please empty your brain below

Love this DG. I think you make a very good point - by walking from the heart to beyond the city, you manage to exceed it, it doesn't swallow you up.

When I lived at Shepherd's Bush in the noughties, I managed to walk out to Gatwick Airport via Box Hill - 33 miles or so, the last of which, navigating through the airport environs to the station, was hardest. The year after I walked from the same house out to Wendover, 42 miles, little knowing that I'd move there not long after. Maybe that influenced my choice, I cannot say. Hard work though!
'..while the grass on the bowling green is being given a striped manicure by two gents with rotary mowers..' I'd use a cylinder mower for the best stripes. Perhaps they do things differently in Battersea.
Great blog as always.
Very interesting & a great idea. I've been looking for walking ideas since almost finishing the LOOP so this might be one to consider. I'm in East London (well nearly north) so I'd probably end up at the Woodford pub as you did in 2014, but from the centre - could do a route in each main compass direction.
You might like this map of the London Green Belt (looks more like a lace doily, when zoomed out) to inspire you, if "walking out of the city" means 'reaching the bit they're not supposed to build on". I plugged in a local postcode at the end of your walk to orient it. I need to check if it's my nearest bit as I live not far off your transect.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/greenpolitics/planning/9708387/Interactive-map-Englands-green-belt.html#location=51.3770019%2C-0.23827460000006795

I enjoyed your take on areas of London I know fairly well (SW1, 8 and 11 particularly; I'm less good on 18/19).
What a great idea and great post, thanks DG!
Brilliant idea and wonderful post DG! I wonder what 0°, 90°, 180° and 270° from King Charles would serve up.
good stuff DG. One of your best posts for ages.
Great post DG. You just missed where I live !
One of the best posts of the year I say. I give it a quite respectable 8.5/10...on my Post Value Hierarchy.
A good, interesting read.
Fascinating account; I wonder how different the feel of a walk-in journey would seem, travelling out to a start point to walk back into the centre. Perhaps more stressful.
Great idea and an interesting post. I always thought distances out of London were measured from Charing Cross. I see I am wrong and that the central point is in fact Charles 1's statue, although in practical terms we're only talking a few yards.

Has the central point changed or have I been wrong for years?
Post Value Hierarchy (Grumpy Anon) Ha ha. Excellent.

Excellent post too. Not going to get as much done today as I was hoping. Not sure how many tabs I've got open here with maps etc. looking at various routes out of London from friends houses who might be interested, reading Olly O'Brien's blog etc. etc.

Thanks.
I was never more impressed by the sheer size of London than when I had a window seat on a night flight from Milan to Stansted.
It passed over a number of European cities on its way north and I'm pretty sure the pilot announced one of them as being Paris: it was probably the largest of the pools of light we'd been passing over, that far.
Then we crossed the Channel and London started coming into sight. If it's the first time you've had this view of it, it can be a real 'OMG!' moment. And, if you're actually from London, you might even find a lump coming to your throat!
Excellent article. I've considered doing a walk from the Houses of Parliament in Westminster to Amersham in Bucks, which I measured an as the crow flies distance of 22 miles. The route passes through Harlesdon, Pinner & Rickmansworth.

I also recall when I did the London to Brighton bike ride many years ago, it didn't seem to take that long to reach open country from Clapham Common.
From the moment you crossed south of the river it could hve been entitled "walking through my career". All of the route went through sales areas I worked over a 20 year period. I recognised every road and could picture them. Now I live the best part of 1000 miles by road away it was nice to retread the streets through your efforts.
Google maps shows three walking routes between your end points, all of less than twelve miles.
- via Whitehall, Lambeth Bridge, Clapham Common, the A24 (the Roman Stane Street) and Hillcross Avenue
- as above, but getting to Clapham Common via the Mall and Chelsea Bridge
- The Mall, Kings Road, Putney Bridge, Wimbledon Common, Raynes Park and Motspur Park.

So why was your route two miles longer? The reason is in geometry. By sticking as close to the straight line as possible, it is necessary to proceed in a series of zig-zags. If each turn is a right angle and each zig and zag is the same length, the distance walked would be (sqrt 2) times longer than the crow flies. (In this case 14.1 miles, not far short of the distance you actually walked). Note that it does not matter how many zigs you do - if you could do a single right angled turn in Richmond or Crystal Palace, you would have walked the same distance as if you never zig zagged more than fifty feet from the straight line!)

