Whitehall is one of the most famous and historic streets in London but has been tucked away on the cheap-to-middling side of the Monopoly board, perhaps because it's not a real estate hotspot. Instead it's an administrative hub for the highest echelons of government, the focus of our Remembrance commemorations and a conduit for protest, as well as the site of what was once the world's largest royal palace. As a street it's longer than it used to be but shorter than you probably think it is, terminating short of Parliament Square at the southern end. Let's start off instead at Trafalgar Square, the pink set's focal point, and explore the less bureaucratic end first.
Whitehall kicks off with a Pret A Manger and swiftly settles into catering mostly for tourists. The first gift shop is called Memento London, a souvenir-packed honeytrap where punters are lured inside by the sight of Paddington Bear sitting on the roof of a Mini. Nextdoor is a 'magical' emporium which sells Hufflepuff scarves and Triwizard cups, plus knock-off goods from other fantasy franchises, and if you pause to window-shop a bloke in a red beanie will walk over and ask if you fancy a ride on an open-top tour bus. For higher level contemporary culture try opposite at the Trafalgar Theatre (originally the Whitehall) which has reverted to offering a diet of celeb-fronted plays now that Jersey Boys has finally vacated.
Here too are several pubs that sightseeing families might plausibly drift into, some of which are converted banks so not as traditional as they appear. I checked their menus for fish and chips and can confirm it costs £16.50 at Walkers, £17.45 at the Silver Cross, £18.50 at The Horse & Guardsman and £19.50 at The Old Shades and The Clarence, so best shop around. In particular try not to be tempted inside Café De Royale because it's not a nice place for a cuppa and a sitdown, more a candy bazaar flogging Pop Tarts and Cheetos whose sole nod to hot drinks is a machine on the counter dispensing £3.99 lattes. I'm pleased to say its interior was doggedly empty.
The first sidestreet is called Great Scotland Yard, this the location of the Metropolitan Police's first HQ. The name has followed to each subsequent site, the first being New Scotland Yard on the Victoria Embankment (1890), then New Scotland Yard in Victoria (1967), then back to the Victoria Embankment again (2016). Whitehall remains a sensitive zone, so much so that on my visit multiple police vans were parked up in the middle of the road, sharpshooters were positioned in many a doorway and several groups of gloved officers were carefully checking every single lamppost and junction box against a prescribed list in a red folder. Given that I was wandering around taking multiple photos and scribbling down notes, I'm relieved to have got away unchallenged.
And then the government buildings start. First up is the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, last year's spin-off from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, most of which remains in the building behind as the Department for Business and Trade. If nothing else it's keeping the signwriters busy. Across the road are the Admiralty Buildings, another labyrinthine civil service warren, with 26 Whitehall being where Nelson's body rested on the night before his funeral. A lot of the buildings here present an ornate and overprotective frontage to the street, with very little clue as to which policies are being enacted behind the spikes and bomb-proof drapes.
Horseguards is the chief magnet for tourists hereabouts, specifically the two large sentry boxes to either side of the entrance to the parade ground. Onlookers take it in turns to pause with cameras in front of the mounted soldier with the funny hat, then ideally stand alongside, undeterred by signs warning that Horses May Kick Or Bite. The punters' big grins are in sharp contrast to the poor sod on his saddle, who can't have imagined on signing up that deadpan performance for a TikTok audience would be the central premise of his job. Were his helmet less obstructive he'd spend his entire duty staring at the two buildings opposite, either side of Horseguards Avenue, which appropriately for Monopoly purposes turn out to be a hotel and a house.
Hotel:The Old War Office
They didn't call the hotel the Old War Office because that would be commercial suicide, instead rechristening it The OWO. Once the domain of Kitchener and Churchill. it re-opened last autumn after an eight year refit with one half now containing 85 luxury residences for multimillionaires in need of a showy London pad. The remainder comprises 120 ultra-spacious hotel suites starting at £879 a night, plus a restaurant with a Michelin starred chef and a spa with a "gamechanging holistic wellness offering". This sumptuous internal rearrangement has been paid for by a group of Singaporean investors under the 'Raffles' brand, and I mention all this in case next time you're protesting down Whitehall you want to vent your righteous fury at the obscenely rich as well just as the government.
House:The Banqueting House
The Banqueting House is the sole surviving (visible) remnant of the Palace of Whitehall, designed in full-on classical style by Inigo Jones in 1622. It has a Rubens ceiling, a Flemish balustrade and an upper window through which Charles I walked just before being beheaded. It's also very closed at the moment pending renovation so hopefully you've already been inside. The original palace was Henry VIII's creation, a sprawling collection of royal buildings between here and the Thames, and you can probably guess what colour it started out given its name. Most of the palace burnt to the ground over two days in 1698 after a washerwoman left some wet linen too close to a charcoal burner, the Banqueting House being saved after adjacent buildings were frantically knocked down as a fire break. Whitehall once terminated here at an ornate archway called the Holbein Gate, beyond which it became a much narrower thoroughfare called The Street, before that too was demolished in 1759 to improve the flow of traffic.
Continuing south, back in the present day, the government buildings now come thick and fast. First the Scottish Office and the Welsh Office (the former significantly larger), then the Orwellian bulwark of the Ministry of Defence with its protective stripe of fenced-off lawn to either side. Three heroes of WW2 are commemorated with statues out front - that's Monty, Alan and Slim - and are highly unlikely to be joined by any heroes of WW3 because this spot is ground zero for instant vaporisation. The Cabinet Office has less oppressive premises across the road, although still with armed police on guard at unmarked doors and paparazzi waiting out front hoping to capture the guilty face of an emerging minister. I merely caught a glimpse of the scrawled notes under the arm of a senior civil servant.
The memorial in the middle of the street commemorates The Women of WW2 and takes the form of a bronze monolith bearing a coat-rack hung with evocative uniforms. It's been here since 2005, is hollow to save money and was part funded by Baroness Boothroyd's winnings on the gameshow Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The next sideroad is Downing Street, now incredibly well fortified, with a gazebo for the checking of passes on the far side of a screen of black railings. Look closely and you'll see a few remnants of the red paint someone hurled at a recent demonstration, making absolutely no impact whatsoever on government policy. We have just two buildings and a pylon of Portland Stone to go.
The Cenotaph was originally made from wood and plaster because it was intended to be temporary, but was so widely admired that Lutyens designed a permanent structure to replace it. Medals, uniforms and duffel coats have been worn here annually since 1920. The peculiarly palatial edifice opposite, set back from the road, is Richmond House which was built in 1987 to house the Department of Health. More recently it's been pencilled in as the site for a temporary Commons chamber while the Palace of Westminster undergoes urgent repairs, but a heads-in-the-sand approach has so far reprieved the building. And this is where Whitehall unexpectedly terminates, the last 100m down to Parliament Square being called Parliament Street instead. For confirmation see the street sign outside the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, partway down the balustrade...
