London Nov 2018 394 - Tower Bridge contrasting with the modernity

            I made my annual trip to London in November, as ever, the only bloke in a coach full of women. I think it’s my 16th year now. A fund-raising trip in aid of Slaithwaite Brass Band it started as a one day trip and eleven years ago we started to stay overnight Sat/Sun at The Cumberland Hotel at Marble Arch, a superb central location. Leaving at seven we are usually at the hotel for 11.45 subject to traffic. We usually have really good weather, this year though Saturday was really wet, I was probably the only person on the trip who wasn’t bothered, having made the trip so many times I was looking forward to getting photos on the busy streets in the wet, all reflections and umbrellas, something different for a change. I headed off with my camera and backpack as soon as we got there. Currently struggling with a damaged ankle, I tried to keep the kit to a minimum and in the end, I decided to stick with my 16-35mm lens all weekend. I started with the Selfridges Christmas window display and worked my way to Piccadilly, making sure I found a licensed café for late lunch and a glass of wine (two actually) I was meeting my daughters and two of their friends to take them out later so I was working to a bit of an agenda.
After eating Italian, we popped along to the Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park only to find that they stopped serving food and drink at 10.00pm-it was the drink that we were after needless to say so we went back to the City of Quebec pub near the hotel. We were directed to the night club downstairs. Having been upstairs many times we had no idea the Quebec was a gay pub- we soon realised when we got downstairs. We had a good laugh and a drink or two and made it in before midnight.
I checked out loaded up with a beautiful breakfast at 8.15 on Sunday. It had dried up and was a glorious sunny day, a complete contrast to Saturday. I felt like I had London to myself for a while and made good progress, I made it to Covent Garden by 9.15. I walked through Seven Dials, Theatreland, Chinatown, St Pauls, crossed the Thames and down to Tower Bridge. I covered about ten Miles each day and took around 800 shots, mostly in the rain on Saturday.
I was father Christmas again on the way home, we all buy a mystery present and I get the job of going around the coach distributing them, there’s some serious drinking on the way home so things can get a bit boisterous at the back of the coach. We left at 3.15, had an overlong break at Tibshelf services and we were back in Slaithwaite for 8.30. A few of us dragged our bags to The Little Bridge wine bar for another latish night, followed by an early start for me unfortunately.

   

Taken on: November 27, 2018

Tags:

LONDON

CITY

BRIDGE

RIVER

PEOPLE

STREET

STREETLIFE

ARCHITECTURE

PLACE

MONOCHROME

BLACK

WHITE

ST PAULS

REFLECTIONS « less

Sets appears in: • London • London November 2018 more » • It's a Monochrome World « less

Stats: 1,668 views

close tools panel

Badge creator

Use Flickriver Badge Creator to create a badge linking to your photos, your group or any other Flickriver view.

You can place your badge on your Flickr profile, Blog or Website.

Add to your iGoogle or Netvibes page

Flickriver widget for iGoogle or Netvibes can display almost any Flickriver view - most interesting today, by user, by group, by tag etc. Once added to your personalized homepage, just edit widget settings to select your desired view.

Clickr on one of the buttons below to install:

Embed on your Web site

To embed this view, Copy and Paste the following HTML code:

Black background (preview):

White background (preview):

Firefox and Chrome addons

Adds a 'Flickriver' button to your browser. While viewing any Flickr photos page, click on this button to open the same view on Flickriver.

Install in Firefox
Install in Chrome

Search plugin

Add 'Search on Flickriver' to your browser's search box. Works with Firefox and Internet Explorer. Install search plugin

"View on Flickriver" Greasemonkey script

A Greasemonkey script that adds Flickriver links to various Flickr photo pages - user photos, favorites, pools etc, allowing to quickly open the corresponding Flickriver view.

Also, allows quickly viewing any Flickr photo on black background in large size.

Install "View on Flickriver" script

Bookmarklet

While viewing any Flickr photos page, click on the bookmarklet to open the same view on Flickriver.

To install: drag and drop the following link to your Bookmarks toolbar.
IE users - add the link to your Favorites under the Links folder