The Capital Ring: South Kenton to East Finchley

To South Kenton on a clear Friday morning in February, starting on the last part of my Capital Ring walk by the Windermere, a big pub by the station that looked like it was built in the Thirties – as did every other building in the surrounding area. No time for a drink, though, for Dad and I had some walking to do. Besides, it wasn’t open at that time of morning.

Before long, we’d passed through our first park of the day – Preston Park – and crossed Preston Road, crossing over the Metropolitan Line as we did so. 

One street later and it was under the Jubilee Line and over the Wealdstone Brook, a tributary of the River Brent. The next street led us to a footpath which turned onto an open space called Fryent Country Park; it would be grass paths for the next couple of miles, and very muddy some of them turned out to be. 

We climbed Barn Hill, and before entering the trees turned for a stunning view of suburban north-west London and the ridge of countryside behind it (marking the borderland between Middlesex and Hertfordshire). Of particular note on this vista were the church atop Harrow-on-the-Hill, Bentley Priory, the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital and the Edgwarebury Hotel.

At the top of Barn Hill was a trig point (282 feet up) and a pond adorned with signs advising that fishing and camping are not allowed in the vicinity. 

A dead and hollowed-out tree provided a perching-post for ring-necked parakeets; these pale green and rather loud creatures are relatively new additions to London’s bird scene. Native to India, they’ve been recorded in south-eastern England since the late Sixties and there is a nice story about how they got here, something about the first pair being released by either Mick Jagger or Jimi Hendrix (who for a time lived on Brook Street in Mayfair, coincidentally next-door to where George Frideric Handel had lived over two centuries beforehand), although it’s more likely that the earliest ones escaped from private collections. Either way, they’ve firmly established themselves here now and they seem to do well despite the weather!

Moving downhill, we crossed a track signposted as Eldestrete, an old path which according to Colin Saunders in his book is reckoned to be of pre-Roman vintage and “was used by pilgrims to St Alban’s shrine”. That book, by the way (as I may have mentioned before, it’s published in association with the Ordnance Survey and is simply called The Capital Ring) has proved to be very useful, especially at points where the Capital Ring signage may be damaged or not immediately apparent. Crossing the A4140, we continued through Fryent Country Park which is a place that Dad and I have both driven past many times but never stopped to explore. That, of course, is what something like the Capital Ring enables people to do; it connects places which people may have heard of or passed on a regular basis but haven’t looked at further. There is, of course, always more to London – maybe I should qualify that by saying Greater London – than people think; Samuel Johnson was, of course, right when he pointed out that “when a man is tired of London he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford”.

We got another good viewpoint from the top of Gotfords Hill (just over 200 feet; no trig point this time). After walking alongside and through gaps in hedgerows, we hit suburbia again in the form of Kingsbury which has a rather interesting church; St Andrew’s was built in 1847 and was reckoned to be one of London’s finest churches but it was built in the West End (Wells Street to be precise). By the early twentieth century, falling congregation numbers led to the church being closed and it was threatened with demolition. What saved it was suburban development to the north – the growing suburb of Kingsbury was turning out to be too big for its church, so a solution was proposed. Between 1931 and 1933, the church was taken apart stone by stone and rebuilt in Kingsbury. We turned left just after the church, heading along Old Church Lane which afforded views of the ‘old’ St Andrew’s church through the trees (it’s now a Romanian Orthodox church).

Our next goal was the Welsh Harp, alias Brent Reservoir, a place where I’ve gone birdwatching several times. It was here that we crossed a local authority boundary for the last time on the walk, leaving the London Borough of Brent and entering the London Borough of Barnet. The reservoir – which gets the ‘Welsh Harp’ name from a pub that used to stand nearby, dates back to the early nineteenth century when the River Brent was dammed to supply water for the Regent’s Canal; as well as a popular wildlife-watching venue, it’s also well-known as a sailing centre. We stopped for lunch there, looking out onto the reservoir with the sound of the North Circular making itself known in the background (more of that to come). Bird-wise, we saw black-headed gulls (lots of those), coots, moorhens, tufted ducks (lots of those, too), a lone lesser-black-backed gull, pochards, gadwalls, mallards, geese of the Canada and greylag varieties and mute swans.