...which thankfully saves me from writing two more paragraphs.
Once their leaves come out, trees are green until the autumn. But they're never as brilliantly green as they are in early spring when the leaves are still young. The canopy is a beautiful burst of light greens, a mix of subtle tones of jade and emerald. Here's the view from Richmond Hill looking proper lush.
But it never lasts. As the weeks go by the greens get inexorably darker and well before summer they're all just identikit deep green, those fresh contrasts lost. The shift to autumn's also fabulous, don't get me wrong, but nothing beats the first flush of green we get to enjoy in April.
It's all to do with chlorophyll. In young leaves the chloroplasts are still developing so contain less green pigment and the leaves tend to be lighter. It's also compounded by maturity. As new leaves grow they begin making additional pigments that darken the foliage, and they also thicken as they develop waxy layers that can dim the green hue.
Spring's bright burst is brief and gone too soon. Enjoy the greens while you can.
Farrow and Ball paint colours: Arsenic, Ball Green, Bancha, Beverly, Breakfast Room Green, Calke Green, Card Room Green, Carriage Green, Chappell Green, Chine Green, Churlish Green, Cooking Apple, Danish Lawn, Duck Green, Folly Green, Eddy, Emerald Green, Green Ground, Green Smoke, Green Stone, Grove Green, Hog Plum, Lichen, Mere Green, Minster Green, Monkey Puzzle, Olive, Palm, Pea Green, Pond Green, Raw Tomatillo, Sap Green, Saxon Green, Studio Green, Suffield Green, Sutcliffe Green, Teresa's Green, Tunsgate Green, Verdigris Green, Vert de Terre, Vitty Green, Whirlybird, Yeabridge Green
MPs: Damian Green, Chris Green, Caroline Lucas, Lilian Greenwood, Kate Green, Margaret Greenwood, Sarah Green
Tube stations: Bethnal Green, Bounds Green, Golders Green, Greenford, Green Park, Kensal Green, North Greenwich, Parsons Green, Stepney Green, Turnham Green, Willesden Green, Wood Green Former names: Acton Green, Croxley Green, Walham Green Other London stations: Drayton Green, Edmonton Green, Greenwich, Harringay Green Lanes, Hither Green, Palmers Green, Slade Green, South Greenford Outside London: Acocks Green, Barnt Green, Borough Green and Wrotham, Broad Green, Dunton Green, Green Lane, Green Road, Greenbank, Greenfaulds, Greenfield, Greenhithe, Greenock Central, Greenock West, Gretna Green, Hall Green, Heald Green, Hough Green, Hurst Green, Langley Green, Lea Green, Marston Green, Seer Green and Jordans, Town Green, Welham Green, Wylde Green
Musicians: Al, Cee Lo, Day, Gartside, Jelly, Norman Baum, Professor Music: Barwick, Door, Grass of Home, Onions, Tambourine
London walks: Jubilee Greenway, Green Chain, Green Link, Dollis Valley Greenwalk
Html codes: Aquamarine #7FFFD4, Eucalyptus #5F8575, Jade #00A36C, Lincoln Green #478778, Malachite #0BDA51, Olive Green #808000, Pear #C9CC3F, Pistachio #93C572, Sea Green #2E8B57, Spring Green #00FF7F, Teal #008080, Verdigris #40B5AD
London's Millennium Greens: Aberfeldy, Albion, Alexandra, Chadwell, Cricklewood, New Southgate, Waterloo, Robin Hood
Cities/towns with Green Belts: Bath/Bristol, Birmingham, Blackpool, Bournemouth, Burton upon Trent, Cambridge, Derby/Nottingham, Gloucester, Lancaster, Leeds/Sheffield, London, Liverpool/Manchester, Newcastle, Oxford, Stoke-on-Trent, York
National flags that are at least 40% green: Algeria, Bangladesh, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Guyana, Madagascar, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, São Tomé and Príncipe, Saudi Arabia, Togo, Turkmenistan, Zambia
Places in London according to the Ordnance Survey: Acton Green, Ardleigh Green, Bell Green, Berry's Green, Bethnal Green, Bounds Green, Broad Green, Brook Green, Chingford Green, Colham Green, Fortis Green, Golders Green, Green Street Green, Greenford, Greenhill, Greenwich, Hither Green, Horns Green, Kensal Green, Leaves Green, Newyears Green, North Greenwich, Norwood Green, Palmers Green, Parsons Green, Pinner Green, Rowley Green, Rush Green, Slade Green, Strand on the Green, Stroud Green, Walham Green, West Green, Westbourne Green, Wood Green, Woodcote Green, Woodford Green
Salt and vinegar: Walkers, Sainsburys, Tesco, Aldi, Asda, Morrisons Cheese and Onion: Golden Wonder, Smith's, Hula Hoops, McCoys Green Onion: Lay's Chicken: Smiths (Australia)
Fictional: Green Gables, Green Ginger, Green Hornet, Jolly Green Giant, Dock Green, Lieutenant Green, Reverend Green, Camberwick Green
Green lines: District, Waterloo & City, Trams, Suffragette, 701, 724, 755, 757
The Battle of Barnet, one of the key turning points of the Wars of the Roses, took place on 14th April 1471. A 553rd anniversary's not particularly major but unfortunately I missed the 550th, as did most of the population of Barnet due to lockdown issues. Also the battle took place on a foggy Sunday morning, so at least I've got the day of the week right, although it was also Easter Day so I've missed out there.
Much of the late 15th century was a bloody tussle between two warring dynasties, the Houses of Lancaster and York, and the Battle of Barnet was the key moment when the white rose finally triumphed over the red. Beforehand Henry VI was enjoying his second spell as king but afterwards Edward IV was back on the throne for his second go, this very much a peak ping pong moment in the history of the English monarchy. And it all took place at the top of the Northern line, a short walk past The Spires shopping centre, although precisely where it happened is a hotly debated topic and the question at the heart of today's post.
The best place to go for answers is probably Barnet Museum, a volunteer-run repository of wonders on Wood Street. There's no aspect of local history its members haven't diligently researched, displayed and brought to publication, with the 1471 battle meriting pride of place in the ground floor gallery. Here are helmets, shields and battlefield models, plus a large watercolour painting of all the main players, plus did you know that three kings of England were in Barnet that day (the future Richard III had rocked up to his first major military engagement). The curators are terribly chuffed to have the seal of the Earl of Warwick, aka the Kingmaker, on temporary display on loan from the British Museum. He'd long been the strategic mastermind behind the Wars of the Roses but had recently made the mistake of switching sides and at Barnet the victorious Yorkists slew him dead.
