Tag Archives: London

London Memories -3

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City in Blue

There are a number of arbitrary hooks which snared me as regards London. I loved pictorial history books as a kid and these being Anglocentric featured much on the development of English culture and society, with London at its centre. The Tower of London, St Paul’s and the Thames were familiar to me, as illustrations of their place through history.

Pop music too, of course. In 1968 my soul spun upon hearing Last Night in Soho by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich. Dave Dee was sometimes known, ominously, as the singing policeman having once been a cadet in the Wiltshire Police; one of those boys in blue. Here, he’s one of the bad boys we love. It was my first single, and also, I’ve just read, Waterboy Mike Scott’s. Great minds, Mike, great minds.

You came into my life like rain upon a barren desert

Just one smile and I was born again

I felt sure it wasn’t too late

I’d find strength to make me go straight

I had love and threw it away

Why did they lead me astray

For last night in Soho

I let my life go

Last Night in Soho was written by Ken Howard and Alan Blaikely and released on the Fontana label, which used attractive deep blue graphics. The song is a cautionary tale, melodramatic but seductive. London is cinematically rendered, in a collage of crime and romance. How dangerous and attractive this place Soho sounded! I had a fondness for maps, and a London street guide was thumbed close to invisibility, as I traced my path through Soho and the wild West End.

As a football fan, the towers of Wembley loomed large in my youth. FA cup finals provided a rare chance to see a full televised match. My first featured West Ham and Preston North End. But I lost my heart to the boys in blue, Chelsea, although losing the final to Spurs in 1967. I had built many memories of London by the end of the twentieth century, physically stepping onto the streets of London, seeing the sights, the galleries, eating, drinking, going to the movies, music gigs and theatre shows. But it would be 2005 before I actually went to a Chelsea game. As a treat for my fiftieth birthday, M and Sons brought me to the Hotel Chelsea right in their home ground. Chelsea were turned a hundred years old then having been founded in 1905 to occupy Stamford Bridge, an athletics stadium in Fulham. That’s a different Stamford Bridge to the one up near York that hosted King Harold’s semi final victory over the Norwegians in 1066. Harold lost the final to the Normans at Hastings, led by William, since known as the Conqueror.

Chelsea FC were admitted immediately to the Football League, though it would take another fifty years to win it, which they did in the year of my birth, 1955. Another fifty years later at the end of November I saw them play at the Bridge, as defending League Champions, having triumphed again the season before. They played Wigan Athletic, John Terry scoring the only goal of the game. They would go on to win the Premiership that season.

Earlier, with M and the boys, I met star players Peter Bonetti and Bobby Tambling. Tambling was the Blues star striker of the sixties scoring over two hundred goals. Bonetti was their goalkeeper, known as The Cat. I fancied myself as a goalie in my youth, but was known as the Vampire, as I couldn’t deal with crosses. Bonetti had played in Chelsea’s first FA Cup winning team, in 1970, beating Leeds Utd in a glorious mudbath at Wembley. Kicking and a gouging in the mud the blood and the beer, as Johnny Cash ‘sang’.

The Fox and Pheasant is the oasis of choice, out in the beer garden oiling the tonsils for the afternoon ahead. I sank a few with my boys here on an Easter weekend before seeing Chelsea beating Arsenal two nothing with a brace by Didier Drogba, later marching down the Fulham Road singing Didier Drogba, la le la le la. The day after seeing Henry IV at the Globe, Davin and I attended the first game of the season to enjoy Chelsea beating West Brom 6 – 0. Drogba scored a hat trick. Visiting the Chelsea Museum, we got to lift the Premier League trophy and the FA Cup, the benefit of a double winning year. Been there, done that, even bought a souvenir teeshirt.

Woke up, it was a Chelsea Morning 

And the first thing that I heard

Was a song outside my window

And the traffic wrote the words

It came ringing up like Christmas Bells

Rapping up like pipes and drums

Chelsea!

Joni Mitchell’s song from 1969 is a song of joy. Oh, to feel like that of a morning! It appeared on her album Clouds.

You can head back east to the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea by Fulham Road or King’s Road nearer the River Thames. The crossing is bracketed by World’s End and Brompton Cemetery, which sound more cheerful on a matchday. Along the river I can stroll along Cheyne Walk and think at least something sounds like it’s named after me. Chelsea Bridge is further on. The current structure dates from 1937, replacing an earlier one originally known as Victoria Bridge. Like its predecessor it is a suspension bridge, though much wider, and while plain enough, pleasantly illuminated at night.

