Friday, July 09, 2021

Lea Valley Walk 1: Trinity Buoy Wharf to Three Mills


This is part of the Lea Valley Walk proper, and I used this guide from TFL, though walking the route in reverse, a total here of 6.3 km from the cable car to Bromley-by-Bow tube.

The developments being thrown up all along the walk mean there were routing options not shown on the TFL map. Some of these were visible on Google Maps (as above) but this was wrong too If you look about half way up you'll see a yellow arrow. This was a section where Google Maps showed a nice riverside walk ending up at Cody Dock, but reality it ended up at a metal fence.

I wasn't the only one confused, as there were two young woman also puzzling how to proceed. However we worked out the thing to do was to clamber round the metal fence into what looked like a builder's yard and then get out from that via the fence with the "absolutely no admittance" sign on it.

Moral of the story: don't rely on Google maps to show public rights of way.

Anyhow, starting at Trinity Buoy Wharf, the route initially goes around the various loops of the Lea River, with coloured apartment blocks and the DLR snaking between them:


This development calls itself London City Island, which is odd as it a) isn't an island b) isn't in the City of London.

Then there's a seriously industrial bit before getting to the waterside walk that ended in the metal fence:


You can see that getting round the side isn't that hard. Beyond is Cody Dock, which looked like a cool place to hang out:


Not sure the above is on The Line sculpture trail, but the one below was. It's called DNA DL90, and, yes it's made up of old shopping trolleys arranged into a double helix:


From here it was a short walk to the lovely Three Mills:


These were tidal mills and the site goes back many hundreds of years - all the way to the Doomsday Book. I really should come back and explore this more, but during lockdown it wasn't possible to go inside.

In this case I felt that was enough for one day and made my way to Bromley-On-Bow and the tube home.

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