Ride the Dangleway

Some people have been saying for years that London should build a cable car down the middle of Oxford Street, but the powers that be have inexplicably decided instead to link two patches of East London wasteland together in a rather expensive project which opened this week. Having said that, your author took his first trip on the Dangleway yesterday, and thoroughly enjoyed it.


There is something magical about the experience, and getting a new perspective on the city, and from that high up the views across East and South East London are amazing, and it becomes clear why cycling up Shooters Hill always felt such a drag. Though queues were reasonably long, those with topped-up Oyster cards were able to join a shorter queue and on opening weekend wait for no longer than 10 minutes to participate, though it did strike your author that on a rainy tuesday in November 2013 the levels of footfall are going to make it all seem rather ridiculous.

For more, see http://www.emiratesairline.co.uk/

Attend the Docklands Cinema Club

Screening films on the second Friday or every month, the Docklands Cinema Club allows film-lovers to watch films in the Grade I listed surroundings of the Museum of London Docklands, a former Georgian warehouse in the heart of Docklands.


Tonight's choice is the Ipcress File, a 1965 film which sees Michael Caine cast as as a spy who caught up in a brainwashing plot in London during the Cold War. Tickets are £7 and it all kicks off at 7pm. Your author apologises in advance as at the time of going to pixel tickets were looking limited. If it sells out, please make a note for next month.

For more, see http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/Docklands/Whats-on/Adult-events/DocklandsCinemaClub.htm

Drink at the Gun, E14

Found beside the Thames on Coldharbour in Docklands, the Gun is a beautiful pub about which your author had heard a great deal. He was lucky, therefore, to have an opportunity to pop in on a beautifully sunny Saturday bike ride, and thankfully it was not a disappointment.


We are told that the current pub dates back to the early eighteenth century, and takes its name from a cannon fired to celebrate the opening of the West India Import Docks in 1802. It is a fitting name in an area which once housed iron foundries producing guns for the Royal Navy fleet. The owners also claim that Lord Nelson was a regular patron of The Gun, and would have secret meetings with Lady Emma Hamilton in the beautiful upstairs room, which is now fitted out as a function room called The River Room.

The pub had a roaring log fire on Saturday, and a welcoming terrace with blankets to keep your author warm as he sat watching the boats with a nice cup of tea, as sadly the food was a bit beyond budget. For weekday lunchtime diners, however, there is a more reasonably-priced menu, and the pub might even throw in a free return taxi from Canary Wharf if you ring them first to book.

For more information, see http://www.thegundocklands.com/

Attend the London Ice Sculpting Festival

It's the second and final day of the London Ice Sculpting Festival today, across Canary Wharf's Montgomery Square, Canada Square Park and Jubilee Place Shopping Mall.


Eight teams from around the world have been taking part, manning the chainsaws to produce some interesting and artistic sculptures. Today, we are told there will be a Frost Fayre with wintry snacks and drinks, then this afternoon your chance to vote for your favourite sculpture - albeit within the cringingly corporate theme of 'team spirit'.

For more, see http://www.londonicesculptingfestival.co.uk/

_{^Picture © By Paul Sissons, used under a Creative Commons licence^}

Explore Sailortown

The Sailortown galleries, at the Museum of London Docklands, recreate the environment of a bustling Victorian Wapping for visitors to explore.


Designed to reflect the winding lanes of Wapping between 1840 and 1850, Sailortown is found on the second floor of the Museum, and features a public house, lodging houses, a chandlery and even a wild animal emporium.

For more information, see http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/Docklands/Whats-on/Galleries/Sailortown-1840-1850.htm

_{^Picture © ell brown used under Creative Commons^}

See William Pye's Curlicue

Standing on the Southern bank of the Thames in Helsinki Square, near Greenland Dock, Curlicue is a tubular steel construction, designed by William Pye and put in place in 1989 by the London Docklands Development Corporation.


The piece was plas part of the Greenland Passage development, and is a modified and enlarged version of a previous Pye work from the 1970s. By 1989, we are told, Pye had largely moved into working with more natural materials such as water and stone.

For more on William Pye, see http://www.williampye.com/

See a model of old London Bridge

The Museum in Docklands holds countless interesting items, but one that particularly caught your author's imagination on a recent visit was the 1:50 scale model of Old London Bridge.


The model shows the bridge in two different eras, representing how it looked in 1440 on one side, with the other side hidden until visitors enter the next gallery, when they see the bridge as it looked by 1600.

