A walk to Battersea Park

Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens were closed today, as the Royal Parks management gets into a health and safety panic when there's a bit of wind. In fact the wind didn't seem particularly violent, just normal November bluster.

So I decided to walk to Battersea Park, with the intention of getting some video of the Carrion Crows playing in the wind over the river, and the Mandarins whose presence Joan Chatterley had alerted me to. I didn't expect any ornithological wonders, and didn't get any, but it was a pleasant walk.

Battersea Bridge, designed by the fantastically active Sir Joseph Bazalgette and opened in 1885, has a beautiful iron parapet in what was called the Indo-Moresque style.

At the south end of the bridge there is a pleasing sculpture of two swans by Catharine Marr-Johnson, on separate plinths some distance apart. In the background across the river you can see Chelsea Old Church, no longer all that old as it was mostly destroyed in the Blitz and rebuilt after the war.

The Thames barge Atrato is permanently moored just downstream. In the background is Albert Bridge, designed  and built by Rowland Mason Ordish in 1873. It was an engineering disaster from the word go and had to be reinforced, again by Bazalgette. More recently it began to fail again and is now propped up on a pier in the middle. But it's too pretty to demolish.

Ransome's Dock has several working boats, including the Dutch barge Vogelzand.

One of the river police boats is always called Gabriel Franks, after a 22-year-old constable in a predecessor of the present force who was shot and killed in 1798. This is the third boat with that name.

A Common Gull stood in the shallows ...

... and there were Herring Gulls and a Black-Headed Gull on the shore.

A Lesser Black-Back completed the set, on a barge in the middle of the river which is a perch for Cormorants ...

... some of which flew upriver.

Of course there were the ubiquitous Egyptian Geese.

A Grey Heron was fishing on the edge ...

... and I was slightly surprised to see a single young Great Crested Grebe.

A large tribe of Carrion Crows lives in Battersea Park and just across the river in the garden of the Royal Hospital. At low tide they gather on the shore. They love windy days and enjoy themselves whirling around in the blast sweeping along the river.

There are at least a dozen Mandarins in Battersea Park, with the drakes now in their finest breeding plumage. I'm envious, as we don't see them in Hyde Park very often.

I went home over Chelsea Bridge, a fairly hideous structure of 1937 designed by London County Council architects G. Topham Forrest and E. P. Wheeler. You can now cross underneath the south side on a metal gangway. Grosvenor railway bridge is in the background, carrying trains to Victoria Station. The present bridge was built in stages during the 1960s by Freeman Fox and is much better looking than the road bridge. Carrying ten tracks, it's said to be the busiest railway bridge in the world.

On the way I passed the Michelin building of 1911, designed by François Espinasse in a completely unique style. It has ceramic wall plaque showing early achievements on Michelin tyres. Here Charles Terront wins the Paris-Brest bicycle race in 1891.