A landmark across Chelsea Bridge is the Battersea Power Station. This massive coal fired power station was designed by engineer Leonard Pearce with architects Giles Gilbert Scott and Theo Halliday. Construction began in 1929. It was paused during the Second World War; the complex ultimately completed in 1955. In the late seventies decommissioning began and the building became derelict for thirty years until redevelopment in 2012. Numerous bids included Chelsea’s plan to convert the station into a football stadium. But that didn’t fly. Frank Gehry and Norman Foster were amongst the leading architects redesigning the forty acre site along with restoring the original buiding on a project incorporating residential, retail, leisure and entertainment. The complex was opened in 2022.

Battersea Power Station is a combination of awe inspiring scale and art deco elegance. One of London’s most iconic buildings, it is also a cultural landmark in its evocation of both utopian and dystopian themes. Pink Floyd fans will know this from the cover of their 1977 album, Animals. The cover photo, by Hipgnosis, was not collaged or manipulated, no Photoshop back then. A giant inflatable pig was hoisted into place for the shoot. Unfortunately, the monster broke free, terrorising the population of West London and Heathrow Airport before landing in Kent. You can’t get more Orwellian than that.

London Memories -2

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City of Drama

Leaving London back in ’73, we made our winding way back to Holyhead via Stratford on Avon, hometown of the Bard, William Shakespeare. He was born there in 1564 and the town has become a mecca for Bardolators. Stratford is suitably picturesque, packed with tourists and Tudor style buildings. From our ad hoc camp by the river our trio wondered if we could swim across the Avon and bunk into the rere of the theatre for a show. A Midsummer’s Nights Dream, most likely. We visited Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, a sizeable thatched timber-framed building with a museum. Anne Hathaway was twenty six and with child when she married eighteen year old Will. Daughter Susanna was born six months later, and another year on Anne gave birth to twins Judith and Hamnet.

In his early twenties, Shakespeare moved to London and became part of the theatre scene. He acted and wrote with a group called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and in 1599 they established their hq at the Globe Theatre in Southwark. The first Globe burned down in 1613 during a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. A pyrotechnic flourish misfired, and sparks ignited the thatched roof. There were no injuries, other than a man whose breeches caught fire which helpful spectators extinguished with their tankards of ale. A rare occasion of a punter being obliged to buy a round for the people who had just drenched his crotch with beer. The theatre was rebuilt but the flame of drama was extinguished during the Civil War period from 1642. The Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. were against the brazen licentiousness of the world of theatre. The Globe was ultimately demolished. Although the Restoration saw the return of theatre, staging had changed to a more refined, and subdued form, indoors and viewed through the Proscenium Arch. Actresses, forbidden in Tudor and Jacobean days, were now allowed. Shaskespeare’s popularity was reignited and his plays revived. 

The modern version, Shakespeare’s Globe, was built in 1997, the culmination of a long campaign by Sam Wanamaker, American born actor and director for film and stage. It is located just over two hundred metres from where the original stood, and is a very realistic rendition of how the outdoor Elizabethan theatre would have looked. Daily tours explain its setting and heritage, and what you might have experienced back in the day; theatre in the round, outdoors with a rumbuxtious audience drawn from the broad social spectrum of city life. More rock gig or football crowd than the genteel theatre of today, with plenty of two way rapport; but there was poetry and message in the medium too. Drinking, smoking and heckling were not so much tolerated as encouraged. It was a daytime thing, and not well thought of by the great and the good. Though, of course, many from that sector did attend, and indeed sponsor the enterprise.

Best of all, book seats for a performance. On a family trip in 2010, we booked seats for Henry IV, Part 1. This features the notorious Falstaff, chief amongst the company of the young dissolute Hal, future king, here depicted as dedicated to life on the raz. Young Will perhaps drawing on  memories of his own misspent twentysomething back in the eighties. My son, Davin, was dubious of the joys of an afternoon of Shakespearean theatre. I impressed upon him that the following day, Saturday, we would go to Stamord Bridge to watch Chelsea trounce West Brom by six goals with Didier Drogba scoring a hat-trick; an astonishingly accurate prediction as it turned out. He got fully immersed in the experience. Most cheerful he was relaxing in the bar. afterwards, as he thought, less so on being informed that was merely the intermisssion.

