Passing the bridges ………

It will have been in 1979, and I guess it was sometime in the summer and on a whim, I took a trip on the River.

Now if you were born and grew up in southeast London paying to travel the Thames was a rare event, reserved for impressing a girlfriend.

On this day I will have been home from Manchester which had already been my adopted city for a decade, so reckon that pleasure cruise would have been a way of reuniting with my city.

Or it may have just been an excuse to try out a new camera.

Either way I used up two films, and still have the negatives which sat in the cellar for 40 years before I brought them out of the shadows.

 Looking at the direction of some of the images I will have taken the trip upriver from Greenwich past the Tower and on to Westminster.

Back then I didn’t record the exact destinations or who was with me, but it was a rewarding day and I still have heaps of pictures of that grimy London, which the tourists see but never bother “snapping”.

I did and many of those warehouses have now vanished or been converted into swish riverside apartments.

The waterfront has been “cleaned up” and new properties stand where once cranes unloaded diverse cargoes from pretty much everywhere.

Added to which since I sat on the benches of that boat new bridges cross the River and stepping back from the water are shedloads of gleaming glass and steel tower blocks.

All of that said these images instantly bring back that smell of the Thames and the noise of the river traffic.

And now it’s a full 45 years since the journey which has gone in a blink.

Location; The River

Pictures; wot I saw on a trip along the Thames, 1979, from the collection of Andrew Simpson