Underground, Overground…

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It’s been two years since we moved out of Leytonstone in East London, back to Inverness in the North of Scotland. Lock-downs aside, life is certainly very different here. Taking the train in London – generally hot, smelly, and crammed in like sardines whether on the Overground or Underground – was pretty much an everyday occurrence for me as this was by far the quickest way to commute. Yet the last time I was actually on a train of any kind was the day we travelled from one end of the country to the other, city to city, to start our new, quieter life in what feels like a completely different world.

Over the years I’ve probably got about a gazillion images involving trains in my archive – tube trains, sleeper trains, train stations, train tracks, views from trains – but these few pics I took from my WordPress media library to share again today, a snapshot memory of train travel in London. And you’ve no idea how long it took me to capture the empty tube station shots – it’s a case of choosing a relatively quiet time (where there’s more than a minute between each train) and finding the sweet spot between passengers loading and unloading… You only get seconds to press the shutter, if you’re lucky! 🙂

Ragtag Daily Prompt: Train

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Cee’s Fun Foto: Red

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A selection of red images from my archive – all taken in Leytonstone, East London in July, just before our move to Scotland 🙂

Cee’s Fun Foto: Red

Red Mini in East London

I captured this mini parked against a colourful painted wall just before we moved out of London, simply because I loved the colours and the shapes created in the shot – I’d forgotten all about it until Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge this week prompted me to go looking in my archive 🙂

Homes and Houses

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A row of Victorian terraced houses, a three-storey town house, a post-war block of flats and a modern apartment block – oh, and a House of God, just for good measure 🙂

Delapidation, Demolition, Renovation, Rubble

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There’s always some kind of residential building work going on here in East London – some delapidated or derelict homes sadly do get knocked down but most get fixed up and updated, one way or another 🙂

London Buses in Leytonstone

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London buses in and around Leytonstone 🙂

Car R’n’R

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Car R’n’R here in Leytonstone, East London 🙂

Corner Shops Big and Small

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The Victorians seem to have been big on building local corner shops into the fabric of their terraced housing, where the entrance is set into the cut-off corner itself, on a diagonal to the rest of the walls – we actually live in a flat where the original building was once a Victorian corner shop plus accommodation (converted to three individual flats in the 1980’s) 🙂

A Post About Post

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Here in the UK, our postal system livery is red – Pillar Box Red, to be exact! You post your letter in a post box, often found outside a post office, then a postman (male or female, because let’s face it postperson just sounds silly) in a van comes round at set times to empty the box and collect the post to be taken to the sorting office. After sorting all the post into individual delivery rounds, more postmen walk their rounds street by street, positioning their large lockable trolley at the end of each somewhere to keep the post secure, and delivering your post (via a heavy shoulder bag) directly through your door 🙂

Images taken in and around Leytonstone, East London 🙂

Let’s ‘ave a butcher’s…

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‘Butcher’s Hook’ is Cockney rhyming slang for ‘look’ – so ‘Let’s ‘ave a butcher’s’ means ‘Let’s have a look’, which is a silly play on words on my images of a delivery of whole carcasses to be butchered into joints for selling on to the rest of us to buy and eat. Not necessarily something you expect to see every day while out for a walk around Leytonstone in East London, but I asked if it was OK to take a few pics and the guys were very obliging 🙂