London’s modern theatre district flourishes on the other side of the river. The West End denotes the main commercial centre of London. It stretches north of the river up to Regent Street to the west of the ancient walled city. The areas of Soho and Covent Garden are central to London nightlife, with Leicester Square and Picadilly Circus its focal points.

Leicester Square is the place to go for tickets for silver screen or show. Myself and M got tickets here for the fun dance show Top Hat ten years ago, front row seats which were quite startling. Cinema remains a a draw for us even though films are not so frequently banned in Ireland as before. Myself and M visited back in the mid seventies on our way to Greece, and took in an afternoon showing of the Life of Brian. Monty Python’s satire on zealotry and mass hysteria was set at the time of Christ and caused a muttering of modern zealots to chant: Down with that sort of thing! Still, we emerged into the afternoon sunlight happily singing always look on the bright side of life.

West End, of course, is synonymous with theatre. Alongside New York’s Broadway it is the main theatre zone of the English speaking world. There are about forty venues showing musicals, classic and modern theatre. Other, non commercial theatres, including the Globe, Covent Garden Opera House and the Old Vic feature classic repertoire and the work of contemporary and acclaimed modern playwrights.

The longest running show in West End history is The Mousetrap. Written by Agatha Christie it was first performed in 1952 and is now approaching thirty thousand performances. A whodonit with a twist, it’s a typical scenario for the author. Born Agatha Miller in 1890, by her death in 1976 she had published sixty six novels and over a dozen collections of short stories. Her most famous creation is the fastidious Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot. The Mousetrap was originally a radio play called Three Blind Mice, and then a short story. The title had to be changed for the stage as another play called Three Blind Mice had been produced in the thirties by Emile Littler. The name the Mousetrap was taken from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, it being Prince Hamlet’s smartarse reply to Polonius concerning the title of the play at court. Hamlet had hijacked the play to let off his own grenade. “The play’s the thing wherein to catch the conscience of the King,” he mused.

On a family visit in the Noughties we took in a performance at St Martin’s Theatre which has hosted the play since 1974. We four at home often enjoyed an elaborate murder mystery on the telly. Theatre, by its nature, brings you into the box itself. You are sharing atoms with these people. The famous twist is a major subversion of the mystery genre. I have often wondered since if anyone has ever thought of suspecting Poirot for causing the puzzles he so brilliantly solves. After all, he is a common thread throughout so many killings. The play was just the thing, so, to be followed by convivial food and drink.

St. Martin’s is on West Street, just off Shaftesbury Avenue and close to the Seven Dials. This is an intersection of seven straight streets, giving the small plaza an incongruous centrality in the great scheme of things. From here, you can go anywhere. Eateries abound, though we took the quaint decision to go for a fish and chips nearby. Well, it was my fiftieth birthday, and the One and One is my favourite food. Why not have it here at the centre of Chipperdom? There was a bench outside and we watched the world go by. Nearby, Shaftesbury Avenue seethes with life. Across the street Soho embraces the divine vices. Musicians strum and dancers strut, and wining, dining and dancing pleasures galore stretch into the wee small hours. In all the darkness and joy, what better time to join the vamps and werewolves of London.

I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand

Walking through the streets of SoHo in the rain

He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fook’s

Gonna get a big dish of beef chow mein

Ah-hoo, werewolves of London

Ah-hoo

Ah-hoo, werewolves of London

Ah-hoo

Werewolves of London was written by Warren Zevon, Waddy Wachtel and Leroy Marinell. It is included on Zevon’s third album, Excitable Boy, from 1978 and was its lead single. Fleetwood Mac provide the rhythm section, in case you wonder why it’s so good. Phil Everly suggested the idea to Zevon having seen the 1930s film Werewolf of London. Lee Ho Fook’s was London’s best known Chinese Restaurant, located on Gerrard Street in Chinatown, at the south end of Soho. The name itself suggests the sort of ribaldry that chimes with the suggestive comedy of the song’s lyrics. The restaurant closed in 2008. Zevon died in 2003, but the music lives on.

