TADS #52:Merstham to Croydon (or Into Happy Valley).

On Good Friday of 2018, Shep and I were on the fifth leg of our epic London LOOP walk when, in Happy Valley on the outskirts of Coulsdon, he slipped in the mud and ended up absolutely caked in the stuff. We continued into Coulsdon and knocked the walk on the head for the rest of the day. Last October, I'd planned for the TADS to revisit Happy Valley and lay that ghost to rest. A combination of weather, drop outs, and train problems meant that that walk, too, was cancelled.

Or at least postponed. Until next year. Which is now this year. So the question, in the run up to Saturday's Into Happy Valley walk from Merstham to Croydon, was 'will the curse of Happy Valley strike again?' and if so, in what form? I was determined that no inclement weather, no transport failure, or no amount of people dropping out would stop this one from happening. No mischievous imp, no meddlesome goblin, and no puckish sprite would stop us from finally lifting the curse of Happy Valley.

In the end, it was the trains that became the biggest challenge. The train strike, one I wholeheartedly support, that was called for Saturday just gone was never likely to be called off - and indeed it wasn't. I feared a long, and time consuming journey, so I'd risen ridiculously early and taken the 197 bus to East Croydon where a few trains were running.

Including one that took me to Merstham. So I got on it. East Croydon station was pretty quiet and the train itself was almost empty. It took me about ten minutes so I arrived in Merstham a good hour before everyone else. I had a look at the war memorial (special tribute to the Arctic convoys of Arkhangelsk and Murmansk) and the town clock and watched the traffic going by before heading to the Quality Cafe for a cup of tea as I waited for the others to arrive.

Shep, Adam, and Teresa had come by car and Pam arrived on train (having taken a similar route to me, only an hour later) and soon I was tucking into a rather lovely, and big, plate of chips and beans with doorstep slices of bread and a can of Coke. Probably not the best for my blood pressure but a nice way to get set up for a decent length walk.

One which began by crossing back over the rail tracks and taking a zigzag path up to a bridge that took us over the M25. We hadn't spent long in Merstham but then it's a pretty small place. Feels more like a village than a town. Contiguous with Redhill, it's part of the Surrey borough of Reigate and Banstead and has been settled since Roman times.

Its name, in Anglo-Saxon, means "homestead for a trap set for martens and weasels" and by the time of the Domesday Book, 1086, it was held by Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury and already renowned for its quarries. Reigate stone was used to build parts of Westminster Abbey, Windsor Castle, and Nonsuch Palace. A big event in the town's history was when the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel first publicly demonstrated the use of dynamite in one of those quarries.

Another happened in 1905 when the body of Mary Sophia Money was found in one of the Coulsdon-Merstham railway tunnels. Initially, it was suspected to be a suicide but a scarf found tied round her throat and marks inside the tunnel made it look as if murder was the case. A case that remained unsolved. Her brother, Robert, remained under suspicion.

There was a reasonable uphill stretch, along a little alley, to Rockshaw Road where we found a house with a fairly large amount of pampas grass in the garden. I don't know if swingers live there or not but the decommissioned and rusting Humber Pig (an armoured personnel carrier used in Northern Ireland during 'the Troubles', thanks to Dave F for identification) in the driveway didn't make the home look particularly inviting.

From Rockshaw Road we took another path through another field and met with another motorway. This one, the M23, only sixteen miles long and passed under, via subway, rather than over. The M23 and the M25, and the gentle roar you can hear from them, is pretty much all that tells you you're anywhere near London. It really is quite green and pretty. Even the sun came out.

We passed diagonally through a couple of large fields, cyclists passing us in each direction - the ones going downhill seemed to have the better deal, and, at a crossroads, we took Church Road to the small village of Chaldon. We didn't hang round to see Chaldon's church and instead took a slight wrong turn on to the edge of Happy Valley.

We nearly missed the pub stop so we cut back for that. It was worth it too. The Fox was a nice stop as you can see from the fact that muddy boots, and paws, are welcome. I had a London Pride and we all sat out the front of the pub watching gliders and planes go by and slagging off Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng. I got told off for drinking too slowly so some of the others got squeezers in before we headed back into Happy Valley.

It wasn't far into Happy Valley, and the infamous Bridleway 741, that we reached, roughly, the spot where Shep had "gone for a burton" all those years ago. He gamely recreated the moment though, to be honest, it lacked both the drama and the spontaneity of the real thing.

Happy Valley lives up to its name by being a valley but when you ascend its steep sides you may not feel completely happy. Luckily, looking out to the green fields and trees restores glee pretty quickly and even a yappy little dog that reminded me of Scrappy Doo couldn't ruin that.

Happy Valley merges into Farthing Downs (the most extensive area of semi-natural downland - chalk hills- left in Greater London, human occupation dates back to the Neolithic era) where there's both a toilet stop and some information boards. You feel quite high up here and you can even make out on the distant horizons the skyscrapers of London. Certainly I saw the Shard as we slowly descended into Coulsdon itself.

