The Greenway of East London

I walked to the Abbey Mills pumping station from West Ham tube station, taking a route along something called the Greenway. I thought it was a disused train track that had been converted in a similar way to the High Line in NY, but I was wrong.

It was actually part of Bazelgette's great work and one of the reasons for Abbey Mills.

Those great pumps that look like ammonites rise the waste up so it can fall under gravity to the outflow in Beckton. As the land is pretty flat it means that at this end the pipes must be several metres above ground level. So under this track are a number of huge pipes flowing down to the Thames.

While walking along the Greenway I had a flash back to a few years earlier, September 2012, when I'd walked that way without knowing what it was.

It had been near midnight just after the end of the final event of one of the greatest summers that London has known, the Closing Ceremony of the Paralympics:

It makes me sad as I look at the chaos today to remember those wonderful days and weeks when the UK was united and positive.