Jerry and Vicki's house is located on the Grand Union Canal. For the English, this was their equivalent to the Erie Canal. It linked Birmingham to the Thames and from there to the sea. It was a crucial part of the Industrial Revolution, but the railroad and then the motorways made it economically irrelevant. For most of the 20th centuries these canals were open industrial sewers. They are slowly being reclaimed for recreation, nature preserves, and for housing. Their house is a part of a development called "The Island" which cleaned up the site of a former dry dock and replaced it with a combination of townhouses and apartments. It is way, way nicer than most of the neighborhood - Brentford, London is not exactly Brentwood, Los Angeles.
The natural environment is a lot cleaner than it was, though there is still a lot of old garbage in the waterway. I would hardly want to swim in the water. Despite this, it is becoming home to a fairly large number of different types of waterfowl.
Where the canal crosses under the A4 (which turns into the M4, the main highway from central London to Heathrow), it is also prize real estate for expensive office buildings for large corporations like Glaxo-Smith-Kline. I am not sure which corporation owns this building. I assume the public art is Alexander Calder. I have no idea who did the knots. You can see ones of them in the foreground.
John decided that he wanted to try driving into London. There is no congestion charge on Sunday, and there is some amount of free parking available as long as you are nowhere close to Leicester Square or Covent Garden. We had not done the audio walking tour of Chelsea, so we drove towards Sloane Square and found a legal, free spot just off King's Road. This audio tour - one of the "Londonwalks" available on Audible - was not a revealing as some of the other ones, but we have spent some time in this neighborhood before. Still I learned a few things. The Victorian postboxes below are beloved by everybody except the Royal Mail. The design has no flap on the letter slot and snails climb up them, enter the box, and eat mail. The government wants to rip them out and replace them with something snail-proof, but the Londoners love the design and protest whenever this is proposed.
I found this sign in an archway on Cheney Mews. I did learn what a "mews" is. These little alleys were not always the most fashionable addresses in London. "Mew" comes from the Old French word for molting, and they were originally barns where hunting falcons were kept when they were molting and therefore useless for sport. As keeping birds of prey lost favor, these barns were turned into stables, and the upper floors became servants quarters. With the advent of the automobile, the ground floor stables became garages. The mews are the most fashionable places to live in London because they resemble suburban tract houses with an entire ground floor devoted to storing the automobile.
On my walk I saw places where people like George Eliot, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Laurence Stern, Henry James, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards had lived. The tour took me down Paradise Alley and advised that whenever streets have wonderful names in England they were usually horrible slums at one point. Paradise Alley, behind the fashionable lane where Oscar Wilde and his wife lived, was an open sewer with people living on it in conditions of unbelievable filth. Wilde had a special screen built to hide the back neighbors from his view.
John went to his meeting while I poked a little while further around the neighborhood, then we drove back to Hounslow.
Tomorrow, we leave with Vicki for Honfleur.