After the Welsh Harp we crossed the A5 – part of Watling Street, the old Roman road which I’d previously encountered in its south-of-the-river guise as the A2 on an earlier Capital Ring section. Then it was over the M1 and into Hendon, skirting the back-streets just to the north of Brent Cross Shopping Centre which celebrated its fortieth birthday last year (it’s never been the same since they got rid of the fountain). We were still walking in bright sunshine but parts of the sky looked ominously grey. A subway took us under the A41 and not long afterwards a footbridge took us over the Northern Line (Edgware branch) – and from the footbridge you can see Brent Cross station, supremely ill-suited for access to the shopping centre of the same name but it should be noted that the station pre-dates the centre by over fifty years.

 The footbridge led into Hendon Park, and it was here that Dad’s Capital Ring odyssey came to an end, he having started the walk after me but from a point further back. 

I would therefore be doing the final few miles back to East Finchley on my own. For part of this I would be doing so within earshot of the North Circular, a ring road that dates back to the Twenties and which “has the dubious distinction of being the noisiest road in Britain” (according to Colin Saunders); it has never ceased to amaze me that people will voluntarily (I presume they do so voluntarily) pay good money for and live in the houses that line it. Thankfully, the Capital Ring goes through parks for the most part of this stretch.

First up was Brent Park, a narrow park running alongside the River Brent which was deliberately left undeveloped when this part of North London was built up, just in case the river flooded. There’s a pond called The Decoy (so called because it used to be used to lure ducks for the purpose of capturing them) and I’m pleased to report that the flowers were out at this time of year. 

At the end of the park is the point at which the Brent is formed from the merger of Dollis Brook (which rises in Moat Mount Open Space) and Mutton Brook (which starts out as an underground stream in Cherry Tree Wood in East Finchley). These are followed by the ten-mile Dollis Valley Greenwalk which could be a future walk, should I fancy something a little shorter next time.

Following Mutton Brook and the afore-mentioned Dollis Valley Greenwalk, I passed under the North Circ and through a small patch of open space sandwiched between the former and Hampstead Garden Suburb, a settlement established in the early twentieth century by Dame Henrietta Barnett, a philanthropist who wanted to set up a community which included people from all social backgrounds (but no pub), a social experiment which lasted for a couple of decades before economic reality took over and the Garden Suburb became one of the most affluent parts of North London. 

I skirted along its northern edge, briefly touching on Addison Way before passing through Northway Gardens and Lyttleton Playing Fields, the latter of which afforded a view of the Garden Suburb’s skyline, with the spire of St Jude’s and the dome of the Free Church bookending the girls’ grammar school named after Dame Henrietta; that, by the way, is where I did part of my teacher training, thirteen years ago.

From the playing-fields I emerged onto Norrice Lea, a stretch of road with a primary school at the end. This was familiar to me, for last year I did my bit for democracy by being the man in charge of a modest-looking portacabin close by the gate that served as the local area’s polling station in the EU referendum. After crossing the A1, it was time for the final stretch – up through a couple of streets of very nice (and very expensive) houses that count as being in the Garden Suburb even though they have the N2 postcode which denotes East Finchley. This took me to Edmund’s Walk, a close which has at the end a narrow path which leads to The Causeway, the footpath leading to the back entrance to East Finchley station which was where I started on my Capital Ring walk almost two years ago.

I stood there briefly as some people walked past, going to or from the station oblivious to the modest green Capital Ring signs that had caught my attention and sent me off on a 78-mile walk, a circle which I had now closed. What, I wondered, would I do next as a walking project? The London Loop, perhaps, or maybe the Thames Path? Or perhaps a series of shorter walks? First things first, though; I’d walked nine miles that day, and I needed to sit and put my feet up while having a cup of tea that didn’t have the metallic taste that comes with drinking it out of a flask. So I went home.

The Capital Ring: Greenford to South Kenton

That part of the Capital Ring which runs from Greenford to South Kenton is described (in Colin Simpson’s very helpful walking-guide The Capital Ring) as “one of the hilliest parts … a substantial amount is on uneven ground or grass which may be muddy or wet after heavy rain”. Although it wasn’t raining on the day Dad and I set out to Greenford to continue our walk along London’s circular footpath, we both reckoned that hiking-boots were a good idea. A wise move. As for hills, I could see the first one, Horsenden Hill, from the platform at Greenford station.

From there, we passed a retail park before entering the Paradise Fields Wetlands, a nature reserve on land that used to be a golf course. I’d brought my binoculars with me but I didn’t see much from a viewing-platform – a solitary moorhen, a few crows and little else. Before long we rejoined the Grand Union Canal, this time following the branch that goes to Paddington to (eventually) become the Regent’s Canal. 

