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January 02, 2008
City of Bridges
Lambeth Pier, just downstream from the Lambeth Bridge.
One of the things we passed almost every day.
Dave once wrote a poem for me about how we came together in a city of bridges. That was when we lived in Portland. It's one of the things we both miss, living here. We're so landlocked. Not a river in sight. So imagine our joy, being able to step out of the hotel and cross the street and walk along the Albert Embankment. Going out in the morning or coming home at night, we always walked along the Thames. And to get to most of the places we wanted to go (including the most useful Tube stop), we had to cross the river as well.
Albert Embankment, just south of the Westminster Bridge.
(The green bridge you see there.)
While we were in London we crossed the following bridges on foot:
Westminster Bridge
Lambeth Bridge
Vauxhall Bridge
The Millenium Footbridge
Tower Bridge
Dave also crossed the Waterloo Bridge one day when I was making my promised all-day visit to the Tate Britain.
Because we frequently used the Westminster Tube Station, and because it was the nearest bridge to the nearest Starbucks (for Dave's sake we visited almost every morning), the Westminster Bridge was the bridge we used the most, with the Lambeth Bridge coming in a close second (it was nearer to our hotel).
Westminster Bridge
Taken from the Lambeth Bridge, looking downstream.
That big ferris wheel thing is the London Eye. It's HUGE. You can see it from all over town where tall buildings aren't in the way. Each of the cars holds 35 people. Dave really wanted to ride it. I really didn't. I don't much like heights, and ferris wheels tend to make me feel ooogy. But I would have ridden it for him. It just never made it to the top of our things to do list. Anyway, the London Eye is now as iconic as Big Ben (which is also in that picture, just across the river) when describing the city.
Lambeth Bridge
Taken from the Westminster Bridge, shooting upstream.
The Albert Embankment is to the left side of the river in this photo. You can see our hotel, though I'm not going to go through the bother of pointing out on the photo which it is. It's one of the brown buildings on the other side of the Lambeth Bridge. Some of the windows are lit up with orange neon.
The one issue we had with using the Westminter Bridge was the crowds. Even on Christmas Day, there were people shoulder to shoulder on the very wide sidewalk (downstream side) taking pictures of each other with either Big Ben or the London Eye in the background. And it doesn't matter what time of day or night you cross. There are hoards of people. It was insane. Until we realized that nobody was using the upstream side of the bridge and that there was a subway to the tube station* from that side. From then on, we used the upstream side.
Though the hot, sugared nut vendors only parked their kit on the downstream side of the bridge, since that's where the tourists were. So sometimes we had to walk that way anyway. If you are ever in London in the wintertime and you don't have a nut or peanut allergy, I highly recomment the sugared nuts. They're served HOT, and goddamn are they tasty. It's like eating warm CrackerJacks.
One of the many things I love about London is the diversity. When squeezing our way through the masses on the Westminster Bridge, we would hear the following languages spoken, all in the span of 100 yards: Japanese, French, Russian, some Middle Eastern language, (I am not even going to try to guess which one), Portugese, Spanish, Italian, some Asian languages (again, no idea which ones) and a variety of English and American dialects. It's so wonderful. All of these people from all over the world who have come to this city because they love it too. We're all so different, and yet all so human. It makes me cry, the beauty of that, and it's another reason it's so hard to live here in this small, white, western town. At least we get some diversity via the University.
View Larger Map
The parts of the Thames we frequented.
Just to give you a taste of where we were, the Lambeth Bridge is just off the section shown on the map. The lowest bridge on the map is the Westminster Bridge.
The river flows from the bottom of the page up and off the right side of the page.
Oddly, I didn't take upstream and downstream shots from all of the bridges. And we never walked the Millenium Footbridge on the days I had my camera. Which is too bad, because from the West End it leads right to the Tate Modern, which is a sight to see in itself. Also, there was a graffiti park I'd wanted to photograph, but never got to on the camera-toting days.
Dave also bewailed the fact that he didn't have an audio recorder with him for one of our passes across the Millenium Footbridge. The first time, we walked down to it from The Strand. The second time, we were walking along the Victoria Embankment and came at it from underneath. Which is where we made another one of those joyous discoveries. From underneath, the foot traffic passing over the metal frame of the footbridge makes an exotic, percussive music. (Which was apparently more of a problem than a benefit when the bridge was first built.) We stood underneath for a while, enjoying the sounds and looking at a monument there, before heading up onto the bridge ourselves to join in the music.
The Thames, for all its strong, fast current, is a relatively flat river. It's affected by the tides. So sometimes, the water was very, very high, and sometimes it was so low you could see beach off the Embankment. In fact one of thos magical and unexpected moments of our trip happened our second night in London. We had just had dinner at this lovely pizza place in--I think--Lambeth, and were wandering along the Embankment when we saw a group of people clustered at a corner and looking down onto the river. There, on an exposed bit of beach, a busker was building a sand sculpture of a family--man, woman and child--by candle light. It was really beautiful to see, he was already done with the three primary figures, each was lit by two votives that were built into the sculpture.
Of course, the bridge everyone thinks of when they think of London and the Thames and Bridges is Tower Bridge, so named because it's near the Tower of London and also because it has, well, towers.
Tower Bridge Tower
We crossed the Tower Bridge on Boxing Day as part of our excursion around to places we hadn't seen yet that we could get to because everything but the stores was closed. (Boxing Day, i.e. the day after Christmas, is, just like here, the day when all the stores have blowout sales. The advertising on Christmas Day TV in Britain is just as annoying as it is here. All about the Boxing Day Sales. But, as I said, nothing else was open.) It's the only bridge from which I have up and downstream photos. Though apparently I haven't actually done anything with the downstream pix. So you'll jsut have to be satisfied with upstream.
Tower Bridge, looking upstream
Our hotel is that direction, around a couple of corners.
The ship sticking out into the water is the HMS Belfast. I don't know what it actually did, but it's the site of one of the Markets in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. It's amazing, by the way, how much my view of the Underground has changed thanks to that book. The names of the Tube stations all have very different meanings for me now.
And if you look to the right side of the picture, to the skinny thing that's the tallest building on that side of the river, bristling with scaffolding, that's the Monument to the Great Fire of London, the one that razed much of the city in 1666 and led to Christopher Wren's work being all over town, since he was the principle architect. It's known as the Monument, and is basically a big column with a golden flame on top, and the Monument's height is supposed to be exactly the distance from its base to where the fire started in Pudding Lane. It's currently undergoing major restoration and will be done in, I think, July.
I didn't even think of the appropriateness of picking London for our tenth wedding anniversary trip until we were walking across one of the bridges on the second or third day there. And then I remembered that beautiful poem Dave wrote for me, the one we included with our wedding invitations.
Bridges
steel and stone stretching across
green
eyes looking across
sand
falling slowly - now.
miles passed easily,
leading up to the structure;
the spanning yards, most precious.
lost years shared with wonder,
lives changing and growing;
new days and hours relished.
time
and
asphalt,
words sent across wires
and
a few steel girders,
a fortunate confluence of circumstance
in a city of bridges.
What luck, then, what marvelous good fortune, to be able to celebrate ten years of marriage to this wonderful man in another city of bridges. Thank you, David, for the gift of this trip.
*Note for those people who were confused by the combination of subway and Tube station. They're not quite the same as the U.S. usage. In England, a subway is a pedestrian underpass, something that crosses under a road to help you get to the other side--by walking--without having to deal with traffic. The Tube is the other name for the London Underground. Which is what in the U.S. would be considered a subway system.
Posted by sally at January 2, 2008 08:45 AM
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