A view I never tire of

When I work at home I miss the morning exercise I get from the bike commute, and if I'm not in the mood for a swim, I usually ride a half hour circuit round Greenwich before I sit down at the desk. 

After nipping through the pretty streets of the Ashburnham Triangle I give the legs and lungs a workout up Point Hill, before cutting over Blackheath, against the traffic, and turning into Greenwich Park. Where all the commuters turn left and down the hill to the village, I go straight on and pause for a few minutes at the General Wolfe statue on the top of the slope next to the Royal Observatory. 

It's one of the best views in London and I often have it to myself at that time of day.

Often I take a photograph, so I have quite a selection now. 

Mist - or perhaps more likely smog? - drifting across to Canary Wharf.

Lovely autumnal scene with damp pavements and fallen horse chestnuts.

A clear and sunny morning, looking particularly grand.

Tate memories

Remember Carston Holler's slides at the Tate?

I went with my friend Lisa and we had a blast - at the time I was enjoying experimenting with the film setting on my camera and I had just discovered IMovie, so I thought I'd make a little movie about it.

I dug it out again recently after talking with another friend about making films, and felt quite proud of what I'd achieved, especially since I had no experience in film making or IMovie, and even now after making a few little films, I still struggle with the software.

Reading back the blurb on the Tate website, I was struck by the fact that the themes in my film are identical to those that interest Holler:

"What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the ‘inner spectacle’ experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend."

A bit cheesy perhaps? But brings back some great memories!

Winter textures and colours

You may have noticed comments from a few of my blog posts about how much I love trees in winter. The colours of silver birch trunks in sunlight, topped with deep claret-coloured frondy branches are a particular favourite, but I also love trees of all shapes, sizes and colours when their branches are bare and their bark shines in winter light.

Wood, steel and iron are used to great effect by David Nash in his sculptural works, a large number of which are currently on show at Kew Gardens. If you get chance to go before it finishes in April, I recommend it, although at nearly £15 to get into the gardens, it's not a cheap day out.

When I went in December with some friends, we didn't get there till late in the day and unfortunately weren't able to take our time exploring the gardens, but we did manage to get round most of the sculptures and even had time to go up the treetop walkway, which by that time was deserted.

The sun was just going down so we got the last light of quite a grey day giving a lovely soft hue to the rusty brown of the Corten steel used on the treetop walkway and the smooth wooden handrails.

Nash's sculptures are scattered around the gardens, some of them situated to offer an intriguing counterpoint to other buildings or features of Kew. Many smaller wooden sculptures, such as the one shown above, are tucked among the plants in the temperate house.

I particularly liked the fact that it is often difficult to tell what material Nash has used until you actually touch it - some sculptures which appear to be scorched wood are actually steel, and those shown in the picture below are actually cast iron, which boggled my mind a bit when I started musing on the practicalities of transporting and assembling these sculptures.

I thought of these sculptures when I was out walking in Derbyshire last week and came across this fabulous jumble of steel that was strung on a chain and being used as a gate-closer.

Similarly, the bright green moss that clings to some pieces of stone on dry stone walls changes them from sharp, cold lumps of inert rock to something soft, welcoming and warm,  not to mention providing a splash of glorious colour in these grey days.

It made a pleasing circularity to my holidays that on a visit to the Millennium Galleries in Sheffield we came across an exhibition about John Ruskin and landscape. One of the exhibits was David Nash's film Wooden Boulder, which I didn't have time to see at Kew. The film tells the tale of a 25-year journey by a wooden boulder from the Ffestiniog Valley in Wales down to the Irish sea. There is no narration, only brief subtitles where necessary, and I became fully absorbed in the journey of the boulder and the soundtrack, mostly rushing water or rain, or just the quiet lapping of waves; in a few cases, silence, when the boulder sat stranded on a sand bank. 

In the docks

Last Sunday was such a beautiful day that I decided to take the bike down to the Royal Docks in east London for a bit of exploring. In fact the original idea was to head down the south bank of the Thames towards Erith, but I revised my plans as I approached south London's famous new 'transport link' (tourist attraction), the cable car.

Been meaning to try this out ever since it opened, but had been waiting for the right combination of lack of queues and good weather. Sunday delivered both, plus I was on my bike - surprisingly the ideal scenario for a trip on the cable car. It's free to take a bike on, and to get it in the cabin they have to fold up one of the benches, it's a bit of a faff. The benefit is that you don't have to share your cabin with anyone else, which is bloody great!

