A Walk around Greenwich Peninsula

The development on Greenwich Peninsula is being described in the marketing literature as ‘New London’. Situated by North Greenwich Station and the O2 Arena/ Millennium Dome on a peninsula jutting out into the River Thames, the development boasts of 17,000 new homes and 12,000 new jobs. It’s built on what was once Bugsby’s Marshes or Greenwich Marshes. It was at the centre of Britain’s Millennium celebrations with the building of the Millennium Dome. On a windy day at the end of March I set out to walk this ‘New London’.

This walk starts and ends at the Dome – heading up onto The Tide then walking along Parkside East to Millennium Village and Greenwich Peninsula Ecology Park before following the path along Bugsby’s Reach to Blackwall Point, passing Antony Gormley’s Quantum Cloud sculpture along the way. The walk also has great views across the River Thames to Silvertown, Trinity Buoy Wharf and the Isle of Dogs.

Brave New London at North Greenwich

Greenwich Penninsula

This was the scene that greeted me at North Greenwich Station yesterday as I alighted the bus from Eltham – a brave new world of golden tower blocks rising from Bugsby’s Marshes. Whale oil to property development, money magicked from mud. I’d just gazed across a moat at the Tudor Eltham Palace, and here new palaces stacked atop each other jutting out on a peninsula in the Thames. Eerily the website for the development has a headline that I’ve been using as the work-in-progress title for my new book.