As summer approaches, I like walking home through the back streets.   There are unexpected pieces of popular styling:

And even the Corbusian housing estates look surprisingly magnificent in the setting sun:

Since I have been told that my blog is too highbrow, I should maybe record the fact that I have had lunch in a motorbike store in Hackney Wick following a trip to visit the Custom Built Bicycle Show in the Velodrome.  I wanted to like the Velodrome, which is beautiful from the outside, but unexpectedly disappointing inside, cheap finishing, exceptionally poor disabled access and smelling of drains.   So, we retreated in search of food in Hackney Wick where we discovered pancakes, burritos and Beavertown American pale ale (brewed in Hackney) for lunch.

I’ve just walked to the London Library by way of the Regent’s Canal.   It’s a long time that I’ve done the full stretch from Bow in the east to Regent’s Park in the west.   In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever done it except on a bicycle.   It’s a pleasure to see London from the back view, as from a railway train, past Victoria Park, past Broadway Market, past the Towpath Cafe which was setting up for breakfast and the smarter gardens east of Duncan Terrace, up and over Islington by way of Chapel Street Market and down through some of Islington’s seedier estates to Dixon Jones’s King’s Place, which I’ve never seen from the canal, through the new developments north of King’s Cross, past Nick Grimshaw’s smart aluminium pods at the back of his Camden Town Sainsbury’s and the egg cups which are all that remains of Terry Farrell’s tv-am to the creamy Regency houses on the north side of Regent’s Park which have canal boats moored at the end of their gardens and the brilliant green of the canal-side as it goes through the zoo.   Apart from a brief detour to pich up a map of Piedmont in Daunt’s in Marylebone High Street, it took the best part of three hours, ending with a cappuccino at the Royal Academy.   I recommend it.

Having just read an email about how beautiful it is in the Valley of the Kings, I am posting some photographs of how beautiful it is in the Mile End Road:

At long last, there are signs that the new London has arrived in Stepney.   We’re able to have eggs and bacon in Foxcroft and Ginger, the new, so-called ‘artisan bakery’ which has been installed in the old Wickham’s Department Store, which English Heritage has shamefully failed to list in spite of being one the grandest buildings in the old East end and the subject of a memorable eulogy in Nairn’s London.

A developer has bought the building and installed work units upstairs.   Now we don’t have to go to Spitalfields for bread and cappuccino.   Farewell to the chicken shops which have traditionally lined the Mile End Road!