Best-selling author and Lambeth resident Will Self argues that any new definitive maps of the capital’s footpaths should help create more rights of way for London’s walkers

As a committed urban trekker, I welcome the Ramblers’ campaign to make inner London [...]

Will Self argues that urban-fleeing walkers’ tunnel vision of the countryside is both damaging and self-defeating…

At first sight a walk going from Lambeth North to Peckham seems to owe more to Will Self than William Blake but stay with me for a moment and I’ll try to explain…

Will Self balks at the crowded and ‘pre-packaged’ outdoors of Britain’s beauty spots, recommending the solitude of an ‘unlovely’ urban walk instead

A couple of years ago, the writer Nick Royle and I decided that we would undertake the Three Peaks Challenge. We’d get another rambling writer to join us, raise sponsorship and give the proceeds to charity. However, it transpired that there were grave environmental concerns about the peaks. The sheer numbers of sponsored walkers clambering up Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Snowdon were leading to catastrophic erosion, denudation of flora, scaring off of fauna – not to mention the large quantities of plastic water bottles that were left behind by these charitable folk.

In truth, I’ve never considered doing a sponsored walk since my age reached double digits, but I liked the idea of three writers/three peaks. I suppose it was naïve of me not to have realised the extent to which these eminences would’ve become a magnet for people who would never normally go walking. After all, I’ve been a walker all my life and I’ve noticed that the words ‘area of outstanding natural beauty’ attract Gore-tex the way sugar does wasps.