Adventure on the Blue Bridge on the Isle of Dogs

To those of you unfamiliar with the Isle of Dogs, this is the blue bridge on the east side of the island that can be lifted for access of river-faring vehicles to the docks.  It has a great view over to the east of the O2 arena and over to the west of the tower blocks in Canary Wharf; nice place for a picture on a sunny day.  On three occasions in the past month I encountered something interesting while trying to exit the island using this bridge.  Two of these involved the bridge being opened to let ships in/out; perhaps it is a bit naive to be so excited about this but it seems ingenious to me that we can make tools that help us make the most of our surroundings and facilitate our lives.  I get equally excited when I see Tower Bridge lifted for the same reason; its not the scale of the operation but the fact that it works at all that interests me.

The other incident was perhaps a little more unusual in that it has nothing to do with the normal function of the bridge.  I saw a funeral procession in the street for the first time in my life; on this occasion they were crossing the bridge.  I have no idea who was being buried but it was a slow procession led by a man in a top hat and penguin suit.  As I wasn't on any urgent business, I found it amusing to watch this happen as I waited to go on my way; it was something that added colour to London life.  I am sure some of the other motorists didn't think so.

Road closures everywhere

Its Jubilee holiday weekend and the 2012 Olympics are not far around the corner.  Things are really hotting up in the city and the increasing number of road closures is irritating.  

For months the Hammersmith Flyover has not been operational and it has been a pain in the backside to get to Heathrow Airport to pick up and drop off visitors by car.  Travelling in to, and out of, the city from Heathrow by underground is a possiblility but it gets extremely crowded on the Piccadilly line as it approximates central London and disembarking from the train with luggage is a problem.  Besides, lift availablility at the tube stations are so unpredictable that travellers often risk having to carry their luggage up many steps of staircases.  Pick up and set down by car allows our visitors to circumvent issues like these but the trip is particularly difficult to plan at the moment: it is impossible to predict how long it would take to get to Heathrow because of the traffic problems caused by the repairs of the Hammersmith Flyover.

There are numerous road closures over the Jubilee holiday weekend.  Whilst this is an occasion for celebration in the UK, the lives of motorists have been made harder by the road closures around Buckingham Palace in preparation for the concert in front of the Palace.  I was driving to work the other day and in an effort to avoid Trafalgar Square where traffic is always almost bad, I drove along St. James Park from Westminster towards Hyde Park along the Mall.  Traffic here is usually not too bad but on this particular day last week it was.  I knew that some of the roads between Victoria and Buckingham Palace have been closed off from a previous trip in the area but I didn't realise that part of the Mall was closed as well so that all the traffic was diverted towards Piccadilly.  As there is usually quite a lot of traffic in the latter anyway, cars were jammed up along part of the Mall trying to get through the diversion.  While I understand the importance of a spectacle on a celebratory occasion, I think the prolonged closure of roads in preparation for such events is detrimental to the general well-being of the wider public who need to be able to go about their usual business without too much disruption.  Did the preparations need to be this elaborate?

There are also quite a lot of road closures in East London in preparation for the Olympics.   The security checkpoint near one of the large shopping centers by the Olympic site in Stratford is already operational and to date I have been stopped there three times out of four visits by car already.  I found out today that the car-parking facilities in the shopping center will not be available from the second week of June as these have been commissioned for use for the Olympics.  One could get to the shopping center by public transport, of course; but public transport is often undergoing remedial or extension work at the weekends which makes travelling to the shopping center time consuming and inconvenient.  Excellent.  I don't think I will be shopping there for a while.