The Capital Ring: East Finchley to Hackney Wick (part 2)

Towards the end of the Parkland Walk, I encountered some more people who were neither jogging nor walking dogs; instead, these people were on a litter-picking trip, with a supervisor (self-appointed, I guessed) shouting at everyone else not to wander off.

The Parkland Walk ends at the footbridge over the East Coast Main Line, with Finsbury Park located on the other side. It was a lovely day for a walk in the park (this particular one having been one of the first public parks to be laid out by the Victorians) – whether people wanted to take the dog or the kids (or both) for a walk, feed the ducks (whose numbers, as well as the usual mallards, included pochards, I noticed – although the ducks were outnumbered by Canada geese and many black-headed gulls), sit on a bench in quiet contemplation, play football or even strum away on a guitar. The flowers (daffodils and crocuses) were out in bloom, and there were plenty of ground-feeding starlings as well. Another sign advised me that I had 2 miles to go to Clissold Park, although I could take a shortcut if I wanted to avoid some steps on the next stretch; I opted against that.

  

 

On the other side of Green Lanes (the plural, by the way, is deliberate because it used to be a drovers’ road that linked several villages), the Capital Ring took a turn for the seedy and run-down as it followed the course of the New River, an artificial waterway constructed in the early seventeenth century to provide fresh drinking water for London (it runs from Hertford to Islington, and there’s a New River Path that you can walk along for most of its length). The first thing I saw was a discarded computer monitor that someone had chucked in the river; further along I came across a chair, a submerged mattress and a floating mess of weeds and discarded rubbish brightened up by a few ducks, a couple of coots, a moorhen and a swan. To my left I had views of an industrial estate (and, beyond that, Alexandra Palace), while to my right stood the tower-blocks of Woodberry Down, the largest council estate in the country.

The New River twists and turns, running under the Seven Sisters Road (pedestrians must cross over) and then doubling back on itself as it passes two reservoirs, which according to my map are called East Reservoir and West Reservoir. These afforded some good views to the south, including a lovely juxtaposition of a church spire (later identified at St Mary’s, Stoke Newington) and the Shard. Closer by, I can across my first path blockage of the day – a construction site where the redevelopment of Woodberry Down is taking place.

Further along, I passed an empty-looking sailing-centre (why was it empty? It was a lovely day – surely someone must have wanted to go boating on the reservoir?) before re-emerging onto Green Lanes by The Castle – an old Victorian water-pumping station that became one of London’s biggest indoor climbing centres in the 1990s. I, though, was back walking along a main road for the first time since Highgate, although only for a few hundred yards until I came to Clissold Park.

This was teeming with life, much more so than Finsbury Park which it predates, having originally been the grounds of an eighteenth-century villa. More footballers, more families out for a walk, and more flowers. Both the children’s play area and the café – located, spectacularly, in the villa itself – were full of people. A good place in which to enjoy the sunshine of early March.

Out on the other side, I came up against the church I’d seen from the reservoir, and found out that there are actually two St Mary’s churches in Stoke Newington, one across the road from the other. The older of the two dates back to the sixteenth century, with the new one – the one with the big spire – having been built in the 1850s to deal with the rapid rise in the population (and, therefore, the congregation).

Further along Stoke Newington Church Street, I came across a pub named after Daniel Defoe, opposite a house with a blue plaque commemorating said author who lived in a house on that site (he also has a street and a garage named after him). The house bearing the plaque looked eighteenth-century to me, right down to the bricked-up windows which were so done by the owners in order to avoid having to pay window tax, although I could be wrong here as I’ve been told before now that some houses that were built after said tax was abolished were given the bricked-up window effect too, the idea being that it broke up an otherwise plain wall. 

Once again, the Capital Ring split into two alternative paths as the next part of the walk involved some steps. I duly went up the steps and entered the strange world that is the old, decaying and overgrown Victorian cemetery.

