Views from the Gherkin

A couple of weeks ago I dragged Lesley along to the top floor of the Gherkin for some champagne at the Searcy's bar there. It was pretty expensive (£15 a glass, so my sister might have a point when she says I've got more money than sense), but for the experience of going up a tall building in London and taking photos, it was worth the money.

The light on the day wasn't great, unfortunately, and it had been raining just before we got there, so the photos aren't the best quality (although some of them do have a kind of vintage cinema sheen to them because they're a bit fuzzy). However the views were amazing, and we had fun playing spot-the-landmark, and in my case, spot-the-buildings-I've-been-to-before.

The Gherkin is one of those buildings that looks quite delicate from afar, and then you get up close and you realise it's flipping massive.

The bar is actually right in the top of the building:

Very tall buildings and raindrops:

(I have briefly been to the bar in this one and posted photos here: http://metropolithan.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/views-from-heron-tower.html)

View towards Canary Wharf:

Two stupid buildings (seriously, what is that one on the left doing?):

Tower Bridge/Tower of London/City Hall etc.:

And finally, the building on the right of this picture (with the red umbrellas) is the Allen and Overy officers, where I went last year as part of Open House (pics here: http://metropolithan.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/open-hooooooouse-2015-9.html).

Open Hooooooooouse 2015 #1

To start: Open House is a very big deal to me. It’s basically my favourite weekend of the year. I was trying to explain it to my new boss – who had known me for all of six weeks by this point – and she said ‘you’re so excited, it’s like Christmas’ and she’s right. It’s like the whole city is there as a present. 

You know, once upon a time, I considered – seriously considered – moving out of London. HA HA HA HA. 

I’ve done Open House six or seven times now (with a few years’ break when I was always in Cornwall on holiday at the time) and I have got much better at planning it over time, which I will now demonstrate. Previously my record of sites was 9 over two days – not too shabby, and still enough to get me strange looks – but this year I managed THIRTEEN sites over the weekend. 

It was amazing. I had such a great time. The planning process, if anyone’s interested, runs like this: 

1) Get book and go through, marking everything that looks interesting. 
2) Go through again a few days later and narrow it down, discounting anything that requires pre-booking (not a bad thing but I like having flexibility), and/or is open to the public at other times. 3) Plot remaining sites on a Google map to work out where they all are in relation to each other. 4) Add info to map points about opening times. 
5) Work out travel times/distances between sites combined with opening times to make final decision. 

I started off on Saturday morning getting stuck at Lewisham station after the doors stopped working on my train. I noticed a new apartment building that had appeared from nowhere behind Matalan, but this is Lewisham, where new apartment buildings appear at a rate of one a month. Eventually a new train turned up and I headed off to Custom House, currently used by HMRC and previously where customs duties were collected when ships came in to London. 

It’s an imposing building, built in the early 19th century (with some rebuilding since), and inside it looks like most older buildings still in use in London – mostly normal but then with some really interesting period features, in this case the Long Room (190 feet long, in fact) - now in use as a very very big open plan office - and some big staircases. There were also some interesting displays on things confiscated by customs (including rare animals) and the different aspects of HMRC’s work now. Sadly they’re only open to the public for Open House.

After Custom House I walked up to Tower Bridge to visit Tower Bridge House, a building constructed mostly of glass which looks a bit like the new front of Blackfriars station (also mostly glass). Slightly confusing at times tbh. Anyway, I’d decided to visit this site because the book talked about a ‘giant window’ that overlooked the Tower of London (not hard to do by Tower Bridge, admittedly) and it was energy efficient and all that. It was worth it, as the view was great and the construction of the building was interesting as well - really nice use of light and space:

Views from Heron Tower

Today I went up to town with my sister and her bf as I wanted to go to the plaza under the Cheesegrater. Unfortunately we got up there and the plaza was shut off (damn) so we wandered around aimlessly (FYI there's a lego model of the Gherkin outside the Gherkin...) until we decided to go up Heron Tower to Duck and Waffle for a drink. Unfortunately they were too busy to serve us which has turned out to be a good thing now I know the wine list starts at £40 a bottle!

Anyhoo, Heron Tower is 46 floors' worth of premium office space near Liverpool Street Station which opened in 2011. The fishtank in reception is the largest privately-owned aquarium in the UK and has an entirely sustainable ecosystem (!). Sadly we didn't go in to the main building so I don't have any pictures but it is pretty impressive even just walking past.

I took these photos in the lift on the way up so please excuse the quality as they were taken through two layers of glass.

Phoenix Garden

A colleague told me about this place a while ago, and as we had a lovely sunny break in the rain on Wednesday I decided to go along to see what it was like.


The Phoenix Garden is a community garden in Covent Garden, just off Shaftesbury Avenue (it's on Stacey St - turn off next to the Odeon). It's a gorgeous quiet space with lots of flowers, a couple of ponds, plenty of benches and a LOT of insects. Watch out if you don't like flying stingy things; I know bees aren't going to sting me but aaaaaaaaargh they make me jump.


There's also other wildlife - the damselflies were particularly exciting to me - including a cat that was enjoying the sunshine.

I'd like to tell everyone to go (and pretty much the first email I sent the next day was telling people where it was) but then it would get crowded so...maybe don't all go at once?

And some of the flowers growing in the garden:

Website: http://www.thephoenixgarden.org/