The Thames Barrier

We spent the weekend staying out in Greenwich with Julian and Shelley. Part of our weekend involved adventuring along the Thames walk eventually leading us to the Thames Barrier (which has been on my “things to see in London” list since we moved here). It’s a rather impressive feat of modern engineering!

The walk was waaaaayyyy longer than we had realised! To get there we walked through some lovely industrial estates, complete with enticing aromas of…. actually I don’t know what that smell was, but the closest I could get is “fart gas”. Yuk. Apparently there’s supposed to be a lovely “green chain” walk that we should have been doing, but between the four of us, we somehow missed it.

Finally we got to the barrier, and we stood and “ooohhed” and “ahhhed” at it for a while. Our only complaint was there was no pictures that we could see of the barrier when it was closed, so we could only wonder as to precisely how it works. (When we got home, we found an image of them in closed position which served only to make us ponder further.)

A little bit later we came across a big slippery slide, and suddenly our pondering about how the barrier works fell into insignificance.

Continuing on our active weekend theme, we took to J&S’s backyard for a spot of frisbee throwing on Sunday morning (after our peach pancakes, of course). We all quickly realised that we were not the frisbee champions that we had thought we were. Julian summed it up best by saying, “if there was someone from the middle ages watching us play this game, they’d think the aim was to throw the round disc carelessly, and then say “sorry!”.”