Things you probably won't want to do: Tunnels under the Thames

Frankly, I could probably entitle the entire blog 'Things you probably won't want to do'.  But that would perhaps be unwelcoming. One is suddenly 'minded of Why Don't You? suggesting you switch off your television set and go and do something less boring instead. But! Dear, dear reader, I, rather, propose that you read on, and have your life immeasurably enriched. Quite a proposal.  Quite an inaccurate proposal.

I like to give my otherwise-random cycling efforts some purpose. I try to find places to go to give my life meaning, and thrill my little point-and-click camera. Hence this thematic voyage of discovery.  Tunnels under the Thames that a cyclist may enjoy en bike.

The Greenwich Foot Tunnel runs from an uninspiring bit of grass on the Isle of Dogs to the south of Canary Wharf (from which you get a wonderful view of Greenwich Maritime College, alias Les Mis Land), to Greenwich (from which you get a view of an uninspiring bit of grass on the Isle of Dogs, and the towers of Canary Wharf in the haze).

Basically, all of SE London looks like this (cf Thamesmead).

On each side there is a spiral staircase down from the turret / 99-without-a-flake entrance, and a large and oddly wood-paneled lift.  Like a drawing room on a pulley.

The tunnel itself is cool in summer (wonder if it gets cold in winter), and slopes slightly too steeply down, and then back up. It's much like any number of Tube tunnels you've tramped along. Makes me think for some reason of the Bakerloo line. Must be the mud-brown tinge. Despite the signs urging pedestrian pursuits, a collection of idiots is constantly on hand to skate or cycle along the tunnel.  One should try not to hope that they fall over and injure themselves in some sort of facial way.

On the Greenwich side, pause briefly to be annoyed by the post-fire reconstruction of the Golden Hind (or whichever boat it is), now trapped in a wave of geometric Tupperware.

A few miles further east is the Woolwich Foot Tunnel, which is much like the Greenwich one, albeit a bit longer. The lifts are currently broken, so the adventurous cyclist will have to carry his bicycle up all the bloody spiral stairs. There's not much to see back on the north side (well, there's the (free!) Woolwich Ferry, and, mmm, Woolwich), although the wonderfully and slightly-wacky Thames Barrier Gardens are a short cycle west, by Pontoon Dock DLR station.

Fun and daft in roughly equal measure.

Of course, the cyclist is not allowed down the Limehouse Link (and, since it doesn't go under the Thames, the tunnel is beyond the rubric of this blog post), but one can, one speculates, do over 30mph on a bicycle down there, given the steep downramps and hefty tailwinds. One speculates.

A less illegal cycling option is the Rotherhite tunnel, which goes from glamorous Surrey Quays to glamorous Limehouse (home of the aforementioned lovely fun illegal tunnel). It's probably dull to drive along, but it's a good laugh on a bike, despite the general stink of traffic fumes.  I decided to ride on the pavement, rather than risk the narrow road, which is, in hindsight, probably also illegal.

Trusty steed.

Finally, narratorially, there're the Big Daddies of Thames Tunnels, the ones which the East London Line runs through.

Occasionally, they leave the tunnel lights on (above), so you can peer down the tracks and imagine yourself a Victorian gentleman (below), all top hat and searching for a filly of liberal morals unbismerched by the pox.

And then there's the Victoria, Northern and Jubliee Lines (oh, and Bakerloo, forgot that one), each of which delves under the Thames, but none of them permit bikes.  The District Line, at its poncy end, has its own bridges over the river, although some idiot designed the Richmond bridge's sides so high that you can't see the water at all.

I don't know if you can take a bike through the Dartmouth Tunnel, and I'm not going to try.

Pleasant voyages, now-enriched reader!

Woolwich: Faded Glory

So much of London has been gentrified, even since I've been here.  The property boom of much of the 2000s led to lots of rather humdrum suburbs becoming newly-desirable, and awash with organic wooden toys and hand-fired single-varietal macchiatos.

Whilst the impression may be an inexorable improvement, it seems rather that this may be part of London's natural ebb and flow.  So, I thought I'd explore some of London's less-loved areas, keeping an attentive eye out for former grandeur.  Hence Woolwich.

Approaching from the West, the impeccably-dressed cyclist comes across the William Morris Estate.  God knows why it's named after a proponent of local crafts and workmanship, as the estate is made of Danish system-built prefab point blocks and slabs (the same type that collapsed at Ronan Point in '68).

The estate map looks like a screenshot from the original Star Wars arcade machine.

 Underlining the meanness of the site, the mainline railway track cuts through the estate but doesn't stop there.

There's the train you can't get on.

This type of building is wildly unfashionable. But on a sunny winter's morning, the well-endowed cyclist could nearly infer the architect's efforts to play with light.

