This morning was taken up, as Sunday morning usually is, by breakfast and a run to the supermarket.

Later, when we were stirred by pangs of hunger, we thought about going out.

We took a bus to Finsbury Square and tried out the branch of Haz, the Turkish restaurant, there. Above is a panorama of the restaurant taken by Tigger though, because it is squeezed into a relatively small space you probably can’t make out much detail.

As usual, Tigger chose ayran to drink and I chose Turkish tea. They serve their tea in small tulip glasses here. This is traditional but when I can I persuade the restaurant to serve me a large cup! (Photo by Tigger.)

They serve meze here and we chose several vegetarian items, starting with lentil soup. (Photo by Tigger.)

Here we are looking along City Road and the sky shows that the weather is far from promising. It rained this morning but the rain is holding off for now.

We walked down City Road to London Wall where Tigger took this photo. We had come here to catch the 100 bus to our next destination, a participant in the Open House Weekend.

When I was young, I had an ambition to join the Thames Police. The idea of fighting crime by sailing up and down the Thames in a police launch appealed to me. I was therefore very interested to visit the Thames Police HQ in Wapping. When we arrived, however, it turned out that only the museum was available to visitors.(Above is one of the exhibits.)

The museum was quite crowded with visitors and it was hard to move about and view the exhibits.

According to the label, this equipment belongs to the Under Water and Confined Space Search Team. Their work includes the recovery of bodies and “Protester Removal”. Do they have many underwater protesters, I wonder, or protesters in confined spaces? Anything is possible, I suppose.

If I had hoped for a ride in a launch or even to see one close up, I was disappointed. This was as close as we were able to go. Tigger took this photo from the museum window.

If you look closely and perhaps use a magnifying glass), you can perhaps make out a cormorant perched on the pole just to the left of the blue boathouse.

Finally, this photo by Tigger might amuse you. She took it in Jusaka where we stopped for a final coffee before returning home. While Tigger was going on on with her crochet work, I was catching up with the blog, using the Bluetooth keyboard that I mentioned in an earlier post.

In addition to the places described in the foregoing two posts, we visited two others. Unfortunately, as I have committed myself to blogging on the day and have run out of time, I cannot describe them in detail. All I can do is identify them so that you can research them yourself, if you wish.

The first is the Blackheath Quaker Meeting House, a Grade II list Brutalist building, whose meeting room is shown above. Note the hour glass on the table (hour glasses fascinate me!).

It has a pyramidal ceiling to allow in the light without this being intrusive.

You will find plenty of information about this intriguing building online.

The next is Boone’s Chapel, built in 1683 to serve almshouses erected by the Merchant Taylors’ Company which have since been demolished. (Photo by Tigger.)

Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Hook were both involved in building it. The chapel fell into a state of neglect but has been rescued and restored. As with the previous item, information about this building can be found online.

When we emerged from this last visit, we were both rather tired as we we done a lot of walking and we were glad to sit on buses for the long ride home.

It now remains to be seen what tomorrow will bring!

Our next destination was a Jacobean mansion called Charlton House, pleasantly situated in Charlton Park. (Photo by Tigger.) It was built in 1609-12 as a residence. In its long history it has served as a military hospital and a museum and is now a community centre. The rooms no longer contain period furnishings so the interest is in the fixed decor.

The column-decorated entrance.

We started with a cup of tea in the house’s cafe which has this strapwork-decorated ceiling.

Here are some photos taken as we went through the house.

Here is a view of the park which I assume was once the house’s grounds.

This gateway now stands in an isolated position in the grounds.

As a nice touch, this public library occupies a part of the house.

This quaint little building away from the house near the road is the stables.

We crossed the road and caught a bus to Blackheath for the next part of our tour.

Here we are leaving the train at Charlton. It’s a pleasant sunny day so far, just right for a ramble. Let’s hope it remains so.

Here we are in Charlton village, heading to our first destination. This is London’s annual Open House weekend when many buildings are thrown open to the public.

On the way we spied this old drinking fountain. Is it Victorian? (Many, if not most antique ones date to that period.) I could not find a plaque or any other dedication so I cannot be sure.

This photo by Tigger shows where we were going, to the 17th-century Church of St Luke with Holy Trinity. (The double name suggests that two churches once combined into one but I didn’t enquire into that.)

On the façade of the church is this colourful sundial. I’m not sure that it is telling the correct time but in this age of watches and mobile phones that hardly matters.

This is a general view of the interior of the church, looking towards the altar.

The church has a number of stained glass windows, so ancient and some more recent.

This is one of the side chapels. If it has a name, I did not see one displayed.

This is a view towards the rear of the church, showing the massive beams in the roof.

On the way out we stopped to view the Millennium Tapestry, completed in 1999. It is in a narrow room so I had to take it by panorama which accounts for the distortion. It i a very complex piece of work and we were told that people who had worked on it were reckoned to be descendants of people who had worked on the Bayeux Tapestry.

In the entrance is this colourful mosaic showing a winged bull with the inscription SANCTUS LUCAS. This mythologicl animal is the symbol of the named saint.

We now caught a bus to our next destination.

Earlier this afternoon I was in Canonbury, a district in the Borough of Islington, when I spied this church spire nicely illuminated by the autumn sunshine.

I was intrigued by the fact that the end of the main church building (nearest the camera) seems to have been converted into residential accommodation.

I progressed around to the front of the church and discovered that this is St Stephen’s Canonbury. As I had an appointment I could not spend more time investigating.

The church just qualifies as Victorian, dating from two years into that reign (1839).

Canonbury owes its name to the fact that the land was given to the Priory of St Bartholomew in 1253. As the priory was in Smithfield, I assume the canons derived income from from the land by renting it out for farming.

There we have two topics for further research!