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Next on my list of London walking books is The Capital Ring. As the name implies, this book covers the famous 78-mile (125-kilometer) circular route around inner London. Absolutely yes. Basic coverage is not expensive, and as a visitor you are NOT covered under the NHS. Compare policies and prices with Travel Insurance Master here, a big name in the travel insurance business, and cross that off your list. Next on my list of London walking books is Walking London. As the name implies, this book covers a range of self-guided walks in and around the city. I had lunch at the then Good Beer Guide-listed Vine pub, but although it’s great a pub pays attention to its beer, its food was rudimentary – no puddings! Now it’s an Indo-Chinese fusion restaurant, sigh. There’s a broad pathless meadow on the way up to the M1 before you skirt round Aldenham Reservoir and cross fields with good trees north of Elstree village. The station lies across golf course 3, not in the village but the more workaday suburb of Borehamwood; you are only passing through. There’s only a few hundred yards beside the Lea itself, just above one of the immense valley reservoirs that store so much of London’s water, until you cut up the hill after Sewardstone village onto the gravel ridge on which the larger part of Epping Forest rests. The Loop takes quite a short cut through the forest proper, but shows its variety of landscapes well nevertheless: we dipped into Chingford off-route, to visit Pole Hill, a detour that later triggered Walk 3 in the London book. More of the forest next stage.
The self-guided London walks in this book will take you around to see monuments dedicated to monarchs, military greats, politicians, local heroes, artists, writers, and other notable people. It’s a great one if you like history and art.Shepherd spent a lifetime exploring the Cairngorms on foot. This impressive mountain range attracts climbers from around the world, yet this is not a book about climbing. Dismissing macho Munro Bagging as “sterile”, Shepherd instead ventures out in all seasons and all weathers (mostly alone and sometimes barefoot) walking not on to the mountains, but “into” them. It is the meditative rhythm of walking that unveils for her the essence of the Cairngorms – mountains that she comes to know as intimately as old friends. Yes, you do, otherwise you won’t be able to plug in your electronics/phone/lifelines. I recommend this one, which is all-in-one so you can use it in other countries. As with any walking guide, they tend to appeal to people who want to follow a set path to a pre-determined location, whereas I am more of an ambler around town. That is more relaxed, but I wonder now how many vantage points I’ve accidentally missed on my perambulations because I didn’t know there was one a few hundred yards off from where I was walking. There are a lot of candid descriptions of the less idyllic stretches, as you’re never that far from a busy road in London, and the description of the concreted canal in Lewisham as the lowest point in that walk may have been a reference to its height or appearance. You can decide on that.
There are ten walks to follow, or you can mix and match to fit in with where you end up on the day. Walking London has color photographs, complete route maps, and suggestions for pubs and restaurants to visit on each walk, too. True to conventional travel writing form, at the heart of this book is a Homeric-style quest: a journey the protagonist is compelled to take, often within a specific timeframe. Less conventionally, the quest undertaken in this book is a Sebaldian stroll around the 117 miles of the M25. Sinclair splendidly unearths an idiosyncratic and multilayered edgeland of industrial parks, shopping centres, housing estates and golf courses encircling the capital at the turn of the millennium. From Highgate to Canary Wharf, Ealing to Embankment, London Tree Walks reveals all kinds of great greens. The book features architectural, social, and natural history as well, so it’s a good one if you have a variety of interests. Non-fiction accounts such as Stevenson’s make up the majority of books about walking in Britain, although fictional narratives have their place too – as do walks in less bucolic landscapes. Today, it seems no topography is too pedestrian to induce British authors to lace up their boots and take to the byways (and sometimes the highways) of our country. Here are my 10 favourites.
10. Walking London, Andrew Duncan
The book is full of walks that will let you explore various London neighborhoods. It’s fully illustrated with hundreds of color photographs and detailed maps, so it makes for good armchair walking, too. It ends by the busy A23 and railway lines, alas, followed by a long pull up a dull street with a golf course to the right and although there is more open country after here it cannot match up to the downs. On the final stretch to the station, in gathering gloom, I rather nervously passed the walls of Highdown Prison. From famous areas like Notting Hill and the City of London to green spaces like Regent’s Park and local areas like Islington and Dulwich, it has a lot of walks you can enjoy in both known and lesser-known parts of London. London Tree Walks: Arboreal Ambles Around the Green Metropolis is another of the best London walking books. Given how much greenery the city has, it’s perfect for gaining a greater appreciation of London’s natural highlights. The walks will not only show you great local areas of London, but also pubs and restaurants you can enjoy along the way. It’s just the thing if you love discovering the unexpected corners of the city and getting a glimpse of local life.
One June morning in 1934 the young Lee set forth from the Cotswold village of Slad, where he’d lived for most of his life, to walk to Spain. But before reaching Mediterranean shores, Lee walked through southern England, writing about his wanderings and encounters in characteristically elegiac prose. This was the era when tramps still roved the country lanes, cars were a rarity and Lee was still young and idealistic – before his initiation into the turmoil of the Spanish civil war.Similar to The Capital Ring, The London Loop is another of the best London walking books for long-distance London walks. This book covers the London Outer Orbital Path (LOOP), a 140-mile (225-kilometer) ring around the city.
There’s a bit of suburb (Woodford) before the Lea’s partner the Roding is crossed, and then alas road up into the posh suburb of Chigwell. Things get more rural, including a pretty churchyard scene at Chigwell Row, after which you enter Hainault Forest, far less of which now remains than Epping: one had parliamentary protection in Victorian times, the other did not. There’s a walk in Hainault Forest, not in my London book, but in my Essex book (Walk 9). The walks it contains combine Pepys’s diary with lots of historic facts and details about London. It’s a great book if you love history and want to dig deeper into the city’s past. There are also a number of literary diversions in the book, darting off to the history of Croydon’s seven hills, water towers, lost hills, notable people and artificial hills. When living in central London it can be difficult to remember that it’s quite a hilly city, and a new guidebook to the hills of London has been written showing off the best spots to get vistas of the London skyline. Another of the top London walking books is Walking Pepys’s London. Samuel Pepys was a 17th-century English navy administrator and member of parliament who was famous for the diary he kept. This book covers London from his perspective.
Walking Cities: London (second edition) brings together a new interdisciplinary field of artists, writers, architects, musicians, human geographers and philosophers to consider how a city walk informs and triggers new processes of making, thinking, researching and communicating. In particular, the book examines how the city contains narratives, knowledge and contested materialities that are best accessed through the act of walking. Each of the three volumes of London’s Hidden Walks is filled with detailed routes, maps, and photos. There’s lots of good information about the history of London in each one, too. They’re perfect if you love exploring secret parts of the UK capital. So began the great British tradition of walking, and writing about it. Some authors have accomplished arduous hikes in far-flung lands; others have written just as engagingly about journeys much closer to home. Take Robert Louis Stevenson. Famously, he tramped with a donkey across the mountains of the Cévennes, though it is his gentler ramble across the Chiltern Hills that is the focus of my book, The Country of Larks. The routes have details about the city’s architecture and history, so they’re great for learning while you walk. Saturday 19 April 2003: Harold Wood to Coldharbour Point, 12 miles (to Purfleet on Thursday 9 October 2014, additional two miles)
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