Scene seen from the Golden Jubilee Bridge.

Better in large ("L"), for a change...

Hum, I was walking across the eastern one of the Golden Jubilee Bridges (the pedestrian bridges that flank the older Hungerford Bridge: they were added to the existing rail bridge and share its foundation piers), and noticed a strange scene on the foundation pier nearest the Southbank Centre.

The first peculiar thing that I noticed was that it has a large pile of skateboard carcasses on it: some of them were snapped, some were missing wheels or their metal axles ("trucks"). There is a skatepark nearby (within eyeshot) on the Southbank, but it still seems peculiar behaviour...
"My skateboard is broken: perhaps I should throw it from the pedestrian bridge onto the foundation pier...".
There were lots of skateboards: presumably it is the done thing. Idiots...
There were also lots of shoes on the pier, which seemed pretty normal by comparison.

There were about a dozen gulls (mostly juvenile herring gulls) and crows picking through the wreckage: the gulls were vigorously shaking pieces of skateboards (and shoes, bottles, a bicycle tyre's inner tube...), and the crows were watching and trying to get in on the action.

This juvenile herring gull (?) got very excited when it discovered an almost empty bottle of Evian. It pulled it away, and started pecking at the middle of the bottle.
Gawd, even London gulls want mineral water...
Anyway, pecking at the middle wasn't very successful (although it did manage to pull off and swallow a bit of the label: yummy), but it did attract this crow's attention. The gull had wedged the bottle against the edge of the pylon's concrete mount, but the crow decided it wanted the spring water, so grabbed on to one of the gull's primary feathers! It shrieked (poor gull!), and swung the crow around which eventually made it let go...

Perhaps I'm sheltered, but I thought it was extremely strange to see a crow fighting a gull over a bottle of Evian, on a pier covered in broken skateboards.
Am I awake?