Moving further west, one comes across the rather attractive water feature of stagnant rain collecting on the happy space / roof of the communal garage block.

A bit further towards the town, the devastatingly-charismatic cyclist passes through a mish-mash of Victorian, 30s and 50s housing, and chances upon a particularly exciting public house, which is clearly the centre of the local community.

Wow, that many forthcoming events?

A touch further West, the witty and yet international homme en bicyclette chances upon the first real signs of lost glory, in the shape of some superb 30s buildings, now sadly in really horrible states of disrepair.  Gateway House, a rare piece of Streamline Moderne (which might be my favourite type of Art Deco), was once an Odeon, and is now a New Wine Church.

Why do I always have lampposts in my photos?

Across the road is the Grade II-listed Granada, which was once billed as the 'most romantic theatre ever built'.  It's now a Gala Bingo.

Oh hai lamppost (which is strangely of a different design to the one on the other side of the road).

The Royal Arsenal Cooperative, another great bit of Deco, is now derelict.

Sob.

Passing through the mainly-50s pedestrianised parade of shops, the plucky adventurer comes across a timewarp Sainsbury's, all brown and orange and low-ceiling'd.  It looks in my photo as if the block of flats on the left is connected by a flying walkway to the lift tower of the multi-storey carpark above Sainsbury's...  Surely that can't be right.  Surely.

All shops in Woolwich must be clearly signalled by massive orange arrows (Bye law 1.26.2).

At the far end of the shops is a post-Millennium public realm, with a whopping TV on stilts to help placate the grunting masses.  The sloping square has thoughtfully been subdivided by multi-level wedges of grass, again helping to assuage the English fear of open spaces.

Saluting any picture of Cameron on the TV is obligatory (Bye law 1.26.3).

The teasingly-wonderful urban raconteur has, of course, saved the best of Woolwich till last.  In the middle of the shops, an observant and well-muscled chap can find the area's principal tourist attraction - the world's 3000th McDonald's - the very first in the UK.  It's like looking upon the face of God.

 Mr Ray A Kroc later went on the manufacture a range of vile rubber shoes.

Foreign: Copenhagen

When heading from Copenhagen airport to the centre of town, I decided to eschew the direct train, and go a slightly more protracted route on the new Metro.  In fact, as the Metro doesn't serve Central Station (presumably putting it on a strategic par with Fenchuch Street), I also got to go on one of the mainline suburban trains too.

The Danes like their design, and like the neighbouring country of Ikea, they like things minimal.  The trains are large and wide, and the floating seats allow easy cleaning of the floor (which was slushy with melted snow and grit).  But this unrelenting efficiency makes them a little characterless, feeling a bit like a cross between the plastic delights of the Croydon Tramlink and the DLR.  Although, like the DLR, you can go right to the front and pretend to drive / be taking off from Battlestar Galactica.  Should that sort of thing roll your stock.

Yes, camera, please focus of the scratched graffiti,

rather than the tunnel.  Thank you.

The Metro stations also seem to be of a uniform design.  Symmetrical escalators zigzag up towards the skylights, whilst the metal-panelled walls make the whole place feel a bit surgical and cold.  But nonetheless hi-tech and pleasantly shiny.

Rather cutely, the arrivals boards count down in half-minutes.

Another bit of escalator porn, for those that way inclined.

The suburban trains were also massively wide, and quite unlike British trains, were happy to carry bicycles.

Note that although loads of people in Copenhagen cycle, none wear helmets.  These seems somehow at odds with the high-pay, high-tax Welfare State system in which you can't even buy booze from an off-license after 8pm lest you get tipsy and fall in the sea.

I had hoped to take a river taxi too, but the canals had frozen over.  It was cold.

I thought that expanse of white was a field.  

Actually, it's a frozen and snowed-over lake...

Cycle Path Fails: #1

There's a phone box in it.

Thamesmead

I'd been to Thamesmead once before, a flying visit, safely in the car with the doors locked.  I remembered the road running between blank concrete walls, like the Death Star trench, and the simply huge flyovers that appear to go from and to nowhere.  But at that youthful time (2003, on the way back from France in a friend's mum's BMW which fascinated HM Customs), I was less sensitised to the esoteric delights of concrete housing blocks.  

But, excited by Owen Hatherley's 'New Ruins of Great Britain', and engorged by a recent viewing of Clockwork Orange (which has a slow-motion ultraviolence fight scene filmed along the concrete lake there), I set off again to view the massive 'town of the 21st century'.

Thamesmead is a late 60s New Town, the only one built in London.  It sits in a largely inaccessible part of Zone 4, just south of the East-widening river.  The nearest Tube or DLR station is Gallions Reach.  But getting there involves swimming the Thames.  For a bit of August tailwind fun, I cycled there.

