Fun London
The lowest point
Once upon a time. That’s a terrible beginning for any story. But that’s the beginning of this story. A story of sights, sounds, and gingers. Let’s begin.
A wise man said that only a ginger may call another ginger “ginger”. He also said “cheese”, a lot, and had a penchant for lunging. This wise man’s name is Tim. Tim is an entertainer from a strange country called Oz. We went to see Tim in his “show” before we decided to run around our nation’s capital. It was funny. Very funny.
This running challenge is about running to the highest point in each county. That means that there is also a lowest point in all these hills. Our low point was London. Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t an emotional low point (that crown goes to Suffolk), but physically the lowest county top is in London. As hinted to above, we went to see Tim Minchin the night before our run, the plan was to then start at the end of Kensington Gardens and run through (most) of the royal parks, then along the river, taking in the delights (read: crowds) at Covent Garden before making the long arduous ascent to….22 meters.
The plan started well - we dropped our bags near Blackfriars, but it turns out London had a little surprise for us, in the guise of the lord mayor’s show. What is that I hear you ask? Exactly. We’ve seen it and we aren’t any the wiser. Catching the central line to Queensway we made our way to the edge of Kensington garden, trying not to make eye contact with the local wildlife lest they think we were breakfast (REALLY BIG RATS; gross). We started, true to all form, by going in the wrong direction. Thankfully, an overly-familiar Londoner tried to befriend us (I think he must have been new to London), so we made our excuses and got back on course, running past the round pond and into Hyde park along the Serpentine, making sure to spend a penny on the way. Duck! Ha ha ha, there were ducks. And Herons. And seagulls, and stuff like that scattered in amongst the crowds enjoying a lovely stroll in the park.
Well, until two sweaty fools came barrelling through them, scaring pigeons left, right and centre. We cut across the corner from the end of the Serpentine to Rotten row, leaving the parks and heading across Wellington place.
Out the other side we emerged next to Buckingham palace, giving Lizzy a wave, around Canada gate and into St James’ park. Dodging, pigeons and tourists; a blight on this earth, we ran over the bridge and emerged on to the corner of Parliament square. This is where the fun began. By fun, I mean semi-jogging passively aggressively behind oblivious tourists running whenever a gap opened up. We joined the river Thames at Westminster bridge passing the vacationers gawping at the fake façade covering Big Ben - yet still taking photos! Strange people.
Taking the clear path up the river, we ran past Embankment to Waterloo bridge, diverting up to the theatre district by the Lyceum. We headed up Drury lane (no sign of the muffin man though. The muffin man? Yes, the muffin man who lives on Drury lane).
We emerged on to High Holborn road, almost the highest point, and trotted over to a derelict church with a Greco front, next to the museum of comedy (ha!). We snapped our obligatory “summit” selfie, and backtracked to the river.
It turns out that London had anticipated our run and had kindly closed all the roads from Waterloo bridge all the way to Blackfriars bridge. How nice (nothing to do with the “Lord Mayor’s show”).
(Julie made me mention this “best” bit) Just as we were getting back to the station after collecting our bags we encountered “brass band Bon Jovi” - a brass band playing Jon Bon Jovi’s classic hit ‘Bad Medicine’. Certainly an experience I’ll never forget.
All in all not a bad run - certainly better than expected given it was a Saturday afternoon in London. Weather was a bit crap, but it was also in November, so can’t complain. It was fun, we saw lots of different landmarks, including the Great Albert Hall, Kensington Palace, Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, Houses of Parliament, Nelson’s column, Covent Garden and St Paul’s cathedral. Call us tourists.
NB: My GPS device was miscalibrated so put our elevation at ~100 metres - this was definitely not the case! The height of Holborn Hill is a dizzying 22metres, so here’s the OS map we used with our route drawn out in faint pencil.
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