London: Greenwich; Sunday, 27 August, 2023

Breakfast completed I headed out of the hotel to the DLR station and caught the train a couple of stops to the end of the line at Lewisham and changed there onto the 89 bus out to (and up) Shooters Hill to my first stop of the day.

The folly of Severndroog Castle was built by the widow of Sir William James who had risen through the ranks of the East India Company from a first mate on a ship to Commodore and towards the end of his life served as an MP. The castle had originally been built in 1784 the year after his death and by the 1920s was in the hands of the London County Council and it’s successor the Greater London Council. When that was wound up in 1986 it passed to Greenwich Council who struggled to pay for it’s continued upkeep and in 1988 they boarded it up and left it to rot. They were almost successful with the building close to total destruction when it was rescued in 2013 and restored, reopening as a tearoom and viewing platform in 2014.

From the top of the castle – only open on Sundays – the views are excellent, and, on the day after a series of thunderstorms have cleared a couple of weeks worth of pollution and humidity from the air, stretch all the way from the North Down and Windsor Castle deep into Essex and Kent. I spent quite a lot of time taking in the views from the top of the castle – helped by the very keen volunteers who were happily pointing out all the sites that you can see.

As Severndroog is located almost at the top of Shooters Hill anywhere else is a downhill walk, so it made sense rather than heading back to the bus stop and taking two different buses to my next destination to just walk it (Google Maps was predicting almost identical travel times, but clearly a 2 mile walk is healthier than sitting on buses).

The walk turned out to be pretty dull, but the reward at the end was the stunning Eltham Palace. Originally a medieval palace and at one time the childhood home of Henry VIII, the palace fell into disrepair and by the early 20th century was in an advanced state of ruin, with only the Great Hall in any repairable state. At that point the site was purchased by Stephen and Virginia Courtauld who proceeded to restore the Great Hall and add on an Art Deco 1930s mansion to it creating a weird mix of modernity and medievalism. The house and grounds are now owned by English Heritage and are open to look around and I spent a good couple of hours looking round both the house and the gardens.

I stopped off in Eltham for a very late lunch in a café on the high street before hopping on a bus down to Woolwich and the ferry. There’s been a ferry service here since at least the 14th century, though at the time of visiting the service was suspended due to maintenance work on the current fleet of ferries. However, for pedestrians there is another option – the Woolwich Foot Tunnel, the unloved sibling to the Greenwich Foot Tunnel. Whilst the latter sees about 1.5 million visitors a year the Woolwich tunnel barely gets 300,000 which means that when you head down into it you often have the whole space to yourself. In the 15 minutes or so it took me to descend down below the river walk through the tunnel and ascend on the other side I only saw 6 other people.

I had originally planned on taking the ferry one way and the foot tunnel back, but with the ferry option not available, and a bus pulling into the bus stop as I emerged from the stairwell, I decided to hop on a bus back to Canning Town and pick up the DLR from there rather than heading straight back over the river.

Back in Greenwich I grabbed a bite to eat and had another dusk wander round the town before heading back over to my hotel room for a well deserved early night.