London: Greenwich; Monday, 28 August, 2023

I checked out of the hotel and left my luggage with reception before heading out into Greenwich for a wander, stopping off first at St Alfege’s Church in the heart of the town centre. The church is the Parish Church of Greenwich and the current building was designed by prolific church architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, though significant repair works had to be carried out following a direct hit by a bomb during the blitz.

From St Alfege’s I hopped over the road to the Market, which has been in Greenwich since the early 18th century, though today it’s much more focused on the tourist market than on providing provisions for the people of Greenwich (Waitrose and Marks and Spencers have taken over that role!)

I had a bit more of a wander around Greenwich before heading over to the Greenwich Foot Tunnel to cross under the river and over to the Isle of Dogs. In comparison to the previous day’s experience at the Woolwich foot tunnel, I’d already passed more people on the stairs before I reached the tunnel than I’d passed the entire journey the previous day.

Over in Island Gardens I took in the stunning views across the river to The Old Royal Naval College, Royal Observatory, Cutty Sark and Greenwich Park before heading over to the DLR station and catching the train up to Heron Quays to meet up with friends for lunch.

After lunch we hopped back onto the DLR and headed down to Mudchute to visit the country park and farm. The park was formed by the mud from the excavations of the Millwall Docks in the 1860s being dumped onto the land by conveyor belts – literally mud chutes! With the redevelopment of the rest of the Isle of Docks as part of the Docklands development the local community banded together to protect this part of land and it was eventually turned into a park with a small urban farm opening within it.

Today the urban farm is a popular tourist destination, evidenced from the number of people looking round at the same time as us. The farm houses a significant number of animals – different types of pigs, sheep, goats, donkeys, chickens, ducks, geese and, slightly weirdly, llamas.

From the farm we continued walking through the park land and through Millwall park down to Island Gardens and then back through the foot tunnel to Greenwich itself.

In Greenwich we hopped on the Thames Clipper river bus service east. Earlier in the year the service had been extended beyond Woolwich, where it used to end, to Barking Riverside – a new development on former Power Station site that is slowly being constructed. Weirdly, for the UK at least, the infrastructure has been set up first with a railway station and ferry connection already in long before any of the houses, making it a slightly weird place to visit – an almost deserted patch of London with nothing there, except transport connection. Almost the direct opposite of the Thamesmead estate on the opposite side of the river that, after more than 50 years, is still waiting for decent transport connections to be installed!

Given how little there is to see at Barking Riverside we hopped back on the return Thames Clipper and headed back to Greenwich where we headed to a pub right by the Cutty Sark for a very nice dinner a couple of drinks before my friends headed off towards their homes and I headed back to the hotel, grabbed my luggage and headed home myself.