Tag: tourism

Visiting the Thames Barrier – the fiddliest daytrip in London

Its gleaming gates rise from the murky waters of the River Thames, and next week one of the country’s most under-sung feats of engineering will receive a visit from one of its highest-profile fans, the Emperor of Japan. But for most of us, planning a trip there is unbelievably fiddly.

Its gleaming gates rise from the murky waters of the River Thames like towers in a medieval castle wall, and next week one of the country’s most under-sung feats of engineering will receive a visit from one of its highest-profile fans.

The Emperor and Empress of Japan are making a private trip to the Thames Barrier before the engagements of their state visit next week. According to a touching article in The Times, Emperor Naruhito, when crown prince, devoted his postgraduate thesis to the river while at Oxford University in the 1980s.

And why shouldn’t they? To stand only metres from one of those giant rotating gates is awe-inspiring.

Except, unless you’re the Emperor of Japan and have imperial levels of administrative support (well, access to private boat trips and chauffeurs), the planning is unbelievably fiddly. In which case, read on.

For the steel-gated super-structure is surprisingly inaccessible.

I wanted to go because my five-year-old son is a budding engineer, into steam trains, diesels, modern trains, trams, buses and so on – and his grandparents were visiting us.

We needed a rainproof daytrip with multi-generational appeal, ie suitable for differing concentration spans and levels of mobility: one member of the group would want to run around constantly; another member would really not.

Even in five years, minus the lockdowns, we’ve ticked off many London attractions. So I cast my mind east and settled on the Thames Barrier. It’s one of the largest movable flood barriers in the world, according to the Environment Agency. And climate change is only making flood defences more topical. The other adults assured me they wouldn’t find it too nerdy.

That was the easy part. I imagined there would be a visitor centre just next to the barrier, from where a boat-trip would take visitors right up close. And a shop where you could buy postcards, cups of tea and books about Charles Draper, the engineer whose cooker’s gas taps gave him the inspiration for the rotating gates.

I adjusted my expectations when I found the barrier isn’t obvious from Google Maps. Que?

And if you want to pass between its gates by boat, the nearest pier is more than 1.5 miles away from the visitor centre car park.

Let’s start with the boat part.

You can take the Uber Clipper, which sails through the barrier, to Royal Woolwich Arsenal, disembark, have a quick coffee, and sail back the other way. There is a Thames Barrier Park on the other side of the river, so, on your return trip you’d need to hop back only one stop to Royal Wharf Pier, and then it’s a 15-20-minute walk away. Apparently there’s a great café there and some eye-impressive topiary, but we didn’t get there because the mobility issues put it out of our reach.

Yours to print out and draw on any missing elements

So accustomed am I to Google’s omniscience that I feel cheated when it turns out to be fallible and I should have consulted other, more British maps, such as Streetmap. So Royal Woolwich Arsenal, for example, is not just the old military buildings turned into tidy streets of private residences. A coffee shop is squeezed into one of two Grade 2-listed guardrooms, and the large Visitors’ Book Café, which has a full brunch menu, sits just the other side of a courtyard adorned with sculptures. Neither of these was obvious in advance. Had they been, we could have enjoyed some shakshuka or avocado on sourdough – tastier than a hasty sandwich on the boat.

Between the pale grey sky and murky grey river we sailed, and passing through such powerful gates was a privilege, if a fleeting one. The Thames Barrier Park being out of our reach, we opted to pad our day out with a quick stop at Greenwich, where the grounds of the Cutty Sark, with their benches and ice cream vans, are clearly more accustomed to welcoming visitors.

There is a visitor centre, next to the barrier, but it’s only open – and its phone is only picked up – for five hours on a Saturday. The boat stops a further 1.7 miles away, so if you want to visit, you’ll need a bus or a car. We returned to Royal Woolwich Arsenal, picked up our car and drove east down a busy A road through a markedly unloved part of town that has you questioning your eyes and your memory. Did I really see a sign? Did it really point down here?

Past the tired garages and up and down over untarred roads finally looms a tall, more promising sight. Sadly, having wanted to prioritise the boat trips, we arrived at the centre at 3.37pm to find it shut. Peering through a window of the centre I saw a notice that said the centre was only open by prior appointment.

