In Brugge

One of the embarkation points for the canal tours that thread through the oldest part of the city

About a month ago we decided we wanted to go on an impromptu city break and after an intensive program of brainstorming, focus groups, consultations and feasibility studies (Sue: How about Brugge? Me: Yeah, okay) we decided upon Brugge. We thought it might be nice to have some travelling buddies on this one so we rounded up a posse and set off on a Friday after work.

The obvious way to get there is through the Chunnel, it only takes two hours to get to Brussels where we changed onto a local train and within another hour we were in one of Europe's most unblemished medieval cities. At the time I hadn't paid very much attention to the times of these trains, I just assumed it would take quite a long time, so I was impressed with the three hour travel time. We can't even get to (most) of our parent's houses in that time.

In the background, the Church of Our Lady

Having had a week to think about it I still can't decide if it's the cobbled, winding streets that defines Brugge or its network of canals that thread their way through the city like a spiders web that has seen better days. On reflection it must be the interplay between the two that lend the city its charm and character. It certainly has both in spades. We arrived at the train station shortly before the medieval bells of the city began peeling the new day. My usual studies of maps of the city beforehand had revealed that it was less than two miles to our hotel and so we decided to walk and get a feel for our host of the next couple of days. The other main bit of preparation that we had all done for this trip was to watch In Bruges, the brilliant film by Martin McDonagh (you should also check out The Guard by his brother John, that would be an awesome double bill). This basically meant that we spent an unhealthy proportion of the weekend quoting and swearing our way through the streets. I highly recommend such a strategy.

Inevitably, there was an Irish pub 100 yards from our hotel but at least this meant that we had somewhere to have a drink into the small hours of Friday night and, in fairness, it was actually a decent place with good beers, good atmosphere and live music.

An artist's impression of the famous belfry

Much like every other tourist our rough itinerary consisted of beer, canals, chocolate and cathedrals; not necessarily in that order. Quite literally every street in Brugge has a chocolate shop and many have up to a dozen; there must be scores of them in total. It is all delicious but it is also expensive, expect to pay easily over twenty quid if you want to have more than enough to simply last the train journey home. Eating and drinking in general is quite tough on the wallet, we just had to accept that we were going to pay €6-7 for a pint and €20 or so for a straightforward dinner; there aren't many places in the world where Londoners can go and feel like things are expensive but this was definitely one of them. The sting of this was slightly mitigated by the mirth caused by using the words Hoegaarden (a beer) and slaagroom (chantilly cream) as frequently as possible.

Perhaps the best way to see the town is by canal and by horse. A thirty minute boat trip with multilingual guide only costs a few Euros per person; a thirty minute horse trip is a bit more pricey, in the order of €38 but as there were 5 of us it wasn't too bad.

The tallest building in Brugge isn't the famous belfry but the spire of the Church of Our Lady. At 122 metres it completely dominates the skyline and is nearly half as tall again as the next highest building. Close up it looks relatively new; it's very clean and isn't particularly ornate but even its most recent sections are more than half a millennium old. It is also the second tallest brick tower in the world second only to St. Martin's church in Landshut, Germany. Disappointingly, it didn't appear possible to go up the tower during our visit.

The Church of Our Lady

Also slightly disappointing was the view from the top of belfry. Having queued for a good hour we finally got to haul ourselves up the 366 increasingly narrow steps to the summit of the bell tower where I had hoped for wide panoramas of the town square and beyond. Unfortunately, all the openings at the top were covered up with chicken wire so that even getting a half decent single shot was all but impossible nevermind a sweeping vista of a shot. It is, nonetheless, an impressive stucture, built in three main phases between the 13th-15th centuries.

One of the highlights of Brugge is its myriad array of beers. There are over 150 breweries in Belgium brewing between 600-1000 beers depending on who you listen to, that means there is a huge amount of choice. We set ourselves the target of never drinking the same beer twice, a challenge that proved fairly easy to meet. As we essentially ordered beers at random it did mean that we occasionally got one that we weren't so keen on but on the whole it went down a treat. You can do a tour of De Halve Maan (The Half Moon) brewery that lasts about 45 minutes and throws in a free beer at the end. I really enjoyed the tour, it had a good mix of history and the science and processes of the beer making tradition. I never knew that so much nudity was integral to brewing a tasty pint.