You can tell it's anniversary month in Barnet because Barnet Museum volunteers have hung almost 100 heraldic banners from the lampposts up Barnet Hill and the High Street, even inside The Spires. They created the set on waterproof cotton in readiness for the 550th, each representing a noble family that turned up to fight, and with typical attention to detail the Lancastrians hang on one side of the road and the Yorkists on the other. Heraldry proved unexpectedly crucial that day in 1471 as Lancastrian fighters mistook the Earl of Oxford's "star with rays" badge for Edward's IV's "sun in splendour" and started firing down arrows on their own side. If there's a lesson to be learned from the Battle of Barnet it's never to launch an offensive in thick fog.
The final banner has been hung at the top of the high street by Pizza Express, which is also where Hadley Green starts. This is Probable Battlesite Number 1, indeed it's where English Heritage decided the battle was fought was when they published a full report in 1995 [report][map]. Contemporary chronicles refer to "a broad green right beside the St Alban's high road" and Hadley Green still fits that description, a substantial triangle of sometimes-squishy grass criss-crossed by minor drainage channels. A lot of large houses have since nibbled away at the perimeter but there's still plenty of room to imagine two armies facing off against each other, perhaps even Edward IV standing beside the bus stop or the duckpond.
Chroniclers specifically mentioned a 'hedge-syde' to the west of the main road behind which the Earl of Oxford's men massed before combat. An ancient hedgerow still exists in the appropriate location, now surrounded by the 18 holes of Old Fold Golf Club, and a lot of academic supposition has drawn the conclusion that this therefore nails down the site. A public footpath crosses the golf course supposedly providing access to the elusive hedge, although the blue posts are quite hard to follow and yesterday the fairways were weekend-busy with flying balls so I gave it a miss. The moated manor house that existed here in 1471 is long gone but the moat survives and provides a unique water hazard surrounding the 18th green.
The most prominent memorial to the Battle of Barnet is an obelisk called the Hadley Highstone. It was erected by Sir Jeremy Sambrook in 1740, this 299 years after the battle proving that commemorating peculiar anniversaries is nothing new. It sits on a freshly-mown triangle of grass at the northern end of the village in the fork where the roads from St Albans and Potters Bar converge. This is Probable Battlesite Number 2, at least according to the Battlefields Trust who place the Lancastrian frontline parallel to the A1000 passing directly through the obelisk [map]. This was later in the battle, because in the foggy conditions the two opposing flanks had rotatedsomewhat, adding to the general confusion regarding who was precisely where.
If the Lancastrians were up by the road then the Yorkists would have down in the valley, or at least on the slopes of a depression containing the Monken Mead Brook. Today the fledgling stream is alas confined to private farmland so off limits, but the dip can be seen by following a short broad track down the side of Greenacre Close. Stand by the metal gate, just past the Girl Guide hut, and you can look out over an open field towards a low line of trees and a bank of pasture on the far side. At present it's a dazzling shade of yellow, i.e. proper peak attractive, although somewhat tarnished by the presence of a bright pink portaloo under the nearest tree. Back in the day all of this would have been heathland on the edge of the Enfield Chase royal hunting ground, perhaps flecked by the bodies of the Duke of Exeter's men. They still call the foot of the valley Dead Man's Bottom.
Probable Battlesite Number 3 lies fully to the north of the Highstone in the vicinity of Kitt's End Road. This quiet lane was the main route between London and St Albans at the time of the battle, indeed right up to the 1820s when a new more direct road branched off from Barnet instead. I walked to the farm on the second bend, part of the longstanding medieval hamlet of Kitt's End, and stared out across a much broader arable landscape towards the mega roundabout at South Mimms. By leaving Hadley I was now firmly in Hertfordshire, indeed there's a distinct possibility that the only registered battlefield in London isn't actually in London at all, not quite.
Much of the land here is covered by Wrotham Park, the private estate of a huge 18th century country house built and still owned by the Byng family. This gets used a lot for corporate hospitality events, wedding receptions and as a filming location, while to the south is a landscaped business park you won't be getting access to either. Edward IV had a chapel built somewhere here to commemorate his victory, although archaeologists have yet to unearth convincing evidence of precisely where it was, or indeed of precisely anything [report]. All that's known is that red faced white in the fog somewhere north of Barnet, the two sides off balance and increasingly confused, and that the tide of English history turned here as one king vanquished another.
» City guide Paul Baker runs regular walks in Barnet, including an anniversary battlefield tour this morning at 11am.
» The Barnet Medieval Festival is due to return on the weekend of 8th-9th June 2024 at Byng Road playing fields.
» Barnet Museum is open five afternoons a week (not Monday or Friday) and also on Saturday mornings from 10.30am. Admission is free and the welcome is warm. Before you leave make sure you pick up a Barnet 1471 leaflet (How the Battle of Barnet fits into the modern landscape) and then you too can try and discover where it might have been fought.
It's a lovely day in the capital so I hope you're out enjoying the unseasonable warmth rather than wasting your time reading today's post. That's because it's about journeys through consecutively numbered postcode districts, an issue of no practical use whatsoever.
Here's an approximate schematic of the postcodedistricts in central London.
WC1 and WC2 cover the West End and EC1-EC4 are essentially the City.
WC: The dividing line between WC1 and WC2 roughly follows the alignment of New Oxford Street and High Holborn. To walk from WC1 to WC2 is as simple as crossing the road outside Holborn station. EC: The triple point between EC1, EC2 and EC4 is just outside St Paul's station. To walk the EC postcode districts consecutively simply walk from there along Cheapside and then do a circuit of Bank junction, which is the EC2, EC3 and EC4 triple point.
It's quick and easy to walk the districts of WC and EC consecutively. As a spoiler, these are the only London postcode areas you can walk consecutively, so you can stop reading here.
Things get more awkward in W, NW, N, E, SE and SW, the "compass point" districts of the London postal district. That's because they were numbered alphabetically rather than geographically, so the chances of consecutive numbered districts being adjacent is quite low.
E1, E2 and E3 are next to each other, that's Whitechapel (the Head Office), then Bethnal Green, then Bow. But E4 is Chingford which is nowhere near and so the sequence collapses.
It goes wrong either side because E7 Forest Gate isn't near E8 and E13 Plaistow doesn't quite touch E12. As a spoiler 'five' is the maximum chain length anywhere in the London postcode district, so you can stop reading here.
W: W9 Maida Hill → W10 North Kensington → W11 Notting Hill → W12 Shepherds Bush (4) NW: NW2 Cricklewood → NW3 Hampstead and NW9 The Hyde → NW10 Willesden (2) N: N10 Muswell Hill → N11 New Southgate → N12 North Finchley (3) SE: SE21 Dulwich → SE22 East Dulwich → SE23 Forest Hill (3) SW: SW16 Streatham → SW17 Tooting → SW18 Wandsworth → SW19 Wimbledon → SW20 West Wimbledon (5)
The NW postcode area is particularly rubbish for consecutive adjacent areas. The SW postcode area manages another chain of 5, but that's still not very good.
Things pick up again in the postcode areas covering outer London. Here's RM for Romford.