Moorhens, coots and mallards were seen on the canal, which we followed as far as a road bridge, passing under it before climbing up to it in order to cross over the canal.

Then the first climb of the day began, along grassy footpaths and a series of steps to reach the summit of Horsenden Hill, marked by a trig point some 260 feet above sea level (not the highest point on the Capital Ring, that honour going to the vicinity of Severndroog Castle on the Woolwich-Falconwood part, or even the highest point of the day which was still to come). 

It’s said that on a clear day you can see Windsor Castle to the west, but I couldn’t.

We descended through a wood, almost being sent the wrong way because one of the many direction signs (adorned by the walk’s logo which depicts what is nowadays called the Elizabeth Tower – it was never called Big Ben, which is the nickname of the largest bell inside it – surrounded by arrows) had been knocked over; I restored it as best I could by resting it against a nearby tree with the arrows pointing in the right direction. There followed a walk through suburbia, crossing the A4090 to reach Sudbury Hill station. We turned off the main road, and subsequently turned off that road onto a track that took us sharply uphill before spilling us out into the A4005 on which we continued the climb. At this point the signs, usually green, turned black to be more in keeping with the locale.

We were now in a rather posh part of town, Harrow-on-the-Hill, and we were following the London Road right into the heart of the old village which is dominated by Harrow School, one of the top public schools in the country (old boys include Sir Winston Churchill and Lord Byron); we saw a few of the boys by sadly none of them were wearing straw hats. The hill, topped by the spire of St Mary’s church, is 350 feet high and is a prominent landmark that can be seen for miles around. At the village green we had hoped to be able to pop into an old pub called the King’s Head – said to have been one of many places where Henry VIII courted Anne Boleyn – but today the pub has closed down, although the sign still hangs on a gallows-like structure. 

There was also a street called Church Hill which I’d like to think was named in honour of the wartime PM but I presume it predates him as it does indeed lead up to the afore-mentioned church which stands at the top of the hill (although the spire is obscured by one of the school buildings if you look up from the High Street).

We descended from Harrow-on-the-Hill via Football Lane – named not for the view of Wembley Stadium but because it leads steeply down to the school’s playing-fields, which we crossed to get to the Watford Road. 

It was here that we took a look back up the hill before encountering a stile which, believe it or not, is the only one on the Capital Ring.

Next up was a muddy part which made me glad I’d worn my boots. 

The path ran between Northwick Park Hospital and a golf course – there is, I recall, a good Churchill quote about golf; not the ‘good wallk spoilt’ one (which has been attributed to, among others, William Gladstone and Mark Twain) but his description of it as “a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into an even smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose”. There were high nets to protect us walkers (and the cars parked outside the hospital, of course) from errant balls. We didn’t seen any golfers but we did see a mixed flock of thrushes on one of the greens which included redwings and fieldfares as well as song thrushes.

From there it was but a short walk through Northwick Park (the park, not the hospital) to South Kenton station. It is my hope that the next part of the Capital Ring will be the last; Dad only has to go six miles from South Kenton to Hendon (where he started), while I have a further three miles in order to get back to where I started at East Finchley, almost two years ago. It is a circle that has taken me to many parts of Greater London that I would not have otherwise visited, and it is to close soon.

The Capital Ring: Osterley Lock to Greenford

Back to the Capital Ring, mindful of the fact that it is almost two years since I started out by following the green signs from East Finchley. I’d made it half-way, more or less, over the course of 2015 and by comparison 2016 was slim, seeing me cover just under 24 miles from Crystal Palace to Osterley Lock (although there were various other walks for Londonist). The next section, Osterley Lock to Greenford, promised to be a fairly easy one – 5½ miles, mostly flat and following either the Grand Union Canal or the River Brent for the most part.

My Capital Ring odyssey had thus far been a solo experience but this was now no longer the case; Dad has been doing the walk as well but for some reason we had not managed to co-ordinate our efforts thus far (although I started doing it before him, he’s actually done more of it than me because he started in Hendon). Since we’d both managed to get as far as Osterley Lock, though, we thought it would be silly not to do the rest together.

We got to Boston Manor station at just after 10am on a clear but frosty January morning – turns out we were on the same train but in different carriages, having got on the Piccadilly Line at different stations. Once at the canal and rejoining both the Capital Ring and the Grand Union Canal Walk (a long-distance footpath which follows the towpath of said canal to the Midlands), we noted that the canal was frozen over at that point; by way of prodding it with a walking-stick we found that it was very thin ice, mind you. The towpath was quite muddy, and both of us thought it was a good job we’d come wearing hiking-boots.