The 83 metre high belfry tower

It is Brugge's access to the sea that made it such a prosperous town. The port was a gateway to the markets of the world, they exported cloth and bought up spices. The money that flooded in led to the establishment of one of the first worldwide commercial powers. Banking, and the power and influence that come with it, rapidly made Brugge a force to be reckoned with in northern Europe. It was here that what could have been the first stock exchange in the world was established. All this prosperity grew Brugge to a size of more than 200,000 inhabitants, more than twice as many as it has today. In the 1650s the future Charles II made his court there in exile whilst Cromwell ruled over England. The erosion of this once mighty city though was literally that. The water channel that gave Brugge its sea access began silting up so that the deep water vessels of world trade were no longer able to get there. Within 200 years the population had shrunk by 75% and Brugge became a quiet backwater.

Today the port has been revived a little but tourists buying up the chocolates and beer is what keeps the town going. Ironically, it is the lack of recent prosperity that has now led to its revival. There is no heavy industry, no ugly glass and steel monoliths to modern living. Walking the streets is like stepping back in time. The swans on the canal, the market square, the cathedrals - it's like a fairytale.

Regent's Canal

Reflection of a gas holder in the frozen surface of the canal

Another week brings me to another one of London's canals. Last Saturday saw me up and out in the biting cold to join in on my first ever London Photo Walk. What they seem to do is meet up every six weeks or so and wander along a predetermined picturesque route somewhere in the capital. There's no fee or dues to be paid, it's just a group of like minded people out and about with their cameras - it was great.

The route started at London Fields, went down through Broadway market and then out along Regent's canal before returning back to London Fields. At first I felt pretty self-conscious, I get nervous about street photography at the best of times nevermind when there's scores of strangers around and it's your first time at a new event. This wasn't helped by the fact that I was feeling a bit tender from the night before. The jitters quickly disappeared though as being in such a large group was actually a big help, everywhere I looked there was someone with a camera in front of their face snapping away.

Not only did this large group help give me a bit of a safety-in-numbers style boost in confidence but they also gave me lots of good ideas. If I saw someone near me take a shot then I wanted to know what it was of, sneaking a peak over their shoulder to see what they had captured. This gave me a fresh perspective on scenes that I might otherwise have passed over unnoticed.

The Regent's Canal is linked to the Lea Navigation canal that I blogged about a few weeks ago near the Olympic Park via the Hertford Union Canal. The canal itself was probably a little less pleasant than the Lea, perhaps not benefiting from an Olympic inspired clean up. One similarity between the two though was an array of excellent graffiti; I know many consider this nothing more than vandalism but, in the right setting, it's rapidly becoming one of my favourite art forms. I suspect that, as I and numerous others on the walk were photographing the big bird motif, we may well have caught the artist in the act. It looked a lot brighter than everything else in the area and the man standing furtively next to it with a carrier bag of what could well have been spray cans was behaving very strangely. He clearly didn't look comfortable having people paying close attention to what he was doing, but at the same time he didn't leave, he must have had more work to do.

The only draw back to this excellent event was the biting cold. Those that know me will know that I love the cold, it's very much my sort of weather; this was a different matter however. To be able to use my camera properly I can't be wearing gloves, they're too clunky and I can't feel my way around the camera. No gloves and two hours at sub zero temperatures left my hands a little worse for wear. For the last half hour I couldn't feel the shutter button and often actually had to watch what my fingers were doing to know what I was up to. When I text my wife once it was over it took me nearly five minutes to write a simple message because I couldn't really move my fingers. Making a fist as quickly as I could took me nearly five seconds and my little finger wouldn't move at all. My hands were in not inconsiderable amounts of pain into the next day and holding anything with them was particularly painful.

I now own a lovely pair of fingerless gloves.

The Lea Valley

The ArcelorMittal orbit

Over the past 6 months or so as I walk to work I've been able to watch a strange structure slowly rise up out of the ground on the Olympic site. Now, I'm no fan of the Olympics but I do like interesting architecture and, living just a few hundred yards from one edge of the site, I've been able to watch a lot of building work in the last 5 years. Aside from the stadium and other main venues there have been bridges built, canals dredged, roads widened, stations redeveloped and railway track laid; being a bit of a geek I really enjoy watching these sorts of things develop as I walk or ride by. I like to watch the process, stage by stage, note the sequences, watch the people and observe how order is slowly borne out of seeming chaos. It was a treat then to see something so unusual as the Orbit emerge so close by.

