London: City of London; Friday, 27 August, 2021

I had an early start and breakfast so that I was out of the hotel a little after 9 to catch a tube round to Temple station from where I could walk up to Covent Garden. Despite having lived in London my entire life, I don’t think I’d ever gotten on or off a tube train at Temple before! I walked up from the station through some of the little back streets to the Strand and quickly popped into the grounds of Somerset House to take a few photos before continuing on to Covent Garden.

Until the early 1970s Covent Garden was the fruit and flower market for London. All that changed when the markets moved out to larger accommodation near Waterloo and the market halls were left empty. The market was an early example of a regeneration scheme with the former market halls being turned into small indoor markets housing boutique shops, cafes and restaurants and in turn making the area into a tourist magnet. The former flower market was also converted, into the home for the London Transport Museum, a museum dedicated to the history of public transport in the capital from the Sedan chairs of the 18th century through to the modern network that powers the city today. Amongst the exhibits are a number of buses, tube trains, trams and other vehicles, as well as displays on the iconic branding and signage of the system that set a standard for how many other systems around the world display their networks.

After looking round the museum for some time I quickly grabbed a cup of coffee and a toasted sandwich in the museum café before walking the 15 minutes or so up through the streets of this part of London to Bloomsbury and the British Museum. The Museum was my second stop of the day and after clearing security that was almost as intense as the Palace of Westminster the previous day I was into the building to explore. I had an idea of the main things I wanted to see – not least of all from trips earlier in the Summer the original Sutton Hoo and Vindolanda finds.

I spent a good couple of hours looking round the museum, and even then there were large parts that I didn’t get to see either because galleries were closed, or the rooms were just so busy that it just didn’t look pleasant to be in there. Also, after a while, I was starting to develop quite a case of museum feet from all the slow walking round of exhibits, so I left the museum and headed on North East out of Bloomsbury and towards Clerkenwell.

Mount Pleasant was once one of the most important postal sorting offices in the country, it was also headquarters to one of the UKs oddest railways – a tiny narrow gauge railway that ran under the streets of London from Liverpool Street in the East to Paddington in the West and never had any humans onboard. MailRail was the post offices way of avoiding the mail getting stuck in Central London traffic, and if it wasn’t for declining numbers of physical mail items it may very well still be in use today, but instead in the early part of the 21st century it was mothballed. A small part of the system, from the maintenance depot above the main line at Mount Pleasant and in a loop round the platform has been returned into service with new mail rail carriages that are capable of taking a human. The 15 minute tour round the small loop of track includes a history of the line, and what it was like to work on a service that had a train departing every 2 minutes for 22 hours of the day, 7 days a week.

On the opposite side of the road from MailRail, and included in the ticket, is the Postal Museum. This small museum tells the history of the postal service in the UK from the original mail coaches through to the modern day and is a good accompaniment to MailRail to get a full understanding of how the postal service in the UK operates.

Having taken in the train and the museum I headed down to Chancery Lane and hopped onto the Central line for a couple of stops to Bank, changed onto the DLR and headed out to Westferry to walk the short distance down to the ferry quay behind Canary Wharf. In my original plans for this trip I had booked an evening river cruise, but a few days out I’d been emailed to be told that they had received a block booking and were cancelling all the individual tickets. It was at that point I realised that, like with the number 15 bus, I could get the same sightseeing experience for significantly less by using the public ferries that run up and down the Thames, and by timing it right could probably see a lot more than I would have done on the sightseeing boat.

Thames Clippers whose service is currently sponsored by Uber (and so most Londoners have started to refer to them as U-Boats) operate a number of services up and down the river. The main route the RB1 running from Westminster towards Woolwich, which I would be taking later, but I’d timed my arrival to catch the slightly rarer RB6. These only operate in the rush-hour and this boat was starting at Canary Wharf for its journey up stream, through the centre of London, and on to Putney. I was one of the first to board, and was therefore able to bag a really good seat at the back of the boat. Clearly I wasn’t the only person with a similar idea as several of my fellow passengers who got on at Canary Wharf were still sitting in the same seats as the boat turned round at Putney and started to head back into the city.

With perfect timing (well, it’s actually timetabled, so more with very un-British timekeeping) the RB6 overtook an RB1 boat in the centre of town and arrived back at Canary Wharf a couple of minutes before it. I was therefore able to make a quick change and continue on down stream past Greenwich to North Greenwich. At North Greenwich I changed from one obscure form of London Transport to another by heading on over to the Cable Car station (again mostly referred to as the Dangleway). The Cable Car was one, of many, vanity projects undertaken by Boris Johnson when he was Mayor of London and runs from a stop not particularly close to the Millennium Dome to a stop quite a long walk from the Excel exhibition centre. As a viable form of public transport it doesn’t fulfil any role – but, particularly if like me you’ve timed it to coincide with sunset – it does form a great way of seeing a different view of the city and Docklands as the sun sets behind the two financial centres skyscrapers.

Back at North Greenwich pier I continued my journey East to the end of the line at Woolwich, which included passing through the dramatic Thames Barrier, before returning back West into the centre of town, taking a night-time sail through the centre of London up to Westminster and then back to Tower where I finally disembarked and headed back to my hotel.