London Sightseeing: a 20k Walk Along the Themes

As you will have seen on my previous post, I recently teamed up with a gang of friends, one of whom suffers from MS, to do the 20k MS Charity Walk and raise money for the MS Society.  We smashed out £1000 target and got to see some great views along the way, so I thought I’d share some of the highlight from out London sightseeing walk with you today.

We started off at Battersea Park befoe crossing south of the river where we saw the beautiful and iconic MI5 building.  Yes, this is the same beauty you will have seen in many a James Bond film, and it’s one of my favourite buildings in London.  Unlike New York, we have so little art deco buildings in London.  I love how this stands out in all it’s blue, shiny glory.

Quite a while later, once we had passed the London Eye and the Tate Modern to name just a few, we passed crossed over the Millennium Bridge or the ‘wibbly-wobbly’ bridge as it is often known.  From here we headed straight towards St Paul’s Cathedral.  A really beautiful structure.

Soon we were passing one of the newest additions to London’s skyline, The Shard.  It’s unique shape and a top that looks like broken glass means it is already one of London’s most well-known buildings.

Next up is one of London’s most famous monuments, Tower Bridge, not London Bridge as people often think it’s named.  Tower Bridge definitely more spectacular then Lonon Bridge so people often get the two confused.  This marked the halfway part of our 20k and it felt pretty good to be walking over this bridge, especially as I realised I’ve never actually done this before!

From the opposite side of the river, we had a great view of the ‘the city’ as it’s locally known, which is the financial district.  As you can see the skyline here is ever-changing, with new, unique buildings going up all the time.  Here you see ‘the gherkin’ and ‘the walkie talkie’.  We like our nicknames in London!

By contrast, just further along the river is one of the oldest buildings, The Tower of London.  This is where the crown jewels are still kept to this day, heavily guarded by the world-famous Beef Eaters.

Big Ben was one of the last photo ops on the walk, so obviously it was selfie time!  I think we had about 5k to walk at this point, but boy did it feel longer!

It was a great day, as you can probably tell from these photos, the weather was interchangeable but I had a lot of fun.  It felt so good to be doing it for a great cause and the London sightseeing walk took me to some of the more touristy parts of London I don’t often go out of my way to see these days.

London, stay beautiful!