I had never been to Bermondsey in my life until Jim took me to the Zandra Rhodes Fashion and Textile Museum. We walked across Tower Bridge, another first for Brummy me, and into old streets of Georgian houses, warehouses, a but tatty, but definitely exciting. Pink and blue painted doors and window frames. Enticing little cafes. The museum was showing bras and corsets, how often do you get the chance to look at Victorian intimates?
Then he took me to his friend's house near Grange Road. A Georgian house with Elizabethan cellars. Magic. I really liked this area.
Plotting my partial move from Bournville to London, I researched cheap London property on the web. Never defeated by people telling me I couldn't afford London, I started at the bottom. The bottom, the absolute bottom, is interesting; garages, lock-ups, shops, cafes. I speculated on sleeping rough in a garage but was defeated by the toilet problem.
I mapped the cheap properties I found across London on that wonderful invention Google Maps and got on a train with just one viewing in my diary and a lot of addresses. That one viewing was a could-not-pass up. On the map it was ten minutes from the river Thames. Getting to Bermondsey tube station a good hour early for my appointment I went straight down to the river, at Cherry Gardens pier. Once there were cherry orchards, and Pepys and his wife used to be rowed across the river to picnic there. I looked down the river and there were walls of warehouses, across the river I could recognise Wapping and up river, well, upriver the view was Tower Bridge. I walked along the river and found a park. It was a bit scary, as always, being in a strange place, possibly hostile, possibly dangerous, but the people seemed OK. I skirted the park, not knowing whether it was a muggers' paradise, and crossed Jamaica Road.
The estate agent picked me up and we drove into a hinterland of council properties, to a great barracks like block of flats, with broken, boarded up garages, looking ripe for demolition. But there were plane trees all along the street and the people didn't look bad. The entrance stairs were rough and covered in graffitti, but the lift worked. When we got to the top floor I looked out, right across London, to the sun glinting on the Gherkin building across the river. And I fell in love, fell in love with Bermondsey.
I spent the rest of the day on London buses following my trail of cheapish property through Deptford and out to Woolwich and Thamesmead. I loved the river but it was too far. The train from Birmingham takes 1.30 hours to central London, and this was a benchmark for travel times. I came back to Birmingham and put in an offer.
The long and the short of it is that my offer was not succesful. A bidding war and several other viewings later I took possession of another flat. By they I was a bit wiser on the question of security and this was in another barracks but one which had already had excellent security put into place by Southwark Council. As I viewed it the estate agent apologised for the lack of that spectacular river view. Over her shoulder I could see the Shard and St. Pauls. I felt that was good enough.
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| Like a fortress |
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| The Shard |
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