On a crisp, cold London January morning...

...we walked from church to church around The Borough as part of Christian Unity week. Southwark is so rich in history, and I've mostly known about London Bridge and the river, and Saxon battles against the Vikings, and so on...but there's simply lots and lots to explore as you walk through the network of streets that lie between the Borough High Street and Waterloo station.

St George the Martyr is all  18th-century-with-high-pulpit, then tucked away in a side-road is a Welsh Chapel, built by the substantial Welsh community that settled in these parts in the 19th century - it's largely disused but, pleasingly, it does host occasional services which the local MP, Simon Hughes is invited to address as he speaks good Welsh...  Not far away is the charming garden which marks where a big and once popular "High Church" Anglican parish thrived: the church was hit by enemy bombing in WWII and only one part now remains,  owned by the Anglicans but now closed...and then only a few streets from that is another former High Church bastion which also suffered from WWII but has a small house with some Anglican Franciscans in it, who kindly invited us to visit  a charming tiny chapel restored in the 1970s...

And of course there is the great St Saviour's Cathedral - a glorious peal of bells every Sunday - and then the Church of the Precious Blood which will be familiar to readers of this Blog...

I had a dozen things that needed doing at home, but am so glad that this cold day of bright winter sunshine was given over to a throrough exploration of a corner of London I have come to love. I first knew Southwark as a young woman, visiting my father's office at Tower House, Hopton Street, next to Blackfriars Bridge. I remember a tall rather bleak building but with superb views over the Thames, and, excitingly, down below, magnificent printing works gloriously clattering and rolling with a satisfying noise, and the smell of ink...