The trip was exhilarating and terrifying in equal measures, I can be a bit of a scaredy cat at heights if I let my panic take hold. Best to just look out to the distance and take lots of photographs!

Looking east along the south of the Thames

Big tent with pointy yellow poles

The mouth of the River Lea, looking towards west London (Olympic site on the right)

Over on the other side of the river there's not a great deal to see - a load of apartments, the Excel Centre, a dash of regeneration but still plenty of urban dereliction. And you know how I love a bit of urban dereliction.

Cranes in the Royal Victoria Dock

Millennium Mills

Victoria Docks Footbridge - showing its age at close quarters

I circled the docks a couple of times, checked out the various bridges, and then headed to the river to inspect Thames Barrier Park and take a look at our famous flood barrier from the other side of the Thames. Like the bridge, the park is quite lovely but needing some TLC - they are both about the same age, built at the arse-end of the Docklands regeneration era and now a little neglected.

Thames Barrier Park with the barrier in the background

From the Victoria Docks I headed west and then peeled off the main drag to the wonderful little oasis of Trinity Buoy Wharf  which is well worth a visit if you are out that way. The road leading to the end of the peninsula is littered with street art and signs telling the history of the wharf, a lot of which is still derelict and overgrown, but full of atmosphere and wildlife. At the end you find a whole host of peculiar things - container city (where people live and work in old shipping containers), an old lighthouse where you can listen to Longplayer (a piece of music intended to run for 1,000 years, so don't worry you can nip back if you miss it the first time, or you can even listen live via the website), the Faraday Effect (a tiny museum about Michael Faraday) and various other arty and quirky things.

The Alunatime clock particularly appealed to my inner geek - it's related to the proposal to build a lunar clock in Greenwich, in my opinion much better looking than the main proposal. It has three rings of lights which change with the tide and phases of the moon. On the outer ring you can see the current phase of the moon, whether it's waxing or waning; the middle circle (I think) shows the current position of the moon, and the inner circle shows the level of the tide, which you can check by looking over the wall at the river.

Most of these attractions are open regularly, but they also host open days when you can visit some of the other studios and homes - worth signing up to the mailing list on the website if you want to find out when the next one is. Sometimes they run a ferry from the dome on the other side of the river, which sounds like fun to me!

Also worth knowing that Fatboy's Diner (shouldn't that be Fatbuoy's Diner?!) is open on Sundays if you want a mid bike-ride snack of pastrami on rye or a chilli burger with fries and a shake.

Rainham and Tilbury, a day of unexpected delights

Last week I took a day off work specifically to spend it out on the bike with my good friend and ace photographer Gareth. We chose one of the hottest days of summer so far, deliberately of course. And our chosen route? Not a picturesque spin round the green lanes of Kent, or a trip to the beach to wallow in coastal scenery - no, a ride along the gritty northern edge of the Thames estuary, from Rainham to Tilbury and beyond.

Luckily it's not all grit, warehouses and landfill sites. Rainham Marshes, the first part of our journey, is beautiful - several miles of paved bike tracks, flowers, drainage ditches and these beautifully appropriate bridges which suit the landscape so well.

The parapets of the bridges, so simple and yet so effective, are made of Corten weathering steel ('rusty' to the general public - designed to corrode a certain degree with the rust eventually protecting the remaining steel from further corrosion. That's the theory - check back in 30 years for the facts.) The route to the Thames and beyond to the RSPB reserve is signposted by these beautiful Corten route markers; I love the cutout style and the fact that the colour of the wording changes depending on which way you look at it and on what bit of sky or cloud lies behind it. I think I took about 30 photos of these signposts, their aesthetics pleased me so much!

Where the path meets the river is a graveyard of old ferro-concrete barges, permanently moored up and in various states of buoyancy. 

Gareth negotiates a rather complicated bike gate at Rainham, presumably designed to keep motorbikes and quad bikes off the path. God knows how anyone without an engineering degree manages to get through it.

The RSPB visitor centre at Rainham marshes is an interesting building which has a cafe overlooking the reserve and a large picnic area in the garden below. We didn't have time to get out into the reserve but it has several hides and a load of boardwalks so could be a good place to check out for a future day out.

The 'world's largest yacht' (I always thought yachts were meant to have sails) the MV Octopus passed by as we were at the cafe, leaving London after being berthed there during the Olympics.

In Thurrock a complete surprise awaited us as we came across the Royal Opera House's education and set-building centre at High House Production Park. It was a weird discovery of a little oasis of culture and beauty among grim housing estates and grubby industrial parks.

