I think I’ve mentioned on here before how Stratford has become sort of my default destination for my daily trundles. Instead of going to the trouble of deciding where to head for an afternoon, I just catch the jubilee line up to the Olympic park and spend a couple of hours up there. I enjoy looking at all the building projects in that area, and watching it change over time. 

Today, though, I felt like I needed a change. I swapped platforms at North Greenwich and headed west to the south bank. To be honest it had been ages since I last went that way, and I was keen to see if much had changed. I remember going there quite a bit when I first moved to London with Lyn: it struck me as a vibrant, amazing area of the city which I had known nothing about previously. I will never forget going to the globe the first time with Lyn. As someone who had grown up loving Shakespeare, watching him performed like that, in that incredible theatre by the Thames, was beyond amazing.

I just got home from a lovely long stroll. Getting off the jubilee line at London Bridge I headed along the south bank of the Thames. One of my aims for the trip was to check in at the Globe theatre to see what they had on at the moment. After I had done so, I carried on along the river to Westminster, crossing it to check out parliament square before heading towards Buckingham palace and then eventually Bond Street. From there I got the Elizabeth line home, typing this very blog entry into my iPad as we went.

London never stops amazing me. It intrigues me, and I will never tire of exploring it: It’s tube stations and shops, it’s cafes and pubs; it’s winding warren of roads and wide, stately river. A metropolis which once seemed so vast, hostile and alien now feels more and more homelike. Areas like the south bank and Westminster now carry a plethora of memories for me, built up over the last fourteen years. Every time I go into it, I get to know it just a bit more, to the extent that I can’t wait to see what I’ll find in this amazing microcosm next.