Last day in London

Today was our last day in London and the warmest yet. We decided to head east today, having mainly focussed on the west end so far.

We got the Tube to Bank and walked past the Bank of England and Royal Exchange buildings to the Monument, built in 1667 to commemorate the Great Fire of London. The plaques on the Monument make for interesting reading about the fire and the rebuilding of London. (I took photos, but you can read the text of the plaques more easily here:
https://www.themonument.info/history/inscriptio…) .

Next we walked along the Thames towards Tower Bridge and the Tower of London (we didn't go into the Tower and it is really hard to photograph from the outside so you will just have to take my word for it.).

From there, we decided to take the road less travelled and walk along the Thames River Trail, past lots of old buildings converted into riverside apartments in Wapping and old vessels moored on the banks (I googled one, the Marinius, and it is a converted historic Dutch barge home that is for sale for just £1m. It would look lovely on the River Torrens but how would we get it home!). We hardly saw anyone the whole way, who says London is crowded!

The goal was to reach a pub we'd seen on Michel Roux Jnr's show Roux Down the River. The Prospect of Whitby is the countries oldest riverside pub (see photo of the history brochure). It's a charming place and I don't think you could find a place to eat any closer to the river if you tried! We had a tasty lunch and Adrian bought the t-shirt!

We decided to get an Uber back to Oxford St to experience a bit of London traffic. An hour later (it was 8km) and after a lovely conversation about, among other things, the electrification of all London cabs and Ubers, with Terefa, who is from East Africa and supports Chelsea, we jumped out near enough. We had a bit of a wander in the Oxford St shops, including John Lewis, where Adrian had his first full time job at 16.

Dinner was another pre-booked choice and yet another restaurant across the road from our very convenient accommodation, a Michelin starred restaurant called The Ninth, to celebrate the end of a really nice 5 days in London. They were a bit short staffed and so it was not quite the service you'd expect from a Michelin starred restaurant but the food was excellent and the staff who were there were amazing. Having said that, we rated Chef Iñaki's dinner last night better overall.Read more