London Memories

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London is my most visited foreign city, a favourite place of mine for over fifty years. I haven’t posted much on it; only an account of a trip up the Thames to Greenwich that I can think of. So, time to put that right. Here’s the first in a compendium of memories of this great city.

The first I saw of London was in the summer of 1973. I was only seventeen and with a couple of friends crowded into a Renault 6 set off on an epic voyage to the neighbouring island. There was a Rock festival at London’s Alexandra Palace, with Ten Years After and Wishbone Ash headlining. Ten Years After were one of my favourites in those days. The late sixties and early seventies gave us Rory Gallagher, Thin Lizzy, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and many more. Dublin was not a major stop on the global concert circus. Other than Ireland’s own, Taste, Lizzy and Horslips, it was slim pickings, though the Doors and Zep did play Dublin’s National Stadium around that time. So, when Ally Pally came up it was the perfect option to tap into the Rock zeitgeist.

The car ferry left from Dun Laoghaire, a four hour crossing to Holyhead in Wales. From there it was a long drive to London, meandering through Wales before passing by Birmingham. We overnighted near Leicester. Looking for a bite to eat, we asked a passing Bobby, as you do, for his recommendations. It was an amusing scene. My two friends were six four, and the policeman might just have equalled minimum height requirements. He recommended a nearby Indian, alien to lads from Dublin, but establishing a lifelong favourite. Who needs halucinatory drugs when you can have a mindbending vindaloo. My companions notable altitude caused panic beyond the forces of law and order. Indeed, febrile hippies, amongst whom we parked overnight, imagined the long arm of the law had found them in the hazy light of morning. Tom and Vin wore their hair short, whereas my flowing locks and mustachios helped ease the situation somewhat. Or maybe I was just the undercover guy.

Another time, another place. Three Men in a Car, me with my boys, Oran and Davin, US 2007.

We parked at Potter’s Bar on London’s outskirts, and then stayed with Vin’s cousin Evelyn near Ealing. Our explorations of the great city were limited. We took a jaunt into the centre to pose in Picadilly Circus and swan around Leicester Square. It was decided to take in a film, ideally something along the lines of those banned back home. We got into the x-rated Heavy Traffic. The American film was a mixture of animation and live action, centering on a cartoonist, name of Michael Corleone, navigating the dingier side of New York. As much scabrous and surreal as salacious, it was, I suppose, a hazy premonition for the graphic artist within me. And it was unlikely such a film would ever go on general release in Ireland. Of course, Heavy Trafic is best followed with a plate of spaghetti Bolognese.

Picadilly, some years later.

We also took a saunter along Ealing Broadway. Ealing is famous for its film studios, the oldest in the world. Home to the Ealing comedies, natch, while the surrounding area has featured in scenes from Doctor Who and Monty Python. Ealing was something of an Alma Mater to Rock Music too. The Ealing Club had been a jazz venue until Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated played the basement in 1962, The band included drummer Charlie Watts, Brian Jones and pianist Ian Stewart with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards amongst the audience. Thus the Rolling Stones were gathered. In January 63 they played their first gig with the classic line up including Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts. The Who, Mannred Mann, Eric Burdon and Rod Stewart were also amongst the club’s alumnii. It was a short, but impressive, solar flare; the club closing in 1966.

Alexandra Palace lies further north, about five miles out of town near Muswell Hill. Alexandra Palace was conceived by architect and designer Owen Jones, who planned a Crystal Palace style glass building. It was built instead to the design of John Johnson and Alfred Meeson. From inception in 1873 it has been a people’s palace, built to provide leisure and entertainment for the great unwashed. And there would have been few that weekend more unwashed than ourselves. You could almost hear us hum. Fortunately, our stay in Ealing gave us a chance to clean up.

Instead of People’s Palace, it was named for Alexandra of Denmark,the Princess of Wales, and future Queen from 1901 to 1910. Her husband, Albert Edward, would become Edward VII. Speaking of; there’s a fair few streets named after him in my hometown, Bray: King Edward Road, Albert Walk amongst them. English tenor, John Sims Reeves sang to a crowd of a hundred thousand at the opening on 24th May 1873. Sixteen days later it all burnt down. it was rebuilt and reopened on Mayday 1875. The Palace became home to the first decades of television. BBC’s television service broadcast from there between1935 and 1955, with a break for the war. It burned down again in 1980, but phoenix like, rose from the ashes once more. And yes, Wishbone Ash did play Phoenix at their gig. 

