Shadwell and Wapping

Today was the first weekend day in quite some time when we haven't been besieged by on-and-off downpours, so we decided to take advantage of the lovely weather and do a walk that's been on my list for some time. We didn't join a walking tour, nor did we just venture out on our own, although we find both styles of walking enjoyable. Instead, today was our first go at following someone else's suggestions and venturing out on a guided walk, with a printout of the walking route to show us the way. It was an enjoyable 10 km walk (the guided walk itself was 7 km, but we added a few km at the end with a destination of our own), and although we couldn't follow the suggested route at times, due to closures of complexes, roads, and park gates, we improvised and generally found the walking suggestions and historical information helpful and interesting. In fact, I've bookmarked the page of walks and hope to do more in the future. But back to today's walk: Shadwell and Wapping. We started out at Tower Hill tube station, and had a peek at a nearby less-visited remnant of the London Wall, accessed through a hotel courtyard: We kept our eyes open for elephants, as the guide instructed us, and when we saw them, we turned in the gate
and found ourselves at St. Katherine's Docks, a place previously unknown to us, and full of touristy shops, pubs, and restaurants--kind of like Vancouver's Granville Island without the market and with a bit more history.
The Dickens Inn had especially pretty balcony tables, but on closer examination, was predictably expensive and bland in that touristy, let's-eat-there-it-has-Dickens-in-the-name way. (When we noticed they did pizza, I scoffed and said it probably cost a fortune--and in my books, £35 for a "six-person" pizza (2 slices each?) is a fortune!) From St. Katherine's, we walked a bit further before stopping in front of this amazing sight:
According to their website, Wilton's Music Hall is "the world's oldest and last surviving grand music hall," and just last month, it made the World Monuments Watch 2008 list of "Most Endangered Sites." Structural weaknesses and water damage are the most salient threats to the 1858 building, with risk of fire and vandalism adding to worry about its survival. The hall wasn't open to the public today, but I've marked its next open day on the calendar, as the brief peek we had inside has me intrigued to tour the interior. On our way past Wellclose Square, I smiled at this hippo rubbish-bin, which from this angle seemed to be waiting for some fruit to fall from the nearby tree (I didn't have the heart to tell him that it wasn't a fruit tree): Our tour guided us to this mural of the "Battle of Cable Street," although we didn't know what that was, and the guide didn't provide further explanation--which made us really feel like we should know! Although we could guess the general context from the mural, It wasn't until we got home that I learned more about this 1936 confrontation.

This quaint building (once a pub, now a café) stands alone on the corner, and displays a street sign proclaiming the (now renamed) street name, Bird Street, along with a date of 1706. Just around the corner is this lovely building, now converted into flats:
Oliver's Wharf was one of the first warehouses to find new life as extremely expensive flats,
and the more we walked through Wapping, the more there seemed to be nothing but warehouse conversions everywhere we looked. Numerous sets of stairs leading down to the Thames can be accessed from Wapping High Street, and each seems to claim some association with the area's lurid past (criminals, pirates, executions):
Area pubs, including The Captain Kidd (pictured below), remind patrons of this past with many a noose.
Wapping High Street is one of the strangest high streets we've been on. Not a high street in the sense of providing a range of shopping conveniences, Wapping High Street is mostly warehouse conversions, with a few very crowded pubs contrasting with the almost deserted street.
On our guide's suggestion, we used our travelcards to enter Wapping tube station, not to take the tube, but to look at the station itself. The staircase down to the tube platforms is in the original tunnel shaft,
which is significant since Wapping station is at the northern side of the world's first underwater tunnel, completed in 1843. After looking at the artwork on the platform wall,
it was slightly disappointing to see the tube emerging from the tunnel, instead of the advertised steam engine!
Back up at the surface, we gazed out at the Thames some more
and popped into a venue/ restaurant that I've long been curious about, The Wapping Project. A site for art, film, dance, and all types of performance, as well as a fancy restaurant, this former hydraulic pumping station doesn't do much to hide its industrial past, instead making extremely good use of its interior to create a unique restaurant setting.
(A Warhol exhibit is set to open soon, complete with screenings of films over brunch and dinner, hence the Warhol image above.) The next pub claims to be "London's oldest riverside inn," dating back to 1520, and features a gorgeous back balcony overlooking the Thames, with obligatory noose of course!
We crossed this striking bridge,

with views over to Canary Wharf on one side
and some lovely basins in the other direction. After a bit more walking, we finished our guided tour, and took the DLR a few stops east to East India station, where we ventured out in search of our final stop of the day. Along the way, this surreal landscape looked like some kind of odd Photoshopping gone wrong,
and we got a good view of the equally surreal stadium with the horrible name ("The O2") that will soon be hosting Justin Timberlake, Barbara Streisand, and Prince, although not on the same night--now that would be a show! After getting a bit lost, we were finally on the right path to Trinity Buoy Wharf. This abandoned building was vibrantly decorated and, oddly, completely open to the street, giving a good view of the enormous piles of junk inside.
As we got closer to the wharf, the streetlamps started to give some indication of the artistic community that lay ahead:



Although the reason for our visit turned out to be closed earlier than advertised (I wouldn't call 7:30 P.M. on a July evening "dusk," would you?),
the man at the gate let us into the complex to have a look around anyway, and Trinity Buoy Wharf turned out to be a fascinating mix of artistic pursuits, including retail, exhibition, and studio spaces, with some live/ work space thrown into the mix:Container City makes use of converted shipping containers to provide low-cost, flexible, creative buildings for a variety of uses (housing, office space, daycare, youth centre, retail space, recording studio, educational space). From our short time at Trinity Buoy Wharf, and from a quick look at the Container City website, the resulting structures seem pleasing inside and out. So although we gazed forlornly up at the lighthouse, shut out from the music installation we came to hear, at least we now know where to find it, that the area has other distractions to offer, and that we should arrive well in advance of "dusk" next time, no matter what we're told.