This week's walk took a lot less planning and being close to home we could do a slightly longer distance too. My partner in walking wanted to revisit a couple of parks and to explore some of Central London, so we did that.
The only parts of the plan we had fixed were to start at Hyde Park Corner (we can use the tube for free anytime of day), do Hyde and Regent's Parks, head for Tower Bridge and then back to Waterloo.
Things started well and Hyde Park was busy with other people having similar ideas. It got a bit messy as we hit the north-east corner of the park as roads got in the way of the footpaths for a bit. Walking in London is a constant reminder that pedestrians are second-class citizens.
Regent's Park reinforced that lacking an orbital walking route that does not run alongside the road. The pointed shape of our route shows that.
The section onto Tower Bridge was a succession of relived memories of times working in various places across London and while I had not walked the full route before I think that I had walked every bit of it several times before.
Local knowledge came in useful as we looked for somewhere to have lunch and we hit Rosie's Cafe just behind Tate Modern. I had used it regularly when working on a project in Southwark Bridge Road.
We had to finish the day at The Kings Arms in Roupell, so we did.
There were so many highlights along the way including formal gardens in the two parks, almost all of Clerkenwell, Art Deco grandeur in Herbrand Street, listening to the Fleet running underfoot and crossing Tower Bridge.
A surprise was just how busy it was. This was a grey, if dry, day in February and I would have thought that tourists would have better things to do than come to London at this time of year. Apparently not.
For the record, we covered 25 km in 4:18 hours of walking.
The only parts of the plan we had fixed were to start at Hyde Park Corner (we can use the tube for free anytime of day), do Hyde and Regent's Parks, head for Tower Bridge and then back to Waterloo.
Regent's Park reinforced that lacking an orbital walking route that does not run alongside the road. The pointed shape of our route shows that.
The section onto Tower Bridge was a succession of relived memories of times working in various places across London and while I had not walked the full route before I think that I had walked every bit of it several times before.
Local knowledge came in useful as we looked for somewhere to have lunch and we hit Rosie's Cafe just behind Tate Modern. I had used it regularly when working on a project in Southwark Bridge Road.
We had to finish the day at The Kings Arms in Roupell, so we did.
There were so many highlights along the way including formal gardens in the two parks, almost all of Clerkenwell, Art Deco grandeur in Herbrand Street, listening to the Fleet running underfoot and crossing Tower Bridge.
A surprise was just how busy it was. This was a grey, if dry, day in February and I would have thought that tourists would have better things to do than come to London at this time of year. Apparently not.
For the record, we covered 25 km in 4:18 hours of walking.
No comments:
Post a Comment
All comments are welcome. Comments are moderated only to keep out the spammers and all valid comments are published, even those that I disagree with!