The London Music Festival of August 1973 was an annual event and we had a two day ticket. The complex was alive with freaks and hairies like myself, and my two bodyguards. Fumble were playing some ear shattering rock and roll in the bar, while everywhere a strangely Catholic tang of incense hung in the air. I was sufficiently exalted to welcome my heroes to the stage on the second night.

Barclay James Harvest were supporting and very good they were too. But my pulse was racing for the arrival of guitar hero Alvin Lee and his band. Ten Years After came from Nottingham. Alvin Lee, born Graham Barnes in 1944, with Leo Lyons on base, were known for a while as Ivan Jay and the Jaybirds. The name Ten Years After came in 1966, referring to Elvis Presley’s breakthrough year. They were renowned as a live band, their set from Woodstock, playing I’m Going Home, was a highlight of the film. And evermore. I had all the band’s albums. My favourite was A Space in Time from 1971, more complex and introspective than their other albums. It includes one of their few commercial hits, I’d Love to Change the World.

Everywhere is freaks and hairies

Dykes and fairies, tell me, where is sanity?

Tax the rich, feed the poor

‘Til there are no rich no more.

I’d love to change the world

But I don’t know what to do

So I’ll leave it up to you

The lyrics are probably not authorial, Lee and his fanbase would have identiied as ‘freaks and hairies’. The fast paced verse mimics the sloganeering of public discourse, the laid back chorus is more personal, and if anything, rejects the notion of rock star as the go-to person to free the world from its state of chassis. 

Marcus Bonfanti at Ronnie Scott’s, 2010.

Another time, London circa 2010, we booked a table at Ronnie Scott’s for a blues night. Ronnie Scott’s, the famed Jazz and Blues venue was founded in a Soho basement in 1959 by Scott and Pete King, both saxaphonists. In 1965 it moved to its current larger premises on Frith Street, Soho. Scott died in 1996 but the soul plays on. Jimi Hendrix’s last gig was here in 1970, so what better place for Pilgrimage. Yes, another Wishbone Ash reference.

The party comprised myself and M, with our younger son Davin, a budding rock guitarist himself, and the same age I had been on my first London visit. With suitable flourish I led us across the road, past the queue and through the doors to the sacred sanctum of Jazz and Blues. Amongst the players that night was Marcus Bonfanti, a fine guitarist. Myself and Davin went to the desk at the break and bought his cd. What Good Am I to You. After Alvin Lee died in 2013, Bonfanti joined a new line up of Ten Years After.

London: River Thames to Greenwich

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The Thames flows on its serpentine path through London towards the sea. It is in no hurry to get there. It is confirmed in its relationship over two millennia, a highway to the world, a crossroads of civilisation. The Romans built their northernmost metropolis on its banks. In Christian days its centre point rose from the hill where now stands St Paul’s. At its height, sixty thousand people lived in Londonium. Abandoned in early Saxon times, Alfred the Great – though not a great baker – rekindled its fortunes as he thwarted the Danes. The ever falling, ever moving, London Bridge, anchored its location upriver of the Tower.

Big Ben from the river

Big Ben from the river

Took her sailing on the river/ flow sweet river flow/

London town was mine to give her/ Sweet Thames, flow softly.

We take the Clipper commuter boat from the Embankment, eastwards towards the sea. London is teeming and towering, but calmed each side of the placid waterway. The morning sky is an optimistic blue, touching infinity above and below. In the words of Joseph Conrad, we are poised on ‘a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth’. Conrad saw the connection here with all the great rivers of the world. Polish was his first language, but Heart of Darkness is an English classic, an exploration of the dark recesses of the human psyche. And it all starts here on the Thames as Conrad’s enigmatic Marlow spins his yarn. Conrad spurned his inheritance to take to the sea, eventually sailed up this river and observed its two way flow: ‘memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea,’ such ships ‘whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time.’ Another Joseph, J.M.W. Turner observed the Fighting Temeraire being towed up the estuary towards its sun drenched destruction.

Tower Bridge

Tower Bridge

From Shadwell Dock to Nine Elms Reach/ we cheek to cheek were dancing/

Her necklace made of London Bridge/ her beauty was enhancing.