A waymarker proclaimed that it was 91 miles via the canal network to Braunston, which we thought was a bit odd as that’s in Devon and surely Devon is further away than that? Turns out that the sign was referring to Braunston in Northants which used to be a central hub of England’s canal system; we were thinking of Braunton where we once went on holiday!

Between Brentford and Hanwell, the River Brent and the Grand Union Canal are one and the same with the river diverting off to a weir whenever a lock appears. At Hanwell, the two split as the canal starts on a six-lock flight, taking it up over 50 feet in a third of a mile. 

Much though I’d’ve liked to see a canal go up a hill (sort of), the Capital Ring breaks off after the first lock, following the river instead with Ealing Hospital to the left; had we wanted to stay on the canal towpath, it would’ve been another 16 miles to Rickmansworth, and 136½ miles to Birmingham.

We followed the river and the path, across the Uxbridge Road and onto a playing-field where we beheld an impressive sight – the Wharncliffe Viaduct, built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel in 1838 to carry the Great Western Railway on its journey to Bristol (according to a sign, Queen Victoria is said to have asked for her train to be stopped on the viaduct so she could admire the view on both sides).

Our path took us underneath said viaduct and into the grounds of Brent Lodge Park, the grounds of an old manor house in the shadow of St Mary’s, Hanwell – a nineteenth-century ‘Gothic Revivial’ church, the spire of which is something of a local landmark.

Our path hugged the Brent, taking us to the edge of the fields at the point where there was still frost in the shade. 

Over the river and past a cricket pitch and a golf course we walked, to a reclaimed landfill site bearing the somewhat optimistic name of Bittern’s Field. Our chances of seeing one of those elusive birds were slim-to-none (I’ve only ever seen one once, and that was at Minsmere although I’m told they’ve been seen at the London Wetlands Centre at Barnes); on our walk we did get to see moorhens, coots, mallards, a lone mute swan, blue and great tits, a couple of robins, black-headed gulls (lots of those), blackbirds, pigeons of the wood and feral varieties, a solitary grey heron and some ring-necked parakeets flying overhead.

We parted company with the Brent by Greenford Bridge, crossing it for a last time before entering Perivale Park from which the arch of Wembley Stadium can be seen. 

We took a tea-break there, marvelling at how quicker a walk can go when you have someone to talk to on said walk, even when the talk veers between such subjects as Watford Football Club, various trivia we’ve found out about London, pubs, what we’ve done with the meat we bought at Smithfield and whether or not John Keble can be classed as a saint (to which the answer is no, because the C of E doesn’t go in for canonisation, although that doesn’t stop people from thinking he is a saint because there’s a church named after him).

Carrying on, our walk, which had seemed to be almost rural in parts, took a turn for the urban as we crossed over the A40 and skirted around Northolt Rugby Club, walking through a built-up area to get to Greenford station and the end of another Capital Ring stage; Dad has two left before he completes the circular walk around London, while I have two-and-a-half to go. A quick perusal of the Colin Saunders book (London: The Definitive Walking Guide, as opposed to his more specific work The Capital Ring) tells us that the next part, from Greenford to South Kenton, is “a very interesting section with some climbing and fine views” – two hills in fact, Horsenden and Harrow. I guess we’ll need our boots for that too.

As we approached the station, it was lunchtime – and just before we got to the station we spotted a pub. That was lunch sorted out, then.

The Capital Ring: Wimbledon to Richmond

To Wimbledon on a very warm September day, from whence I hoped to complete another stage of the Capital Ring. Expectations were high, for this part of the Capital Ring – according to my copy of London: The Definitive Walking Guide – is “possibly one of the finest walks in the whole book, with glorious scenery wall to wall”. Here was a walk with the promise of not one, but three open spaces – Wimbledon Park, Wimbledon Common and Richmond Park.

I am, it seems, not alone in my love of walking. In fact, it’s practically a national trait for us English! I am currently reading a really good book called How England Made the English by Harry Mount (the son of Ferdinand Mount, as it happens). When talking of the weather, he observes that: “Our temperate climate … makes the English obsessive walkers.” Later, he continues: “Because the English weather is so temperate, and the landscape so accommodating, there’s no need for walking clothes, luminous body socks or special shoes … The English walk long distances because nowhere really seems very far from anywhere else, and you’ll never get fatally caught out by the weather or the terrain … Walking has always been our thing – from the Canterbury Tales, through to the Jarrow March and the charity walks of recent years; and walking in all weathers too, because we know the weather’s not going to be that bad.”

