Maybe if I hadn’t been doing so well on the fang front over the preceding couple of days, weeks and months (and I could tender the girth evident in any of the photographs accompanying this Travelogue or the equivalent from last year) I might have had something after my smoked salmon and scrambled egg brioche.
Madam managed to follow her tuna roll with a raspberry Danish.
After that little indulgence, you need to do something to work off a few kilojoules, and you might have specified something more energetic than a leisurely progression around the Georgian sandstone warehouses in Salamanca Place that date back to the 1830s. We’d been there before, but at that point the landscape had been filled with market stalls and strolling shoppers, but with the markets removed there was a clear view of the buildings.
Salamanca Place commemorates the Battle of Salamanca, where the Duke of Wellington’s Anglo-Portuguese army defeat Marshal Marmont's French forces on 22 July 1812 during the Peninsular War. Wellington's victory allowed his army to liberate Madrid on 6 August and begin the Siege of Burgos, but the French regrouped and forced Wellington to retreat all the way back to Portugal in the autumn.
The Salamanca warehouses are further back from the water than their equivalents on the other side of Constitution Dock, the ones that house expensive hotels and restaurants, and now house an array of restaurants, bars, theatres, galleries, craft shops and professional offices.