Thamesmead is, by the way, huge.  I'd love to see an oblique aerial shot.  Aparallel row and angle after row and angle, slight shifts in style like a lucky dip selection of English Brutalist leitmotifs.  I saw a sign for garages numbered 2005-2018.  So, unless the numbering system is whimsically perverse, there are shed loads of flats.    Wikipedia suggest the population is 50,000.  The parts around the lake are easily the best, even if the lake is now largely clogged with pondweed and trolleys and other urban jetsam.

The highish rise blocks.  

And some swans wondering where Greenwich is.

Near the bit where Alex's droogs get cinematically beaten up.

Have those clothes been hung out to dry?  In a lake?

Thamesmead is enduring some scorched-earth gentrification, with boxy old concrete blocks being replaced by, um, boxy new concrete blocks with render. 

 Replacing crap old with crap new.

Almost acknowledging that the new bits aren't actually any better (just not blighted by our cultural association of exposed concrete with poverty and violence), a few of the highish rise concrete blocks have been given a whitewash facelift.  They really look just like the brand new bits.

Stunning (re)development.

In places, the redevelopment appears to have taken the form of a dab of blue paint (reminding me of the bright yellow staircase from another baffling and unfriendly concrete megastructure, Lasdun's South Bank Centre).

Happy now?

As all good psychologists, and no architects, know, the repetitive uniformity of concrete estates does not appeal to the Englishman [apologies for the sexism], whose home, albeit one built on the Thames floodplain, is his castle.  Said Englishman will therefore gleefully etch a little of his character on his home.  There are lots and lots of foul personal touches, like those naff novelty phone cases that you can buy to keep your HTC Rumba free of grease from your Gregg's pasty.

Because my concrete home is half timber-beam 

Tudorbethan and half Georgian.

Because my concrete house is a gated country estate

(and / or prison).

Because my concrete house is a foul Thatcherite Plexiglass Portal 

(cf Surrey Quays Shopping Centre).

I suppose Thamesmead hoped to emulate the success of the City's Barbican.  Whilst it fails at this, it has managed to emulate the some of the Barbican's 'I can see where I want to go, but I have no idea how to get there' / 'Oh, this walkway goes nowhere' hilarity.

A Thamesmead flying walkway.  By MC Escher.

'Aborted walkway (always seem that hardest words to say)'

Thamesmead's failure is attributed in some part to the crap public transport thereabouts (it might once've had a bridge over the Thames or a Fleet Line tube station), which knackered the place's ability to appeal to commuters or basically anyone with a job outside a Thamesmead corner shop.  I couldn't even find the nearest train station, Abbey Wood, because some wag / prick had turned the signs round.  Incidentally, if approaching by bike, strictly the road signs that will send you pedalling wildly past HMP Belmarsh (which scares the hell out of me) along a whopping dual carriageway before suddenly depositing you at the massive flying roundabout above and just to the north of the lake-and-towers part of Thamesmead.  It is a perhaps unintentional, but utterly appropriate, vista.

I love dated versions of the future.

Failed and unloved as it may be, Thamesmead interests me far more than the smug Georgiana of windswept and paranoid Blackheath.  #personalvendetta

Because I haven't killed for a while...

I took my bike out to East Street Market to buy some flowers for the minibalcony.  It's a nice, unreconstructed tat-and-veg market off the Walworth Road.  It's a bit like how I imagine the Blitz to be.  But with more old mobile phones and N64 games for sale.

Like all good middle-class boys, I affected a slightly cockney accent when buying things, lest they recognise me as a member of the gentry, steal my bike and chuck me in a canal.  

They are Flowers.  I know nothing more.  They will be dead soon.

Whilst I'm (diagetically) around Elephant and Castle, I'll include a picture of the tank (yes, tank) that is parked just off the New Kent Road.

If I knew how to link to a Google map, I'd do that.  But I can't.  Anyway.  Clearly, given London is drowning in the July downpours, I didn't take this picture over the weekend.

Eltham: City of Mouthbreathers

Took the bike out to Eltham last weekend.  Ostensibly, I was off to see Eltham Palace, but it was shut when I got there at 11am.  So I amused myself by looking at the lovely 30s houses round there.  A particular and pink one caught my eye:

A magnificently horrid mess (marvel at the curved once-suntrap windows that arc round to the garage extension!  Gasp at the pink, Old Worlde porch extension!  Feel slightly nauseous on behalf of the neighbours and their unruined house on the left).  Oh, those lanterns.

Anyway, whilst taking pictures and chortling in a horribly superior way, a young skinheaded chap stopped his van and asked me if I was trying to break into his Mum's house.  Least he asked, I suppose.  Anyway.  I had to claim to be admiring the stylish architecture.  And then I ran away on my bike.