Starting the Green Chain

I finally got my lazy self moving yesterday and started the Green Chain walk in South London. As I mentioned before, this walk consists of interlinked paths, rather than being a linear route like some of the other walks I've taken around London. So doing more than one segment at a time is tricky because you may have to travel to another location to start the next.

In my case, I just did the first link -- Thamesmead to Lesnes Abbey. I took the tube and then a train and then a bus to get to the starting point beside the Thames, in a rather industrial part of the river (above). You can see the towers of Canary Wharf and the city off in the distance to the left.

The route took me through Crossway Park in Thamesmead, where these colorful murals depicted the wildlife. Thamesmead is a large planned community built in the 1960s on what used to be known as the Plumstead marshes.

There's still some wildlife around, like these ladybugs nestled into the leaves of a strange, white plant...

...but most of Thamesmead looks like this, with towering apartment blocks surrounded by lower buildings of flats. Exterior scenes for the movies "A Clockwork Orange" and "Beautiful Thing" were filmed here.

In Southmere Park I found a lot of residue from Guy Fawkes Night celebrations -- mainly shredded and scorched cardboard tubes that used to contain fireworks. There was also this peculiar guy, who had a hole in the back of his head containing burned-out fireworks.

In the park, I came across a woman walking five yappy dachshunds. (Her male companion was pushing two more in a pram, an old one and a very pregnant one.) Every time they saw another dog they'd send up a chorus of barks. She kept telling them to pipe down and exclaiming that they weren't usually like that, which I find hard to believe, but they were very cute.

Here's the world's shortest video just to show them in action.

I took some photos of graffiti murals in Thamesmead, where apparently there's an effort to improve this basketball court known as "The Cage." I met some women who are working on that project and, seeing my camera, they asked if I was on Instagram. I said no, because I am a technological dinosaur, I'm on Flickr, and I told them I'd send them a link -- even though most of the pictures there are of Olga.

Finally, my 2.6-mile walk ended at Lesnes Abbey, a ruined 12th century monastery founded by Richard de Luci, possibly (according to Wikipedia) in penance for his involvement in the murder of Thomas á Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury. As you can see, people can walk among the abbey ruins and romp with their dogs, and there are gardens, a visitor's center and a vast tract of ancient woodland.

I considered grabbing a bus or train and going to the trailhead of section two of the chain, but it was already about 1:30 p.m. and since the sun sets at about 4:30 I figured I'd save it for another day. I caught a Thameslink train back to West Hampstead (direct!) and took Olga on a walk to the cemetery instead.