Finally paying homage, from the Thames Path beyond the shut Visitor Centre

Nonetheless, being close to the steel that was dazzling in the sunlight that had finally broken through, reinforcing the awe of seeing the structure from the water. The Thames Path bears an attractive mural of the course of the river from its source, though that its main audience when we visited – joggers – looked straight ahead. As for our five-year-old, awe-struck as he was, he also really enjoyed the little play park outside the visitor centre.

This last part will be less important to Their Majesties, but I hope their visit sparks a new interest in the structure that leads to it becoming easier to admire up close and be inspired by. There are some great things to see and do here, but it took perseverance to make them align. And the next time I go to an attraction and inwardly grumble that its marketing is too slick, I’ll remember what a hassle it is to visit something less joined up.

Five things you need to do if you’re going on holiday anywhere

Should we care about the human rights record of the country whose beaches we’re about to bake ourselves on? That is the question posed by the latest issue of the Index on Censorship, which pokes a light into the murkier side of some popular tourist destinations. Mexico’s drugs war and murder rate cast a shadow over its idyllic beaches; Sri Lanka has renewed powers to jail journalists; the Maldives has allowed radical Islam to flourish and democratic gains to wither.

A panel of travel journalists explored the ethics of travel journalism, and whether glossy, picture-led features should also mention a country’s dirty laundry. The popular format of ‘Ten Mexican resorts on a budget’ was considered too narrow a format to get into such things. In the discussion that followed it emerged that the flowers and candles left in Valletta in memory of the assassinated Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia have been cleared away at least 12 times; the number of tourists visiting Turkey not fallen since President Erdogan has clamped down on press freedom; in Sri Lanka efforts to offer tourists the experience of life on a tea plantation backfired when the local press savaged an initiative whereby tourists could spend a night in the home of a poorly paid, marginalised tea picker.

One problem panellists identified was in challenging a deeply carved narrative. Picking tea is not romantic. If section editors (and fat-walleted advertisers) want sun and flip-flops then they won’t want a piece complicated by mention of human rights abuses. Conversely, a section editor who believed Cambodia = genocide, an example cited by Harriet Fitch Little, was reluctant to hear how the country has stabilised over the last 20 years. Then there was the charge of “pink-washing”, mentioned in relation to Tel Aviv – where a destination’s self-promotion as gay-friendly distracts attention away from a complicated human rights record, in this instance Israel’s in the Palestinian Territories.

Benji Lanyado, the male panellist, recommended using Airbnb and spending time chatting to locals to find out what they considered to be the big local issues. In many cultures this is far more straightforward and less risky if you are male. Sri Lankan-born Meera Selva added that offering to listen to someone’s story can do more harm than good if you hear a tale of hardship, thank them and walk away.

Engagement is challenging. But among panellists and audience there was a strong desire for ethical, thoughtful travel that left consumerist escapism far behind.

Many holidays are marketed as one or two weeks of sunshine / pool / peace and quiet or [fill in the blank] in a mythical paradise which could be anywhere hot and affordable. But commodifying a place reduces it to its heat, its beach, its clubs. The people who live there become almost immaterial, reduced to staff, strangers or threats. Engaging with a place helps to ensure the people who live there are not dehumanised. True, it’s not easy to strike up conversation with a stranger that goes beyond directions or sales – especially across a language barrier. But such a conversation allows the humanising process to go both ways; Westerns are not just cash cows (however daft we get when we don a sun hat).

The most meaningful place I’ve found for engaging with people in a holiday destination was on a particularly difficult overseas trip. I was with my father, we had run out of motivation to be away, and on the Sunday we went to the local church, and stayed for its pot luck lunch. It was by far the best meal of the trip, though I couldn’t tell you what we ate. I do, however, remember home-cooked food from people who accepted us as we were. I’ve repeated that experiment on happier trips, and even without the free lunch, a humble, ordinary church service has offered a snapshot of a community and a way of hearing its concerns. But you don’t have to go to church; for me talking to a restaurant owner on a struggling Greek island in 2015 made the country’s economic crisis tangible.

So five things, if you like:

Before you go, look up a destination’s human or religious rights record (the consensus was against boycotting countries because engagement was considered more valuable). There might be heroes to celebrate, as well as white-washed narratives to look out for.

When you’re there, buy a local paper, assuming it’s in a language you can just about understand.

Don’t depress yourself with disaster memorials you’re not in the mood for but do stimulate your brain with a curiosity for what’s around you.

Try the local church/synagogue/mosque – whatever you’d attend at home.

Look for ways to have more meaningful conversations and let me know where you find them.