It's just one of many interesting exhibits at the Museum. For more, see http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/Docklands/

Buy fish at Billingsgate Market

Billingsgate Market has been London's fish market since the sixteenth century, when the riverside market at Billingsgate Wharf was the centre of fish trading. In the nineteenth century, the Market moved to Lower Thames Street, before relocating to Docklands in the 1980s.


Today, the Market is the UK's largest inland fish market, and sells fish from around the country and the world. The market runs from 5am from Tuesday to Saturday, wrapping up around 8.30am, and when your author popped along yesterday morning, it was in full swing, with some of the earliest profanities he has ever heard.

Crates of live British crabs sat alongside huge tuna, small sharks and conger eels, whilst the Asian and African fish specialists stocked an exotic array of produce from around the world. It's just a shame that it seems to be almost impossible to get the fish smell out of hair and shoes...

For more on Billingsgate, see www.billingsgate-market.org.uk

Book a ticket for The Space

The Space is an arts and community centre on the Isle of Dogs, housed in a former Presbyterian built in 1859 to designs by London architect Thomas Edward Knightley.


After the church left the building in the 1970s, it was given to the St Paul's Arts Trust by Trafalgar House Developments and restoration works continued into the 1990s.

Today, The Space hosts a range of theatre, music, comedy and dance events, and whilst Mondays are usually a rest day, there is plenty of things to browse and book tickets for on the website at http://space.org.uk/

Find Jay Battle's 'Vanishing Point'

There is some great public art in Docklands, and one of your author's favourite finds recently is 'Vanishing Point' by Jay Battle.


The piece is made of Derbyshire Stone and was installed in 1999 as part of an exhibition called 'The Shape Of The Century'.

'Vanishing Point' can be found on the Southern side of Westferry Circus. For more, see http://www.wharf.co.uk/art6.html

Find Dragons' Gate

Whilst it suffered badly during the Blitz, as late as the 1940s, when your author's grandfather sailed from the area, Limehouse was known as London's first and oldest Chinatown, owing to the numbers of Chinese settlers who had arrived by ships to the area and decided to stay.


In the late 1990s, a sculpture of a dragon by Peter Dunn was placed on the corner of Mandarin Street and East India Dock Road to mark this association. Called Dragon's Gate, it was created with the help of a Docklands community co-operative the Art of Change, before it was divided up in 2002, and featured banners designed by members of Limehouse Youth Club.

For more on the history of Chinatown Limehouse see http://www.chinatownology.com/chinatown_limehouse.html

Walk through the Hibbert Gate

The Hibbert Gate, at the Western end of West India Quay, is a replica of the original main entrance to the Quay, which had to be removed in 1932 because it blocked traffic. The replica was installed in 2000, as part of the refurbishment of the area to mark 200 years since the formation of the Quay.


The original gate had been installed in 1803, and was topped off with a model of a sailing ship called 'The Hibbert', which traded between London and the West Indies during the 18th and 19th Centuries. The current model was designed by artist Leo Stevenson.

Thought it is at an end of the docks which doesn't have a lot of thoroughfare, the arch is very striking and makes quite an impression. For more information, click here.

Meet the HSBC Lions

The entrance to the HSBC current global headquarters in Docklands is flanked by two bronze lions, cast in 2002 at the Bronze Age Sculpture Casting Foundry in Limehouse.


These lions are copies of two 1930s bronze lions, who were designed by W. W. Wagstaff to guard the entrance to the offices of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation in Hong Kong, and bear a marked resemblance to two designed by Henry Poole to stand outside the Shanghai offices in 1923.

Each lion weighs around one ton, and has lucky coins buried beneath it, because this is apparently traditional. For more information, see http://www.hsbc.com/1/2/about/history/history/frequently-asked-questions

See the 'Pirate Ships' at Tobacco Dock

In front of Tobacco Dock, the huge 1990s shopping folly built in a grade I listed warehouse in Wapping, sit two metal 'pirate ships', forever becalmed in a dry dock sealed off from the neighbouring canal. In truth, on closer inspection these are not real ships, and were built to entertain the children whose parents never came to shop at a shopping centre which never was.


The Sea Lark, apparently a copy of a 330 tonne tobacco and spice ship built at Blackwall Yard in 1788, was designed as a pirate ship for children, and the Three Sisters, a copy of an 18th century American built merchant schooner captured by the Admiralty during the Anglo-American War at the start of the 19th century, was designed as a floating pirate museum. They have long since closed, and are now home only to Health and Safety fines.

