Canary Wharf

This weekend is Open House London when many buildings and sites, some of them not normally open to the public, open their doors free of charge.

We chose to visit the Brunel Museum in Rotherhithe, London.  This museum is open all year round, but it takes Open House weekend to get us out to look at some of these places.

The small museum is located in the engine house which used to run the pumps to remove water from the Thames tunnel, the world's first major underwater thoroughfare.  The tunnel was designed and built by Marc Brunel and his son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was the chief engineer.

The tunnel was originally constructed as a pedestrian walkway, and took many years to complete owing to frequent flooding (and deaths of many workers - I K Brunel almost died in one of these events) and lack of money.  It housed an underground (underwater) shopping arcade and attracted millions of visitors.  Later it was sold to the East London railway and became the oldest tunnel in the oldest underground in the world (claims the museum's web site).  The tunnel is still used (stangely, by London's "Oveground" railway!) and we travelled through it to reach the museum.

After visiting we searched for somewhere to have lunch and, failing to find anything nearby, crossed back to the other side of the river and walked along until we found The Prospect of Whitby, the oldest riverside pub in London (built during the reign of Henry VIII). An excellent late lunch left us with insufficient time to return to some of the other buildings near the Brunel museum, so we continued walking along the river until we reached Limehouse Basin.  From there we returned home via the Docklands Light Railway, Northern Line and Thameslink railway. 

In total we had six different train journeys (overground and underground) today.

Although I have photographs from all the locations we visited on our travels, I have chosen to blip this splendid afternoon view of Canary Wharf, which is actually on the same side of the river as the viewpoint, but round a sharp bend.

A full but very interesting and enjoyable day.