The river Lea used to mark, more or less, the boundary between London and Essex. It was an area to be avoided when I was a boy. The river itself was virtually a sewer, taking waste of all sorts down to the Thames docks at Poplar and Canning Town – now a hipster’s paradise and within a stone’s throw of the financial centre of Canary Wharf.

We stayed between Ponders End and Chingford, popular retirement “manor” for the  successful East End crook in days of old.  The Lea Valley park and the 2012 Olympic site at Stratford have transformed the area.  We caught three buses (Lucy was very well-behaved) down to the Olympic park and then, after looking around the excellent gardens (and West Ham United’s new London stadium) we walked the ten or eleven miles back along the river.