It all goes wrong here because RM11 Hornchurch isn't near RM10. That's a shame because what follows is a perfect run from RM11 to RM18 Tilbury, although we've gone outside London by this point. That said, RM1 to RM10 is actually the longest consecutive sequence anywhere in London, so you can stop reading here.
I told you RM was long - none of the other postcode areas in London get past six. Also CR is particularly rubbish because none of its nine districts adjoin consecutively anywhere.
If we allow sequences of London postcode districts that go beyond London we can do much better.
This is because most provincial postcode districts are numbered geographically rather than alphabetically. TW is particularly impressive, suggesting that whoever numbered the districts had a consecutive sequence in mind. Only the leap from TW6 Heathrow to TW7 Isleworth breaks the chain. That said, TW7 to TW20 is easily the longest consecutive sequence of postcode districts starting anywhere in London, so you can stop reading here.
But if we ignore the letters and just look at the numbers, we can do 20.
That's the UB sequence from UB1 to UB6, a cunning W7 link through Hanwell and then TW8 all the way to TW20.
This is a long spiralling chain and cannot be beaten. If you have nothing better to do this weekend you could try to follow it from Southall to Egham. The 195 bus from Southall to Hayes ticks off the first four quite nicely, and the 285 from Teddington to Feltham does a nice job of TW11 to TW14. But hopefully you stopped reading a long time ago because it's a lovely day and you're out enjoying the unseasonable warmth.
We're not due another tube map until August when the Overground lines get their own names. There's no point replacing paper maps and posters on platforms until then. But the online map on the TfL website is another matter and is often updated between print runs to reflect the latest changes. Indeed a new tube map pdf slipped out unheralded at the end of March and something marvellous has happened. Two daggers have been culled.
This is how the tangle of orange spaghetti in the Hackney area looked before.
It's been like this since the lines out of Liverpool Street joined the Overground in 2015, splitting into two branches north of Hackney Downs. The red daggers first appeared a year later to point out the important fact that half the trains don't stop at Cambridge Heath or London Fields. If you want to board/alight at these stations you need a train via Seven Sisters, not a train on the Chingford branch. And rather than explaining this, TfL stuck two unlabelled daggers on the map and invited users to work this out for themselves.
A better solution would have been to display the two lines separately, splitting north of Bethnal Green rather than north of London Fields. It would then have been patently obvious, even to someone with no grasp of English, that Cambridge Heath and London Fields were served by only some of the trains. I mentioned this way back in 2016, citing the sudden tangle of orange as the reason it probably hadn't been done ("We could show this on the map by splitting the lines, but it's so squished now there isn't room.") Now finally, just before the lines get new colours, the designers have decided to make the split. It means an extra blob and longer lines but hurrah, the intention is so much clearer.
Red daggers were introduced to the tube map in June 2016 to depict issues TfL thought were important but didn't have space to tell you. Blue daggers still got a full explanation in the key ('Holland Park - Station closed until early August 2016') but red daggers weren't similarly listed. Instead the legend said 'services for these stations are subject to variation' and invited you to search "TfL stations" for further information. This was plainly a ridiculous idea, directing customers off on a digital goose chase with no guarantee of success, so has obviously continued in every iteration of the tube map since.
More recently the instructions for red daggers changed from search "TfL stations" to visit tfl.com/plan-a-journey. This is increasingly TfL's answer to everything - when in doubt, plan a journey and follow the solution we serve up. But it doesn't explain what the underlying issue is, nor encourage independent travel, merely expects people to use a digital crutch every time. And given that one of the red daggers is at Liverpool Street, the busiest railway station in the country, this ambiguous approach isn't exactly helpful.
† Turnham Green: Piccadilly line trains sometimes stop
† Paddington: Elizabeth line trains sometimes serve the mainline platforms
† Liverpool Street: Elizabeth line trains sometimes serve the mainline platforms
† Cambridge Heath: Trains to/from Chingford don't stop
† London Fields: Trains to/from Chingford don't stop
† West India Quay: Trains from Bank don't stop
† Emerson Park: (not sure, maybe no trains after 10pm)
But the red daggers at Cambridge Heath and London Fields have now been removed, hurrah, reducing the total to just five. And I'd like to argue that the target should be zero - all daggers should be blue and fully explained or not on the map at all.
One problem with Target Zero is the limited amount of space alongside the tube map to explain what the daggers mean. This used to be easier when the key was on the map itself, but the sequential introduction of trams and Thameslink has scuppered that and now takes up most of the available space. It's going to get even more cramped in August when the key needs to include six Overground lines instead of one, so really the only way to deal with the red daggers is to explain them more concisely or not to include them at all.
Turnham Green's red dagger wouldn't be needed if the Piccadilly/District interchange blobs were removed, because these only apply before 7am and after 10.30pm, not when the vast majority of most people travel. Paddington and Liverpool Street's daggers should either be tied to the Elizabeth line and clarified or removed altogether. West India Quay's dagger issue could be solved by drawing the Poplar junction differently, but this would be such a mess (see on-train maps) that it should never be inflicted on the tube map. And Emerson Park is TfL's least used station so its relatively minor timetabling issue could, indeed should, be easily ignored.
There is precedent for deleting red daggers. Camden Town used to have one because it was exit only on Sunday afternoons, then this was no longer deemed important enough to mention and the dagger disappeared. We should get rid of the rest, or take the time to explain them properly, because expecting punters to search online is a pointless distraction and an utter waste of effort. Solving the Cambridge Heath/London Fields problem graphically shows how well this can be done.
While I was in Enfield, heading away from the power station, I decided to depart across Sewardstone Marsh. Why exit the dull way when you can cross the Lea and walk through a minor Essex village? The riverside path passed nosey ponies and a pumping station and crossed three footbridges of various ages. And halfway across the third of these, which is the Cattlegate Footbridge, I realised I was exiting Greater London somewhere I'd never exited the capital before.
So I wondered how many ways there are to exit the capital, how many paths and tracks and roads and railways in total around the periphery. A footpath here, more footpaths further upriver, and goodness knows how many more around 200 miles or so of boundary. Some ways out are big and obvious like the A10 or the Central line or Woodford High Road, but others are just tiny tracks in woods or paths across fields, not to mention minor bridges across a river.
More to the point, would it be possible to cross them all? I must have crossed the Greater London boundary in more locations than the average person, so how much of a task would it be to cross the rest? With the Cattlegate Footbridge now ticked off, could I become the first person to do them all?
I got a map out and just considered crossings of the boundary in the London borough of Enfield. Bridge✔ bridge✔ bridge✔ M25✔ towpath✔ railway✔ High Street✔ roof of tunnel✔ railway✔ A10✔ aqueduct✔ footpath✔ country lane✔ was a strong start. But then came several subways under the M25 I'd never tackled, and on closer inspection there was another minor subway I'd missed back in Waltham Cross which might or might not have been private, and did a path criss-crossing the boundary count as one or several, and this was actually a lot more complicated than it looked.
