London: City of London; Sunday, 29 August, 2021

I allowed myself a few extra minutes in bed on Sunday morning, and that turned out to be a bad idea as breakfast was incredibly busy by the time I got down. After fighting my way through the buffet I eventually had a decent start to the day and then headed out to Tower Hill to catch the tube a couple of stops round to Barbican.

From Barbican tube station I walked the short distance to the Museum of London – though given it required walking through the Barbican centre, which can quickly disorient you and send you off at right angles to where you think you are going – I made sure to keep following the map so that I made it in an almost straight line. The Museum tells the history of the city from pre-historic times through to the few glorious weeks in 2012 when the whole world watched London host the Olympics and Paralympics. The museum is due to move out to new premises in the next few years, which is why its exhibition stops almost a decade ago – especially as given how many things have happened in London in the following years.

From the Museum of London I bravely set out into the Barbican Centre to start navigating myself back to Moorgate. One of the features of the Barbican, which were a really good idea, were the Pedways – elevated walkways which kept pedestrians and cars apart. The Barbican was really the only place where they were used, and even then several end in weird steps or dead ends, but the idea has recently been revived, with a new connection opening a couple of years ago that runs from near the Museum of London to near Moorgate tube station, and along the way runs above an impressive section of the Roman city wall and the ruins of a city church. From Moorgate I caught the tube one stop south the Bank to pick up the DLR through to Westferry where I then walked round to the second branch of the Museum of London – the Museum of London Docklands.

Housed in a former docks warehouse in West India Quay the museum charts the history of the docks from their original founding’s, expansion and eventual decline before their regeneration into the second financial centre of London. Along the way there are exhibits on what life would have been like for the average dock worker, as well as a gallery on the very large role that London played in the slave trade.

At this point my original plan had just been to hop onto the DLR a few stops south to my next destination at Cutty Sark. Of course, I’d planned that without taking into account that it’s the Sunday of a Bank Holiday weekend, so naturally the line is closed for engineering works. Instead I wandered through West India Quay to the neighbouring Canary Wharf and from there picked up the rail replacement bus down to Island Gardens and the southern tip of the peninsular. From there the Greenwich foot tunnel runs under the River Thames, resurfacing next to the Cutty Sark. And of course both lifts were out of service for maintenance so it was around 100 steps down into the tunnel, and more painfully, 100 steps back out the other side.

The Cutty Sark was built to be a fast ship, a tea clipper whose role was to get tea from Indian and the East back to London quicker than the competition, and in this she excelled for a few years before steam ships took the wind out her sails. She had various roles over the years including a stint under a different name operating in Portugal, before she was purchased and returned to London to be put on display. She suffered a major fire whilst restoration works were underway in 2007, but almost 90% of the ship was saved and today she rests up on supports above the dry dock that she previously was in allowing you to not only explore all the decks of the ship but also to go underneath and walk beneath her keel.

From the Cutty Sark it was a short walk through the Old Royal Naval College complex to the Queens house. The building was built by Indigo Jones for Queen Elizabeth I, and features at it’s heart a hall that is a perfect cube. The house, at the time of visiting, also housed an exhibit on the Armada paintings – the series of paintings of Queen Elizabeth I that were painted after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and are probably the best know image of the virgin queen.

Having taken in the Queens House I headed back down to the Quayside at Greenwich to pick up one of the tourist sightseeing boats – whilst I may not have been able to keep my evening tour I still wanted to do at least one touristy sightseeing river tour – and this one is probably the classic tour starting a Greenwich heading back to the Tower and onto Westminster. The commentary was a bit cheesy, and made some very wide sweeping generalisations about Londoners, but as they operate at a more sedate pace than the public boats it was easier to see things on shore.

After disembarking at Westminster I headed back through to the city to the Sky Garden at 20 Fenchurch Street as I had an evening booking that I’d timed so that I was at the top of the building in time for sunset. Looking almost due West into the setting sun it was a pretty dramatic sunset, helped by a ridge of cloud that helped to frame the sun from above. Once the sun had set I headed back down to street level and had a bit of a wander through the near by Leadenhall Market before heading back towards London Bridge to find somewhere to have dinner, as nowhere is open in the City of London on a Sunday evening.