please empty your brain below

I am horribly jealous. It all looks amazing.
I'm jealous too. Instead of a pit at Canary Wharf I stayed outside and went on the fascinating "Beyond the Olympic Park - the Lower Lea Valley from Hackney Wick to Leamouth" walk. I was wondering if our blogger was going to come along given it's on his doorstep and I spotted one or two likely candidates but it looks like I was wrong :-( . I've read about this area from DG - the Fatwalk and Cody Dock. About 150 of us turned up. The guy at Cody Dock said this was more people than had walked along the Fatwalk to Cody Dock (dead end at the moment) in a whole year. Well worth a look, if only to see the potential!
Another who wished they had seen this!
Like DG and many others, I didn't manage to get anything in the Open House ballot, despite applying for several locations. I had considered turning up on the day in any case, as DG did, in the hope that others with bookings wouldn't turn up, but in the end I decided to join the same Lower Lea Valley walk that Stephen (above) did. The organisers expected 20 to 40 people to join for a 2.5 hr walk. Instead, as Stephen mentions, at least 150 turned up, and the walk was a fascinating four hours. Having read so many of DG's posts in recent months about places in his backyard such as Cody Dock, made them even more interesting to visit. One of the loudest collective gasps during the day was when someone spotted somethings looking like Crossrail boring machines, around Abbey Wood I think.
Unfortunately the hit and miss nature of Open Weekend has been very disappointing. Went to Bond Street Crossrail (no booking, first come first served). Got there at 09:35 a.m. and was surprised to see a queue already. By 10.00 a.m. there were probably more than 100 waiting. Then and only then was it made clear that only the first 25 would get in. The remainder were free to queue for subsequent tours on the hour. Not for me. Caught a bus to Liverpool St to see a queue practically all the way around the Bank of England. It didn't seem to be moving at all. Most people seemed to have their umbrellas up because of the rain. So British but so unnecessary.
Andrew - the Crossrail boring machines were I think behind Canning Town station, in the Crossrail worksite which has an entrance off the Lower Lea Crossing.

Three other highlights of the walk yesterday were the gorgeous children's Adventure Playground just opening in Three Mills, Dane's Yard and Strand East tower, and unexpectedly coming across the London Triathlon and the whole of ExCeL's southern exhibition halls opened as one humungous space to accommodate the event base.

Today's Open House visit was to Sandy's Row Synagogue in Spitalfields - a lovely building - and an aborted visit to the Bank of England which, like Pedantic, I gave up on due to the queue.

Sorry to hijack your thread a little DG.
I won a Royal Academy ballot, only they didn't tell me until this Friday, when I'd made other plans (Audley End and Saffron Walden, both good places for day trips, you could a lot with the latter)

Open House IT has lots of problems, their site selector is badly designed, why no filter to exclude pre-booked or long queue places?
@John, I suggested such a filter last year and possibly the previous year too. This time I saw the Masonic Lodge in Holborn and the Roof Gardens in Kensington, both very impressive, no queueing.
Strawberry Hill House was beautiful in the sun on Saturday and the children enjoyed the special activities. The room stewards were very knowledgeable and very friendly. Well worth a visit, although normal entry price is a but steep for what is essentially an empty (but very interesting) house.
Oh, should have said SHH organised their own sign-up through their own website which worked perfectly.
I'm going to start the "new camera for DG" fund.
I had great visit to the Canary Wharf site having read about it in a Metro I picked up on the train home (I live in the sticks).
I arrived on site at 11:00 on Saturday to find a queue of about a dozen people, most of whom hadn't booked and, like me, had read about it in the paper and didn't realize you had to from the way the article was worded.
I can't praise too highly the patience and good humour with which the staff at the site dealt with the stream of bookingless visitors.
Reading DG's comments re Open House's imaginary reservations I can now see how they managed to fit us all in for a tour, but that doesn't detract from how very grateful I am for this once in a lifetime experience.











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