Also on closer inspection I had crossed Cattlegate Footbridge before because it's part of London Loop section 18, which I'd originally assumed had crossed the footbridge to the north. I'd even included a photo of it on the blog, this being 10 years ago, and then forgotten about it... so there was now another exit from the capital I hadn't actually crossed. If just Enfield is this complicated, I thought, I don't think I'll bother.
I still reckon I've crossed the Greater London boundary in far more places than most people ever have, including some ridiculously unimportant footpaths in Havering, Hillingdon and Bromley. But I won't be deliberately trying to do the rest, nor even cataloguing them, because life's too short. Also I'd have ended up visiting lots and lots of quite dull places, like Sewardstone, and then probably writing about them and nobody wants that. A lucky escape for all of us, I think.
While I was in Willesden, round the back of Taylors Lane Power Station, I came across this oddly-named cul-de-sac. That's an odd name for a cul-de-sac, I thought. Why was Energen Close named after a private company?
I assumed Energen might have been something to do with the power station, or a company who owned something that used to be here, probably in the 1980s/1990s judging by the age of the housing. Then I remembered the name of the electricity company was actually Powergen, not Energen, although they were founded in 1989 so they hit the time bracket perfectly. Energen was merely a company that made crispbreads for dieters and small light rolls for postwar ladies, so I was clearly on completely the wrong track.
I did some Googling, but it wasn't very helpful because Energen Close was the site of a tragic shooting in 2020 and a lot of the results were about that. So I did what I normally do next and checked the old maps on the National Library of Scotland website... and what do you know this genuinely was the site of the factory that made Energen bread rolls! The map showed a large building labelled Energen Works (Food Products), the date being 1955, and further research then revealed that the company had been up and running since 1929.
Which got me wondering if there are any other residential streets in London named after private companies originally based there.
» Not streets on industrial estates, nor access roads to factories, but places people actually live.
» Not streets coincidentally named after companies, like Dunelm Grove or Cadbury Close.
» Not streets thematically named after businesses based elsewhere.
» Not companies named after streets but streets named after companies, most likely streets on the sites of things.
The square after Pall Mall on the Monopoly board is theElectric Company. It would be too overfamiliar to visit Tate Modern and Battersea Power Station, plus neither of them still generate electricity, so I'm not going there. Instead I've identified the five largest power stations in the capital ranked by capacity in megawatts. All are large buildings with tall chimneys so stand out in their locality, and you might like to see if you can guess where they are before reading further.
n.b. The government provides an annual list of major power producer power stations as part of the Digest of UK Energy Statistics, or DUKES for short, so I've used their data. There are only nine such power stations in Greater London because belching fuel and major centres of population no longer mix.
London's biggest power stations
1) Enfield Power Station(408 MW) Type: Combined Cycle Gas Turbine Fuel: Natural Gas Location: Brancroft Way, Brimsdown EN3 7PL Commissioned: 1999
This is a post-Thatcherite pioneer, one of the first commercial projects specifically designed to supply electricity into the UK electricity pool. It was developed by a consortium of American companies who decided the arse end of Enfield was the ideal place to plonk a single shaft CCGT steam turbine and heat recovery steam generator. They hid it well. Enfield Power Station squats beyond the railway at the far end of a industrial estate beside the River Lea and a whopping reservoir. You might have clocked it from the train, you could have traipsed past it up a lonely towpath, but unless you live at Enfield Lock or work nearby in a big shed wearing a hairnet it's likely passed you by.
I'd never explored Brimsdown properly before, other than passing by on the 491 bus and thinking how unpretty it all looked. This side of the railway is a full-on sprawling workplace plied by vans and trucks - one of London's largest Strategic Industrial Locations - because mass manufacturing activity has to take place somewhere. Brancroft Road bears off by the Driving Test Centre (for lorries rather than cars) and curves round past thick hedgerows towards a puffy chimney. The powerstation is functional rather than attractive, a series of pipes and boxes rather than one big building, and looks like it would be relatively simple to disassemble. Three large silos feed the beast, white steam issues from multiple vents and the chimney has all the charm of a vacuum cleaner nozzle. No entry. No drones. Danger of death.
Across the road is one of Greggs 14 UK bakery sites, churning out melts, vegan sausage rolls and most recently pizza, behind that is a vast shed dispensing M&S Food and behind that the Warburtons bakery which feeds London and the southeast. Observing some of the Greggs employees sat out front at tables in the shadow of the power station, it did look like their employer had provided them with bags of pastry treats for breaktime consumption. I then followed an unlikely-looking public footpath which squeezed between the foot of the chimney and Brimsdown substation, an electricjungle of metal frames, spiky ceramics and thrumming coils. The alleyway eventually emerged in a backwoods recreation ground where multiple chains of pylons lead off to feed electricity up and down the Lea Valley, perhaps even powering the device you're reading this on. It all has an eerie beauty, but you'd never know.
2) Taylors Lane Power Station(132 MW) Type: Open Cycle Gas Turbine Fuel: Diesel/Gas Oil Location: Leicester Road, Willesden NW10 8JP Commissioned: 1979
Who'd have guessed that London's second largest electricity generator was inside the North Circular? Only just... up Neasden way not far from IKEA and the Hindu temple... but nowhere you'd build a power station today. Like Brimsdown it's located on the footprint of a former coal-fired station, and like Brimsdown it's operated by the same state-owned German multinational. They're Uniper, the world's largest energy company by revenue, whose portfolio also includes Ratcliffe-on-Soar, the Isle of Grain and three nuclear plants in Sweden. Taylors Lane is one of their smaller operations.
It ain't pretty, more a row of concrete shields with four white boxes stacked on top and two drab brown chimneys rising alongside. It looks slightly prettier viewed from Brentfield Open Space through a screen of leaves, and substantially less appealing from the footpath running alongside the adjacent electricity substation. Here I found half a sofa cushion and a abandoned microwave, plus an ageing sign warning DANGER 132,000 VOLTS on a fence protecting another spiky transformer menagerie. And this time people actually live close by, some in Edwardian terraces probably erected to house the original workers and others in postwar flats built after the air hereabouts got a lot cleaner. Incongruous as anything.
3) Riverside Resource Recovery(80 MW) Type: Bioenergy Fuel: Municipal Solid Waste Location: Norman Road, Belvedere DA17 6JY Commissioned: 2011
This one, by contrast, is as far away from a resident population as Ken Livingstone could manage. Its swooshing silhouette was tucked away on the Thames estuary in Bexley, just downstream from Crossness pumping station on the Erith Marshes. The closest businesses are mostly supermarket distribution centres and storage solutions, and nobody across the river at Ford Dagenham is going to complain either. Try not to confuse it with the similarly futuristic Crossness Sewage Incinerator nextdoor, whose purpose is to combust raw sludge cake at temperatures up to 950°C and whose chimney is less of a grey swirl, more of a grey bulge.