With the shopping centre having stood virtually empty for around twenty years, the real Tobacco Docks having long since been filled in, and these ships never having been used it's all quite sad really. Maybe with the resurgence of interest in piracy someone might open them up one day?

For more on Tobacco Dock, see an excellent article on Londonist here.

See St Peter's Barge, London's only boat church

St Peter's Barge, in Canary Wharf, is London's first and only boat church, offering spiritual guidance to those who live and work in the area.


It was acquired as an empty Dutch freight barge in 2003 by St Peter's Canary Wharf Trust, refitted in the Netherlands before being sailed back across the North Sea under its own power in summer 2003.

Following the appointment of a permanent full-time Church of England minister in July 2004, the boat church now operates from a permanent mooring in West India Quay, right beside the Docklands Museum.

For more, see http://www.stpetersbarge.org/

Explore Russia Dock Woodland

Russia Dock Woodland, in Rotherhithe, is an area of woodland which was planted in the new space created when one of the former Surrey Commercial Docks, the Russia Dock, was filled in in the late 1970s.


Like most of the London Docks, Russia Dock got its name because it was originally used for the importing of timber from Russia, as well as Norway and Sweden. The wood was known as Deal and sorted by the legendary Deal Porters.

Nowadays, the woodland, which was covers 34.5 acres, and was planted in 1980, and is home to a fantastic array of wildlife, including toads, newts, birds, bees, caterpillars, hedgehogs, frogs, newts, grasshoppers, stag beetles, foxes and even possibly kingfishers and herons.

Your author's picture above, taken in December, doesn't really do it justice, so for more information, visit http://russiadock.blogspot.com/

Visit the Hermitage Riverside Memorial Garden

Created in memory of East End residents killed in the Second World War, the Hermitage Riverside Memorial Garden sits on the former site of Hermitage Wharf.


The wharf was destroyed in a firebomb raid in December 1940, and when it came up for redevelopment in the late 1990s, Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act was used to make the developers of a nearby block of flats to create a Memorial Park, memorial and riverside walkway as a memorial to the civilians killed.

For more information, see here.

Drink in the Grapes

Originally a dockers pub, in the days when your author's grandfather often pitched up in the area with the Merchant Navy, the Grapes, in Narrow Street, Limehouse, was probably built as early as 1720 and is still well regarded amongst pub fans.


In recent years the regeneration of the surrounding area has opened the pub up to an altogether different crowd, but this is proof, if it were needed, that Docklands does have some decent pubs.

The pub previously sold beer from the neighbouring Taylor and Walker Brewery, and survived the extensive bombing of the docklands, and nearby Limehouse Basin in the Second World War.

For more, and a proper review, see http://www.fancyapint.com/pubs/pub184.php

Drive through the Blackwall Tunnel

Actually made up of two tunnels, The Blackwall Tunnel links Tower Hamlets and Greenwich along the A102 road.


The western tunnel was designed by Sir Alexander Binnie and built by S. Pearson & Sons, and work began in 1892. When the tunnel was officially opened by the Prince of Wales in May 1897, it had cost £1.4 million, and seven workmen had died during construction. To clear the site in Greenwich, around 600 houses were demolished, including, legend has it, one which originally belonged to Sir Walter Raleigh.

The second, eastern, tunnel was opened in 1967. It is wider and lacks the sharp turns of the western tunnel, which were reputedly the result of a swerve to avoid a plague burial ground. Its construction involved the building of two distinctive ventilation towers, designed by architect Terry Farrell, which stand in Blackwall. The southern ventilation shafts rise through the Millenium Dome, hence the hole in the roof.

For more on the Blackwall Tunnel, see http://www.blackwalltunnel.com/

Admire the view from Stave Hill

Stave Hill is an artificial mound created in the 1980s overlooking the Russia Dock Woodland, in Rotherhithe, Docklands. The hill is conical and stands 30 foot tall, with steps up one side leading to a viewing platform and a relief map, cast in bronze and designed by Michael Rizzell, showing the former docks which occupied the area.


Nearby Russia Dock and Stave Dock, originally key parts of the Surrey Commercial Docks, which were filled in, also in the 1980s, then redeveloped by the London Docklands Development Corporation. Russia Dock became the site of a woodland and eco park to which your author will return at a later date.

The hill provides great views over Canary Wharf, and when your author was there on a crisp Saturday morning just before Christmas they were matched with excellent vistas of the City of London and South London.

Yesterday evening the forecast for today was sunshine, so if it was right why not take a look. For more, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stave_Hill