The poor sods have a view of the Dartford Crossing, one of the ugliest bridges in western Europe, in my opinion!

Further on from the ROH site we headed to St Clements Church, a peculiar sight right next to Proctor & Gamble's chemical works in the middle of a huge industrial estate. A smell like the combination of every pongy cleaning fluid in the world hung in the air, it did not make the place feel clean - quite the opposite in fact.  St Clement's is a lovely church in a totally bizarre location; apparently was used as the location for the funeral in Four Weddings and a Funeral (not that I can remember, which won't surprise anyone who knows me and my memory for films :-/).

At Grays we decided to hop on the train for one stop, to avoid having to ride along busy roads with all the articulated lorries and white vans which we'd already had our fill of. Grays is a depressing place. And then we arrived at Tilbury Town and immediately revised our opinion of Grays.

Luckily we weren't in the 'town' very long and were soon heading back to the river en route to Tilbury Fort, one of the country's best preserved forts, originally founded by Henry VIII. Best photographed from the air, as the link shows!

Unfortunately we chose one of the two weekdays when it happened to be closed, but on the plus side, it was a quiet and peaceful time to be there and we pootled around for a while enjoying the views over the river and the power station, and watching the boats go by.

We weren't sure if we could get along the river much further - there's no official cycle route but seemed to be a footpath marked on the map. Luckily we met an old chap on a bike coming the other way who assured us that apart from having to carry our bikes up and down a couple of sets of stairs, we could get right through to Coalhouse Fort, our ultimate destination. 

He was right, although the path was a little overgrown at times and required a bit of negotiation - past the power station it's a narrow concrete ledge below a big high wall, deteriorating to a muddy footpath for half a mile or so before the asphalt is reinstated coming into Coalhouse Fort. We took bits of vegetation back to London in the spokes of our bikes - very pretty and slightly hippyish!

Final stop before the train home was the modernist Bata factory in East Tilbury, specifically requested by Gareth for architectural curiosity. Lots of photos were taken, I'm sure they'll be up on his blog before too long!

A glorious sunset over Tower Bridge and the Shard rounded the trip off beautifully. Despite a long and hot day out, the ride home cooled me down and made for a fitting end.

Bermondsey back streets

Last weekend I made the most of the sunshine with a leisurely bike ride from Deptford up to London Bridge and back. One of my favourite routes is going over Tower Bridge and back along the river on the north side, but with the contractors at the Greenwich foot tunnel still playing silly buggers it is not the best idea to cross the river at the moment.

So I followed the river up to London Bridge station and then cut south into the back streets of Bermondsey. This part of the city was once home to the capital's leather industry, which is easy to guess from street names such as Leathermarket Street and Tanner's Street, and from buildings such as the London Leather, Hide & Wool Exchange.

A little further eastwards, across the other side of Bermondsey High Street (now painfully hip) you can go back 20 years in as many yards. There are still pubs which have seafood stalls outside on Sundays, a tradition which is rapidly dying.

Near the leathermarket are interesting views of the city's new landmark, which I find quite attractive in its simplicity despite the fact that it is clearly nothing more than a soaring priapic shrine to capitalism ;-)

Seen next to Guy's Hospital tower, its true scale is apparent.

Elsewhere I enjoyed this building just off Bermondsey Street - look closely and you will see the horses heads at each side of the sign. I'm presuming it was once a farrier or stables or something. If we were in France it would probably mean that they sold horse meat, but I think that's unlikely in this case!

Meanwhile I spotted this fella hanging around in a big tree on Southwark Park Road, and wondered why he was up there.

Richmond to Teddington via Ham House

Saturday was my favourite type of winter day - crisp, clear and sunny, even if it was a little bit cold. Richmond was the starting point for a walk with Gareth; we both felt the need for some river views but nothing too physically taxing nor difficult to get to.

We detoured to look at Ham House, not expecting it to be open to the public this time of year, but we had forgotten it was half term and the gardens, cafe and shop are apparently open all week. It was delightfully deserted, seems like nearly everyone else had forgotten too!

The kitchen garden proved so sheltered and sunny that even in the freezing temperature we were able to enjoy our coffee and soup outdoors, watching the parakeets bully the blue-tits off the bird nuts!

Walking on to Teddington Lock offered some lovely river vistas, although the temperature dropped rapidly whenever we were in the shade. Always good to get home to the warmth, and count my blessings that I'm able to do so.