The Riverside Resource Recovery Facility instead exists to turn waste into electricity via a super-heated air-cooled process. It merrily munches through over three quarters of a million tonnes of London's waste per annum, the majority of which arrives by barge and is unloaded at the adjacent pier via a strikingly orange row of cranes. Its original purpose was to allow the closure of the landfill site downriver at Mucking, and a sign of its continuing success is that it's about to be expanded into a building called Riverside 2 which'll be able to process another 650,000 tonnes of non-recyclables. Unless you're heading down the Thames yourself, it's very much out of sight out of mind.
4) Edmonton EcoPark(58 MW) Type: Bioenergy Fuel: Municipal Solid Waste Location: Advent Way, Meridian Water N18 3AG Commissioned: 1970
Back to Enfield and the Lea, this time to the point where the North Circular surges across the valley. And also back in time because burning waste's not new, this place has been doing it for over 50 years, indeed it's one of the oldest Energy from Waste facilities in Europe. So far more than 21 million tonnes of rubbish have been diverted from landfill by the Edmonton EcoPark, and by now managers must realise that branding it an 'EcoPark' is fooling nobody. Again it's not especially close to where anyone lives, more where they come for out of town shopping, car parts or banqueting. And again it's in the process of being expanded, or rather significantly updated, because the original facilities are unsurprisingly nearing the end of their useful life.
The chimney on the old bit has two tiny prongs like something you'd plug into a continental socket. The two chimneys on the new bit are much thinner and almost pristine white, for now. Down below, beneath a footballpitchsworth of solar panels, can be seen a row of identical shuttered gates numbered from 1 to 13. Large megadustcarts arrive regularly at the front gate with muck to unload and take them round the back, but not (quite) yet into the new Resource Recovery Facility at EcoPark South. The most recent confirmed innovation is the opening of a Reuse and Recycling Centre (aka 'the council tip') which allows public access onto the site for the first time, but I hadn't brought any rubbish of my own so I didn't risk that.
5) SELCHP(30 MW) Type: Bioenergy Fuel: Municipal Solid Waste Location: Landmann Way, South Bermondsey SE14 5RS Commissioned: 1994
SELCHP stands for South East London Combined Heat and Power and is a waste incineration plant tucked into the railwaylands west of Deptford. It was set up by three local authorities to deflect unrecyclabes from landfill, a very worthy cause, and has been doing that for three hungry decades. You've probably seen it from the train on the way out of London Bridge, a large industrial shed with a thin chimney rising forth... much like the rest of the top five. Pass by on the Overground and you'll additionally see a dark cluster of giant downward vents in a box on the side, much like someone cut the tops off half a dozen rockets.
This is the only one of the five I've actually been inside, courtesy of Open House, while decked out in safety gloves and hi-vis for an incredibly memorable walkthrough. We followed a maze of walkways and landings to visit the infill hoppers, the rag-filled bunker, the main control room, the incineration grate and (through a thick glass window) the furnace with its raging flames. The whiff was pretty terrible in places but don't let me put you off, it was amazing to gain access to the belly of the beast and see where the contents of a binbag might ultimately end up. However it says a lot about the inefficiency of production that burning all this waste generates only a tiny fraction of the energy generated by the gas belcher in Enfield. In terms of energy production and energy consumption, London's still a world away from net zero.
n.b. Only four other London power stations appear in the government's database and they produce significantly less electricity. In 6th place are the wind turbines in Dagenham (6 MW) and the other three are solar arrays in Cranham, Crossness and Beckton (3 MW, 1½ MW, ½ MW).
n.b. Ten years ago Barking Power Station would have been top of the list, capable of generating 1000 MW of electricity, but that's fully decommissioned and lined up as the future site of the City of London's wholesale markets. The capital's new number 1 doesn't even make the national top 50.
n.b. Greenwich Power Station has a capacity of 155 MW so is arguably in second place in this list. However it exists as a standby for London Underground's power supply in case of emergency loss, not to feed the National Grid, so it's not in the DUKES database and I've disregarded it here.
As the Mayoral election approaches, all sorts of parties are announcing all sorts of policies on all sorts of things.
I'll take a look at some of the more intriguing proposals later in the campaign, once everyone's finally told us what they are. But let's take a closer look at the first big manifesto to be released, that of Green Party candidate Zoë Garbett, a 134-page monster which was launched yesterday. And because transport is one of the areas Mayors have most control over, let's dig into some of her more intriguing transport policies.
Set an ambition to flatten fares and create a single zone for tube and rail, just like we have on buses and trams, helping everyone in outer London pay less for travel.
It's not the first time the Green Party has proposed a single London fare zone. But is it practical, would it work and might a lot of people end up paying more?
We currently have six fare zones so cutting that to one would be a very significant change. It'd mean a tube ride from Leicester Square to Covent Garden would cost the same as from Upminster to Uxbridge, even though the second journey is 200 times longer than the first. These journeys currently cost £5.60 and £2.80 respectively at peak times, or £3.60 and £2.70 off-peak, so some Londoners would be looking at some pretty significant savings. It'd be even better for anyone travelling from Orpington to Chingford because that's currently £9.90 at peak times or £6.70 off-peak, but therein lies a significant problem with Zoë's vision. Fare zones aren't just a TfL issue, they're higher if you use National Rail rather than the tube, which means the Train Operating Companies would have to be on board too. Fat chance.
A key factor here is what that flat fare would turn out to be. If the scheme needs to bring in a similar amount of revenue then that fare would have to be set above the current minimum, say at £3, in which case everyone making a 1 zone journey would find themselves with a large overnight increase. Zoë has made it clear that her intention is for the flat fare to be 'low', but even then I bet the current £1.80 from Leytonstone to Stratford would take quite a leap. She also admits that a low flat fare is never going to happen without a significant contribution from government, so I think we can assume this is an impractical ambition.
It's OK, there's a less idealistic version.
We will start with flattening the DLR fares so there is one charge for a journey with no zones.
Well that might work better. Almost all of the DLR is in zones 2 and 3, so shrinking the entire network to a single zone would be a much smaller proposition. There's also a precedent with the Croydon trams which notionally pass through four fare zones but instead operate on a single flat fare, currently £1.75. You'd simply tap in on the DLR and not need to tap out, paying less than now, so very much a quick win.
Or maybe not. At present a journey from Beckton to North Greenwich via Canning Town lies solely within zone 3 so costs less than £2. In a Green future you'd pay first for the DLR, then for one stop on the Jubilee line, and that could easily double the fare. Another issue is that the DLR extends into zone 1 and zone 4 which means, for example, it would suddenly be possible to get from Woolwich to the City of London at a rock bottom rate. Imagine how much busier the DLR might get if, for a slight time penalty, it were half the price of Crossrail. I suspect there'd also be significant fare evasion issues because the system wouldn't be expecting you to touch out, and I'm not even sure this DLR-lite version has wings.
