We’ve been working with InvestIN for a number of months preparing and planning tours for over 250 students attending their Sustainable Engineering: The Young Engineer Summer Experience 2022 course. As always, we planned for as many eventualities as we could. But every now and again, something wonderfully unexpected (and perfectly timed) happens that illustrates a point you happen to be making.

Neil Sinclair takes up the story:

As Footprints of London tour guides we’re used to the occasional interruption when in full flow. Emergency vehicle sirens, noisy aircraft and, thankfully very rarely, an inebriated heckler or two. We take them all in our stride.

But never before have we been upstaged by a 47,800 ton cruise ship; until last Thursday that is…

Footprints of London guides were entertaining and informing engineering students about London’s tidal and storm surge barrier at Woolwich Reach on the River Thames when the 227 metre long Viking Venus glided through the barrier en route to Greenwich at the end of a 14-day cruise from Bergen in Norway.

The 29 metre wide, 930 passenger capacity ship cruise ship passed easily through one of the barrier’s main 61 metre wide channels, watched from Barrier Park Gardens, Silvertown, by our engineering students.

They had chosen Footprints of London to tailor-make a guided walk around the Royal Victoria Dock and west Silvertown area to learn about the historic role docklands played in London’s economic development and how the moveable flood barrier has protected over 1.3 million Londoners from tidal and storm surge flooding for nearly 40 years.

Footprints guides also showed how, after decades of post industrial decay, the Silvertown area was being regenerated and revitalised culminating in the very recent go ahead for a £3.5bn commercial and housing scheme centred around the iconic art deco Millennium Mills and Pontoon Dock.