Stave Hill is out near Canada Water, which is in the borough of Southwark. It's a very odd place, the kind of thing you don't know is there unless you a) live there or b) find it by accident when you're wandering and have failed to look at a map (ahem).
(actually, Wikipedia tells me it's part of Russian Dock Woodland, so I've learned something new today!)
The hill itself is constructed from rubble left over from the clearance of the docks (it dates from 1985), and from what information I can find, it pretty much looks like it was created to give people a good view of the buildings at Docklands and of the surrounding area. I appreciate this a lot - it can be quite hard to find places above street level to get decent photos.
When you go up the hill to the viewing platform at the top there's also an awesome relief map of the former docks (by Michael Rizzello).
And when you've come back down you can go for a walk around the woods and Stave Hill Ecological Park, although I'm not entirely sure where one ends and the other begins (that's the problem with not looking at maps until after you've been somewhere...). Still, here are a few photos from one or the other:
The Lloyds Building on Lime Street (very near the Gherkin) is an interesting one. It used to be one of my least favourite buildings, but I guess over time I've just got used to it and now I can appreciate the structure and I like the shapes (also, much like the Barbican, it's good for those times you want to pretend you're in a sci-fi film).
It dates from 1986 (you could probably have guessed the decade, right?) and was designed so that as much infrastructure as possible was on the outside - lifts, air con, plumbing etc.
PS: I looked up where the name Lime Street came from in case it was something interesting, but like most of the streets around there it just refers to what was sold there.
