The View Tube reopens next to the Olympic Park

As noted by Diamond Geezer yesterday and by myself today, the Greenway next to the Olympic Park has reopened, as has the View Tube at one end.

From my perspective, the Hackney Wick end of the Greenway is at the end of a pleasent walk along the Regents Canal from Limehouse up to Victoria Park and then alongside Hertford Union Canal that links the Lee Valley to the Regents Canal.

At the end of this pleasant wander can be found the Growing Concerns garden centre, which seems to be some sort of local community venture. Quite what its commercial background is, the place has always been a nice place with chatty staff.

Two small plants for the balcony came to a couple of pennies short of the £5 credit card payment threshold, so I picked up an offcut of a Christmas Tree for tuppence.

Getting home would have either involved a walk back along the canal, or a less than ideal walk along a couple of noisome roads to get down to the DLR station – but hurrah, for the Greenway is open again.

The bit which was closed to form the Victoria Gate entrance — which very nearly didn’t open on the first day, and was closed on the last day — and was seemingly hardly used by visitors throughout the games.

Only reopened yesterday, a local volunteer was cleaning up some of the undergrowth as two hi-vis jacket wearing security guards loitered by the old Olympic Park gates looking out for the very few people who knew they were able to pass through again.

The airport style covered walkway has long gone, and the warm up tracks are now covered in building site rubble. Apart from the removal of the hoarding around the Olympic Stadium, it’s difficult to see what has changed since the park closed to the public.

The view tube — a cluster of huts that I thought was barmy when I first heard about it, but turned out to be hugely popular has also reopened — but if they want customers to return, they’ll need to do a bit more than put a hand-written sign on the floor half way down the dead end to it.

That said, the pain-au-raisin was lovely, and the coffee was appreciated on a cold day.

The reopened Greenway – a garden centre at one end, and a cafe at the other.

I can’t say I think a lot of the garish lime-green paint work applied to the wooden hordings that corral people down under the railway to the rest of the Greenway though, but I detoured via Pudding Mill Lane, which is now a building site for Crossrail.