Thames I
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A walking voyage of discovery, London (re)discovered once again. A London not of commuters, nor of school runs, but of this light, these pasts, this present that adheres into our uncertain future. My children, my brilliant companions. Beginning at Greenwich's scorched clipper, we pass the shipwrecks of riverside industry, pause for picnic lunch on a deserted beach hemmed by scrap metal and littered by animal jawbones. Then on, to the aggregate mountains at the southern head of the Blackwall tunnel, the beached whale of what was once the millenium dome (accompanied by the distant screams of jumpers saved at the last moment by elastic cord). Then the plash of a duck bus hitting the river, an artist's sliver of a ship, the metal colossi of the Thames barrier. We end our trek on the Woolwich ferry, returning to the north side of the river. It's the ferry my father used to cycle to as a child in the '30s; he'd travel back and forth, going below deck to watch the steam engine as it drove the paddles. |
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