The Road to Millwall (4)

Date: 16 March 2011 20:48:52

Or:

Somewhere Over The Railway

Also Known As:

Funny sort of recession, innit?

I've often been able to spot previous economic "downturns" because the amount of construction going on around me goes down. It was especially obvious in the brief blip in the late 1980s/early 1990s - the number of tower cranes visible from the window of my office fell from over 100 to 30 in a few weeks and then went down almost to zero.

Doesn't seem to have happened this time. As you can see from these pictures, that's not where we are at these days at all. Not where I live, anyway. Its swamped with construction projects. As we can see from these pictures of yet another way to get to the Millwall ground - this time by walking across Deptford Park and along Surrey Canal Road. Take a look at some of the smaller pictures - cranes and construction in almost all of them.

We start by going round the corner to Jerrard Street. Our view is blocked by this huge construction site:

But we take our stand by a smaller one:

Straight ahead we can see a railway arch (surprise, surprise, the first of many) and, Somewhere Over The Railway. more construction going on

Our mission today (should we choose to accept it) takes us on a 47 bus along Brookmill Road and into Deptford Church Street.

They even let buses into pubs nowadays:

I like the look of London in the rain. The sky is the the right colour for the buildings. And the more spectacular of the new buildings know that and (literally) reflect it - they gave up trying to look Mediterranean or Manhattanish, and settled for shiny, wet, and yellowish-grey.

Then left at the bottom of Church Street and up Evelyn Street. You get off just after the fire station, by the canal bridge, (not that there is any canal any more) and turn left and walk into the park. You can see the power station in the distance.

We've not got away from either construction or railways though. We need to dogleg left into Surrey Canal Road (people younger than me can still remember when it was a canal) through one of the nastiest junctions in London. For cyclists, anyway. Three roads approach the same spot (four if you count a sort of slipway into a lorry park beside the railway) and all are blind - two of them have bends, two have sudden slopes, two go through railway bridges - so each road has at least two reasons why you can;t see what's coming.

Now we are on familiar territory - yet more railway bridges:

And the power station - we must be near!

Under one more bridge then turn into this inviting driveway and the stadium is in front of us.

Past the place where you can just about see the Big Screen from outside the ground - you can tell it by the heap of empty beer cans and fag ends and the strategically placed old mattresses and dead fridges for kids to stand on

And now we can draw nil-nil with Nottingham Forest.

But its OK, because I'm posting these with a huge lag so I already know that it gets better next week....