For me, though, this was a walk that I approached with some apprehension, for last month I had managed to do myself an injury by going for a quick single during a cricket match; in so doing, I badly pulled my calf which had a knock-on effect on my Achilles tendon and resulted in ‘retired hurt’ going against my name for the first time. After several weeks of icing it and various stretching exercises, I hadn’t done much by way of walking and, although the limp had worn off, this would be my first post-injury big walk.

Having got the Tube down to Wimbledon Park, I set off into the park of that name; a pretty-looking waterfall garden led up to the lake, on which were three types of geese (Canadian, Egyptian, greylag) and across which could be seen the tennis courts of the All-England Club, then diverting around a watersports centre and then across the grass to come out of the park on the other side. Six-and-a-half miles to Richmond Bridge, my target for the day.

After a couple of suburban back-roads, it was onto Wimbledon Common – through the woods to the windmill. Bird-life abounded, with robins, great tits and chaffinches spotted in addition to the much more ubiquitous jackdaws and magpies; a green woodpecker was heard – that distinctive laughing ‘yaffle’ call – but not seen. I’d been told to watch out for wombles, although in the event I did manage to spot a fox. (As well as those creatures who used to collect and recycle rubbish, by the way, my TV-memory of this large piece of open space also includes that episode of Bottom where Adrian Edmondson and the late, lamented Rik Mayall attempted to go camping – the one which wasn’t broadcast for two-and-a-half years due to a particularly brutal murder having been committed on the Common not long before it was originally due to be shown.)

The windmill, as it happens, was covered in scaffolding. It is, apparently, the last hollow post flour mill (whatever that means) in the country; Robert Baden-Powell wrote part of Scouting for Boys there, and it’s now a museum. I passed on by, also passing the club-house of the London Scottish Golf Club before heading downhill to a small lake called Queensmere (also spelled as Queen’s Mere on some maps); there, I saw a grey heron. I then continued, across the golf course – spotting a male kestrel flying overhead and crossing Beverley Brook (which has its own accompanying walk, from New Malden station to the point where said brook enters the Thames near Putney) before crossing the A3 at the Robin Hood Roundabout.

And so to Richmond Park – London’s largest Royal Park, a designated Site of Specific Scientific Interest and, at around 2,500 acres, the largest urban park in Europe. Within minutes of entering, I spotted a red deer – the largest mammal native to Britain; this one was a stag, sitting under the trees. Deer played a major role in the park’s establishment, for in the 1620s Charles I took his court to Richmond Palace in order to escape from an outbreak of the plague in London, and turned the area into a deer park so he could go hunting; just over a century later, the White Lodge in the middle of the park was built as a hunting-lodge for George II.

I followed the path up the hill to the oddly-named Spankers Hill Wood, having lunch on a bench at the top of the hill with a glorious view laid out before me. What a great day for a walk through this place!

After lunch, I had an ice cream at a nearby café before walking between the Pen Ponds, spotting more deer (fallow deer, this time) under some trees. There were plenty of ducks on the ponds – all mallards, from what I could tell – and ring-necked parakeets could be heard and seen overhead.

The signs took me across the Queen’s Road to the top of a slope with a good view to the west – although the view is better from the nearby King Henry’s Mound, a brief diversion from the Capital Ring path itself. This high point – a Neolithic burial barrow, it turns out – is named for Henry VIII and is said to be the spot from which he waited for a signal to tell him that Anne Boleyn had been executed at the Tower; there is, though, no actual evidence for this, with some sources claiming that Henry VIII was actually in Wiltshire, busy wooing Jane Seymour, on the day when his second wife went to the block. What is true about King Henry’s Mound is that it has a protected view of St Paul’s Cathedral, 12 miles away, which can be seen through a deliberate gap in the hedge (called ‘The Way’) and a specially-maintained avenue through Sidmouth Wood. To the west was a wonderful panoramic view – on a clear day, you can see Windsor Castle on the horizon (it was a sunny day for me, but the horizon was hazy; I could only just make the castle out with my binoculars).

Then it was downhill to the gate, and past Petersham Meadow to the path along the Thames. A very nice day for it, with some people hiring out the rowing-boats (£7 per adult per hour, half-rate after the first hour, users are advised to take the tide times into account). I continued past the elegant Richmond Bridge before making my way into town, with a view to getting the train back into Central London. I hadn’t had any trouble from the Achilles tendon, thankfully.