Woolwich to Greenwich - A lot of 'ich'

It’s Tuesday and I am mid way through my second day of lounging around the boat lethargically feeling poorly. I woke up feeling a bit grim on Sunday but put it down to the low pressure of the day before and promptly went on a giant route march. Since then I have been feeling reasonably awful, so awful that I am off my food, which upsets me more than feeling awful.

On Monday morning I got up and thought about going on a walk. I wasn’t feeling it but I found myself thinking that I could force myself to do it so then I had to kick my own shins for being an idiot. I walk for pleasure and there is no pleasure in forcing yourself to do something, so I didn’t. Instead I spent the day on the sofa reading. This morning, after I had taken Derek to the vet for a fang extraction and then went to the gp for a blood test, I came back to the sofa and carried on reading.

While I’m waiting for the vet to call and pronounce Derek de-fanged (she has an infection thanks to a chipped tooth), I shall tell you about Sunday’s walk.

I had an idea that I would do some kind of looped walk which involved me crossing the river and coming back using the Greenwich foot tunnel. Why I decided to do it on a day when I wasn’t feeling great I can’t say. Masochism, maybe?

I took the DLR to Woolwich, where after a bit of wandering around and finding the wonderfully named yet eternally dull Mortgramit Square (it crops up on several websites, all of which say it is disappointing and none of which explain the name), I hit the Thames Path at Woolwich Pier and headed towards Greenwich.

Woolwich is getting polished up by developers. The Arsenal is looking super fancy and has all the loft conversions and coffee shops you could want. The immersive theatre company Punch Drunk have held their show The Burnt City in some of the buildings this summer. I took Andrea, which was a bad idea, as she can’t see in low light and I had to apologise profusely for nearly murdering her for art.

Woolwich though, is a game of two halves. It is a fairly lively place and rich in local colour. I like it. I enjoy an exotic, egg based lunch as much as the next aspirational middle class woman, but I also like egg and chips at the caff. I think places are better for having a healthy mix of the two, although how long any caffs will last in Woolwich now, is anyone’s guess. There are a lot of beautiful buildings there. You only have to look up beyond the phone repair shop signs to discover a wealth of glorious architecture.

As I was walking past Primark a small boy tumbled out with his mum, very excited indeed. He had a piece of card that looked like a bank card and was shouting: ‘Mum! Mum! I’ve got a credit card! Can we tell dad?’ She very obediently took a photo of him proudly clutching his card and sent it. Once it had gone he very solemnly said: ‘Now we must put it away very, very carefully so it doesn’t get lost.’ which she also did and off they went, chattering away. It made my heart burst a little bit.

Walking by the river there are jumbles of new flats, old council flats and older signs of the work of the river. The dry docks and slipways, the rusting chains and piers that head nowhere, taped off for safety. Birds are the bosses of the lonely piers now. Two families sat, fishing into the murky grime of a dry dock now filled with very wet, stagnant water. I wondered why. They were literally steps away from the actual river. If I caught anything in that murk, I’d put it straight back.

I had to leave the river for a small stretch by an industrial complex, most of which was abandoned. One bit was new and shiny and I went to investigate because it said Thames-Side Studios was the largest artist studio complex in the UK. There was a cafe, which I didn’t visit because I was being sensible. There was also a free exhibition, so I went and had a look. It was called Gargling With Jelly, which is the title of a poetry book by Brian Patten, who is one of my favourite poets, so we were off to a good start. It was joyful and cartoonish and fun. My favourite work was a sculpture of an alarmed cat. As it was bigger than me, I was in no danger of carrying it home.

Walking on, I passed some super impressive derelict factories, which will no doubt be made into flats soon, but which had an eerie glamour all of their own. Apparently they were the old Siemens’ factory. Now most of the windows are punched out and some of the walls are netted, presumably to stop things falling off and other things getting in. Beyond that, and in stark contrast, are the Thames Barrier buildings, looking like an art deco, miniature Sydney Opera House. It was closed on the day I went but you can go and visit on 3rd September and watch them shut the barrier if that’s your jam.

