Rotherhithe

This is not an area of London that I know well. Nor I suspect do many people. It essentially consists of old docks from the days when this was England's main port for European trade, but it lost all its container trade over the course of the 20th century. So, it is now in the course of regeneration. Well, largely it has been regenerated over the course of my lifetime. Just that some bits of regeneration are easier and more glamorous than others. So Canary Wharf is more glamorous, and, say St Katherine's Dock much easier as so close to central London; this area is just a little out on a limb. There is still some development going on, but it is mostly done. Not going to get heaps better.

So I started this walk at Canada Water - a dramatically designed station at one end of what was Canada Dock when it was a dock. It is now just a lake in the middle of a group of shops, not chi chi shops but the sort of warehouse out of town supermarket types like Decathlon and Tescos

The station is under this. As I say, dramatic building. Not attractive, but not boring.

One side of the Water has been devoted to nature - reed beds, some duck platforms, plus a sculpture to soften the commercial blandness, and the fact that it is basically a very square stretch of water. No sinuous edges or amorphous shape.

The sculpture is supposed to represent the honest toil of the old dock workers, called the deal porters.  The main import trade for a long time was of timber from Scandinavia, specifically softwood, known also as "deal". It seems this statue was sculpted in deal, but then converted into bronze, which seems to negate the point. And in any case the result is that while intriguing from a distance, it just looks a bit crude close up. No doubt reflecting the limitations of the deal (and possibly the sculptors).

Beyond Canada Water is the much larger Greenland Dock. once the largest commercial dock in the world. It derived its name from a distinctly unsavoury trade carried on off Greenland. Whaling. Remember there was a time when the best source of oil we had was whales, not oilfields. It would have had blubber boiling buildings around it (yuk), as well as timber sheds for the grain and timber that it later relied upon for business. Now it is largely surrounded by new residential buildings designed to look just a little bit like the warehouses they replaced.

This is James Walker, Victorian chief engineer on London dock projects

A Victorian swing bridge

And at the end of the docks - great views across to Canary Wharf.

This little building that has survived all the redevelopment is the Tide Gauge House, used to measure the tides to help operate the locks efficiently. (Well so says the little plaque on it...)

This is South Dock and apparently London's largest marina.

Dock gates - a solitary worker nicely providing scale for me.

The muddy foreground at low tide - rather a contrast to the sleek modern bank opposite

And this is the boundary stone between the two parishes of Rotherhithe and Deptford. So next entry will be Deptford....