Garden bird-watching round-up, 2017

The Spring 2018 issue of Nature’s Home, the RSPB members’ magazine, arrived in the post a couple of days ago with the form for the RSBB Big Garden Birdwatch which takes place over the last weekend in January. I take part in this every year, although for the last two years I have had nothing to report as my front garden received a grand total of no avian visitors during the one hour I had designated for the survey (despite the various options that were available on the feeder), and back in 2015 two Ring-necked Parakeets who scared everyone else away. But one hour on a January weekend doesn’t tell the full story.

The bird-feeder in the front garden, situated so that it can be seen from the armchair in the corner of the lounge, actually gets a nice range of visitors. Over the past year, I have seen four kinds of tit (Blue, Coal, Great, Long-tailed) and two types of pigeon (Feral, Wood) on it, as well as Chaffinches, Robins, the odd Carrion Crow and the very occasional Greater-spotted Woodpecker. Ground-feeders have included Blackbirds and Dunnocks (and more pigeons), while I’ve seen Starlings and a Redwing perched in the tree.

Less welcome have been the squirrels, and I have tried various tricks to deter them. I thought that I had hit on a winning squirrel-deterring method by greasing the pole with some WD-40, and the resulting attempt by a squirrel to climb up the pole was admittedly hilarious. But then, of course, after several attempts enough of said lubricating oil had been wiped off to ensure a successful ascent, so an upturned plastic flower-pot with a hole in the bottom was deployed instead. I’m pleased to report that no squirrels have been seen on the feeder since.

Oh, and the parakeets visit too. Interesting birds, Ring-necked Parakeets. They’re not a native species to Britain, of course – but they have been a visible (and vocal) presence in the London area for a few decades now and are very well-established. Their exotic brightness has led to a couple of rather fanciful urban myths about how they got here; that the first pair in London were released at some point in the late Sixties by either Jimi Hendrix or Mick Jagger, or that the first ones escaped from Shepperton Studios during the filming of The African Queen back in 1951. There are a few question-marks over the extent to which they have affected native species (are they taking nest-sites from Lesser-spotted Woodpeckers, whose numbers are in decline?), although any queries about how a species from India manages to survive the winters here should be directed to the fact that their range includes the Himalayas; these birds may look tropical, but they can do cold. And, as they have shown, they are highly adaptable.

Getting my name in print

The other day I got an email advising me of the fact that a couple of articles that I wrote for the excellent Londonist website have made it into print form by way of a new book that they have out.

Well, naturally we had to buy the book. Londonist Mapped is now on display in our lounge; a hardback with 96 pages, it’s a really cool book adorned with lots of lovely and fantastically-detailed hand-drawn maps that accompany some of Londonist’s best articles. On that particular subject, I’m pleased to say that my article about how London’s docks got their names has become ‘A Brief Guide to London’s Docks’ on page 16, accompanied by a map drawn by London-based artists Luke Agbainmoni, while a couple of entries from my one about how London’s castles and palaces got their names have made it into ‘Stately Homes of Southwest London’ on page 64.

It really is a superb book for anyone interested in London … but I say it who shouldn’t, of course!

The Capital Ring: summing-up

So what to do after finishing the Capital Ring? Write about it, of course – for The Archer, our local volunteer-run newspaper here in East Finchley for which I have been writing for the past half-a-dozen years. Appropriate, really, for I only found out about the Capital Ring by virtue of living in East Finchley which is on the route. My write-up, which made it onto the back page, can be found here:

http://www.the-archer.co.uk/archive/2017/2017May12.pdf

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.

London's unusual church names

Ever wondered about where some of London’s more unusual church names come from? You know, the ones that refer to wardrobes, garlic or being without. I’ve been looking into this very thing for Londonist as part of their ongoing ‘etymology’ series, and this particular episode involved visits to several of the most beautiful buildings on London to find out more. 

It is in such oases of peace and quiet in a busy city that London’s history comes to life; many have associations with famous historical people and many of them are the works of Sir Christopher Wren who rebuilt so many churches (in addition to St Paul’s Cathedral) after the Great Fire. 

Some even commemorate famous former parishoners, such as St Clement Danes which has a statue of Samuel Johnson at the back, facing towards Fleet Street! 

These days, some of them even have cafés, and not just in the crypts either – the one at St Mary Aldermary, for example, is in the church itself which must make said Wren church a strong contender for ‘best café interior in London’.

Here’s the link:

http://londonist.com/london/history/how-london-s-weirdest-churches-got-their-names

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.