Walking Class Hero: Going Loopy

Welcome to Walking Class Hero a regular blog about walking and the walking environment. Whether you like walking on your own, with friends or in an organised group this blog will cover it. It’ll embrace walking in cities and towns and villages. Walking in the countryside and along the coast and up hills and down dales. Walking through parks and by rivers and across heath and down and moor. It’ll comment on public rights of way, access to open country, permissive paths, public urban space and countryside protection. Basically if you can walk there it’ll be in this blog.

Going Loopy (Monday 13 April 2009)

Easter Monday at 11 am found me and Clare in the Costa Coffee at East Croydon station joining a group of friends ready to complete the Hamsey Green to Banstead Downs section of the London Loop. (If you’re keeping score at home that’s section 5.) Easter in London had been grey and overcast but that hadn’t bothered us much as we’d been DIY-ing the previous 3 days. Today was nice and sunny though.

If you want to picture the London Loop think M25. (The LOOP part stands for London Outer Orbital Path you see.) It’s about 224 km long (140 miles in old money) and is divided into 15 handy sections. (Or 24 sections if you use the TfL leaflets.) It starts out east in Erith and goes clockwise round London finishing up in Purfleet (back out east but north of the river). Jo, who is the main organiser of this little group, started the Loop just at the start of 2009.

I guess Croydon is mostly famous for being the birthplace of both Tracey Emin and Kate Moss these days but it got a mention in the Domesday Book. Back then it had a mill, a church and just over 350 residents. I don’t know it very well at all but I have used its tram system to get to and from Wimbledon.

To get to the start of section 5 you take a short bus ride and almost immediately large town melts into a leafy green suburbia. We’d only been walking a couple of minutes and we were down to t-shirts. Not far into the walk we came to the edge of Kenley Airfield – the last of London’s Battle of Britain fighter stations to survive in its World War II form. Today rather than the drone of Luftwaffe airplanes and the roar of Merlin engines you hear the hiss of gliders overhead.

 Most of my companions seemed to come armed with either David Sharpe’s excellent Recreational Path Guide The London Loop or copies of Walk London’s Walk the Loop pamphlets. Between these 2 publications we were well sourced for interesting facts. It certainly isn’t necessary to have maps to walk the Loop because it’s waymarked and signed very well along most of its route.

We lunched at The Fox and spurned the opportunity to enjoy the nearby ‘trim trail’. instead heading off towards Happy Valley. Passing through a tree break you are presented with a panorama of chalk downlands rising majestically to Farthing Down in the distance. At the risk of being clichéd it really is the countryside within city limits well worth a trip to see for yourself. On the top of Farthing Downs you get the most splendid views of London’s skyline. On a clear day you can easily pick out the transmitters at Crystal Palace, the Gherkin and several other high-rise landmarks.

Just before reaching Banstead you cross a 25 acre field of organically grown lavender. Mayfield Lavender helpfully provide display boards that highlight the many and varied properties of this plant. At one point they say: “Physically, it is ‘first-aid in a bottle’” – which is funny because I always think of lager that way. Anyway this field must be both colourful and fragrant later on in the summer.

This section of the Loop had one final countryside trick to play on us. We finished at Banstead station where no trains were running this Bank Holiday Monday. (Indeed it had the air that no trains had passed through since the 1950’s.) Undaunted we headed for Belmont only to find the last bus to Sutton (and civilisation) had departed at 5.30 pm. (It was little after six by now). Clare and I set off to Cheam (a couple of miles down the road) and a direct bus back home to Kingston. Our companions sought out Belmont station with the hope of trains back to Victoria.

During this walk I was testing a Garmin Venture HC etrex hand held sat-nav device. I’m still getting to grips with this technology but the trip counter helpfully informed me that with our Cheam add on Clare and I had walked a total of 12.7 miles with a max speed of 8.1 miles per hour while our moving average was 3.2 miles per hour. Indispensable.

While not entirely appropriate, at many points during the day I found myself humming We Walk by the Ting Tings. My friends plan to complete all 15 sections within the calendar year and I wish them good luck. One of the real joys of walking can be the company and today was an unalloyed pleasure mostly because of the people.  I plan to join them (if they’ll tolerate a slacker like me who has no interest in completing all the sections in order) for a couple more walks – so watch this space.

More information
OS Map used – Explorer 161 London South
Pay less when you order this map here: http://www.ramblers.org.uk/fundraising/shop/anquet-map.htm

The London Loop by David Sharp, ISBN 1 85410 759 3. Aurum £12.99 + p&p.
Order here!  http://www.ramblers.org.uk/info/publications/bookshop.htm#London%20Loop

Walk the Loop free leaflets dividing the route into 24 sections with map, route description and transport information.
Order here! http://www.ramblers.org.uk/info/contacts/transport/travel.htm#TfL

Useful links:
o The Ramblers     http://www.ramblers.org.uk/
o Ordnance Survey   http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/
o Walk London    http://www.walklondon.org.uk/
o Kenley Airfield    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Kenley
o Farthing Downs/Happy Valley http://wildweb.london.gov.uk/wildweb/PublicSiteView.do?siteid=7005
o Mayfield Lavender   http://www.mayfieldlavender.com/
 
Listen to:
http://www.last.fm/music/The+Ting+Tings/_/We+Walk