Down by the river

A sunny summer evening rendezvous in a pub by the River Thames starts promisingly enough when you arrive at the unexpectedly elegant station at Ravenscourt Park:

Alas, idiot planners decided it was a Good Idea to run a six-lane expressway parallel to the river, cutting this community in half and joining the two only by a squalid subway:

But once you reach the riverfront, all is olde worlde elegance and charm:

That was Kelmscott House, the London residence of arts and crafts luvvy William Morris, fronting onto the estuary:

The dominant architectural feature in these here parts is, of course, Hammersmith Bridge:

A deceptively large bridge, the elegance of its suspension system seems to make it hunker down into the landscape:

The plane in this next one is a fluke, but is a reminder that we're under the flight path to Heathrow:

It's easy to forget such intrusions when roads are lined with such bucolic scenes as these:

And there are even occasional reminders that the Thames used to be a hard-core, industrial river:

I mean the tiny island behind the boat, of course ("Chiswick Eyot"), which was a site of Neolithic settlement roughly 4,000 years ago. They may well have been the first Londoners.