Images from a day-long drift in East London's edgelands, then into the centre of the city along its central river artery, on bikes & other modes of transport: Richmond to Stratford - the Olympic site (thousands of construction workers arriving on trains and buses, a huge crowd of blokes smoking, drinking coffee, eating before their shift: one guy doing all three simultaneously, burger, fag, plastic-lidded takeaway cup; then a flood of people in hi-vis jackets climbing up the steps behind the station, like a sort of slo-mo industrial Busby Berkeley-scale postmodern/pedestrian choreography; two bouncers in suits and shades checking their passes at the gate).
Then past the View Tube, deserted at this hour, still only 7.00-ish, and on to Hackney Marsh - Leyton - Walthamstow - Lea Valley - the rare 'delights' of the Lea Valley industrial estate / London Waste 'eco-park' (about which Iain Sinclair writes with such corrosive and enraged melancholy in London Orbital) - Meridian Way - Enfield Lock - Cheshunt, and a perfectly sculpted Mr Whippy from a narrow boat on the canal, sold to us by a man drinking both a glass of white wine and a can of Tennant's.
Back down along Lea Valley to Stratford - Bow - Poplar - Isle of Dogs - Canary Wharf and St Catherine's Dock on one side, on the other a more immediate face-off with the 02 arena (another Sinclair target, the 'sorry meniscus', a 'genetically modified mollusc', a 'blob of congealed correction fluid', the 'Doom of Discovery' 'tricked out with yellow cocktail sticks' etc.).
Then underground through the Greenwich foot tunnel to the south side of the river - Greenwich - Deptford - along the Thames through the City to the West End & London Eye on a nippy clipper - and finally Waterloo to Richmond.
So, a giant L reversed, west to east to north to south to west
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