London – Saturday 28 December 2024
With the March trip to New Zealand and Delhi largely booked and rapidly approaching, and with the largess of Christmas just gone and two New Year feasts pending, we’ve decided we need to return to the good habit of getting out for a walk when we can. It will be good to walk off some of the food and wine (and gin and brandy and the occasional Old Fashioned) and get some walking miles back in the legs before we go on holiday. I don’t like to say I’ve been lazy since we were in Berlin, but, to be honest to myself, I have.
At just over 15km the walk today wasn’t huge, but it was a good start and with aching knees and hips I’m not really convinced I could do much more than 25km in a day anymore; not without some practice anyway. Other than a couple of frustrations, it was a nice walk. Eleanor and I do walking together well.
I’d completed the bulk of this walk before, though hadn’t realised it was just over 10 years ago until I checked back through some old posts to find what I’d thought back then. I had a good time then as well, though it was a lot warmer than today.
I will get the two frustrations out of the way early; both of which I firmly lay at the door of ‘the authorities’. One should be nice and easy to resolve, but I’m sure it isn’t as it requires a bunch of people from different organisations agreeing with each other, and I know that just isn’t going to happen any time soon.
The walk we did is a section of the well established 298km ‘Thames Path’, so you would think that being a part of a well established route that there would be consistent and constant signage. I can say that there is reasonably constant signage, it’s not brilliant but there is at least some. I can also say it is not consistent at all; I counted six different types of sign in the section we walked. That is ridiculous and confusing.
Constant and clear signs should be THE bare minimum for something like the Thames Path. My favourite sign was this one, that just points at a blocked off building site. Which leads me to frustration two…
Bits of public London are slowly disappearing under private management, and as more construction happens around the city, more public access is disappearing or being restricted as the image above shows. Who knows how long that building site has been blocking access to the path or for how much longer, I have no idea.
That this city is being gifted to developers to do what they will in the name of progress (and council tax) is just so unfair on those of us who live, and the visitors who come to spend time and money, here. There are just too many places that are either completely closed or that come with so many restrictions (no photography being a favourite). That this is acceptable will mean that we can just expect more and all of a sudden the public will be squeezed out and the nice places will be the domain of only those can afford it.
Another classic example is this closed gate.
We came across it from the riverside where the path beyond was blocked by an old rivers edge warehouse, at first we thought it was locked and would have to back track to get back to the road, though fortunately it was just closed and we could get out. There should be clear rules insisting that gates on the path should be open to send a clear message that the way is open and all are welcome. To be fair, at low tide you can walk along the riverbank and there are a few access ways down to the river.
I accept that there are parts of the Thames Path closed to the public due to the small number of Victorian era warehouses that line the riverside, albeit they’re all blocks of flats now. What I am unhappy about is new construction being allowed to get away with blocking access; either by building right on the river’s edge or by failing to leave open gates on the section of public path they were ‘forced’ to create as part of their permission.
Even with both those moans, and as I said before, I enjoyed the walk; it was a still and cold day, with a nice bit of low cloud and there weren’t too many people about until we got closer to the city. It was quiet on both the footpath and the road which allowed for a leisurely pace and quiet conversation.
We stopped for a nice pint in one of London’s oldest pubs, ‘The Prospect of Whitby’, which for some reason I was too scared to ask about in case I didn’t like the answer, had a noose hanging from a gibbet over the river.
Not taking the opportunity go for a wee after the pint while we were still in the pub was either a bad mistake or a work of genius as we were forced to stop for another drink at St Katherine’s Dock. This time we added a burger to each of our drink orders and stayed inside for a warming and revitalising lunch (and wee) before partly walking them both off when we walked to Liverpool Street station to get the tube back home.
Where is Phil now? 
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