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 [...]

Today I’m in Shoreham – a very pleasant and picturesque village in the River Darent valley not far from Sevenoaks in Kent. I’m told the name derives from ‘estate at the foot of a steep slope’…

At the risk of going all Parklife on you, these days: I get up when I want, except on (every other) Wednesdays, when I go to sign-on.

I saunter off down the hill whistling Police’s Walking on the Moon while contemplating the irony that Michael Jackson is more famous for moon walking than Neil Armstrong.

The commentary at the top of every Walking Class Hero tells you ‘Basically if you can walk there it’ll be in this blog’ but this entry concerns a place where you mostly can’t walk.

Doesn’t the world seem a better place when the sun shines? It just makes you want to get out and go walking – provided of course you’ve slapped on your sun screen, plonked your hat on your head and perched your sunnies on your nose.

About 40 minutes later we were at the base of Box Hill. Named after the many box trees found growing wild here this National Trust property is a well known beauty spot on the North Downs…

Weymouth, of course, is on the South West Coast Path and here many visitors and locals are aghast that the rest of the country doesn’t have the same right of access as enjoyed in the south west. We really shouldn’t be this complacent though because many of our national trails and regional routes rely on permissive access and 10% of the 1014 km (630 miles) South West Coast Path is not legally secure.

Not much further on is the street skateboarding park situated beneath the Queen Elizabeth Hall. At first sight this seems all frenetic motion accompanied by wooden clacks, raucous cheers and high fives… It’s a great part of London full of verve and life and owes everything to enthusiastic people and nothing to local government who keep trying to close it or strangle it with rules and regulations.

Not deliberately but unlike everybody else out that day I elected to walk counter clockwise. Back in the middle ages this would probably resulted in me being burnt at the stake as a wizard and certainly loads of the people I encountered looked like they thought this would be too soft a punishment. But you know what – it was a really enjoyable walk.