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INTRODUCTION

London is a city of eight million people, and eight million trees. Its people speak 300 languages, while in its skies the cries of 300 bird species may be heard. For every acre of land that bears a building, road or railway, another is open space – garden, park, woodland, farmland, or perhaps just a forgotten corner too marginal or hard of access to attract the developer’s shovel.

Heronry Pond, Wanstead Park (Walk 4)

Spring in Regent’s Park (Walk 10)

Although it is a world city, hub of finance and centre of culture, London is equally a city of open spaces in which 13,000 wildlife species have their niche. This might surprise both native Londoners and the teeming millions who visit for leisure or business: some is plain for all to see, as in the majestic Royal Parks that spread in a loop from Westminster through to Camden (Walk 10), but most is much less-known, except perhaps in its local community, such as Sydenham Hill Wood in the south (Walk 22) or Wanstead Flats in the east (Walk 4).

Take Wanstead Flats as an example. During 2016, the local wildlife group set itself the target of positively identifying 1000 species on its tiny patch, just under 1 mile square, across the year. They finished with a count of 1508, and that is in just 0.2% of London’s area.

It should therefore come as no surprise that there is a serious proposal to have London declared the world’s first National Park City. Not for an entity with planning powers, as say in the South Downs or Peak District national parks; instead, one that would celebrate London’s greenery and the opportunities it gives its people, both for recreation and business, and improve the richness, connectivity and biodiversity of London’s habitats.

The Capital Ring is a well-signposted London trail

This book asks you to invert your view of London – to see it not as a city for humans, but as a range of habitats for wildlife – and this is incontrovertibly best done on foot. A corollary of London’s greenness is that there are remarkable opportunities for the walker – one National Trail, six regional trails, and many more local ones, all taking advantage of over 600 miles of signed footpaths and countless extra miles of informal paths. You will from time to time encounter roads and houses – but on every one of these 25 walks, you will often wonder where all of these have gone.

That said, London is clearly a city that the hand of man has shaped in extreme ways, dating back now over two millennia. It would be foolish to say that even the off-the-beaten-track stretches, which you might visit with this book, are immune. Even the verdant open landscapes of the Lake District are highly artificial in their way, the result of centuries of tree-clearance for sheep pasture which, if mute economics were allowed to take its run, would soon become afforested again. Perhaps a better way of looking at things is to accept that no landscape of Britain – from the great hillscapes of the Scottish Highlands to the long level fields of Fenland – is free from human influence. The question is, where is the line drawn between influence and overt domination?

In the case of London, it is a question without easy answer, bound up in the approaches of Londoners and their authorities (regal and mercantile, state and municipal) to the needs of humans in the city. And that, in turn, depends in part on its geology, and the very particular circumstances of an invading force of Romans in the first century AD.

The geology of London

If there were no city, there would be a great tidal flood plain, as the Thames made its way to the sea. It would be maybe five times the width of the current river. One of the meanings of the word ‘strand’ is ‘bank of a river’; the central London thoroughfare known as the Strand, now 200 metres from the river, was named in 1002 as ‘Strondway’ because then the Thames lapped its edges.

The Roman army that Aulus Plautius commanded in AD43 landed in Kent and soon had a beachhead on the south bank of the Thames opposite what is now Westminster. A ford was practical here (it was then, roughly, at the tidal limit) and the army advanced to its first capital in England, Camulodonum, now Colchester in Essex, where it took over a Celtic fortified town. It was soon apparent, however, that the Thames would have to be bridged if supply lines were to be effective. A pontoon bridge in the vicinity of what is now London Bridge was replaced by AD55 by a permanent structure, and on its north bank the Romans started to create a new town from scratch, which by AD120 was known as Londinium.

The north bank was more favourable than the south as three little hills, now Ludgate Hill, Tower Hill and Cornhill, each rising barely 15 metres from the river, afforded some protection against flooding and perhaps some relief from insect life, which is why London’s core is where it is. To gain some idea of what the territory must have been like, look at the marshes around Tollesbury, just south of Colchester, a warren of mud, channels and islands through which progress is difficult to this day.

