Southampton; Sunday, 06 February, 2011

I checked out of the hotel and left my luggage in their storage room before heading out for a wander around the city. I headed first to the City walls and took the self guided walk along them around the edge of the old town centre.

The walls eventually lead you down to the harbour and the Wool house, the largest free-standing medieval building in the city, and today home to the Maritime museum.

I had a long look round the museum, before continuing along the wall walk down towards the Town Quay and the ferries across Southampton Water to Hythe. As the day was quite nice I decided to catch the ferry across and have a look around Hythe, though on a Sunday morning in Early February, Hythe could be described as pretty dead, so after a quick look around and a stop in a coffee shop in the “town centre” I headed back into Southampton and continued walking around the walls.

I had intended on visiting another couple of attractions in the city centre. The archaeological museum in one of the old gates supposedly has a lot of information on the development of Southampton. Unfortunately, that was closed due to staff shortages.

The medieval house, according to the English Heritage website, was due to be open that afternoon. According to the sign outside, it was closed until Easter, so that proved to be another closed attraction.

By now it was late afternoon and the weather was starting to deteriorate. Added to that was the fact that there were no trains direct back to London. Instead there was a rail replacement service so I decided, as it was going to be a pretty slow journey back, and there was not much else to do, I wandered back to the hotel, collected my bags and wandered over to the train station to get the bus out to the parkway station.

By the time I arrived at Southampton Airport (Parkway) the weather had deteriorated to pretty atrocious, so I felt vindicated in my decision to leave early. It still didn’t help the fact I had a 35 minute wait for the train back into London.