London

Is it a bus, is it a boat? London by DUCK

28 Take the Duck Tour
We turn down an alley hidden alongside Terry Farrell’s MI6 building in Vauxhall, pass through a security gate and then motor down a short slipway. The vehicle jolts as the wheels come off the cobbles and on to the Thames-side shingle, then shudders as it plunges into the brown water. The windscreen slumps downwards, towards the domain of abandoned Saxon swords, cut-up bodies and rusting Ford Cortinas beneath the river’s choppy surface.

I expect to get wet but thankfully the windscreen comes up as sharply as it had gone down and the vehicle remains buoyant. As it should, for this is exactly what it was designed to do. Furthermore it was designed to do it while several angry Germans were shooting at it.
I am in a DUKW, a half-truck/half-boat, amphibious military vehicle built by the American General Motors Corporation to ferry men and supplies on to the Normandy beachhead on D-Day. Feature continues

It has less testing duties now, merely taking 30 passengers a time on an unusual trip along the river we spend so much of our lives ignoring.
Rebranded as a DUCK, the vehicle has been painted yellow and there are seats where previously terrified soldiers had only standing room, but despite these cosmetic changes the vehicle still has an atmosphere of great deeds about it.

Sixty-two years later war is still with us, most obviously in the shape of the MI6 building, espionage Legoland for the secret side of modern conflict that looms brashly above the water. But as we chug east it is an older building that brings home present conflicts in an uneasy way. In the water alongside the Houses of Parliament bob a series of hi-tech buoys bearing orange metal spikes and blinking surveillance equipment. ‘If you get too close,’ says the man next to me, ‘they release torpedoes.’ He’s joking, of course. Michael Hodges
(www.londonducktours.co.uk/ 020 7928 3132)

29 Get a full head of steam
London’s only steam railway; Sundays at Kew Bridge Steam Museum (Mar-Nov).
Kew Bridge Steam Museum, Green Dragon Lane, Brentford, Middx (020 8568 4757/www.kbsm.org) Gunnersbury tube/rail or Kew Bridge rail.

30 Shop for tobacco
G Smith & Sons has hardly changed since it opened in 1869. Fill a pouch.
Smith & Sons, 74 Charing Cross Rd, WC2 (020 7836 7422) Leicester Square tub.