Welcome back to MIlliganstravels Blog!
I hope you all have had a great weekend! Freshly back from the Cotswolds, we thought what a great change of scenery! We hope you agree. Now for us to continue our London Tour, today we will head out to east London.
So from Old Street we jumped on our Boris bikes and headed east along to the world famous Brick Lane where we every other week enjoy a great curry at the Muhib. It is so full of flavour and the best staff! I would highly recommend it.
From here we cycled down through the deserted city and headed back down onto the embankment and to the London Eye. As we rode along the Embankment admiring the Eye standing still for the first time since we had been in London.
As got to Big Ben(there are no pictures as it is completely covered in scaffolding for the renovation!) and hit a left-over waterloo bridge to head back on ourselves on the Southbank to head East along to the London Eye.
This route you would never dream of doing on a bike, as you would not be going anywhere from the sea of people!
As you can see above from the pictures, there was not a soul around. Usually 3.5 million visitors ride on the London eye each year! Which is 9,590 a day, which is a lot of people a day considering how slowly it moves around ( 0.6mph and 1 revolution takes 30 minutes) and how you are limited to 25 people max per capsule in the 30 capsules.
We did a few laps of the eye exploring before heading along Southbank,seeing the Shard towering over the streets. The tallest building in the Uk having 72 floors and Standing 309.6 metres (1,016 feet) high.
which too us to passing the beautiful HMS Belfast, with the City in the background. She is a 9-deck WWII warship-turned-museum with naval guns, permanently moored on the Thames. She has a lot of History; she was part of the Dday Normandy landings on 6 June 1944. One of only 3 surviving bombardment vessels from Dday.
HMS Belfast was the flagship of Bombardment Force E, supporting troops landing at Jano and Gold Beaches. Her first target was the German gun battery at La Marefontaine. As a result of HMS Belfast’s bombardment, the battery played no meaningful role in the defence of the beaches. Not the best picture however, I love the city in the backlground and the blue colours.
HMS Belfast is right next to our next stop Tower Bridge. Yet another Stunning Historical London Landmark. This is one of the other Reasons I Love London, its rich history and stunning architecture from throughout the ages.
We continued past Tower Bridge to head to Shad Thames Street, to loop back to head back across tower bridge.
Construction started on Tower Bridge on 21 June 1886 and finished on 30 June 1894. Tower Bridge also has 40,00 people usinging it on a daily baisis.
Fast forward a few hours of cycling through Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs and we have made it to the opposite side of O2, The Millennium Dome as it more prominently known around the world.
We did want to cross under the river to the other side to visit Greenwich however, this was not possible as the underpass was closed due to Covid. This forced our hand to turn back and head home. We thought we would head back to Olympic park cycling back through and along what I think is the best kept secret in London! Join us for our next post to find out what that is!!
Thank you again for joining me on MIlliganstravels. Tomorrow we will be taking you to one of my favourite spots in London!
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All Content is original. My own writing which isn't hard to see, photographs and exploring!!
See you all soon!!
Dave
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