London in the Snow: Photos of Brockley and New Cross

London in the Snow: Brockley and New Cross, a set on Flickr.

On January 20, 2013, as London became enveloped in snow — the second snowfall in two days, and this time much heavier than the first — I visited Hilly Fields, the hill-top park on Brockley, in south east london, where I have lived for the last 13 years, to take my son Tyler sledging, and to capture some photos of Londoners at play, which I published here.

I then walked with Tyler down to Brockley station, where we parted ways. He went round to a friend’s, and, after a quick coffee and a muffin at the Broca coffee shop, I cycled north, through Brockley, and on to New Cross and Deptford, as the snow grew heavier and heavier, and the cars and pedestrians began to disappear.

It was quite a wild experience, as the snow was driving into my face the whole time, and I had very little time to take photos before my camera was covered in wet snow, an ordeal which, I’m glad to say, it managed to survive — as, of course, did I.

This photo set — the 74th in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike — covers the first part of that journey from Brockley to New Cross, and in the sets to follow I’ll cover the last part of the journey — down Deptford High Street, past the splendour of St. Paul’s Deptford (a Baroque masterpiece) and down to Deptford Creek, the tidal stretch of the River Ravensbourne, near where it meets the River Thames on the border with Greenwich.

I hope you enjoy this journey with me. You were probably either in sunnier, or at least less snowy climes, or, if you were in London, staying warm somewhere out of the driving snow on Sunday. Certainly, I could count the numbers of pedestrians and drivers I saw throughout most of this journey — except in Deptford High Street, which is only ever quiet at night — and this suggests to me that most people, except those with extremely durable toddlers and toboggans, and teenagers like my son and his friends, who spent all afternoon in Telegraph Hill Park, may appreciate the driving snow from a distance, as photographed by bike, while the snow was busy transforming the streets of London with a magical, albeit temporary blanket.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.