Caravan Travels

We got back from our four-day Abbey Wood caravan trip yesterday. The weather was glorious the entire time we were away and we thoroughly enjoyed our second stay at this amazing caravan park in South East London.

Our first trip to Abbey Wood was back in November 2024 when it was rather cold and got dark early. This trip in mid-April was much more pleasant in the lovely sunshine and with ‘longer’ evenings. It wasn’t quite warm enough for sitting outside the van for extended periods, but it was fine for a short time.

To give the site its full name, the Abbey Wood Club Campsite is run by the Caravan and Motorhome Club (CAMC). The site has 112 touring pitches, 95 of which have hard standing, and 17 are full-serviced with running water and grey water drainage as well. Tents are also welcome and there is space for 25 of them on a big grassed area in the middle of the site. There are three modern toilet blocks on the site, although during our stay, one was still closed for refurbishment. The remaining two were in good condition and were pleasant to use.

The one great advantage that Abbey Wood has that, although it is right inside London and is surrounded by row upon row of terraced-houses, once on the site it feels very rural. It’s quite amazing really, how you can feel as though you are miles away from any city of town, and yet there is an Elizabeth Line tube station only five minutes walk away. The site is full of mature trees from which large numbers of parakeets can be heard calling throughout the day. There are plenty of squirrels and the odd urban fox on-site which all add to the rural feel.

We had a full-serviced pitch with running water and drainage on this occasion. We generally try to book serviced pitches as they are much more convenient (I hate filling the Aquarol and emptying the Wastemaster!) This was our second trip with the new caravan, and I’m very pleased to report that everything worked very well. We have a slight concern about our water pump/whale system and think that may need some slight adjustment, but otherwise all was great. I was even able to successfully try-out the built-in roof TV aerial on this trip; the reception in this part of London is extremely good and I only needed to extend the aerial – no rotation was required to improve the signal.

We were tired by the time we had traveled down to Abbey Wood and set everything up and we didn’t fancy cooking anything. There is a really excellent Indian restaurant near the tube station which we visited on our previous stay here, and so we visited that again. Fabulous food, but I rather over-indulged and felt very full on the walk back up the hill to the caravan!

A successful travelling day and we were ready for bed that night!

On Monday we went by tube to Canary Wharf where we boarded a City Clipper for a rapid cruise up the Thames to the Southbank Centre. From here we walked along the SouthBank past the Tate Modern and Shakespeare’s Globe theatre and had a lovely Turkish Meze lunch in Tas Pide on New Globe Walk.

Afterwards, we walked across Southwark Bridge and caught a tube back to Abbey Wood.

We stayed locally on Tuesday and did various jobs around the caravan and went out only briefly to get some fish and chips for tea.

Wednesday saw us going to Covent Garden for a ‘mooch about’ followed by a lunch in an All-Bar-One restaurant prior to getting back to the caravan to start packing things up to go home on Thursday.

On Thursday we had a leisurely breakfast before packing up and departing from Abbey Wood around 11.30am. Once again the weather was really good and we were at the Dartford Tunnel around 12.15pm. As ever the traffic was very heavy until we started up the M11 en route to the A14 and A1. By this time I was able to relax into the drive home.

We arrived back at our storage facility near Worksop by 4.30pm and ‘put the caravan to bed’. We’d had a really good trip and are already very much looking forward to our Cornwall trip in a few week’s time.