Eating and Commuting: Photos of Borough Market and London Bridge

Following the three previous photo sets (two from Soho, and one from Bankside, between Blackfriars Bridge and Southwark Bridge), this set covers the last part of my journey through London on September 7, 2012, as I travelled from Southwark Bridge to London Bridge, and back to my home in Brockley, in south east London, by train. It is the 49th photo set in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike.

This brief journey involved me passing through Borough Market, the celebrated outdoor food market near London Bridge that is a huge attraction every Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and on to London Bridge station, where various ongoing upgrades, as well as the building of The Shard, London’s tallest skyscraper, have led to many significant changes in the last few years.

London Bridge has been a familiar destination for me for the last 16 years, since I left Brixton, on the Victoria Line, for south east London, where London Bridge — and the overground network — are the key components of travel for commuters, shoppers and other pleasure-seekers.

As a result, I can’t remember the number of times I’ve visited London Bridge station since 1996 — often just to change to Platform 6 for an ongoing connection to Charing Cross — although this summer those visits almost entirely ground to a halt before and during the Olympic Games, as non-folding bicycles were banned from all trains for a two and a half week period from July 27 to August 12, whether or not those trains were full — and very often they were not.

Throughout that period, I had plenty of welcome opportunities to explore and appreciate south east London, on journeys through Bermondsey and Rotherhithe to reach central London by bike, and although it made it difficult to combine public transport and bicycling if I was in a hurry, It helped me to get fit, and allowed me to get to know London better, and, in general, it was pleasant cycling in a city in which, on the roads, there was much less traffic than usual.

In the next photo set, I’ll be posting photos by local artists in unusual locations in Brockley, my home in south east London, and I’ll then post some more recent photos, showing London in autumn.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.