Whether tramping along the A24 or the A219 would have been as interesting as the route you took is another matter, as your route took you past both the flat in Wandsworth where I was born, and the first flat I bought, in Battersea, 25 years later! (Both are probably now way out of my price band)
@martin
"Has the central point changed"
No it hasn't. It is the cross that has moved. It was destroyed by the Puritans in the Civil War, and replaced by the statue of the King at the Restoration. The cross in the forecourt of the station is a not-entirely-accurate replica built by the South Eastern Railway in 1865 to embellish the forecourt of their new station
I used to do this sort of walk about 50 years ago, when I lived in a bedsitter near Baker St, so that's where I started. I did various journeys about 10 miles north or west and came back by Underground. Of course there were no electronic aids then, it was all done by looking at the A to Z.
My days of 10 mile walks are now over, but I can still read about dg's travels to learn what I'm missing.
@timbo. Thank you - that's very interesting. The Puritans have a lot to answer for, I'll add Charing Cross to the list!
You bemoan the dearth of council housing on your walk. It's not council housing as such, but you will have walked past the large Peabody estate in Clapham Junction, which is currently being rebuilt.
during the cold war era and all the talk of nuclear devastation, I often wondered what it would be like if we had to evacuate London ... obviously the roads and public transport would be gridlock (and anyway I didn't own a vehicle then) so I thought in the eventuality it would be shanks' pony ... I thought it would take much longer to get out
A fascinating post. And a good demonstration of how yet another picture of "London" can result from such an arbitrary-seeming task.

But when it comes to "getting out of London" in a nuclear meltdown, crossing an arbitrary boundary into legal Surrey is unlikely to be the objective. (Although I'm not sure what is!).
Being an ex-resident of Wimbledon (25 years ago I lived in Lower Downs Road: you briefly walked it at its junction with Dennis Park Crescent), then I am glad that you noted how awful Wimbledon town centre is.

In 1996 they rebuilt the building on the north east corner of the Alexandra Road / Wimbledon Hill Road junction (you recently went straight across here on R493 - and not around the one way system (DG passim)) the site was pre-sold to Argos.

Planning laws are so weak that Merton Council had to beg Argos to incorporate some fake fenestration features on the first floor facade, otherwise the fully finished facility would have had a flat featureless face!

Pedant's corner: it is Bronsen Road - the only Bronsen Avenue in the UK is in Stoke-on-Trent.

dg writes: Fixed, thanks.
Oliver O'Brien's map suggests that the place in London furthest from the gla boundary is in Soho. I can't get the map to expand large enough to identify the location more precisely
Great post as always. Having run in and out of the city and the west end over the years and running around Worcester Park, I can't believe how much of that route I have actually run. Good to see it written about.

Big fan of the majority of your posts but they resonate even more when they cover areas I know so well. Keep up the great entertainment.
Rather like attempting to reach an airport on foot, I once tried to walk from Bluewater to my sister's house about half a mile away on the southern edge of Greenhithe. It involved all sorts of scrambling up and down embankments, climbing over crash rails, and nipping across dual carriageways etc. to avoid a 2-mile diversion along the routes that the pedestrian-excluding traffic planners had kindly laid on.
The roads blocked off to the south from Bronson Road to Gore Road, west of Wimbedon Chase and treated as part of Raynes Park, are known locally as "The Apostles".
I've lived locally for the last 30 years and the only justification that I know of for this name is through estate agents, because there are 12 roads!
This post is why I read your blog each day DG - excellent stuff. Thank you.
Great post DG. In answer to Herbof's (possibly rhetorical) question. I can understand Will Self's desire to feel a link to an agrarian inner, erm, self by walking out of the big city. However, if you love London and all its majestic scale and sheer number of people, I'd recommend walking into it. There is something thrilling about spotting your destination from afar (who hasn't looked for tower(s) at Canary Wharf from the motorways?), whether it is re-creating the journeys of Middle Age pilgrims towards the spire at Canterbury Cathedral or erm sitting on the hot and sticky leatherette backseat of a Vauxhall Viva looking out for Blackpool Tower. I prefer mid afternoon on a warm summer's day where the city shimmers and sizzles below you (yes yes with a nod to health and safety, take a bottle of water and wear a Panama) and striding into town to end up in the neon-lit buzz of Piccadilly Circus after nightfall. I know it's not the countryside as such, but Henry's Mound in Richmond Park works as a starting point for me - you can see Windsor Castle and the North Downs from there as well as St Paul's so at least it has a link to the countryside.
Stirling Corner would put you in fields (just about). Not sure how feasible a straight line route is, though - it may contain rather too much A1...
i recommend the views towards london from botley hill, a high point on the downs south of croydon, above oxted
Marc just above stole my thunder..
This post is why I read your blog everyday dg..
Brill.










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