Famous places within 5 minutes walk of my house Number 9 - the Little Fire of Bow
I arrived home in the early hours of this morning to discover that the building next to mine was on fire. Not the world's largest fire you understand, no flames leaping majestically into the summer sky, but smoking away happily all the same. A fleet of fire engines had arrived, accompanied by an ambulance and a complete set of police vehicles, and they'd sealed off the entire roadway in front of my house using a flimsy chain of yellow tape. A jobsworth officer told me that I couldn't enter the exclusion zone, despite the fact that I lived here, and turned me away. I had to walk up the Bow flyover (which had also been closed), round 'that church in the middle of the road' and back past the Gladstone statue in order to try my luck at the mobile fire command unit. Whilst waiting I was surprised to see that they'd brought 1000 small bottles of mineral water along to fight the fire, although these turned out to be to quench the firemen's thirst on a hot and sultry night. They offered me a bottle while they continued to fight the fire using more conventional water supplies.
The firemen were training their hoses on the blaze from nearby Grove Hall Park (insert history section: In Tudor times this was the site of a nunnery owned by the Earl of Sheffield, Henry VIII's Lord High Admiral who went down with the Mary Rose. Grove Hall itself was a grand Victorian mansion mentioned by Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby, and later re-opened as a reputable lunatic asylum. The nunnery is now used by a collective of local artists and includes a large exhibition space). The fire smoked on, until eventually a fireman was given the all-clear to escort me safely to my door. There was no damage to my property, and seemingly nothing major to the neighbouring building, but the pumps whirred on all the same. Fire had come to Bow on the hottest night of the year, which alas wasn't the best time to have to sleep with my windows closed to keep out the smell of smoke.
Famous places within 5 minutes walk of my house
I arrived home in the early hours of this morning to discover that the building next to mine was on fire. Not the world's largest fire you understand, no flames leaping majestically into the summer sky, but smoking away happily all the same. A fleet of fire engines had arrived, accompanied by an ambulance and a complete set of police vehicles, and they'd sealed off the entire roadway in front of my house using a flimsy chain of yellow tape. A jobsworth officer told me that I couldn't enter the exclusion zone, despite the fact that I lived here, and turned me away. I had to walk up the Bow flyover (which had also been closed), round 'that church in the middle of the road' and back past the Gladstone statue in order to try my luck at the mobile fire command unit. Whilst waiting I was surprised to see that they'd brought 1000 small bottles of mineral water along to fight the fire, although these turned out to be to quench the firemen's thirst on a hot and sultry night. They offered me a bottle while they continued to fight the fire using more conventional water supplies.
The firemen were training their hoses on the blaze from nearby Grove Hall Park (insert history section: In Tudor times this was the site of a nunnery owned by the Earl of Sheffield, Henry VIII's Lord High Admiral who went down with the Mary Rose. Grove Hall itself was a grand Victorian mansion mentioned by Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby, and later re-opened as a reputable lunatic asylum. The nunnery is now used by a collective of local artists and includes a large exhibition space). The fire smoked on, until eventually a fireman was given the all-clear to escort me safely to my door. There was no damage to my property, and seemingly nothing major to the neighbouring building, but the pumps whirred on all the same. Fire had come to Bow on the hottest night of the year, which alas wasn't the best time to have to sleep with my windows closed to keep out the smell of smoke.
