100 Days of Happiness 2020 - Day 28 - London, baby!

[byslantedlight]

Lots of happy traveller things today! First I went swish-swishing past English landscapes (some of them rather flooded...) on the train...

Then I caught the tube (squish-squish with one line on strike and others not fully working...) to my accommodation, which is new for me - by the Thames, in Rotherhithe!

There were a few hours of Sunday left, so I headed over to the Thames Walk, and found the Brunel Museum. It's actually about Marc Brunel, who was Kingdom Isambard Brunel's father, who came up with the idea of tunnelling under the Thames to make a new crossing (when there were only five bridges crossing it in the early 1800s, and only one of them big enough for horses and carts).

They dug a shaft downwards, which is where I was standing to take the third pic here. That door is way up at the top, and it's the one that Kingdom Brunel was rescued through when he nearly drowned in a flooding disaster that stopped work for several years. Eventually, though, there was a tunnel under the Thames - the first ever tunnel under a river. The last pic shows what it looked like. It never fulfilled its original intention though - to get into the tunnel you had to go down the shaft, and the slope to do so was too steep for cattle and horses! Eventually it was bought by the railways, and it's still being used today - if you go on the underground to Rotherhithe, then that's the tunnel you're travelling in!

Anyway - I carried on wandering, and found all sorts of things...

The walls of a manor house built by King Edward III! It apparently had a moat on three sides, and the Thames on the other, and the king would arrive by boat.

This was sad - four statues, an elderly man, a woman, and a little girl playing with a cat. They're called "Salter's Daydream", and they commemorate Ada (nee Brown) Salter and Dr Salter, who worked tirelessly to help improve people's lives. They lived among the people they were helping through a scarlet fever epidemic, and their only child, who was eight years old, died of it.

Here's the story if you'd like to read more. Salter created the first NHS-that-wasn't-the-NHS, and improved the city's health incredibly. Ada did so many things...

Evening began to fall... ...if you look very carefully at the second pic, you will see bellringers, calling for evensong!

This is where the Mayflower sailed off to America. The pub just commemorates it really, but the docks by here would have been filled with excited people...

I'd headed home by now (it's apparently two miles to Tower Bridge, and it got closer and closer, but my feet weren't entirely happy with me for trying to do all the walking I'd not done for the last six months in one day... So I stopped to have dinner, and this was my view...

But I couldn't resist one last walk back over the big Brunel-type bridge to the river... ...for one last view of the Thames lapping at her banks...

Comments

[keli]

I was in London back in April 2018 and we had the time of our lives. I thought we hit the big things but I can't believe we missed a lot of what you posted. We did get to the Bridge and see the Tower of London. All the history was just amazing... here in the States we don't have old history like that. :(