The best beach in London hides, like a secret garden, beneath murky grey water at high tide. Its sand is incongruously soft and golden when uncovered.
Rotting wooden scaffold beams, assembled from the masts of old smuggling ships, cover the beach’s long tail. The structure supports a Chinese takeaway and a small block of flats that overreach the land they started on.
Looking straight across the river, there’s a similar beach on the opposite side. That beach is better known, louder, more popular with pigeons and other city life. From that beach you can hardly see this one.
Boats of all kinds pass, supplementing the waves that sweep litter occasionally onto the shore. These include ribs for the city-bound thrill seeker. Commuter catamarans too, filled with people determined to believe that not every moment of the rat race isn’t living.
To the left, Canary Wharf, central London’s own theme park of steel and glass. Each day more adrenaline enthusiasts ride its high-rises and lows. Weekend desertion, the cold steel ghost town.
Tower Bridge to the right, gate to the square mile. Behind, the Shard left open like a work unfinished. City Hall closed, work not started.
South facing as it is, the beach is cast into sunlight for most of the summer day. If you squint into that sunlight, you can scarcely make out you’re in a city at all. Thrown into relieving shade as the sun drops, your urban situation is again undeniable.
For a few moments down on this best London beach, despite the view and the metropolitan flotsam & jetsam, the smothering dissociation of this city is escaped.