Ploughing through Green London

Green London has it's surprising moments

Tours of London are overly common. Bus tours detailing the history of the city and the tour guides can be dry and boring. So why not try a new kind of tour of the city?

Cate Trotter has created a three hour walking tour of London that focuses on the key environmentally green places that have popped up around the city. She went around London looking for specific examples of green living and sustainability. The stops include places like floating gardens, high end clothing stores, hydrogen-powered buildings and other business’s that represent the green movement.

She started the tour in 2008 and has been running the business and giving the tours since she started. She has since expanded the tour to include another five tours including Quirky and Weird London and London Graffiti.

But the Cutting Edge Green Tour was her first and the most popular of her tours. Highlights of the tour include visiting the city’s only floating gardens, a store that sells 99% recycled shoes, an eco-building half a mile high and other pretty unique places that you wouldn’t find unless you were really looking for them.

The floating gardens might be one of the more unique parts of the tour; they lie upstream of Tower Bridge and have fought the council for the right to be there as an important way to create an ecosystem on the London canals. The gardens are not just for flowers, but are usually full of vegetables for the people on the boats to eat.

You also get the opportunity to eat on the tour; Cate shows you where the best fair-trade chocolate and coffee are available in the city.

Now that the tour is just about two years old Cate is beginning to overhaul it and plans on launching the new version in June of this year. It needed to be revised because of all the new innovations that are showing up around the city.

The tour costs just under £40 per person and starts at the Bishopsgate entrance of Liverpool Street station, finishing by the Oxo Tower a cross the river. So while not the cheapest thing in the world, you do get every view of Green London that is possible to find.