Then, as now, the Thames, rising 215 miles away in the Cotswold hills, drains much of south-east England, and is the longest river entirely within England. For the last quarter of its length, it runs across a flat plain of clay laid down around 50 million years ago and so specific of its type that it is known as London Clay. Bricks made from it are yellow, and easy to distinguish throughout the capital. But for agriculture London Clay mostly gives rise to poor, alkaline soils, and in prehistoric times the flood plain supported fishing and rough pasture but little in the way of crops.

On a wider scale this clay – which covers most of Essex to London’s east as well as much of modern London – is encircled by the chalklands of the foothills of the Chiltern Hills to the north and the North Downs to the south. In the south London boroughs of Croydon and Bromley there are examples of downland that could easily be mistaken for the South Downs of Hampshire and Sussex.

But there is a smaller scale, too, the most significant of which are the gravel beds and terraces. In south London, the sandy Lambeth beds are associated with heathland and acid soils. The Bagshot beds, named for the Surrey town, spread into London’s south-west and also cap some of north London’s higher parts, such as Harrow and Hampstead; they reappear too in Epping Forest, on London’s north-east boundary with Essex.

The Wandle in Watermeads Nature Reserve (Walk 19)

Through this pattern run London’s rivers. The Thames apart, they are often forgotten, even by Londoners, but they are an essential part of London’s geography. Out east, the Lea (or Lee – it retains two spellings), the old Essex/London boundary, was an industrial corridor for many years, as was the Wandle in south-west London, its steep course once powering many watermills. With the Brent in north-west London, these three rivers divide the capital conveniently into the four sectors that provide a structure for this book.

The Lea, Brent and Wandle are the three major tributaries but others feature too. In the very centre of London, the Fleet, Westbourne and others have been lost to underground culverts, but against that can be set London’s canal system. Between them, the rivers and canals provide many quiet spaces in which wildlife can flourish, as well as untroubled routes for walkers.

To sum up: London is built on impermeable clays across the centre; porous chalk to the south and north-west; and gravel toppings appear throughout. Each of these, and little local outcrops too numerous to count, combined with the flow of London’s many rivers, give rise to different habitats, and contribute to a diversity of wildlife which is still apparent to this day. It may require significant human intervention to maintain it – often in conflict with forces of human self-interest that seek to destroy it – but that diversity is a glory of London. Any Londoner should be proud of it, and any visitor can seek it.

London’s open spaces

Londinium was tightly enclosed within its walls. After the Romans’ departure, that settlement was largely left to ruin, but a new city grew up to its immediate west, and so began the slow development of London.

Slow, that is, until the 19th century, when the city became the largest in the world, and the tight Thames-side site that had served for centuries, barely more than a couple of miles long, simply could not hold the burgeoning population. The railways enabled new suburbs to be carved out of green fields, woods and market gardens, with the last major developments, such as the Metroland of outer north-west London and the great estates around Becontree in the east, taking place between the wars.

And yet, open space survives, by a mixture of private benevolence, public planning, some luck, and the often very active and direct role that Londoners themselves have played.

Allotments, West Finchley (Walk 12)

Although most London open spaces were first created so as to give humans a place to relax rather than wildlife a place to thrive, the two often go hand in hand. It’s worth noting, too, that land which is not ‘open’, such as railway cuttings and derelict industrial sites, not to mention house gardens and allotments, can also be fantastically valuable for wildlife, precisely because human involvement is so limited.

Successive monarchs (and senior courtiers), at least until the 18th century, saw London’s hinterland as an opportunity for sport, by which they meant hunting and frolics. Great tracts of land were maintained for that purpose, either as formal gardens such as those around Hampton Court or rougher lands over which men could gallop, nearby Bushy Park an example. But tastes, and pressures on royal time, changed, and the lands became less necessary to their daily needs.

The eleven Royal Parks range from small gardens (and one cemetery) to the famous large expanses such as Hyde Park and Richmond Park. Save for Greenwich Park in the south-east, these are all situated in the wealthier areas of the capital. Much of London’s growth during the 19th century, often in cheap housing where crime and disease were rife, took place elsewhere. Many developers no doubt saw open space as just a lost opportunity for profit.

It took government action to create London’s first public park, Victoria Park in the east end, in 1842. But such a top-down approach was needed less as first the Metropolitan Board of Works and then the London County Council, with smaller boroughs beneath it, took on the responsibility of providing open space for London’s residents.

