City & County 08: A day in London
The Barbican from street level. All photos taken Tuesday 17 September 2019 by the author.
Although precise navigation can be quite difficult for an occasional visitor, few cities compare to London for a loosely-organized wander. The accretion of different historic eras offers so much to see and feel amid the of road networks, railways, canals and their tow paths, repurposed industrial buildings mixed in with shiny new offices and post-war and recent luxury housing, and of course the multiplicity of people from literally everywhere working, socializing, in movement, at rest.
On my way to a workshop in Manchester last month, I stopped off in London to see a friend and update my fieldwork on the Royal Albert Docks, which I had not visited since spring 2017 (linked here is a short piece drawing on that earlier fieldwork that I wrote with my collaborator Jon Silver for The Conversation)
Intent to walk as much as possible while covering a fair bit of east and central London, I walked from Hackney Downs to the Barbican, across the Thames on the Millennium Bridge to the Tate Modern and Olafur Eliasson’s In Real Life exhibition. Then, after a coffee at the Borough Market’s Monmouth Coffee Company I took the Jubilee Line transferring to Dockland Light Rail to meet the above mentioned friend at the Royal Albert Dock.
Olafur Eliasson's Your uncertain shadow (2010)
The dockside promenade at the Royal Albert Dock development.
As urban geographers do, we walked around this Chinese-built, apparently completed but vacant ghost estate, taking photos and chatting about the design of the site as the two security guards and numerous surveillance cameras watched over us. Worth noting briefly that there were no other pedestrians in sight other than a few walkers on the waterfront promenade and a photographer snapping pictures of airplanes coming and going at London City Airport. We did spot two cars, one small SUV and one electric Lamborghini at a charging kiosk. Leaving these transformed docks, we detoured through Stratford to walk from the 2012 Olympic site over the River Lee and the Hackney Marshes to Hackney Wick then back to Dalston-Kingsland Station where we rushed to meet another friend for a drink one neighborhood over, in Stoke Newington.
Sunset in Hackney Wick.
All told I walked over sixteen miles, and while I realize this list of place names and London Underground routes may not offer much to anyone other than me, but it serves as reference for the photos included here.