When I’m out on my daily trundles, I’m often struck by sudden ideas about places or things to investigate. Some of these ideas turn out to be awesome , and I have blogged about many; most of the time, however, they turn out to be grave mistakes. I think today’s adventure was somewhere in the middle.

Today began sunny and very hot. I decided to wheel my way down to Woolwich, just to see what, if anything, was going on there. Of course, Woolwich was still the busy market and town centre which I last visited a few days ago, so from there I decided to go and take a look at the river, trundling through the old Arsenal: What was once a great eighteenth century munitions depot is now a chic upper class housing estate, complete with Marks and Spencers, drama studios and an Elisabeth Line Station.

The problem was, by then the sky was quickly darkening – it was obviously about to bucket it down. It was then I was struck by an idea: perhaps it would be cool to try out the Woolwich ferry. I had never crossed the Thames that way before, and I reasoned it would give me the shelter I suddenly urgently needed. From the look of the cloud, the rain would be heavy but wouldn’t last long, and this way I could cross the river  and explore a part of the city I hadn’t been to before.

That is basically what happened: the ferry crossing was short, uneventful and free. Looking out towards the west, I saw the metropolis before me, a forrest of skyscrapers, cranes and building sites, cut in two by the river. By the time I was on the north shore of the Thames, the rain had stopped. From there I started to explore a bit more of East London, again nothing how much of the old nineteenth century housing is being replaced by more and more ultra modern infrastructure. What might once have been termed a juxtaposition I now think is more rightly called an outright conflict, as the very new rapidly wipes out what was here recently in that weird abutting of architecture which I have only ever encountered here in London. Here, exhibition centres sit beside nineteenth century docks, as cable cars are carried above a river once plied by sailing ships.

The Woolwich Ferry, then, struck me as a nice, pleasant way to cross the Thames. Of course, taking the Lizzie Line or DLR is faster, but given that there has been a ferry crossing at Woolwich for centuries, it seems to me that it is a cool link to London’s past. Ferries now carry cars and lorries where they once carried horses and carts. And beneath them all flows the mighty Thames: timeless, immortal, unchanging.