Today was a planned slow start, and we didn’t get out of the flat until 1pm, which I suppose is proper holiday mode.

A leisurely run into Liverpool Street station on the Overground was followed by a walk through the City of London, which was full of City types on their lunch break. We stopped in Boots, then Sainsbury’s for supplies, then wandered into a very windswept Leadenhall Market. It’s a high vaulted Victorian arcade with some seriously fancy ironwork on show, and I’d never visited before. Like everywhere else, it was full of people on their lunchbreaks, just like I had been forty years previously.

Then we walked down the gently sloping roads to the Monument. It’s a bit like a squat Nelson’s Column and has golden ball of fire on the top that signifies this was the approximate starting point of the Great Fire of London in 1666. You can go up inside the column and stand on a little balcony at the top, and I have done that before. But it has 311 spiral steps that take you up around 200 feet, which for old farts like us is a bit much. You do get a certificate if you make to the top, and presumably back down again, though. Fortunately, it was closed for lunch.

Then we followed the river, past the old Billingsgate fish market, to one of the City’s ruined churches, St. Dunstan’s, which is now given over to a curiously exotic garden. Apart from the surprising number of people in there on a cold November afternoon, it was a calm and beautiful place right in the City, and only yards from the Tower of London. There were notices about not using the place as a set for professional photography without permission, and there were some people in there with photographic paraphernalia, but at a guess I’d have said it was an Internet “Influencer” because the photographers were using their phones to record the pictures, which is hardly professional.

The Tower was looking fine in the sunshine, and of course was packed with tourists, so we skirted around the back (still a fine view) and made our way to St. Katherine Dock. This was the closest dock to the Pool of London and one of the first to cease trading as goods started to be moved in ISO containers in the 1960s. It’s been under redevelopment for decades and is now a place for expensive boats and expensive flats and offices. That said, there are still a fair few council flats to the eastern end, so it’s not all posh. There are loads of bars and restaurants, and it was to the Dickens Inn that we were headed. It’s situated in an old wooden warehouse, the origin of which I’m not sure, but I do know that in 1970 it wasn’t at its current location. It has been rebuilt, though, and is a popular place to drink for locals and tourists alike. The kitchen wasn’t open when arrived, but we had a drink and waited. To be honest, the grub was a little disappointing, but we were tired and would probably have eaten anything. A dull but interesting point is that the place is known as St. Katherine Dock, not St. Katherine’s Docks. When I was using the TfL bus app, I couldn’t locate it using the possessive and plural form. Who knew that it wasn’t St. Katherine’s personal dock, and that there was only one of them?

As it was getting dark, my planned walk along the river gave way to a bus ride to Wapping Station, following more or less the same route. There I posed for photographs in a vain attempt to recreate Sidney Poitier’s emergence from the station in the title sequence of the film To Sir With Love. Then we had a short walk along Wapping Wall (actually a cobbled street lined with warehouses, or at least buildings that had once been warehouses) to the Prospect of Whitby pub. The walk was fascinating, the narrow cobbled street lined with the old warehouses, albeit that they were now occupied by monied people rather than goods offloaded from ships. Whatever I think about it, they are at least keeping the place vibrant.

The Prospect of Whitby is a fine old nineteenth-century pub that replaced earlier pubs on the same site. It is claimed to be London’s oldest riverside pub, and I have no reason to doubt that. Because it was dark, we couldn’t see that it was right on the river, but we learned some of its colourful history from a nice little printed card on the table. The menu in the pub looked so inviting that me and the good Mrs. Mayne decided on a second dinner, barely two hours after the last one, and what a good decision that turned out to be. Although just “light bites”, the beetroot tart and salmon fishcakes were simply excellent.

Actually, the whole visit was great. The pub is quite authentic and was filled with people having a good time, and while it was quite noisy, it all added to the atmosphere. It seemed a bit Dickensian, especially with the Christmas decorations up, and I half expected Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim to come along the street. That’s not such an odd notion of course, because this is one of the very areas that Dickens wrote about.

I did see a fox come trotting down the road, though. He stopped to pee on an e-bike, then carried on with his mission. The things you see…

We walked back to Wapping station to catch a train north to Dalston Junction and were pleasantly surprised to see that the train platform, under the street, was at the northern end of the Marc and Isambard Brunel tunnel under the river, completed in 1843. It was originally built for horse and cart traffic, but was more used by pedestrians, and became a tourist attraction. In 1869 it was converted to rail traffic, and that’s what it’s used for today. Mind you, it looked like any other underground railway tunnel to me, and the only thing a little odd about Wapping station was the really narrow platforms.

At Dalston Junction we left the train and did a bit of evening shopping before getting on a number 56 bus and heading home. Kingsland High Street was so busy given the relatively late hour. We remarked that provided you had some money, you’d never starve in London, given all the food outlets.

It had been a long and enjoyable day, the walk in the City proving that there is history on every corner, and in such a small space. Had we gone on the Tube, we’d have missed it all. We were both shattered, though and crashed out early, because our next run out was to be to Midlands.