Dynamic London

As a

Walking today:     3.8km
Swimming today:  0.80km

Inevitably I don't get to visit London very often, the last time was in 2012 during the Olympics, so I can't claim to be very knowledgable about the city.

We had to collect our visas from the Vietnamese Embassy in Kensington then across the city to Liverpool Street so that Barbara could catch a train on to Ipswich for an appointment. The streets around the Embassy area near Gloucester Road are narrow with small houses and Mews properties, they were even narrower with all the builders skips in the road as what seemed like an army of builders were busy renovating and updating many of the properties.

Nothing compared to what was going on around Liverpool Street, the forest of cranes above Bishopsgate heralded the huge developments going on in this area.

I walked back from Liverpool Street down to Southwark Bridge (huge developments on Queen's Wharf and Threadneedle Street), over the Millenium Bridge and along the river past Bankside and Tate Modern.

There's a huge amount of building work going on in London, there are lots of things that aren't right about the property market in London but the fact remains that the residential and commercial market is dynamic, driving the economic recovery and much of it is influenced by foreign purchasers. And many of the foreigners are in London because of the financial industry - and London is attractive because it's in the EU but not in the euro.

At least until after the next election .......

The only problem all day was at Clapham Junction on the way up where the brakes stuck on. The driver came on and told us that the support team had asked him to "re-boot the train" so he proceeded to turn everything off and restart the train. Now, I'm used to £200 PC's needing to be turned off and on again but a £2 million pound train .... .

Couldn't let this story pass without pointing out that the train was built by a French company !