OK, how about this pledge?
By the end of our first term in 2028, we will have replaced the current Mayor’s ULEZ scheme with a smarter, fairer road-pricing plan, which will see cleaner vehicles on our roads, protect drivers’ data privacy and reduce distances driven.
For drivers road pricing is the evil elephant in the room, a threat to make them pay extra for the freedom of driving whenever wherever. It's also at the heart of Susan Hall's long-running smear campaign, insisting Sadiq intends to introduce pay per mile when he's explicitly said he won't. But if vehicles are increasingly going electric then government needs to find some way of taxing drivers who no longer buy petrol so it's likely coming eventually. The Greens would rather that was sooner rather than later, indeed by the end of a single mayoral term, bringing charges to significantly more drivers than currently pay either the Congestion Charge or ULEZ.
But how's that going to work then? London's full of cameras but nowhere near enough to be able to work out where you drove and how long it took, nor how many passengers you might have been carrying. To be fair to everyone it'd require some kind of in-car device to trace your route and nobody has one of those yet, they don't exist, but they'd need to be in every car. And not just Londoners but visitors from the West Midlands, Scotland, even abroad, because you can't make London a gizmo-dependent exclusion zone.
Road pricing's obviously fine as an aspiration if you're an environment-first party but it'll never happen by 2028. Look too at these additional pledges, all of which look a tad too overenthusiastic.
• Make London diesel free by 2028
• Work with councils to phase out residential parking permits for diesel cars by 2028
• Phase in a Central London car-free-zone by 2028
Here's an intriguing one.
Whilst looking to bring in smart road charging, introduce a toll at the Blackwall Tunnel to raise money for improving walking, wheeling and cycling routes, including a study for the potential transformation of either or both of the
Rotherhithe Tunnel and Tower Bridge for walking, wheeling and cycling.
A toll at the Blackwall Tunnel is coming anyway under Sadiq, if not under Susan. But the idea of banning vehicles from the Rotherhithe Tunnel and/or Tower Bridge is on another level. I could see Tower Bridge working, Green-wise, unless you're one of the displaced bus passengers whose journey would suddenly take much longer. And the Rotherhithe Tunnel might even make a good cycle route, though I suspect embarrassingly few people would actually use it. But it's never going to be a useful solution for pedestrians and mobility scooters because with its twists and turns it's nigh one mile long and hardly anybody wants to walk from Limehouse to Rotherhithe anyway. You only have to walk the existing Woolwich Foot Tunnel, which is strategically much more useful, to experience the tumbleweed of potential demand.
Here's worse.
Make one bore of the Silvertown Tunnel exclusively for walking, wheeling and cycling, and for electric buses, and work with local councils to use the second bore to extend the DLR across the Thames.
The Greens would never have built the Silvertown Tunnel, we get that, indeed many local politicians wouldn't have bothered either. But now it's nigh finished you can't suddenly retrofit it for a completely different outcome without wasting a phenomenal amount of money. Nobody wants to walk a mile from not-quite Canning Town to not-quite North Greenwich anyway - far better (and quicker) to make the Dangleway free and send pedestrians and cyclists that way instead.
As for the idea of extending the DLR through one bore of the Silvertown Tunnel that sounds potentially brilliant but is actually bloody stupid. Even though the DLR passes directly over the northern mouth of the road tunnel it's already too late to re-engineer the works in an even vaguely cost-efficient manner. And it'd be even worse on the southern side, the new DLR extension suddenly popping up in a concrete crevasse at the centre of the peninsula with absolutely nowhere to go. This is a solution looking for a problem, and an inconceivably poor solution at that.
Here are five other Green policies I have severe practical doubts about.
• Install crossings at every traffic light junction
• Upgrade our bus fleet to include space for more wheelchair users to travel together
• Convert 25% of parking spaces into parklets and free-standing cycle hire drop-off points, clearing pavement clutter
• Commit to a 20mph speed limit across all of Transport for London’s Road Network by 2025
• Relocate loading bays from bus lanes to side streets
And here, for balance, are ten that might work well.
• Freeze bus fares at the current level for our first term
• Bring Santander cycle hire into the Oyster Card charging system
• Explore the introduction of more tram routes
• Restore 24 hour free travel to holders of 60+ London Oyster photocards and Older Person’s Freedom Passes
• Work with councils to develop standardised parking charges across London
• Make cycle hire free for everyone under 22
• Design a new standard bus stop with better shelter and seating suitable for older and disabled people
• Prioritise the provision of toilets at stations at interchanges and in areas with no nearby provision
• Ensure stations are well-lit, fully staffed and have visible and well-connected CCTV and wifi
• Introduce more Cycle Optimised Protected Signal junctions
And here's one that displays Shaun Bailey levels of misunderstanding about where the edge of London actually is.
Consult communities on the introduction of new, direct bus routes that allow safe travel between neighbourhoods and give them a say over changes to existing bus routes, such as extending ...the 463 from Coulsdon South Station to Netherne on-the-Hill, to help connect places in outer London with public transport options.
No Zoë, Netherne-on-the-Hill is in Surrey, and that's why its transport links are poor.
Anyone can cherrypick a manifesto and pick out the bad apples, which as a blogger is exactly what I've done. Indeed many a voter gets so obsessed by one policy they absolutely detest that they fail to look at the wider picture, which in Zoë's detailed manifesto is very wide indeed.
Zoë's never going to win - London's not yet a Green city - but she is offering several properly intriguing policies that future Mayors may one day borrow as their own.
My apologies that the following ten paragraphs are in an unhelpful order.
The Canine Activity paragraph
I never found the WW1 memorial stone at Sharpenhoe Clappers because just before I reached it I encountered a group of young people with two dogs. I wasn't at all pleased when the bull terrier looked up and started running towards me, this essentially my worst nightmare when out walking. 'Nana!' cried the bloke sitting in a tree, at which the dog stopped advancing and just yapped a lot, which thankfully subdued my adrenalin burst. "She's friendly," he added, to which I replied it was hard to be sure of this within the first three seconds of contact and walked swiftly by. Imagine my horror on encountering the same group ten minutes later on the footpath I needed to follow to exit the site, their hounds all leapy, bouncy and overexcited. I held back and let them go first, advancing round the escarpment only when their noisy barking sounded far enough ahead, and thankfully managed a mile and a half into Streatley without encountering them again.