Beyond the barrier I was headed into Charlton, an area I know nothing about and as I was walking the fringes, still know very little about. It seemed pretty old school, at least the bits I was in. There was a huge, Victorian pub, separated from the river by a road more like a track. On the river side they had a loose approximation of a beer garden and a car park with a jellied eel van, gorgeously called ‘Eels on Wheels’. It was doing a roaring trade. It made my stomach flip just thinking about it, so I sped by into a world of gravel.

Looming ahead was a huge, industrial complex full of rusting hoppers and conveyor belts, punctuated by giant mountains of gravel, sand and loose chippings. It went on for ages. In the midst of this deeply unlovely but fascinating landscape I found an information board which said that this area covers 33 acres and all of it deals with aggregate. I could not imagine looking at 33 acres of aggregate, but luckily I didn’t need to, because it was all around me. It felt like being on Mars. If Mars had easy access to a jellied eel van.

I rounded a corner, dwarfed by the hills of stone and came across a thickly silted dock. It stank to high heaven. The top had crusted in a poisonous looking mat of orange, oily substance and green ‘stuff’. Where the mud had become too heavy for itself, it had cratered off in big, gelatinous wodges into which excited gulls were poking their beaks. Everything shone in a quietly evil way and the wheels of drowned shopping carts poked aloft, too far gone to save.

Coming out of this dystopian landscape, I walked smack bang into the gentrification of the Greenwich peninsula. They have a yacht club. It has a headquarters on stilts, standing in the river, looking like the shed Tracey Emin made for her dad. Suddenly art and life started smashing up against each other. Soon I was in the land of Damien Hirst and Anthony Gormley sculptures every few yards.

There was also the Greenwich Peninsula Ecology Park, which I was going to have a nose around until I read the endless notices pinned up on the fences surrounding it. ‘We are sorry you can’t use the inner boardwalk, but it is not safe.’ ‘We are sorry the water levels in one of the lakes is worryingly low. It is very distressing.’ ‘We are sorry that the other lake is infested with a pernicious weed which is so invasive we can’t remove it safely without burning everything down.’ ‘Please do not bring us baby birds. We don’t know what to do with them.’ I was exhausted and depressed and decided to walk on by, although I did nearly go in to look at the pernicious weed.

Rounding the peninsula I could see the masts of the Cutty Sark on the horizon and picked up pace. I walked past a two storey driving range where dozens of people were spending their Sunday afternoon whacking small, dimpled balls into netting, while people on minimum wage drove around in a golf buggy trying to retrieve them without getting brained. The ground looked like snow there were so many balls. To the side, where the path widened out by the river, a group of young people in baggy jeans were practicing their skateboarding skills. They looked far cooler than the golfers. Nobody looks good in sports’ casual slacks.

I passed an abandoned dry dock, full of the rusting hulls of huge old boats, sinking slowly into the mud. Willow trees had set themselves in the banks and for one, small stretch there was dappled shade and real, river trees. In a break to the railings, someone had gone through and left something that looked like a rusting anvil into the top of which were marked shapes and symbols. It looked vaguely magical. I blame the willows.

Passing a micro brewery and sour dough pizza joint at Mordern Wharf, I knew I was shifting gear, class wise. I swear that pony tails got swishier, trainers got exponentially more expensive and the dogs upped their game from that point forward.

Greenwich was heaving with tourists. Every pub was full of people sitting outside eating fish and chips and Sunday roasts in the late afternoon sun. Rowing boats became a thing and there were a lot of people shouting through megaphones. A whip thin American woman with cheekbones you could shave with and spray on white jeans was leading an expedition, ‘explaining’ London in a voice that you could also shave with. It was not for me and I hot footed it through the tunnel and back to the relative sanity of the Isle of Dogs where I limped home.