🌹🎶 Seasonal Sparkle 1: Turning Tides
A ramble along a stretch of London's famed waterway
🌹🎶 Seasonal Sparkle 1: Turning Tides
As the year ripens through autumnal pumpkins and crystallises into midwinter festivals of light, I’ll be sharing a weekly sparkle from my seasonal rambles. Celebrating the restorative power of natural highs and following whimsical moments of inspiration, I’ll sketch sights, sounds and stories to mark the turning of the season.
Do let me know what the season is sparking for you in the comments. You’re also warmly invited to come and sparkle at my Winter Sparkle Concert on 6th December.
We begin with a riverside ramble as the mellow days of October tumble into the tides.
Burnt autumnal leaves framing my vistas, I rambled along the Thames on a warm October afternoon, embarking at Rotherhithe, crossing the river at tourist-camera-clad Tower Bridge, and wandering through Wapping to Canary Wharf.
A lone boat bobbing about amidst skyscrapered skylines, I docked off at a few of the many Watermen’s Stairs studding the waterway. These narrow steep-stepped pathways drop suddenly into the swirling waters, teeming with a multitude of ghosts - from everyday traders and travellers to suicidal passengers and notorious pirates dangling from gibbets. Rocky Thames beaches, splintered with timbers, open out into views of luxury yachts, industrial wharves and riverside monuments.
Skewered between tall buildings, the sky carries whisps of clouds and a whisper of winter’s chill. I walk to carry the light away in my pockets, to capture pristine moments of curious beauty to tide me through the impending gloom. I walk to free myself from boxed-in city life and bathe in rippling riverscapes.
Quiet riverside parks and memorials harbour hopes of peace, whilst the din of urban transport rumbles on. Traffic light leaves flicker through a cascade of colour, tumbling over tree barks and spiked railings. Squirrels scurry close, tamed by human feeding, in parks splattered with human construction signs.
Costly empires of commerce stand mirroring cloud faces, caging canary workers in little boxes of light whilst mining for profits. Undeterred, the river swells, tugs and rows on, rhythmic tides turning with the times.
I do love the water steps down to the river, where you can imagine Samuel Pepys hailing a boatman to whisk him from Whitehall to Greenwich, or Christopher Marlowe slipping aboard a wherry at Deptford to escape a London that has become too hot for even him to handle...