Westfield London – Friday 9th December 2022

Having arrived in Ealing for a couple of nights, we immediately hopped on a tube and headed into central London.   We planned to visit Westfield Shopping Centre on our way back, but first we did a bit of sightseeing.  After a few hours walking, with a pitstop at the new Brewdog at Waterloo station (it has a slide!), we headed west and got to Westfield, which is near Shepherd’s Bush, at about 2.30pm, but we took ages to find the Waterstones, as the centre is vast! It was pretty busy too, so I don’t think we’ll be heading back any time soon (we don’t go to London to go shopping), but the Waterstones was a nice one.

Being in a huge shopping centre, there wasn’t anything other than shops to look at, so I’ll share a few (quite a lot, actually) shots of the rest of our day!

First, we visited the National Windrush Monument at Waterloo Station.   This was unveiled in June ’22 and is by sculptor Basil Watson.  The accompanying poem is an excerpt from You Called … and We Came by Laura Serrant, a nurse and poet.  You can read the rest of the poem here.

After that we went to see if we could go inside St Paul’s Church in Lorrimore Square, as we wanted to see the beautiful stained glass, but sadly the church was locked. The older church which originally stood here was destroyed during the Second World War.  This replacement is of modernist design built from reinforced concrete.  It’s not a style that’s to everyone’s taste, but I like it. We’d like to go back and look inside someday – if we can find it open!

Then to The Dog and Pot Sculpture. At the age of about 12, Charles Dickens used to walk past a statue of a dog and pot which hung outside a shop, and he later mentioned it in his autobiography.  This new statue was unveiled on 6^th February 2013, the end of the year celebrating the 200^th anniversary of Dickens’ birth.  The old statue still exists.  It was in the Southwark Museum, but I’m not sure if it’s still displayed there.

Below, clockwise from top left. [1] An old entrance to Blackfriars Station, which used to be part of the Charing Cross Railway Company. [2] Roupell Street – near Waterloo Station, this is a conservation area and is pretty much unchanged since the workers’ houses were built in the early 19^th Century.  [3] Leake Street Arches – an authorised graffiti tunnel hidden near Waterloo Station. [4, 5 and 6] back in Ealing!