The Waymarked Trail paragraph
This particular part of the country is traversed by a number of long distance footpaths, mainly I suspect because contours are always a draw. Chief amongst these is the Icknield Way Path (a continuation of the Ridgeway National Trail from Ivinghoe Beacon to the Brecks in Norfolk) and another is the Chiltern Way (a 125 mile circuit of which this the northernmost tip). Perhaps most evocative is the John BunyanTrail, a loop linking many of the locations referenced in Pilgrim's Progress, because we're very much in the area where Bunyan lived and preached. It's said that Sharpenhoe Clappers was the inspiration for Mount Caution. I ended up walking about five miles of the Icknield Way, because why invent a new route when someone's done most of the hard work for you? You can see all of these paths, and how complicatedly they all link up, on the excellent Waymarked Trails website.
The Horse Racing paragraph
Harlington is a sweet little village once you get away from the railway and up towards the church on the green. John Bunyan inevitably visited the place, indeed preached regularly under an oak tree in a nearby field and was imprisoned at the manor house prior to spending 12 years in Bedford Jail. Itspubs are delightfully old with low-beamed character, and one had a particularly intriguing plaque which claimed that the first Grand National had been run here in 1830. Wikipedia disagrees, preferring Aintree 1836, although it does cede that the first recognised English National Steeplechase started in an orchard opposite this pub in Harlington and ran four miles to the obelisk in Wrest Park. So popular did the annual event become that it inspired William Lynn to stage a similar race at Aintree, which rapidly surpassed the Great St Albans Steeplechase, so think on that as you watch the horses tumble next weekend and blame a village in Bedfordshire.
The National Landscape paragraph
I hadn't realised this before but the Chilterns are no longer an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, not since last November, because the official nomenclature has changed. The new term we're all supposed to be using is National Landscape, as in 'this is the Chilterns National Landscape', ditto the Cotswolds National Landscape, the Surrey Hills National Landscape, the North Pennines National Landscape and the other 42. It's purely a rebranding exercise - in law they're all still AONBs - and all have been gifted dinky new logos to increase brand cohesion. The new name makes more sense if you compare it to National Park, a term we all use perfectly happily, but calling the second tier areas National Landscapes still feels bland, clumsy and strangely unfamiliar.
The Council Estate paragraph
A country walk has to connect to civilisation eventually, if that's where the stations are, which is how I eventually found myself trooping across Luton's outer suburbs with muddy boots. Primarily this meant Marsh Farm, a 1960s council estate with a reputation for rioting earned over two nights in 1995. I threaded up minor walkways between concrete homes, through muralled subways beneath feeder roads and past the ends of an inordinate number of cul-de-sacs. One thing that struck me was how bad the pavements were, not in terms of surface quality but in the way they didn't join up coherently as if the planners expected everyone would drive everywhere. Since I was last here exploring the source of the River Lea, I see the three landmark blocks of flats above Leagrave Park have gained funky vibrant blue cladding. On this visit I also realised you could easily plot the evolution of Luton's borough logo by rearranging some of the bins on Bramingham Road, but I'll spare you from that.
The Rail Ticket paragraph
How far can I get for less than £10, I thought? I'm aware that Thameslink fares at the weekend are particularly cheap so started by checking both north and south. It's not quite possible to get to Bedford or Brighton for under a tenner, the latter having slipped just beyond the threshold at the last fare rise. But Flitwick and Hassocks are still doable, both of which are 40 miles from central London so a pretty decent bargain. I should say this is using my Gold Card to buy a ticket from the boundary of zone 3, otherwise it'd be more like £15. I also researched the furthest I could get with other rail companies, all for nine pounds something, and it turns out travelling northwest out of London is unduly expensive. 20 miles: Hemel Hempstead (Northwestern), Great Missenden (Chiltern) 25-30 miles: Pitsea (c2c), Wickford (Greater Anglia), Marlow (GWR), Guildford (SWR), East Grinstead (Southern), Tonbridge (Southeastern) 35 miles: Baldock (Great Northern) 40 miles: Flitwick/Hassocks (Thameslink)
The Wonderful Wildlife paragraph
The wonders of nature are really why you come to the countryside, and they were indeed fabulous. Beech trees with shallow sprawling roots. Crows, robins and swooping birds of prey. A display of bluebells in a tiny wood between two ploughed fields. Light budding. Pink and white blossom in full glory or already fallen to the ground. Occasional squirrels. Horses in a paddock stalked by pylons. Roadside cowslips. Fields the colour of a muted sunset. Late daffodils. Tiny insects scuttling across the path. A bumble bee bobbing in the daisies. Unharvested stubble. A low-flying helicopter disturbing birds in the canopy. Red, white and brown butterflies. I also confess to saying "Hello Mr Fox" when a fox emerged from the undergrowth on Smithcombe Hill, and not unsurprisingly he swiftly withdrew.
The Underlying Geology paragraph
This being the Chilterns the bedrock is of course chalk. Its resilence is why the escarpment stands proud above the Bedford Plain and its weakness is why the ridge has multiple steep indentations. The only plainly visible outcrop was in a former quarry at the tip of the Sundon Hills, still scattered with chunks of white, while the undulating humps to the east remained covered with lush meadow. One of the largest gullies is Watergutter Hole, the name a reference to natural springs at the base, its steep sides densely smothered with trunks of beech and birch. The fun of following the Icknield Way is that it traces the rim of the ridge around all these contorted deviations, and the curse was that this path occasionaly degenerated into unavoidable mud and coated my boots in cloggy clay. Sharpenhoe Clappers is the longest of the many projections, a chalk headland whose wooded summit is visible from far and wide looming above the village of Sharpenhoe fifty metres below.
The Ordnance Survey paragraph
I looked up Flitwick on an Ordnance Survey map but my eye was instead drawn by Harlington, one stop south, and a nearby whorl of contours. That looks totally intriguing, I thought. This is Bedfordshire so I bet that's a chalk escarpment on the edge of the Chilterns, but also a ridiculously contorted shape totally unlike what you might see at Dunstable or Wendover. Also it's shown as National Trust property so it must have something scenic going for it. Also I spotted another wiggly escarpment just to the west and if I linked those up I could make a pretty good ramble out of it. I decided to walk from Harlington station to Leagrave station, an entirely doable distance, and I don't know if you've ever gone for a walk purely because you were inspired by how it looked on a map but I can heartily recommend it.
The Explanatory Introductory paragraph Sharpenhoe Clappers is a long chalk spur on the northern edge of the Chiltern Hills, standing out like the prow of an ocean liner above the surrounding flatter land. If you need to get your bearings it's in Bedfordshire, not far from Toddington Services on the M1. According to the National Trust, who oversee the site, it's "crowned with traces of an Iron Age hill-fort" and it does indeed look like a perfectly defendable promontory. Alas the good folk at the Buckinghamshire Archaeological Society carried out a survey in 2014 and found no evidence whatsoever of any ramparts, concluding that "the purpose of The Clappers was due to extensive rabbit warrens being farmed there". The Old English word for warren was even 'clapere', so the clue was always there. These days the summit is covered with beech trees and ideal for exploration, plus there's a very convenient car park a short distance away, and I look forward to telling you all about my visit.
