blahflowers

So, some fourteen months ago now I had a dream. But then I thought "I can never train that many gerbils to form a perfect right-angled triangle!" so I gave up on that and decided to walk around London instead.

Walking was one of those things that I was forced to do as a child, tried to give up as a teenager and rediscovered for pleasure as an adult. It is also an almost entirely suburban activity as I live in London. I'm happy to walk elsewhere when the opportunity arises but I'm not one to get a train into the middle of nowhere and try not to walk into a bog. Tasked with taking the One Ring to the fire I'd be bitching all the way about how the Numenoreans were supposed to have built such a great civilisation but never discovered the miracle that is roads. I'm glad they drowned. Stupid Numenoreans.

It started around ten years now. I'd been living in London, well, alright, Croydon, for several years and was slightly abashed that when a friend came over to London for a week she seemed to know her way around the centre of London after forty-eight hours than I did after three years.

Then the Observer did a booklet of walks one Sunday, one of which was in London, and that was that. I had moved up to Edgware by this point and so could get the Northern Line straight down into the heart and impacted colon of the city. Like most people who don't live right in the midst of it my early view of London was as a collection of places that you got to by leaving the safety of a tube train and briefly coming on to the surface, like a survivor from some disaster movie. What's the best way to get from Charing Cross to Embankment? Why, down the stairs, through the barriers, down more stairs, along a corridor, down more stairs, wait for a train, then at the other end along a corridor, up some escalators, through the barriers and out of course! What way were you thinking of?

That was when I was fifteen. Ten years later I was a little better. I might walk from Holborn to Tottenham Court Road but just because the Central Line/Northern Line interchange below ground was a bit of a pain. My snapshots sense of the city was bigger and my knowledge of the areas around each station were larger but that was all.

The Observer walk was in the City of London. I can't remember clearly now but I think it started and ended at Saint Pauls, went down Cheapside, cut across to London Wall and made it's way back via Postman's Park so I could look at all those plaques. It was a walk of two miles, three at most. I was, I am, fairly healthy. I don't smoke and I don't drink to excess but I don't really eat sensibly. I walked paper-rounds of a few miles when I was young, I walked to and from school when it was a mile away. But I walked a distance only because I had to, to get to or from work. To walk several miles, for pleasure? What new realm of madness was this? Surely I was pushing the human body beyond all known barriers of pain and endurance?

Walking London by Andrew Duncan was next. I can't remember how many of the walks I did, I guess somewhere between a third and a half. Some were long walks of six or seven miles far out in the wilds of places like Windsor, so they were out. Some didn't have the decency of starting near a tube station. Looking back the thing that amuses me was how puritanical I was about it all. Supposedly I was doing this to learn about the city I had the great fortune to live in, the London of Dickens, the London of the fields Amis junior seemed to think important, the London Mrs Seacole left and the London Florence Nightingale came back to. But I would emerge from a tube station like Mole blinking in to the light, stick my nose into my book and walk the prescribed route, occasionally remembering to look up and around to see where I was, before diving back in to the welcoming darkness of a tube station at the end of my three or four miles. The walks, at least those ones that I did, rarely crossed one another. I would get very cross if the author of a book that was several years old by the time I had bought it not thinking to make sure his routes did not cross over the sites of new building works. The route in the book was all important, the idea of actually going off the path to investigate the city was anathema, if I did that I was no better than the boy that goes off-piste while walking through the forest and next thing he knows is helping the frail old lady with the suspiciously well-maintained bijou cottage with the hundreds-and-thousands pebbledash to clean her oven from the inside at gas mark four for twenty minutes per pound. A moments vagueness in the book's directions and I'd be huffing and puffing and consulting my A-Z and deciding that I'd play a couple more levels of Command and Conquer just to show that nasty Mr Duncan what i thought of him and his wretched book.

At some point I lost interest in the book. I think it went to a charity shop a few years back, which is a shame as I'd like to see which walks I did and which I didn't, which parts of the city I have seen myself and which are areas I still have yet to visit. I knew quite a few of the popular parts of the city, but still had no great desire to link it up in my mind, An incremental movement to Colindale moved me a couple of stops south on the Northern Line but, as long as that was how I was getting in to town I was still experiencing it as just another blood cell in it's veins rather than a flea or tick on it's surface. Hmmm, that was an awkward metaphor. Simile? Oh Christ, it's all going wrong...

I threw aside the works of Duncan and embraced those of Wright. The London Walks Podcast was ostensibly aimed at tourists but really, are we not all tourists? As the bard Bowie might have said, switching from the book to the podcast certainly brought some ch-ch-changes to my walking schedule (Look, I worked ages on that joke so just fuck off if you don't like it. Go and watch The Flight of the Conchords or something). I was looking up a bit more, noticing things around me. Robert Wright recorded the podcast by walking it himself and describing where he was going as he did it. His walks tended to start and end near tube or train stations so that tourists would be able to get back to wherever they were staying while visiting and, because he was recording them sometimes only a few months before I would do them reality wouldn't have much chance to mess around in the middle. Sure, he'd sometimes say 'turn right here' when he meant 'go left', sometimes he'd have you hanging around somewhere for ten minutes while he talked about the history of an area, then say 'right, now turn off your MP3 player, walk half a mile down this road and then turn it back on again' but those were just minor irritations. The width of his knowledge and love for the city meant that I'd sometimes find myself approaching familiar places from new directions, from Baker Street to Marble Arch via Marylebone? Waterloo to London Bridge along the river front? Surely it can't be!

