Ooooh! Another Island

Another island to add to our list (a proper one this time):

Ven (or Hven in Danish and old Swedish) is a small island in the middle of the Öresund strait between Sweden and Denmark. We decided to go there for a day trip on our visit to Copenhagen, and had a lovely time.

It is a charming place, and well worth a visit on a sunny, early summer's day. But more importantly it was home to our favourite 16th century astronomer Tycho Brahe, and we had been wanting to visit there for a number of years.

There is more about Ven on our Virtual Tourist travel page, and you can see all our pictures here.

Dome there, done that - still stinks

In a vain attempt to find some redemption for the Millennium Dome I managed to persuade Dave to take a walk around the Greenwich Peninsular. It was a fantastically sunny day, so we felt that we had to do something "out", and I thought that it might be nice to see what they had done with the area around the Dome. Not such a good idea as it turned out. The Dome itself seems to have done absolutely nothing to contribute towards the regeneration of the area - if anything it is worse now, and it still stinks - literally. So bad you almost want to retch.

Walking along the Thames footpath around the outer circumference of the Dome is a pretty bleak, depressing and uninspiring experience. The Dome was intended to be an outwardly expressive, iconic "building", but the outside is mostly fenced-off. All you see when you walk around the perimeter are rubbish bins, vans, loading bays, crates, sheds, portaloos, stacks of various gear, general rubbish, and all sorts of other service paraphernalia. It is really sad and depressing that what what was originally a nice riverside general circulation area now resembles a trashed back alley. Even the former meridian plaza area, which I recall was quite nicely done for the original 2000 exhibition, is now just a trailer park for the cast and crew of the semi-permanent Afrika! show in it's tacky plastic tent alongside. Shame on you O2for allowing the Dome and its public spaces (both of which were paid for from public funds) to be so appalingly treated. I thought that the inside was pretty awful when we visited it last year (Blog: New tack and old chic), but this was worse.

Continuing our walk down the west side of the Greenwich Peninsular we were at least expecting to see some evidence of physical or economic regeneration - the "knock-on effect" that was the main point of building the Dome in the first place. But nothing. Just the same old decrepit and derelict industrial riverside that it was when I first walked along here 20 years ago.And some of those factories really stink. It is difficult, I know, as these places are presumably productive and provide employment, but there seems little prospect of renewal and regeneration while they continue to operate. And the millions of pounds of public money pumped into the Dome have clearly had no effect whatsoever.

It was with some relief that on contnuing on towards Greenwich proper we arrived at one of our favourite pubs (and one of Greenwich's better kept secrets) - The Cutty Sark - for a very welcome pint.

Messing about on the river

Our plan today was simply to take a boat trip on the Thames. No particular reason, just that it was nice weather. We live just a few minutes from a pier and going into town seemed like a good idea. We do this on and off and have never had any problems.

Didn´t quite work like that. Thames Clippers seem to have been overwhelmed today. We gave up trying to get on a boat at Greenland Pier and instead went for a walk and we weren´t the only ones.

We managed to get a boat back from central London, but a young woman at Greenland on out return complained to the crew about how long she had been waiting.

The Thames Clippers river bus service started in 1999, with just two boats and around 200 passengers daily. It now has a fleet of ten in part thanks to subsidies from TfL, carrying over 20,000 passengers per week.

It´s good that the service is popular, although if they were having problems on a Sunday in February what´s it going to be like when the tourist season really gets going? Based on today, I can´t imagine the London Assembly entitling its next report into river services London´s forgotten highway!

The picture comes from an earlier boat trip from the Dome

Change boats in mid-fjord

Wonderful article in the FT today about the joys of armchair travel and in particular using the Thomas Cook European Timetable for daydreaming - a book published as a serious resource.

If we want to find out how to get from A to B by train for a particular journey in Europe it's easiest to turn to the Germans and DB's great online timetable service. Cook's ignores all the complexities of actually booking tickets (the companion piece in the FT covers those) for your fantasy journey, but replaces them with complexities of its own.

"No list of symbols on a word processor can do justice to its virtuoso command of footnote symbols". The FT article doesn't even try to replicate any but here's one example:

= Mondays to Saturdays except holidays*

Yes, even the explanation has its own footnote - the asterisk leading the reader to public holiday dates for each country in the book.

There are lots of claims that Europe is going through a rail renaissance. Of course, there are the various high speed services, sleepers, restaurant cars etc., and Cook's deals with those, but also narrow gauge railways, boat and bus connections. Air travel is all about getting from airport A to airport B as quickly as possible. In the case of no-service airlines those airports may not bear any relation to the cities claimed. Rail travel offers something different - or can do.

The title of this posting refers to a footnote that we came across some years ago and made us smile. In the space of one short column and three footnotes the timetable tells you that:

Daily except Saturdays at 1630 you could get a boat from Bergen to Kaupanger (reservations recommended Fridays and Sundays [phone number provided]) with onward bus connection to Lærdal and Øvre Årdal, but to get to Flåm required a change of boats in mid-fjord (10 minutes after leaving Leikanger).

The thought of changing boats in mid-fjord has stayed for years. I've got no idea how they did it, but images of breeches buoy came to mind. The connection no longer exists so we can't go and find out now. But, as Jan Morris put it, the joy "lies not in the reality, but in the imagination".

Not an island

Continuing the island theme, we have just spent the Christmas week in Swanage, on the Isle of Purbeck. This is, of course, not an island at all. Physically, it is very much a part of the mainland, although its particular geography means that there are only really two ways of getting to Purbeck, and one of them involves a ferry across the entrance to Poole Harbour.

Even better, this island has a steam railway! And a pretty impressive one at that. And the bus service was not that bad either. There are hourly buses from Poole/Wareham and Bournemouth. The latter using the Sandbanks-Shell Bay chain ferry.


Swanage is English seaside on a nice small, genteel scale. OK, it is not as up-market as St Ives, and it obviously has its fair share of chav youth, but it does pretty well for a small seaside town. In high season, I would imagine that it is pretty awful, but in Decenmber it was actually OK, and the weather was still good enough for us to have some fun on the beach. Good choice all round I'd say. Though it helped that we had pretty good weather most of the time.