This was Abney Park, created in the 1840s as one of the so-called ‘Magnificent Seven’ large London cemeteries (the others are Brompton, Highgate, Kensal Green, Nunhead, West Norwood and Tower Hamlets). After nodded greetings to a trio of dog-walkers who’d congregated for a smoke by the last resting-place of William Booth, I passed on though, noting the plethora of overgrown plots and collapsed headstones (no wonder so many of these old cemeteries have been designated as nature reserves). A strange world, and a lost one too.

Back in the land of the living, I crossed Stamford Hill and, having thus completed section 12, I briefly toyed with the idea of calling it a day and going home by way of Stoke Newington Station. But I was on a roll and the sun was out, so instead (after noticing a Salvation Army charity shop and wondering if its position had anything to do with the grave of that organisation’s founder being so close by) I turned down the interestingly-named Cazenove Road and continued on my way.

Although I saw signs for a mosque and a Muslim community centre, the religion most on show on Cazenove Road was Judaism, and highly orthodox Judaism at that – the men in beards and circular fur hats, accompanied by their bewigged wives and ringletted boys; everyone decked out in their Saturday best.

Architecturally, this road ranged from the Victorian (this part of the street included the mosque) to the post-war, with big houses gradually giving way to blocks of flats, one named after Nelson Mandela (which briefly made me think of Only Fools and Horses), another an Art Deco pile called Hadley Court. Other buildings, by contrast, looked more down-at-heel.

I carried on, crossing the Upper Clapton Road and passing a large mock-Tudor house and another block of council flats (this one named after Keir Hardie), before entering Springfield Park. This one – like Clissold Park, once the grounds of a manor house – had a fountain on the duck-pond (which contained Egyptian geese), and after a quick pit-stop at the café (the former nineteenth-century manor house, naturally) I beheld a spectacular view out over Walthamstow Marshes.

The Capital Ring: East Finchley to Hackney Wick (part 1)

“Where does that go?”

It’s an age-old question which I found myself asking the other week when I noticed a green signpost outside the Causeway entrance to East Finchley Tube station for something called the Capital Ring. The name rang a bell somewhere in the back of my head but I wasn’t entirely sure where I’d heard about this before.

A quick bit of online research told me that the Capital Ring is a 78-mile circular walking route which, in the words of TfL, “offers you the chance to see some of London’s finest scenery”. Encircling inner/central London and passing through urban and suburban areas with an emphasis on parks and nature reserves, it was first proposed in 1990 but did not become a reality until 2005. It’s divided up into 15 sections, each of which begins and ends at or near a Tube or railway station – making it easy to pick and choose which bit you want to do, or even do the whole lot in several day-walks. It is in many ways the inner London equivalent of the 150-mile London Outer Orbital Path (better known as the London Loop) which makes its way through the outskirts and the point at which the suburbs peter out into the countryside; to put it another way, the Loop is the pedestrian equivalent of the M25, and the Capital Ring is the walkers’ North (and South) Circular. But hopefully with less congestion.

Having realised what the Capital Ring is, and that it’s more or less on my doorstep, I naturally wanted to have a go and see where those green signs would lead me. East Finchley is located on section 11 (Hendon to Highgate), and indeed the walk passes through the Tube station itself (although there’s a diversion route just in case someone decides to do the walk when the station is closed – a good bit of attention to detail on behalf of the walk’s organisers), and I figured that as that’s where I live, that’s where I’d join the walk.

Which, early one Saturday morning, is what I did.

After the station, the walk crossed the High Road and went through Cherry Tree Wood, a favourite birdwatching venue of mine and the location, every summer, of the East Finchley Festival. But for the birds, I had the place to myself (I’d gone for an early start), and although I could only see pigeons and a couple of mistle thrushes I could certainly hear robins, blackbirds and blue tits (evidently my ear for birdsong, one of the weaker elements of my birding, is getting better).

Coming out the other end, I found myself in a back-street street of suburban inter-war semis not dissimilar from the street on which I grew up; most of the front gardens had been tarmacked over to create driveways, although this one had a few more mock-Tudor gables. One doorstep, I noticed, had a couple of bottles of milk on it; did I imagine that, or do early-morning milk deliveries still exist? I thought they’d gone the way of the football pools, VHS tapes and cars like the Austin Metro – once part of the fabric of British life, now all but forgotten.

