pumpkinstrokemarrow

Another swing around London Town yesterday afternoon. Warm with no wind - but still cold enough in the more enclosed galleries and walkways running along the south bank of the river around London Bridge so it will need to get a good deal warmer before it will be comfortable to eat outside in any of the many eateries with outside tables there. Ditto the balconies on the flats, despite their fancy price tags - with the one agent we asked suggesting that one might pick up a two bedroom flat in Bermondsey for a million or so. Roughly four times the price of Epsom; possibly worth it for those who are young, rich & beautiful and so better able than I to take advantage of all the other fashionable eateries which have sprung up in what used to be a reasonably dodgy part of the east end.

Along the way various points of interest. So inspected the interiors of both St. Vedast's and St. Mary-le-Bow, both more or less rebuilt after being more or less destroyed during the second world war. I much preferred St. Vedast's. St. Mary had not recaptured or at least not achieved the lightness I like in baroque. A heavy, cloying feel about the place; like a cake the goo on which is not quite right.

Came across a small container terminal just to the west of Cannon Street Station. This was a bit of a puzzle: why would there be a small container terminal in such a place? Puzzle very quickly resolved once home by Wikipedia: it seems that the thing is not a container terminal at all, rather a waste transfer station for all the refuse - oyster shells and champagne bottles - generated by all the bankers in the City of London. Does each bank have a container in its back yard into which the bankers chuck their stuff, with the smelly containers being hauled away by smelly bog standards to the waste transfer station on alternate Wednesdays?

Came across a very large butcher in New Change Passage. An extraordinary looking place, with most of the back of this very large shop being what appeared to be a glass fronted cold store containing large quantities of beef - lots of fore rib on the bone for those that are keen on that - and numbers of pigs. I found it all rather off-putting: I think I prefer my butchers to be more domestic in scale; not putting the large scale slaughter of dumb animals quite so much in one's face. A second downer was the fact that the place was part of the Oliver empire, Oliver being one of the many television personalities whom I find rather irritating. Given that there did not appear to be any customers at around 1500, what sort of trade does the place do? There might be plenty of people around who earn lots of dosh, but how many of them want to fight their way home through the rush hour with some ribs of beef tucked under their arm? Does the place serve all the restaurants round about? First thought was not: city restaurants would go to the specialist wholesalers. Perhaps the answer is to return in five years and see if the place is still there. Oddly enough there was a second butcher just up the road from this first one. Nothing like so grand looking, but perhaps a bit more practical with prices rather less than the double what one might pay in Manor Green Road that Oliver was charging. See http://www.jamieoliver.com/barbecoa/ for the full story.

South of the river, past all the flashy new-to-me buildings and piazzas at Tower Bridge, came across an inlet which could serve very well as the location for a costume drama, looking very Dickensian, despite the overhanging warehouse having been converted into flats. The illustration does not do it justice at all; you will have to go there yourself to get a proper grip on the atmosphere. Complete with ducks. The AZ says the thing is called St. Andrews Wharf, so not the entrance to some formerly serious dock that I had thought it might be.

Last stop was the replica of the Golden Hind. Not one of those originals where the repairs have more or less completely replaced the original - like the Victory at Portsmouth, just a straightforward replica. But not quite because there was a propeller and there were bulges strapped to the side just below the waterline, visible as the Hind is in a dry dock. The bulges were a bit like the sort of thing, I think ballast tanks is the technical term, you would have had on the sides of a second world war submarine (rather than a sixteenth century battleship (the very small size of which never ceases to amaze)) and presumably present here as a result of a visit by some health & safety enthusiasts at the time when the replica was due to sail around the world.

Cakes from the City branch Bea's of Bloomsbury (http://www.beasofbloomsbury.com/). Cakes which on this occasion took the form of very sugary & jammy doughnuts. Not the sort of thing that I would normally go for but mine was rather good.