Beach

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An early evening walk down to the beach at Whitstable. Sun breaking though the clouds to the west, rain approaching from the north east. A flock of oystercatchers flew past: sadly neither of the cameras I was carrying was up to the job of catching them. The birdsong here is fantastic, and the air noticeably cleaner than my corner of south east London has been recently.

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From The Archive Friday

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From this time 3 years ago (though somehow – Olympic effect, maybe? – it seems much longer), the now-demolished Tunnel Refineries silos on Greenwich Peninsula.

Tunnel Refineries, East Greenwich

Three years on and the Peninsula looks very different already; but what is its future? Darryl at 853blog has a depressing report which suggests it’ll be a fairly bleak yuppie development, with social housing ghettoised at the south end; the north an extension of Canary Wharf, rather than a part of Greenwich. This seems a missed opportunity to create some of the kind of housing suitable for families that the area needs , and that our Labour council should remain so in thrall to developers remains a source of deep gloom.

Easter Sunday

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We went up to Spitalfields Market, by tube and DLR; the latter gloriously deserted, allowing an uninterrupted front seat view from Canning Town to Tower Gateway. A walk up Middlesex St revealed full Sunday market mode, all looking very different from the weekday lunchtimes I usually visit it on.

Lunch in the market followed (adding butternut squash to my list of Unnecessary Pizza Toppings), then a walk up Brick Lane, where the fashionable youth were carrying out a sort of Easter Parade; shuffling along, not really looking where they were going, and wearing variations of tweed.

Next we failed to get into Spitalfields City Farm, where a festival of some sort was taking place (featuring the Oxford and Cambridge Goat Race at 4pm). Queued down the street, it was clearly a popular do (you don’t usually see people clutching cans of Foster’s on their way to the petting zoo).

Home via the East London Line (London’s most civilised transport offering). When we emerged at North Greenwich it was snowing, as though mocking last night’s change to British Summer Time.

Happy Easter.

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From the archives – North Greenwich skyline

From 5 years ago this week, the shot from which I’ve cropped this site’s header image.

From March 1998

From March 1998

I tried to recreate this a few weeks ago but couldn’t work out where I’d actually taken it from; eventually I worked out that at some point in the intervening 5 years, the lampposts on the A102 have been replaced with taller versions, making for an uglier photo. I’ll try again sometime when it’s a bit less chilly.

Those 5 years have seen significant change to this view (whether it’s from Old Dover Road, or Charlton Road): the cable car, Olympic Park, Stadium, and Orbit have all appeared, for better or worse, plus a variety of new buildings along the Peninsula with – in theory – plenty more to follow.