From there, it was a surprisingly short walk – via a footpath between two houses – to Highgate Wood. Owned and managed by the Corporation of London, it’s a surviving remnant of the ancient Forest of Middlesex and there are plenty of signs to show that this is the property of the City. 

While walking through the woods, adding crows, robins and great tits to my list of bird sightings, I encountered a couple of dog-walkers and, rather curiously, a child’s woollen glove which someone had hung on a low-lying branch. I’ve seen this sort of thing before in parks (and I would see it again during the course of the day), and it always strikes me as evidence of peoples’ good nature; someone obviously saw it on the floor and, rather than just leave it, took some time to pick it up and place it somewhere nearby so it wouldn’t get dirty. The fact that people do this is, in my opinion, cause to feel optimistic about life in general. A bit like strangers wishing each other good morning when they pass by. Sometimes it really is the little things that count.

Moving on, the walk crossed Muswell Hill Road (the traffic consisting mainly of buses) and entered into Queen’s Wood, where I saw some blackbirds and a flock of chaffinches, managed to identify a thrush-like bird as a redwing and heard the laughing call of a green woodpecker. Another dog-walker passed by (“Morning!” “Morning!”) and I spotted my first major Capital Ring signpost; a pair of arrows giving directions and distances to walkers. I had 2½ miles to go to Finsbury Park, 4½ to Clissold Park and, depending on which way I was going, either 34½ or 43½ miles to Crystal Palace Park.

Priory Gardens, a combination of big inter-war semis and earlier terraced houses,  marked the end of section 11 of the walk (Highgate Tube station is quite literally at the end of the road) and the start of section 12 (Highgate to Stoke Newington) which would, as I found, cover a path that I had trodden before.

From Priory Gardens, where I encountered my first cyclists of the day and an Ocado delivery-van, it was a steep climb up another footpath between two houses; is it just me, or are there more of such footpaths than most people realise? I bet someone could live on a road like Priory Gardens for years and not realise that there was a footpath path on the street that gives a shortcut to Shepherd’s Hill, emerging by Highgate Library. Heck, you could probably live on a street like Priory Gardens for years in blissful ignorance of the fact that it’s part of the Capital Ring. After all, it took seven years of living in East Finchley for me to realise that it passes through there.

A brief stint along the Archway Road would mark the last bit of street walking for a while before the Capital Ring joined onto the Parkland Walk, that stretch of disused railway line from Highgate to Finsbury Park that these days has the distinction of London’s longest nature reserve. I walked along this back in the summer of 2012, and this time I noticed something new straight away; the Highgate Tunnels, merely fenced off to deter the curious back then, have now been bricked up in order to protect the bats who use them to roost.

The Parkland Walk was easily the busiest part of the walk so far. Joggers, now doubt preferring the softer going to pavements, like to use it as do dog-walkers, and as it passes between back gardens, over side-streets (some of which can offer tantalising glimpses of the skyline of the City) and under a couple of main roads it can be a busy place. By way of neither running nor being accompanied by a dog, though, I was in a distinct minority; even the man doing his bit to keep the litter under control had a dog with him. As the day grew warmer, I shed my fleece as I walked along the platforms of what used to be Crouch End station.

to be continued...

Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel wrote the excellent Wolf Hall as the first part of a trilogy about the rise and fall of the Tudor-era politician Thomas Cromwell; it and its sequel, Bring up the Bodies, both won the Booker Prize so the pressure is really on for Mantel to deliver a belter for the final instalment which will, if the historical record is anything to go by, portray the downfall of the King’s most faithful servant.

In the meantime, while Mantel has been courting publicity by publishing a short story about murdering Mrs Thatcher, fans of Wolf Hall have been treated to a theatre adaptation (which I didn’t go and see) and now a TV adaptation with Mark Rylance as Cromwell and the brainwashed Marine from Homeland as Henry VIII.

