East End and St. Paul's

After a slow start, we made our way by tube and bus to Columbia Road Flower Market, a Sunday-morning-only thing. It was super-crowded, but the flowers were lovely and the shops along the road were interesting. We walked to Brick Lane, which was also slammed and bought some lunch from the very plentiful food vendors.  We walked to Spitalfields where we nipped into Christ Church Spitalfields, or CCSpits as it is called on their logo and social media. The original Spitalfields Market has been expanded in the last few years, but we really just did a run-by fruiting on our way back to Bishopsgate for a bus to St. Paul's. We arrived in time for Evensong, which turned out to be way too much like church, but with a really good choir.  Annie had a hard time keeping a straight face because the reading of the First Lesson from Nehemaiah sounded way to much like Monty Python and The Life of Brian. We came home and sorted out dinner from the local grocery stores and are now finished with the day.

 Columbia Road Flower Market

 The crowds were thick

 House plants and shrubs

 Beautiful succulents

 Oak leaves and flowers

 The last hydrangeas of the season

 Roses of every shade

 I wish we could brings something home

 Lots of handsome little shops

 That's Kris looking at really cute kid stuff

 Graffiti on a building on the corner of Barnet Grove 

and Bethnal Green Road on the way to Brick Lane

 A shop on Bethnal Green with a study in red and green

  Brick Lane was not at all what I expected

 Food vendors

 A nice Canadian lad fed me poutine, another first

 These guys were making Dire-Straits music

 More Brick Lane

 CCSpits

 Recently restored Christ Church, 1729, by Nicholas Hawksmoor

 Spitalfields Market

 Spitalfields with new Bishopsgate development in the distance

 Spitalfields Market

 St. Paul's for Evensong

 The dome secretly taken from my lap

 Perfectly purloined photo: I just won't accept "no photography"

 Photos just can't capture the enormous presence of this building

 I love Wren's Temple Bar

We managed to miss almost all of the rain and we had a good day. This, however, is all for now. More adventures tomorrow.

OXO

D.