I wanted to go a little further east to visit some lesser known areas and, hopefully, a few unknown ones.
The immediate constraint on the route was river crossings going east of Tower Bridge meant the Greenwich Foot Tunnel. A second constraint was only being able to use the tube before 9:30am so that gave us Kings Cross as the best start point.
And so, once again, we were at Richmond Station waiting for the barriers to open to old people at 8:57. As always, I walked to Richmond which gave me a 6k head start on the day's step count.
From there I had come up with a rough route to Greenwich that took in several parks, notably Shoreditch Park, Haggerston Park, Weavers Field, Stepney Green, Bartlett Park, Jubilee Park and Mudchute Park. None of these was brand new to me but usually I had walked past them and the intention this time was to walk through them.
Shoreditch Park was an immediate success...
... though finding any information on this impressive sculpture ws a complete fail - there was no information board nearby that I could see and the best that I could find online was a reference to the "javelin man statue" being moved within the park to this location.
Weavers Field lacked interest except for this centrepiece.
From there we continued our drift east and south with me constantly on the look out for new roads to walk which were more or less on our route.
We were also on the lookout for a cafe and had to wait a while for this as we were in areas of large housing developments with few shops and nothing to attract us. Google mentioned Beans & Beyond in Limehouse so we headed there.
I was expecting a trendy cafe, going solely on the name, but it was an odd, but effective, amalgam of a working me's cafe (all day breakfasts) and a coffee shop. I ordered a Red Velvet cake to go with my coffee and was very surprised when it arrived with three scoops of ice cream! We had thought at the start of the day that we might end with a full meal somewhere but this coffee break made that unnecessary.
Getting into Canary Wharf was not a lot of fun as we had to cross a busy dual-carriageway on the footbridge serving Poplar DLR station and then follow that road a little way before walking past a construction site to get into the centre of Canary Wharf.
Our route then was basically due south and I managed to find a route that included a few new roads without us being trapped on the wrong part of the isle by docks. Luckily there is a bridge by Crossharbour.
Before we headed underground and under water, we looked back across Mudchute Park towards Canary Wharf.
We had thought about walking all the way to Vauxhall but time and age were working against us so we walked up to Canada Water in Rotherhithe instead. We followed main roads for directness and this suite me as we had not walked them before because walking beside the river is much nicer.
Last week's point-to-point walk set a very high standard and I think this one equalled it. We are going to have to think hard about where to go if we hope to match these walks next time.