Turning books into TV shows can be a tricky business; with this one, the writers had to take the action from two not particularly short novels (between them, Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies top 1000 pages) and condense that into six one-hour episodes (although, this being a BBC drama, an hour really did mean an hour). The result was damned good – a slow-burner of a series that refused to treat the viewer like an imbecile while taking a story we thought we all knew, and retelling it from the perspective of someone who is usually a supporting character.

The son of a blacksmith who rose to become one of the most powerful men in England, Thomas Cromwell’s a fascinating character; in TV dramas about Henry VIII he’s usually portrayed as an unprincipled politician on the make, the man behind the scenes who’s overseeing all those confessions obtained through torture. This is in contrast to the apparently saintly Thomas More (indeed, Cromwell is very much the villain of that classic play-turned-film A Man for All Seasons).

One thing I really like about Wolf Hall is how Mantel did a spectacular piece of revisionism and turned this on its head, with More being shown in a more villainous light than is usual and Cromwell getting the sympathetic treatment. Perhaps a more neutral way of putting it would be to say that the two were contrasting politicians – More was an idealist, whereby Cromwell was a pragmatist (and, as is so often the case, pragmatism won out over idealism). Allowing Cromwell to shine may have upset the historians – David Starkey is not a fan – but it does make for a really good political story (I hesitate to use the word ‘thriller’, what with the ending being widely known), especially at a time when the third series of the American remake of House of Cards has just come out on the Netflix. And especially with a quality actor like Rylance in the lead (when he’s on form like this, I’m prepared to momentarily overlook his support for the ever-odd Shakespeare-didn’t-write-Shakespeare conspiracy theory).

But then, all this debate about Cromwell versus More obscures who the real villain of the piece is – the man who, ultimately, would send both of them to the block. Claire Foy may have stolen the limelight as Anne Boleyn – always the most fascinating of Henry VIII’s wives – in the final episode, but the power was always with the King, portrayed superbly in this series by Damian Lewis (the sinister man-hug at the end was particularly well done and summed things up brilliantly without any need for dialogue). The whole thing played out like the best sort of political thriller, even though everyone (well, everyone who went to school in this country) knows how this story was going to end. Turns out that it’s still possible to make an old story exciting.

Pilgrim

When a book has a quote on the cover that proclaims it as “the only thriller you need to read this year”, you may think that’s hyperbole but sooner or later you might be interested in finding out what all the fuss is about. Especially if you’ve seen quite a few people reading it on the Tube.

The thriller in question is I am Pilgrim, the debut novel by journalist and screenwriter Terry Hayes. Be warned, though – once you get started on this, you won’t want to put it down. It’s smart, complex and very compelling.

The story begins at a murder scene in New York. The narrator is the Pilgrim of the title, a man of many aliases who used to work for an ultra-secret US intelligence department – he was, of course, their best agent – but left after 9/11. Since then, he wrote a highly-regarded book on forensic pathology (published under a false name) and has used his fieldcraft to disappear under a false identity and move to Paris in a doomed attempt to leave the secret world behind him and try to lead something approaching a normal life. However, he gets tracked down by a determined NYPD homicide cop who has been inspired by his book – which is how Pilgrim ends up helping to investigate a murder in which the killer appears to have drawn inspiration from said book to create a situation where the police can’t even identify the victim, let alone the killer. Subsequently, the US government comes back into his life – as well as a suicide that may not be all it seems in Turkey, there’s a big terrorist plot against America, but they don’t know who’s behind it, where the plot is being hatched or what form the attack will take. Only Pilgrim can figure this out.

Running alongside this are some flashbacks in which we get to see how Pilgrim became involved in, and later disillusioned with, the secret world. We also get to see another series of flashbacks that track the life of the novel’s antagonist, a character known only as the Saracen – a Saudi boy who witnesses his father’s beheading, became disillusioned with his mother’s tentative embracing of Western values and went off to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. Having thus become a Muslim fundamentalist, he went on to become a doctor in Beirut but, having adopting a false identity, he is himself nigh-on untraceable. From this position, he sets about planning a spectacular act of bio-terrorism on US soil – without so much as setting foot in the country itself.

