I'm going to be out all day, in "regenerated" Docklands (West India
Docks, to be precise), where independent retailers are very thin on the
ground.
But I start in West London, with coffee. I have an alarm in my pocket
that goes off at 7.50 every morning to remind me to start writing, and
it goes off just as the train pulls into Gloucester Road. At the Forum
cafe it's already busy (including 3 Mongolian men playing card) but
there are tables free outside An espresso is £1.10, with a" free
croissant before 11am".
I'm heading to the Museum in Docklands for the first time - to do some
background work on a speculative TV pilot I have brewing. And it just
so happened that I turn up on the Museum's 5 birthday. Free entry and
chocolate cake all round. Lunch - somewhere between the Blitz and the
building of Canary Wharf - is a ham sandwich and tea in the museum cafe.
I'm a little shamefaced that I haven't visited this museum before; it's
excellent, with a decent balance between original and interpretive
material, all laid out over three floors of late Georgian Sugar
warehouse, one of the few to survive 1940-41. "Sailor Town" is a
claustrophobic reconstruction of a corner of 19th Century Limehouse,
with some pretty authentically ripe scents impregnated in the walls. It
even has a public house you can sit in, under the baleful glow of a oil
lamp.
It's too hot to go back to the flat and pant in the communal courtyard -
so go to Piccadilly, and the West End Kitchen, for the special - three
course chicken dinner, £8.70, then sit in St James Park reading "The
Longest Night: Voices from the London Blitz" by Gavin Mortimer.
Discover too late that St James Park has mosquitoes the size of Pelicans....
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