How can you resist the melody of English in the endless thoroughfare of the River? Shakespeare and Jonson lurk in punts in the shadow of the quays. Kit Marlowe sails by to his fatal reckoning at the riverside tavern in Deptford. The Globe Theatre looms out of the south, recast perfectly anew in some weird warp of time. Theatre in the round was the focal point of freedom on the periphery. We saw Henry IV here beneath a summer sky as it was meant to be seen, swirling skywriters, helicopters and all. Off season there are tours. We were told that in Elizabethan times, this was the theatre of life. A typical playhouse was some combination of festival and football stadium, rowdy patrons well past sobriety. It was a den of iniquity, the original smoker’s theatre of Brecht.

Despite appearances, time is of the essence. We have a late lunch audience with Oran at Southwark, with drinks in the Shard to follow. Greenwich is just over five miles west on the south bank where the urban crush begins to ease. We have a few hours to look around, and what better place to synchronise our watches.

Greenwich

Royal Naval College, Greenwich

Heard the bells of Greenwich ringing/ flow sweet river, flow/

All that time my heart was singing/ Sweet Thames flow softly.

At Greenwich the city’s glow would have dimmed with distance. The lure of the sea, conversely, grew strong. The Royal Navy College steps up from the river. Initiated by James II, it is a neo-classical masterpiece of Christopher Wren. Begun in late 16th century it was originally the Royal Hospital for Seamen. Beyond the quiet splendour of its collonades and domes, Greenwich park slopes up to higher ground. The Rpyal Observatory was commissioned by Charles II. Overlooking Greenwich Park, it now boasts stunning views of the highrise London of Canary Wharf, the vast city jewelling the horizon by day and night. Here would be established the prime meridian of longitude. Bisecting the global river at Greenwich, forming the crossroads of the globe, where east is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet. Although, good tourist that I am, I straddle the line in the yard of the Observatory, a photo opportunity in real time.

East is east and west is west.

East is east and west is west.

Made the Thames into a crown/Flow sweet river, flow/

Made a brooch of Silvertown/ Sweet Thames flow softly.

It was after 1884 that Greenwich was recognized as the line 0 of longitude. The accurate measurement of longitude had presented an intractable problem in previous centuries. With the Longitude act of 1714, Parliament offered £20,000, almost 3 million quid in today’s money, to anyone who could devise a reliable system for the reckoning of longitude. John Harrison, a carpenter from Lincoln, was building almost frictionless grandfather clocks in his early twenties. In pursuit of the prize, he set about the task of building a timepiece to reckon longitude. For the scientific community, gentlemen all, the notion of a mere craftsman providing a solution to the problem was laughable. However, Harrison had a champion in the Astronomer Royal, Edmund Halley.

After sixty years trying, Harrison’s H4, an oversized pocket watch, seemed to fulfil the criteria. However, the board demurred, putting Harrison’s success down to beginner’s luck. His H5 passed the test. But Harrison had difficulty extricating the prize. Only the support of George III gaining some compensation, to the tune of £8,5000. Harrison was eighty years old and died shortly afterwards. His timepiece was used by Cook on his second and third voyages. William Blythe also carried one, although it was nicked by Fletcher Christian, to be returned to the Maritime Museum much later.

Greenwich Park and the Maritime Museum

Greenwich Park and the Maritime Museum

At the Maritime Museum there’s an exhibition devoted to the Harrison clocks. I figure I have the best part of an hour before our return trip. As luck would have it, I’m about to leave when a museum guard takes centre stage, launching into an entertaining account of Harrison’s travails. Spellbound, I lose all track of time. Herself has seen the hour grow cold and comes in search. The account concludes, but now we’re running late.

Swift the Thames flows to the sea/Flow sweet river flow/

Bearing ships and part of me/Sweet Thames flow softly.

 

The giants of Southwark

The giants of Southwark

We walk through bustling Greenwich town down to the pier. Heading upriver, the bells of Southwark are chiming for our appointment. Above the shaded grove of the ancient cathedral, the blue sky is scraped by the slender Shard of Glass. Oran slopes out of the shadows as we arrive. We take a lift to the thirty first floor, where the split level Aqua bar floats in a bubble of glass. London is laid out below us, caressed by its loving river. It feels like heaven, or close enough.

Aqua London