The Book of Sifty

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HTTP 500 - Internal server error
So it has been for many days. I take it since Ash is away the server is down and much time and bandwidth wasting fun is on hold.

Well the promised write up of my walk to work.
For the last three weeks I've been working at a big law firm in The City. The City is the oldest part of London, but is now a fully business, suit filled, serious and less residential part of London.

The walk from The Borough, where I've been staying, is through quite a strange bit of town. It's very old, and ten years ago was very run down. It's now a strange mix of expensive converted warehouse apartments, small office blocks, some of the Southbank university's builings and abandoned buildings.

Once I reached the Thames I turned left, walking through one of the older parts of London, London Bridge, on narrow cobbled streets. People have been living here for over 2000 years apparently. Its quite freaky since some of it looks like it hasn't changed for at least 300 years. Anyway its past the ANZ bank HQ. (Yep they have the ANZ here, although its just the investment branch and no banking service apparently. I was quite blown when I first noticed the label on the building one Sunday arvo on the way to the pub!) Past some old sailing boat (The Hinde?), of which I know nothing. Past the ruins of Winchester Palace, and The Clink. An old prison where the slang name for prison, 'the clink', comes from.

After this i was right beside the river Thames, on the Thames path. After a couple of classic old pubs, which probably have their own history, its past the reconstructed Globe theatre. Shakespeare's old haunt, further along the river is the Millennium bridge. Which is quite a stylee suspension footbridge they built for the millennium. It's the first new bridge over the Thames for something like 100 years (other new ones have been built but are replacing existing ones). This bridge was closed about 3 days after opening, since it wobbled around when people walked on it. In fact I saw a video at the national museum the other day of it on the second day. And it was flapping around like nothing. The problem was it would start swaying, then people would step sideways to counter it and stop themselves falling over. They ended up doing this in synch with everybody else, and this of course made the wobble worse... closed system feedback and all that. So they have closed it while they fit shock absorbers to the bottom of it, to damp the sway (all you mechanical engineers would be fascinated I'm sure, more about it here if you care).

On from here is the Tate Modern. A massive modern art museum built in an old coal power station, by the same people who knocked up the bridge i mentioned before. Modern Art isn't entirely my bag, but the building rocks. Then it's over the Thames and into work.

Well that was the walk to work since I finished there on Monday.