This image is a panorama of three photos stitched together. Click on it to panorama-fy it up a bit

The Olympic site, which will be known as the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park once all is done and dusted, is situated in the east end of London on what was largely an industrial area in years gone by. From my point of view the main item in favour of the Olympics has always been the redevelopment of this land into what should eventually be a pleasant and green space, which is always good. Criss crossing the whole site is the river Lea and the associated canals that used to supply the industry of past. Linking this area to other patches of more natural looking life is a route known as the Greenway. This stretches from the Royal docks further south on the Isle of Dogs (not only is this no longer an island but no one seems to be quite sure anymore as to the dog reference either) up through West Ham and Plaistow into Stratford, where I live, and on into Hackney. It's a sort of ribbon of green that picks it's way through the city and, as you walk along it, if you don't look too closely and avoid the horizon you can almost fool yourself that you're taking a turn through the countryside. Almost. Maybe a small town.

This looks more like the nice end of my home town than the edge of Europe's biggest building site

The route is almost entirely raised up on a large bank that gives away it's heritage upon closer inspection: it's a sewer. But not just any sewer. The Great Stink of 1858 and the cholera outbreaks of the same decade were what instigated legendary Victorian engineer Joseph Bazalgette to construct London's famous sewerage works. The Greenway rides atop the Northern Outfall Sewer which is responsible for taking all of north London's waste down to the Thames at Beckton. At the time it still wasn't common knowledge that cholera was caused by a bacterium, the sewers were built solely to remove the stink which happened to result in the water quality improving which got rid of the cholera.

Okay, I can feel myself getting over excited now so I'm going to stop talking about sewers. The point is that there are thin veins of greenery threading their way through what is normally considered a pretty grim part of the city and they're really quite nice. They are also currently the closest you are allowed to get to the newer building work (barring special events) passing within just a couple of hundred yards of the new stadium - near enough to hear builders guffawing with laughter when something large and expensive sounding got dropped.

I exposed for about 1/3 second to get the blurring effect on the water

So, for more than five years I had been living in the Lea Valley and completely ignoring it. This has clearly been a mistake. As my wife and I left the Greenway and started following the canal around the north of the Olympic site we managed to forget that we were right on top of a vast construction site. With the stadium and Orbit out of view behind us we were just left with one and two storey residential buildings, the tranquillity of the slow moving water and the ducks and swans that made it their home.

Even the water ways here that look natural have been heavily modified by man's hand. The river has been 'canalised'; which basically means it's been levelled off, made a bit straighter and generally made more navigable. Whilst on the walk I spotted that some signs said Lee and others Lea with no apparent rhyme or reason. Investigations revealed, though, that the parts that are still fairly untouched are still called Lea, whereas man-made sections and modifications are distinguished by being called Lee. Neat.

One of the great things about canals, asides from their history and functionality, is that they tend to be rather still; combine that with a windless day, like we had, and that means you can get some very nice reflections in the water. The above shot was at a sort of T-junction that was more open than most areas and therefore the water was more disturbed but I still loved the reflection from this construction site.


Another reason why I enjoyed this little excursion so much was that it was an opportunity to get out with my new camera. I bought a Sony A65 in the January sales and am very impressed with it so far. I wasn't sure at first as it's an SLT camera, not an SLR, but it has more than held it's own and is definitely opening up some new avenues for me. I won't go into any more detail here, I'll probably give it it's own post in the near future and clearly label it as a techy sort of post so that those not interested in geeky detail can skip over it. I'll be doing the same with a post on digitally incorporating textures into images at some point too.

The old canal with traditional barges moored and the 'Gherkin' rising up on the horizon

A couple of hours of walking took us two thirds of the way around the Olympic site and from there we got the train home. I suspect I shall be spending a lot more time walking along these canals this year. I think a wander down to the Royal Docks on the Greenway wouldn't go amiss either. Home just got a little bit nicer.