On a fine sunny day in October 2005 I put my Brompton on the train around noon and went to Clock House in the deep south of London. The station is a few yards from the Pool River, which is joined not far away by another of the tributaries of the Ravensbourne, the Beck. I had some unfinished photographic business a little further north, at Bell Green, around the 'superstore' developed on part of the former gas works there, and then intended to ride as much as possible along by the river (it joins the Ravensbourne at Catford) to the Thames at Greenwich and then through the foot tunnel and on to Hackney Wick.
As often, progress with a camera in hand tends to be rather slow, and at Lewisham I updated my plan and took the DLR, at changing Canary Wharf to go on to Canning Town. From there I rode south to photograph Bow Creek and the DLR line to Woolwich under construction through Silvertown, before turning back to the north and cycling along the top of the Northern Outfall Sewer (aka Greenway) from West Ham to Hackney Wick and then returning to Stratford and the underground.
As I wrote at the time, I wanted "to take a look at Stratford Marsh again before work starts in earnest to demolish the existing businesses and create the Olympic waste." There was plenty of evidence of work going on in the crowded industrial sites around Marshgate Lane, and the willows further north by the Pudding Mill River were in splendid shape.These pictures were taken around an hour to half an hour before sunset, and are all either from or from close to the Greenway, and so all but one in locations that are more or less accessible now, although these may look rather different.
