Blue Skies and Golden Light: Photos of the River Thames in September

After my recent five-part series of photo sets from south east London — my home turf — in November, I promised to publish some photos from September, from the huge archive of photos I’ve been building up over the last five months, as part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, and also to publish photos from further afield in London.

In the first of five previously unpublished sets from September (and the 66th set overall in my London photo project) the photos here are from a journey I made by bike on September 6, a gloriously sunny day, when I took my son Tyler and his friend Louis to the South Bank and back, travelling there via Greenwich Foot Tunnel and the Isle of Dogs, and returning via Bermondsey and Rotherhithe, a great circular tour of the River Thames to the east of central London, which involves two of my very favourite journeys in the whole of London.

These routes are largely unpolluted by cars, and permanently close to the river, which, I realise more and more as time passes, is the city’s creator, however much generations of the rich and powerful have deluded themselves into thinking that it has something to do with them. Without water, we are nothing, however rich we are, and without the Thames — and the fresh water that feeds into its long tidal reach — London’s rich would be corpses.

The highlights of that September trip are all here — on the way there, a break on the shoreline of the River Thames on the Isle of Dogs, taking advantage of the low tide, and on the way back, the barges and boats of the community at Reeds Wharf, just to the east of Tower Bridge, and the towers of Canary Wharf, viewed from Rotherhithe, bathed in golden light by the setting sun.

In the next set, I’ll be posting photos from Nunhead, which, I realise, is in south east London, but the three sets after that will, I promise, be further from home — one on the South Bank, and two others in central London, and, in particular, on Regent Street and in Leicester Square.

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.