It couldn't last forever. We were growing apart. He wanted to walk the Princess Diana memorial route. I wanted to see other things, other places. Tempers grew short. I said things, stupid things, things I didn't mean, but it was too late. I... unsubscribed from his podcast.

I didn't realise how wrong I would be for a couple of years but I was under the delusion that I had seen pretty much all there was to see in the centre of London. I had a hazy sort of understanding where most places lay in relation to one another but that could of been as much from looking at the A-Z while deciding which walk from the book or podcast to do. Looking for more walks, new walks, I came across The Capital Ring. It was, if not a project Ken Livingstone started then one he smiled upon, so I don't know how reliable the details are in this era of privation and 'Boris's Bikes'. It starts off in Woolwich but don't mind, you're soon leaving all that and it goes through some of the nicer parts of the outer part of inner London, and Hendon, before finishing off with a few walks through the shitty bits of East London to finish in the Woolwich Foot Tunnel which, if you are especially lucky, someone will have pissed all the way along the wall that very morning to make your visit that bit more special. I've taken the odd photo along the trail. It was something new. Other than perhaps Wimbledon I'd never visited at this particular radius from the centre of the city, relatives tended to be further out, friends closer in. I envisioned myself as some bargain bin wizard willy, I made a point of touching every Capital Ring waypost as though creating some web to enclose London, to constrain it within bounds I thought I already knew.

While I concentrated on the suburbs I didn't pay close attention to the City at the centre of it all. I was still crossing it every day going to work, at the very point I took a break from doing the Capital Ring because it was midwinter and the days were too short I moved to be closer to work. I finished one walk in Hendon Park, for once a short tube ride from home, when I restarted a few months later I was now crossing London from Peckham. I'd lived there for around eight years and been away less than a hundred days but was already looking at it with outsiders eyes. Local history books will explain about how it is the northward progress of train but especially tube lines that created most of what make today's Barnet. Golders Green, Hendon, Finchley were carved out of the earth with the excavations of the tunnels of the Northern Line. Before I left I'd walked out to Kingsbury a few times, walked up the North End Road once or twice, even seen what Fortune Green had to offer. A nice cemetery as it turned out. I was ready to move on.

So, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, I continued with the Capital Ring. I have many happy memories from doing that. The very first walk I did on a day where I was lucky to come across a view across mist-shrouded Eltham to the Distant Downs. The North-East part of the route goes through several fine woods at Highgate and, over the road, the Queen's Wood.

When the Capital Ring was done there was the question, where next? The London LOOP was the obvious choice. It was further out, it was longer, the sections more spaced out, but what were walks of six or seven miles to the powerhouse I now was. The 'problem', such as I told myself, was that I was considering this in Autumn, the days were getting shorter again and I didn't really want to be walking in the dark, for no other reason than you don't really get to see much. I needed something else to do to tide me over until late Spring of the following year, when the days would be long enough again to do some of the Loop walks. As I'd somewhat neglected the centre of London during my flight to the suburbs my gaze turned towards that. Also, being a South Londoner I had become more accustomed towards journeying via walking or buses rather than tubes and so was seeing more of the City. To catch a bus from Camberwell that goes up through Vauxhall to Victoria, then on to Hyde Park, or from Elephant and Castle up to Kings Cross was making me think of the sprawling mass of the City in a new way, and making me realise my belief that I had seen all there was of London was a huge mistake.

So, it was time to get anally retentive about it. I thought I'd seen all of London, I would make sure I'd seen all of London, at least the centre of it, at least once. I went to Stanfords and bought an Inner London streetmap. I would walk every road on that map, stretching from Maida Vale to Shoreditch to a mere few roads away from where I now lived to West Brompton, and once I had, colour the map with a blue marker. Initially when I bought the map I immediately started colouring in a few of the roads I walked regularly or had done in the past, Tottenham Court Road, Whitehall, but I quickly stopped. Why shouldn't I walk them as part of this project? After all, I'd have to walk them to reach the alleys and roads off of them anyway, so I might as well leave them until I walked them again.

I thought this would take me through to the Summer last year. I generously gave myself a year to complete the project. here we are in December, fourteen months last and you can see how I'm getting on. Maybe I'll be ready to head out to the Loop next Summer. I failed to realise that Inner London is not somewhere you can walk just by doing a few hours most weekends or holidays. I've already seen a lot and, as you can see, I'm only about halfway through. I walk a lot more, at least when I'm not in a rush, last Wednesday, the 30th of November, I estimated I walked around ten miles in one day, I'll not be troubling Ian Botham in his John O'Groats to Lands End hikes any time soon but if I could travel back in time to the me of ten or fifteen years ago it would be that feat, rather than the time travel, that would have him gazing at me in awe. I still have more to cover, more to see, get in touch if you fancy literally walking every cul de sac and mews in the designated area and I'll let you know before I next head out. I have ended up doing most of the East side of the city first by accident rather than design and there's great swathes of the west I've not gone anywhere near yet.

There have been any number of times where I've approached somewhere familiar from a new angle and had that moment of confusion until the piece fits in my mental jigsaw and it's a great feeling. I have no great insights in the state of humanity that I have gleaned from walking around Vauxhall or Paddington with my iPod playing music as I wrestle with Googlemaps printouts and avoid eye-contact with other humans to share I'm afraid, it's a crazy and bizarre endeavour and I should probably stay inside more and watch more telly, but at least out there I can be a salutary warning for parents to point out to there children. "Look what will happen to you if you don't watch all your episodes of Hollyoaks!"