Canary Wharf From Canning Town Station
One of the best free views of Canary Wharf is from the high level DLR platforms at Canning Town station.
Canary Wharf From Canning Town Station
Canning Town is a good station to start an exploration of the mouth of the River Lee.
It Would Have Been Nice To go To Nottingham On Tuesday
With Ipswich beating Leicester City today, it means that the game at Nottingham on Tuesday might have been worth a trip.
But it is impossible, without an overnight stay in a hotel, as the last train home leaves Nottingham at 21:28. As the football ground is fifteen minutes walk away from the station, you would only get a train home, if you leave at half time.
Now for Ipswich fans, this only happens occasionally, but I wonder how many Nottingham Forest fans live in London and will be cursing the lost day on their season ticket.
Do We Need Another Titanic?
An Australian mining billionaire is going to build a replica of the Titanic. It’s reported here on the Guardian web site.
I know a lot of this is about his ego and it’s creating a lot of humour, if you look at the comments on the Guardian report.
But he could be on the right track for traffic across the North Atlantic. When I was a child, my great aunt Beattie came over from Canada on the Queen Mary and one of Celia’s aunts, who worked as a governess in the States, regularly used the ocean liners. It was certainly a better way to travel in some ways than flying today. Everybody who used them, seemed to enjoy the experience. Although, everybody seemed to prefer the Queen Elizabeth to the Mary.
With a lot of people having a lot of money, they don’t know how to spend, I suspect that a luxury liner on the North Atlantic route might be a viable proposition. I must admit, that I need a holiday and a window is opening up, so if it was warmer, I might seriously take a liner to New York and fly back.
I suppose the backer of the Titanic II’s biggest problem is the worries of what happened to it’s ill-fated predecessor. But then I can’t think of a passenger ship disaster in recent years caused by either icebergs or design faults in recent years. He must of course choose his Captain and crew with extreme care.
One point not made about the ship in the various articles, is that just building it will create or sustain a lot of jobs. So in some ways you have to admire him for taking the risk of building the ship, instead of just sitting on his money.
A Real Advantage Of Not Having A Car
A friend of mine had their car stolen yesterday.
The day before the battery went flat and they had to call the AA to get moving. So when they got back home yesterday, they left the engine running so that their partner could drive the car to the garage to get a new battery fitted.
But when their partner went back outside, they found that the car had disappeared.
What I find so funny about this story, is not the fact that the engine had been left running on the street, but that the car is one of the oldest Homda Civics on London’s streets. But then it is difficult to understand the mind of the criminal. Perhaps they wanted it for cover for a ram raid on an old peoples’ home or to con someone out of a Zimmer frame.
And to make matters worse, I don’t suspect it had been properly cleaned for some time. So it probably wouldn’t impress the girl-friend. That is assuming it was stolen by a man! on the other hand it could have been stolen by a man with a sense of humour to get rid of his girl-friend!
You have to ask various question. Was it full of petrol, as this would give a motive for this serious crime? Did my friend, a non-smoker, keep pound coins for the meter in the ash tray? Both facts would have at least doubled the value of the vehicle.
My friend is seriously questioning the need to replace this car. Perhaps, it is a message from some supreme being, who feels that another non-driver is a good thing!
I shall keep laughing as this is possibly the biggest advantage of not having a car.
Metro Gets On The Crossrail Bandwagon
If you have a freesheet like the Metro or the Standard or even a newspaper like the Sun, you need good pictures and stories to fill the pages.
A week or so ago, it was the Sun and today Metro gets in on the act, with this set of underground pictures of Crossrail.
Crossrail is proving to be an excellent page filler for popular newspapers.
Engineering Open Heart Surgery
Not my words, but those of Linda Miller, describing on the Crossrail web site, the work being done to upgrade the Connaught Tunnel. The full article is here.
It may be an odd mix of words, but we all know what she means.
The Shard In The Afternoon Sun
I took these pictures deliberately this afternoon, with the sun directly behind The Shard from a DLR train on the way into Bank station.
It’s of course, breaking the rule of not shooting pictures looking directly into the sun.
The Woolwich Ferry By Foot
In some ways, I can’t go anywhere near the Woolwich Ferry without laughing, as one of the funniest things I ever saw was a sketch on Michael Bentine‘s It’s A Square World called the Night the Woolwich Ferry Sank.
Today, I crossed the Thames as one of a surprising numbers of foot passengers and took these pictures.
If I have a complaint, it’s that you can’t get on deck like you can on a Mersey Ferry and taking good pictures is difficult. I did take some other pictures five years ago, when I last drove across using the ferry.
Winding Through The Crossrail Works
Crossrail are building their rail line along the line of the old North London Line to North Woolwich. Their blue fences were everywhere.
Some of the pictures were taken from a pedestrian bridge over the site and others were taken on that excellent photographic platform, a London double-deck bus. In this case it was a 473, that goes from Canning Town station to North Woolwich, where the Woolwich Ferry berths.
Note how the Brick Lane Music Hall dominates the first part of the route.
The Anonymous Widower 