An unremarkable town in many ways, its main street (Brighton Road) has an ALDI, a Waitrose, a few cafes, nail salons, and barber shops as well as a peculiar statue of two tiny pugilists atop a signpost. As Brighton Road leaves Coulsdon for Purley, via Reedham, we entered a long, straight, and not particularly inspiring stretch.

Unless, that is, you enjoy mock Tudor architecture because the A23/Brighton Road has a lot of that. We also noticed that some of the newsagents, at least three of them, were proudly advertising The Sun 'newspaper'. Points taken off.

Coming into Purley, via one of those Tesco Extras you so often see on the edge of towns, we spotted The Jolly Farmers pub so took a brief drink (for me, a Timothy Taylor's Landlord) there. Football was on in the background but we didn't pay it too much attention.

Purley is where Terry and June lived and where Steve Wright's Mr Angry character hailed from. In real life, Purley's most celebrated sons and daughters include Derren Brown, Ray Mears, Peter Cushing, Jay Aston of Buck's Fizz, Sir Bernard Ingham (he was born in Hebden Bridge but he lives in Purley), former Crystal Palace FC chairman Ron Noades, the Brotherhood of Man vocalist Martin Lee, and the perennial TADS favourite Wilfried Zaha was was born in Abidjan but grew up on Purley's Webb Estate.

Leaving the pub behind, we had another climb up a path called Coldharbour Lane, negotiated a few suburban streets, and entered Roundshaw Downs, the former site of Croydon Airport. We'd timed it well. The sun was low and that resulted in the golden hour sensation of brilliantly illuminated trees and fields and shadows as long and spindly as Giacometti creations.

It definitely beat staying on the A23 as it becomes Purley Way. Croydon Airport was once, during the interwar period, the UK's only international airport. Built in a Neoclassical (though some of us felt more Art Deco) style it was the first airport in the world to feature an air traffic control tower and an airport terminal. It closed in 1959 and Heathrow took over as London's main airport.

But in its heyday it was used by such luminaries as Winston Churchill (who took flying lessons there), Amy Johnson, and Charles Lindbergh who was greeted there by a crowd of over 100,000 people when he arrived in the Spirit of St.Louis in 1927. Pity he was a racist, a Nazi sympathiser, and part of an isolationist American group called the America First Committee. Hmmm, sounds familiar.

Once you pass a load of discarded tyres, abandoned mattresses, and all manner of other crap in what was presumably once the car park of the Costco tyre centre, you're greeted to some rather fine architecture, an old plane to look at, and the inviting smell of Indian food from the Imperial Lounge. There's even a few Tesla charging points for those that have enough money to buy a Tesla and don't mind giving it to Elon Musk.

My planned walk would have taken us to Waddon before hitting central Croydon but time was against us, Adam was hungry, so we took a short(ish) cut through some suburban roads and that bought us out, eventually, on South End. A kind of extension to Croydon's High Street that leads down to South Croydon station.

The Swan and Sugarloaf pub had been converted into a Tesco Express, the Tree House looked promising but felt more like a club and insisted on table service so we carried on to the King of the South. That, too, was more like a club than a pub but we decided to go for it. A very young barman told us it was happy hour and we could have two drinks for the price of one.

When I got back from the toilet, Shep had got me two pints of Corona. It would be a tough ask to get them both down in the forty minutes before our table was booked at Sangri but I gave it a go and managed about a pint and a half. Both Pam and Teresa mentioned that their negronis tasted particularly strong.

It wasn't too far to walk to Sangri (another spot Shep and I had visited during our London LOOP walk - and one that involved an embarrassing moment) and we met Mo outside before taking a table for six and a large plate of poppadoms. I had a Goan panir curry and a paratha washed down with a brace of Cobras and it was all generally agreeable if not outstanding.

The chat was going so well I didn't even get round to reading any Croydon history or listing any notables (Stormzy, Edward Woodward, Ralph McTell, Wilfried Zaha (of course), Captain Sensible, Aaron Wan-Bissaka, Peter Sarstedt, Eden Kane, Kate Moss, Jason Puncheon, David McAlmont, DH Lawrence, the sexologist Havelock Ellis, Roy Hodgson, Peggy Ashcroft, Carlton Cole, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Raymond Chandler). Ronnie Corbett even has a statue in Croydon which, sadly, we didn't see.

We retired to the Green Dragon pub for once last drink and talked about our favourite songs from Fame and Ray Dunbobbin who played Ralph Hardwicke in Brookside. Shep obsessed over Uber prices before him, Adam, and Teresa departed in one. Pam took her bus and Mo and I took the 197. Her jumping off way before I did. The journey was painless (although the final walk back home did involve some minor chafing). My phone told me I'd walked 28,290 steps but I felt like I'd done more. The devices of other walkers certainly gave higher readings. Either way, it didn't matter. It'd been a lovely day out and we had, finally, lifted the Happy Valley curse.

Thanks to Shep, Adam, Teresa, Pam, and Mo for another great TADS day and thanks to Pam and Adam for the snaps I've used in this account of it. Next month we're walking along the canal from Sudbury Hill to Camden and when that's done we'll have done a full calendar of TADS walks for the first time since 2019. That'll be worth celebrating and Camden seems a good place to do that celebrating. See you there.