All around Victorian London there were great natural spaces held as common land. From Tudor times, and gathering great force from the 18th century, tracts of land which were once open for all to use – for grazing, say – became enclosed by a landowner and the collective rights withdrawn. Although the city had grown in part through the use of enclosure for housing and commercial development, areas right across the capital from Tooting Common to Hampstead Heath and Epping Forest were still held in common. In 1864 the proposed enclosure of much of one of the largest of the commons – Wimbledon – proved a spur to campaigners, who feared that if Wimbledon went, no other common in the capital would be safe. Meanwhile, in Epping Forest, enclosures by a local vicar were opposed by the direct action (and ensuing imprisonment) of his parishioners.

Within a year a Commons Preservation Society was set up, its aim ‘to save London commons for the enjoyment and recreation of the public’. It had early success, with an act of 1866 that in essence barred further enclosure of London Commons. Not that the war was quite over; as an example, in 1896 a golf club sought to ban locals from One Tree Hill (Walk 22), only for mass demonstrations of first 15,000 then over 50,000 to assert their rights. However, we must thank the 1866 act and its successors for the retention of common land across the city, which provides much relatively untampered, relatively wild land to retain its natural aspect, and with it a refuge for many species that would otherwise be lost.

During the 20th century, many other open spaces were taken into local authority ownership while others have come under the control of the National Trust. Allied to that, the Metropolitan Green Belt established in 1938 provides a chain of green spaces encircling London. Not that such provisions are guarantors for all time. The green belt is chipped away a little each year, and the post-2010 relaxation of planning law deliberately makes the life of a developer easier.

London’s physical boundaries may not increase, but the number of people who live in it undoubtedly will: perhaps to 10 million by 2027. That brings more pressure on places to live, work and play, and to travel within the city and beyond. Watchfulness and a campaigning spirit are needed to defend the open spaces that London has. But as we have seen, that is hardly new; they are traits that come naturally to many Londoners.

Above Happy Valley (Walk 20)

And in this they have support. Almost every open space has its own little volunteer-led group, which might run anything from a bird count to a children’s nature hunt or a litter pick. Many are listed in this book. If you’re a Londoner and haven’t joined one, do. If you’re a visitor, check out what they are doing this week – there might be a talk or leaflet, say, which can enrich your knowledge of the area you’re walking in.

Renewing the Walthamstow Wetlands (Walk 6)

Add to this the London Wildlife Trust, whose remit specifically includes the protection of the capital’s wildlife and wild spaces. They manage many of the sites covered in this book, and some of their recent work has transformed previously neglected areas into true wildlife havens. Walthamstow Wetlands on Walk 6, Woodberry Wetlands on Walk 9 and Wilderness Island on Walk 19 are shining examples, but there are many more. The Essex, Kent and Surrey Wildlife Trusts have an important role in some parts of outer London too, reflecting that London’s present formal boundaries were only set in 1965 with the absorption of districts then within those counties, and a fragment of Hertfordshire.

When to go

London’s equable climate makes it suitable for walking at any time of year. Winters are rarely too cold, nor summers too hot. The transitional seasons of spring and autumn bring first a blooming of life and second the transformation of leaf, both in the heart of the city and beyond.

Climate change means there has been little snowfall in recent winters, with the greatest likelihood on higher ground of the capital’s edges. When it does fall and settles on the city, it is as described by the Victorian poet Robert Bridges: ‘the unaccustomed brightness / Of the winter dawning, the strange unheavenly glare’.

If summers are a little warmer than they were, temperatures are not generally so extreme as to pose a challenge to the walker, except perhaps for a few days a year. At any time between April and September, however, be sensible and use sun cream when exposed to the sun for any length of time.

Flood markers in Isleworth (Walk 18)

Although London’s reputation for rain is largely undeserved – it has less than Rome, Sydney or New York – it is true that drizzle, a fine curtain of rain which falls from leaden skies sometimes for hours on end, can come at any time of year. It poses no danger, other than to the spirit. But another marked result of climate change is the downpour. Short, intense periods of heavy rain, perhaps with thunderstorms, are increasingly common in the London area, again at any time of year. They can overwhelm drainage systems and rivers alike, and lead to flash flooding. They can affect London walking even if the rain has fallen many miles away, as the Thames carries flood waters to the sea – see the flood markers at Isleworth (Walk 18), for example.

While many of the walks in this book are on gravelled or metalled paths, many are not, and after heavy rain – or any time between late autumn and early spring – some paths can become very muddy, a by-product of the London Clay beneath the surface. Nothing is likely to be impassable, but it could affect your footwear choice (see What to take below). Natural paths on chalk surfaces may be drier, but very slippery.

Safety in London

In preparing this book, the author walked all of these routes several times, in all seasons, usually alone, with rucksack on his back and expensive camera equipment around his neck. And not once did he feel his safety threatened.

While vigilance is a good quality to bring to city walking anywhere, these walks are for the main part away from the areas in which crime is most commonplace. The rules to follow are those which you would follow in any city: be aware of pickpocketing in tourist areas, Walk 10 the most obvious; cross a road, enter a shop or hop on a bus if you feel you are being followed; use mobile phones carefully.

You are more at risk crossing the road, especially if you are an overseas visitor, and from a nation that does not drive on the left. Use a zebra or pelican crossing if there is one nearby. A zebra crossing is marked by black-and-white stripes across the road, a flashing orange Belisha beacon on each pavement. London drivers are remarkably courteous in stopping for pedestrians on these, but it is wise to look the driver in the eye as they approach, before stepping out.

Pelican crossings (and three other types, pegasus, puffin and toucan – they are similar, and in this book the term ‘pelican’ is used for all) have traffic lights with separate phases for road traffic and pedestrians. Always wait for the pedestrian phase to turn green. Most have a button to encourage this to happen, although you may be forgiven for thinking that it does not always work. Wait, all the same. And keep an eye out for cyclists.

Some heaths, parks and commons around London harbour ticks, which can spread the very unpleasant Lyme disease. Check your skin carefully after a walk – not just exposed areas, as they can crawl to the groin and armpits. If you find a tick, remove it with tweezers or a specialist tool, and over the next few weeks keep an eye out for inflammation around the site, which must be treated with antibiotics. Other insects can bite, but are no more than a nuisance unless you have a specific allergy. Britain’s one poisonous snake, the adder, might be encountered, particularly on heaths, but prefers to scurry away rather than confront.

Getting around London

Every single one of these walks is designed for public transport. Almost wherever you are in the capital, you will find it is the best way to get around. Car parking can be very expensive and road congestion horrendous. Even residential areas can have very restricted parking, although things might be easier on Sundays.

Most of the time, London’s public transport works fantastically well. There are some excellent smartphone apps, such as Citymapper, which give real-time information, as do the websites www.tfl.gov.uk (tube and bus services) or www.nationalrail.co.uk (National Rail services).

Off-peak services are rarely more than 15 minutes apart; the few exceptions are mentioned on each walk. Sunday services are generally less frequent, and in some cases may not run at all, and engineering works on both tube and rail can lead to bus replacements that take far longer. Check before you go.

The Croydon tram network features on Walks 19 and 21

If you are a visitor, either arm yourself with an Oyster card (a pre-loaded smart card valid on almost all tubes, trains, buses and trams within London), a contactless debit card (but it’s unlikely to be sensible to use cards in foreign currency because of the transaction fee), or use a major mobile phone payment app. All come with a price cap promise, so they are a far better option than buying individual tickets or daily travelcards. Only one walk (Walk 1) starts outside the zonal system, by one stop, but it does take Oyster and contactless cards.

If you can, travel outside the morning peak (peak times are from 6.30am to 9.30am), not least because it’s cheaper. Most walks can easily be completed between the morning and evening peak periods, although in summer when it’s light (up to 10pm in June), it’s delightful to walk late into the evening.

Children under 11 travel free, and there are significant concessions for 11- to 17-year-olds. If you have a bus pass for England, bus travel is free after 9.30am, but trains and tubes have to be paid for. London residents over 60 get a Freedom Pass for all zones which entitles them to free buses and tubes; almost all trains are free after 9.30am, and some (Overground and TfL Rail) all day.

Access

England’s rights-of-way network gives the walker open access to off-road footpaths, bridleways and other tracks which can lead to the heart of the countryside. They are important in London too, and are often followed in this book. Each is signposted 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.