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St Pancras Cruising Club has published a
completely revised edition of its London Cruising Guide as a 32-page A5
booklet. The club is well-known for its organised cruises in the London area,
especially on the Thames Tideway, and the guide has been editied by Dr Roger
Squires, who has organised many of these.
The guide begins with an eight-page section
about cruising the tideway, with much safety advice and recommendations for
timing your journey from Limehouse to Brentford or Teddington with the tide.
The next eight pages are about the other half of the London Ring - from
Brentford to Limehouse via the canals.
Then comes a three-page section on one of the
cruises for which St Pancras is well-known, the circumnavigation of the Isle of
Dogs using Bow Creek, the tideway and Limehouse Cut, with an alternative
extension via the bottom end of the Regent’s and the Hertford Union.
The Slough Canal, one of the last (until now)
built in Britain is the subject of the next two pages, and is followed by a
page about “man overboard” emergencies.
A four-pages section on cruises on the Bow Back
Rivers is followed by an advertisement for the London IWA London Ring Plaque
(albeit with an out-of-date illustration), then a two-page section on the East
London Ring (lower Regent’s, Hertford Union, lower Lee and Limehouse Cut).
Those of our readers who cruise these waters
regularly (but how many of us do?) will find nothing new here except some
useful up-dated information. To anyone considering exploring the London
waterways for the first time, or for extending their knowledge of them, I
recommend this cruising guide as preliminary reading. It is less suitable for
refernce by the steerer while actually cruising. On the tideway I would prefer
for that use London IWA’s own Tideway Notes, of which a new edition
is recently published (as of Jan 2006). In my view the two publications
complement each other very well.
The St Pancras booklet is currently out of
print ( as of January 2006)
Review by Mike Stevens, first published
in Excalibur, Summer 2000 |
