where it leaves a public road, and usually at path junctions as well.
Perhaps surprisingly, London is far more accommodating to wanders off of rights of way than many other areas. After all, most of London’s parks and commons were safeguarded precisely because city dwellers were to be encouraged into the great outdoors, and are open to the walker, criss-crossed by a multitude of informal paths. Discretion should be used however – if there’s a perfectly serviceable path going in your direction, use it, rather than cause erosion elsewhere, and certainly don’t push your way through thickets and bushes just because you think you can.
In farmland, respect the rights of way. Even here there is often a give-and-take between locals and the farmer, and once or twice the walks in this book use a farmland path which is respected in custom and practice. You will also come across a few ‘right to roam’ areas, shown by a brown logo of a walker traversing rolling countryside, but these are not frequent in London.
What to take
Good walking shoes or trainers will be perfectly adequate for these walks, except perhaps in winter or after wet weather on the more rural walks that traverse farmland or wood, when proper walking boots will be better. The shorter walks need almost nothing in the way of specialist clothing, but if you’re out for a long half-day or more, look for a wicking top, trousers (if not shorts) that will dry easily (so not jeans or cords), and something warm to pull on when you stop. If there is any doubt in the forecast at all, take a windproof and/or waterproof layer, preferably breathable. But on most of these walks, you are only a few minutes from a station or bus stop, or pub or café, to take respite from the weather.
Many walks have fine pubs (Walk 18)
If you have a mobile phone, carry it – signal strength is excellent almost everywhere, albeit with surprising exceptions. Smartphone users will usually find usable 3G signals, or better, and sometimes WiFi hotspots too.
Check the ‘refreshments’ line in the information box to each walk to decide what food to take with you – although a few snacks are always a good idea, and a bottle of water certainly is, especially in hot weather.
Maps
The extracts in this book are from Ordnance Survey Explorer maps at 1:25,000 scale. Coupled with the route descriptions, they should keep you on track. London as a whole is covered by sheets 146 and 147, 160 to 162, and 172 to 175.
The OS Landranger series, at 1:50,000 scale, is of less use in London, given how much needs to be packed in. London is covered by just two sheets, 176 and 177.
Street maps of London vary – some give more off-road detail than you might expect, but in general they won’t be using the National Grid that precisely defines start and finish points in this book.
Mapping software allows you to scale Landranger or Explorer maps as you wish and print off specific areas relevant to your walk. Anquet, Quo and Memory Map are three of the best known. All enable maps to be saved to GPS devices, and most to smartphones; ViewRanger is a dedicated app for smartphones.
Using this guide
The walks in this book start on the north bank of the Thames east of London and then progress in a roughly anti-clockwise fashion to finish near the Kent border in London’s south-east. For each walk there is a plant or animal species described that might be seen on that walk – it might be common, it might be rare, it might be seasonal, but it is in some way relevant to that particular walk. Between them, the 25 species give an indication of the scope of London’s wildlife.
A few of the walks stray outside the Greater London boundary, mostly by inches; Walk 1 is the only one to start outside, but even that is within the M25, London’s ‘second boundary’.
There should be enough detail in the route descriptions, including the map extracts, to follow each walk without using a separate printed map, but it’s always good practice to relate the description to the map as you go; this will help make sure you don’t go wildly off beam, and also guards against any changes in the waymarking: signs can get overgrown in high summer, for example, and if a sign near housing seems to point the wrong way, it might possibly have been ‘adjusted’ by local scallywags. Street names in brackets don’t have a sign showing that name in the location given by the text.
More to the point, relating to the map gives you a fuller account of the townscape or countryside you are walking through, and not just its shape; the alert map user will spot many details, historic and natural, that the guide can’t hope to include.
At the beginning of the route description for each walk there is a box giving a range of useful information: the start and finish of the walk; distance; an approximation of time (see further below); the relevant maps; places to buy refreshments; details of public transport, parking and local interest groups. Some of this information is also summarised in the route summary table. Throughout the route descriptions, place names and features that are shown on the map are highlighted in bold.
The estimated walking time is calculated at a fairly relaxed 4km per hour plus an extra half hour – adjust it as you wish to take account of your own speed plus time for a picnic, pub stop or just time spent looking at the flowers. In the route descriptions, a ‘minor road’ carries very little motor traffic, a rural ‘lane’ even less and may be unmetalled, while a ‘track’ is both unmetalled and less robust than a lane.
London has never been a static city. What was in place when this volume was researched may change with the course of time; please see the Updates to this Guide at the front of the book and let Cicerone know if you find that this is so.
Lastly, Appendix A contains details of long-distance paths in and around London, and Appendix B offers details of useful websites and interesting books relating to the capital.
EAST: ESSEX TO THE LEA
Arcelor Mittal Orbit tower (Walk 5)
INTRODUCTION
Eastbrookend Country Park (Walk 2)
Until 1965, the Lea was the boundary between London and Essex, and this boundary had a very real effect on how what is now east London developed. In particular, much of the London-specific legislation preventing noxious industries had no effect here, and so refineries, gas and chemical works, and heavy industry from shipbuilding to railway manufacture were located here instead – especially in what are now its two westernmost boroughs, Waltham Forest and Newham.
Yet wild London was not pressed out of all existence. The River Lea itself became home to reservoirs for London’s water, and hence a green corridor for wildlife. Tipping down its gravel ridge between the Lea and the Roding, Epping Forest was saved as London’s eastern lung by the steadfast vigilance of locals and city folk alike. The marshes of the Thames below Barking have to this day precluded large-scale development, while further out, town and country battled an uneasy draw that persists to this day.
WALK 1
Rainham Marshes and Coldharbour Point
| Start/finish | Purfleet station (TQ 554 781) |
| Distance | 8 miles (13km) |
