A Walk in the City: Take a walk around parts of the City of London with me and my camera five years ago on Wednesday 7 Aug 2019. The first part of the walk I was on my own, but later I met up with a couple of friends and we continued to walk around but visited several interesting City pubs before ending up with a meal at what must be the worst Wetherspoons in Greater London at Cannon Street Station. Though I suppose it’s handy if you want to catch the train.
I’d taken a bus from Waterloo to the City and got off at St Paul’s and walked down to St Andrew’s Hill where I wanted to retake digitally an image I had made on film over 30 years ago.
Taken from the steps of St Andrew’s by the Wardrobe Church, the view of St Andrew’s Hill and the Cockpit pub was a taxing subject on film with the foreground in Wardrobe Terrace, and I never quite managed what I wanted. Using digital gave me a rather better result with no problems.
I walked on down to the River Thames and made some views along the river with the Millennium footbridge and the Shard now rather dominating the scene.
The tide was very low and I went down the steps onto the foreshore, though I needed to be careful walking on the stones and mud as I was only wearing a light pair of shoes which were very much not waterproof. I walked along under the Millennium Bridge and on towards Queenhithe, taking quite a few pictures.
The foreshore can be dangerous and the tide comes in rapidly. Although anyone is free to visit it, searching in any way – metal detecting, ‘beachcombing’, scraping and digging etc requires a https://pla.co.uk/thames-foreshore-permits PLA permit. You are advised to wear sensible footwear and gloves – which of course I wasn’t – and to watch out for hazards including raw sewage, broken glass, hypodermic needles and wash from vessels. I stepped very carefully.
Buried below the sand and mud at Queenhithe are the remains of part of London’s Roman harbour and the later medieval quay. A scheduled ancient monument, it is probably the only existing Saxon harbour in the world, presented by King Alfred the Great in 883 AD to his brother-in-law Ethelred. It got the name Queenhithe later when the harbour dues became the property of the wife of Henry I, Queen Matilda. The dock was still in use mainly by the fur trade in the early 20th century, and there were still fur shops in the area around in the 1970s.
I didn’t stay long on the foreshore and couldn’t remember where the next set of steps up from it were, so went back onto the Thames Path where I had come down and walked east towards Monument Station where I was meeting two photographer friends.
One of my friends had planned this walk and I was just a little surprised to find we were going back to one of the places I had visited earlier, St Andrew’s Hill, though less surprised when we went into the Cockpit pub.
The pub is on a historic site, originally part of one of the gatehouses of Blackfriars Monastery. There was a pub here when Shakespeare bought a house nearby. And undoubtedly there was somewhere here where cock fights took place until cockfighting was banned – along with dog fighting, bear baiting and badger baiting – in 1835. But this is a Victorian theme pub, rebuilt around 1865, though some at least of its interior decoration almost certainly came from actual cockfighting venues. But punters never stood in the closed galleries here to watch fights. Now firmly on the tourist circuit it is still worth a visit, if just for a pint of Harvey’s Sussex Best Bitter.
Our walk continued through more of the streets in this area and then across New Bridge Street and on to Bride Lane and St Bride’s Passage and The Old Bell Tavern, once very much part of Fleet Street, the Street of Shame. The Old Bell Tavern is on the site where it all started, when in 1500 Wynkyn de Worde who had worked with William Caxton set up the first print shop on Fleet Street. The building is apparently derived from one that Christopher Wren knocked up for his masons when they were building St Brides, the journalists’ church.
Our walk more or less finished there, though we took a bus to Cannon Street Station for cheap food at the Wetherspoons, though I found it very disappointing. Spoons do much better almost everywhere else. I caught a bus from St Paul’s Churchyard, sat in the front seat on the top desk and it had unusually clean windows so I took a few more picture on the way back to Waterloo.
More pictures from the day at City & Thames.
Flickr – Facebook – My London Diary – Hull Photos – Lea Valley – Paris
London’s Industrial Heritage – London Photos
All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
Contact me to buy prints or licence to reproduce.
