...there's also an official Ripper Tour of the area where the crimes took places just gathering. We're tempted...we take a leaflet for future consideration when it's not raining...also, I've never been to the Tower of London. All the years I lived in London and I never went. Never came to this part of town really. In fact I remember when still a student after a very late temping assignment in the city I went home by black cab and the cab chose to go via Tower Bridge. It was about 2am on a lovely spring night with a gorgeous moon and it was the very first time I'd ever seen there was a full on medieval castle slap bang in the heart of the City itself. I remember actually laughing out loud and clapping with delight at the sight of it because I'd been in London over ten years and never ever seen this before...Co-incidentally, one of the free papers I collected on the way home later this evening carried the headline that the first female Beefeater has been appointed to the Tower.

From there, a little way to Stepney Green. G hoists me up onto the window ledge:

One more stop up and we reach Mile End, of Pulp song fame and where Rent Boy ended up in Trainspotting, and all that. The station has peppermint striped tiles, like pyjamas worn by long term hospital inmates.

And thence back via the Hammersmith & City actually sitting down and staying on the train all the way up to Kings Cross. We come back into the part of KX that's been renovated recently. This is a massive on-going project expected to finish around 2010 to improve the capacity and interchanges as part of the Mayor's commitment to improving transport in London. Partly he's been putting a shed load more buses on the road as this is one of the fastest ways to increase passenger capacity - huge building projects like KX involve vast commitments of time and resources when you are dealing with tunnelling under a city like London with street filled with all manner of odd conduits, sewers and such-like.  Traffic diversion around KX have been nightmarish for several years now as the project closes off various roads.

This part used to be closed in and grimey, and strangley while that grimeyness, and Victorian dark-coloured, wood-pannelled industrialism seems to work at Baker Street it was always oppressive at KX - now all is gleaming minimalist expanses of beige...but one suspects the cleanliness won't last...

I see G to the mainline station where he heads off to Cambridge, and head back down into the tube network. Immediately I am accosted by a chap waving a leaflet asking me if I am a Christian. I admit to being a Pagan and he launches into arm-waving denouncement of how I'm going to Hell. I respond by telling him that his lot have co-opted their religion from mine. He spouts gibberish...I get silly and yell back 'nail some sense into them' as I walk off...a chap passing wheeling a huge piece of luggage shouts 'you tell em sister!' and trundles on...