This parallel plot device is similar to the cat-and-mouse layout of Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, which follows both the titular assassin and the detective who’s on his trail until they finally meet at the novel’s climax. This is somewhat appropriate, for The Day of the Jackal, first published in 1971, was in many senses the first modern thriller (the first thriller having been John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, first published a century ago and never out of print since).

I am Pilgrim is, at 896 pages, a long book but this gives Hayes the chance to go deep into the characters of both Pilgrim and the Saracen. We get the extensive back-stories of both men – the adopted, Harvard-educated spook who’s more than capable of getting information out of Swiss bankers and bumping off just about anyone if required to do so but has a vulnerable side when it comes to the subject of his foster-parents, and the radicalised Islamist who will stop at nothing (in one memorably gruesome scene, he even removes someone’s eyes so that he can beat the iris-recognition software in a top-secret Damascus laboratory) in his quest to bring the mighty USA to its knees. At times, the book’s fast-paced plot, spectacular set-pieces and array of locations feel like it should be a movie (which I don’t doubt it will be at some point), which is in a sense appropriate as Hayes’s background is in movie screenwriting.

All in all, those commuters who were engrossed in this novel really were onto something. I am Pilgrim is definitely worth a read.

Coventry Cathedral

A few months ago, I visited Coventry on business. At first glance it was a very uninspiring place – the city centre is a textbook example of the sort of dull, unimaginative post-war planning that involved a lot of concrete, resulting in what was apparently one of the first large-scale pedestrianised shopping precincts in Europe.

The reason for this is that in November 1940, Coventry was flattened by the Luftwaffe. Over 4000 houses, three-quarters of the city’s industrial plants and the city’s old medieval heart were destroyed, and of the buildings that were left standing afterwards most were deemed so unsafe that they had to be knocked down.

All that was left of the fourteenth-century cathedral was a roofless shell and the spire.

When the city was rebuilt, it was decided that the remains of the cathedral should be preserved as a permanent memorial, with a new, modern cathedral being built next door.

I somehow managed to get to Coventry early for my meeting, so I decided to take a look around the cathedral. The old one, that is. Open to the elements, it has the feel of an old castle courtyard. Where the altar once stood is a wooden cross; the wood is from two of the old roof timbers, found amid the ruins (having fallen in the shape of a cross) not long after the bombing; the words “Father Forgive” are inscribed on the sanctuary wall behind. A memorial to those who died on the Home Front during the war is nearby. Forgiveness and reconciliation were key themes in the rebuilding.

I don’t know of many war memorials that commemorate the sacrifices made on the Home Front, but I will say this: A visit to the bombed-out shell of Coventry Cathedral is a sobering reminder of the realities of war, and as memorials go it is both beautiful and breathtaking.

Some time later, when I had a lunch break, I returned to the cathedral and turned my attention to the one part of the old structure that’s still standing – the spire. At 295 feet, it’s the tallest structure in the city (and indeed the third-tallest cathedral spire in England, after Salisbury and Norwich), and it’s open to the public.

Now I cannot resist the chance to climb a tower at the best of times. For £2:50, I got to climb to the top for a view over Coventry – including such sights as the university, the ring road and, somewhere in the distance, Birmingham. Another cathedral visited, another tower climbed.

Elsewhere in the city, there wasn’t really much to see. That said, Coventry city centre does have a statue of a naked woman on horseback.

This commemorates Lady Godiva, the wife of an eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon nobleman who ruled these parts. Legend has it that when he was obliged to raise taxes, Godiva made him promise that he wouldn’t if she rode naked through the city. He called her bluff, but she wasn’t bluffing – riding naked through the city is, apparently, exactly what she did. Out of respect (she had, after all, just saved them from a tax hike), the townspeople averted their eyes as she rode past – all except an apprentice who became the original Peeping Tom.