant building up the Royal Navy; Peter the Great later came to study shipbuilding, and (like any modern rock star) trashed the house he was staying in, which belonged to the other great 17th century diarist, John Evelyn; Captain Cook set sail from there on his great voyages to the Pacific and Australasia.
A sign of more recent social history is that the tower block nearest the river in that photo, initially public housing, was eventually, after a long campaign of resistance by some diehard residents, sold off to private developers for "luxury housing", so as to raise money to do up the rest of the social housing in the area.
Here I have to leave the riverside path and come back to the main road. There are still some commercial premises using the land all the way to the river - in this case, a storage company that believes a sense of humour keeps the burglars away:
Their particular piece of riverside is rented out as a landing pad for someone who commutes in by helicopter from time to time, which must be fun for the people who live in the flats next door.
Carrying on up the main road, there's the typical London palimpsest of not so ancient history:
The Italianate building to the right was built as a Presbyterian chapel, in the days when the working class needed to be saved from drink and sin; now it's an arts centre and performance space with a nice bar and café upstairs. To the left you can see modern housing. Nowadays every new housing development has to include a certain amount of "affordable" or social housing: those blocks go on the boring and workaday side, by the road - the river views are for the "luxury" part of the development. In the distance is an old-style, 1940s, "council estate": social housing as it used to be done.
A little further, and the road is squeezed between a slipway to the river (now only used for the occasional boat race) and the docks which dominate the middle of the Isle of Dogs - here a few cranes are kept to show what was here, but now it's used as a sailing and boating centre. The backdrop is still industrial, however - in those buildings, large numbers of newspapers are printed:
Now I can come back to the riverside, beside a park much used in the sunny weather, but the rest of time only for the devotees of jogging and fitness training. It's named for the local bigwig of the early 1900s, of the Macdougall flour company (they had a flour mill on the docks here), who was also a great figure in local government. Here you can see (the towers with pointed roofs) some 1960s public housing, and beyond, the office and residential towers of Canary Wharf, our "Manhattan-on-Thames" (or, given the origins of its developers, "Montreal-on-Thames", complete with underground shopping centre):
From here on, planning requirements allow the riverside blocks to become taller and more cliff-like. It's a wonder the seagulls haven't completely colonised them:
All the new housing estates round about are given nautical-sounding names - So-and-So Wharf, or Quay, or Harbour, or Anchorage, and the like - as a nod to the area's heritage. I think the projecting roofline of the red building above is a deliberate echo of the building that was there until about ten years ago, a container unloading terminal.
For a time, every new estate tried to look more striking than its neighbours:
and this one is a famous example of the relaxation of planning requirements that was allowed in the early days of regenerating the area after the docks closed and local industry started to move away:
From here, as you look across the river, you can see the taller buildings in central London:
but to do so, your gaze has to meet the city farm on the other side of the river, and the cormorants unimpressed by the shiny new glass tower ("The Shard") at London Bridge:
I once overheard a guide explaining that a cormorant needs to eat one and half times its own bodyweight in fish to keep going: in which case, there's an awful lot of fish in the Thames nowadays.
Now my route turns away from the river towards our own gleaming towers at Canary Wharf:
That pumping station inlet was once a full-scale lock allowing ships into and out of the river - there's a companion lock on the other side of the peninsula that we call the Isle of Dogs, so that at times, it really did become an island. Indeed, one of the last desperate suggestions to save the inner London docks as an industry was that the main channel of the Thames should be driven across here in a straight line, to make it easier for ships to come up to the Pool of London.
I turn in to Canary Wharf itself, at "the most expensive pub in London":
Behind it, you see one of the latest new housing developments (the premium price kind, as you can imagine). Just before the credit crunch, someone came up with a plan to do something similar on the site of the pub (with their "affordable housing" component on an old industrial site down our end of the Island). Rumour has it, they had a rush of blood to the head and paid £32 million just for the site of the pub. Mind you, rumour had it, on three different occasions in the first couple of years I lived in the area, that Robert de Niro was "thinking" of buying a flat in whatever new development was being heavily marketed at the time!
I haven't taken any photos of actually doing the shopping - one supermarket is much like another, and they're not too keen on people snapping away in case there's some commercial espionage going on. But just to prove I do indeed use a push-bike to carry my weekly shop: