On
yet another of the hottest days of the year, I was on a short stay over in
London before heading back home. So,
what to do in that heat? Well, I did the
most sensible thing I could do, and as usual, went out in it. As I was staying near to the Thames, and the
tide was low, I thought I’d make my way there and wander along by the shores of
the river to do a bit of mudlarking.
I
wandered along the white hot pavements by Waterloo, and then cut through the
back streets until I arrived at Gabriel’s Wharf. There I made my way past the trendy, overpriced
coffee shops and eateries, to a set of stairs that led me down onto a sandy
beach by the Thames.
This
little bit of beach was busy with sunbathers and lots of children who were
swimming in the brown, swirling waters of the river. Though I was wilting in the heat I wasn’t going
to join them in the cool water, as I remembered the stories of old about how
dirty the Thames was. There was one in
particular about a passenger boat that sank sometime in the eighteenth century. The story goes that of the hundred or so
passengers on the boat, around twenty survivors were pulled from the
river. Within a week they had all died,
poisoned by the water they had ingested while in the Thames. The story, like many, may not be true, but
the river was once horribly polluted and dirty, and even though it has now been
cleaned up massively, you wouldn’t catch me swimming in it.
Leaving
the beach area, I walked under Gabriel’s Pier and followed the shoreline along
the Southbank, past the OXO building and towards Blackfriars Bridge. Scraping at the stone and mud with my feet I
found a few clay pipe stems and bowls, and a couple of small stones that had been
cut into a circular shape with a whole drilled in the middle. What they were I had no idea, but stuck them
into my pocket anyway.
Finding
a relatively dry outcrop of rocks I sat down to watch life on the river. Tourist boats sped past whipping the
shoreline with rough waves, a couple of barges ambled by, and a group of a
dozen or so canoeists paddled along, bouncing merrily in the waves of the
passing boats. Seagulls soared over, screeching,
and gabbling in the way that seagulls do, and up above on the walkways around
the shore was the distant mumble of the thousands of people out and about in
the hot, hot sun.
After
daydreaming for a while on my seat of rock, I walked back along the shore to
Gabriel’s Pier, which like Gabriel’s Wharf, is named after Christopher Gabriel,
whose family business was based here from the 1770s until 1919.
In
a tangled wooden thing that had been fixed between the struts of the pier, I
left the Skulferatu that had accompanied me on my walk.
The
coordinates for the location of the Skulferatu are –
Latitude
51.508557
Longitude
-0.109673
what3words:
until.swaps.wiped
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