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Where the setting sun lies upon the ground
Tracks are hard and dry smoothened with the weather wear
My mind did move with them that had before me been
Trodding down the ground a track for me to follow
Leaving marks for others, a sign for them to follow"
- David Dudgeon, 1999.
The London LOOP (LOOP standing for London Outer Orbital Path) is like an M25 for walkers although it's all enclosed within the circle of London's orbital motorway so it's not quite so long. It's a fairly decent 150 miles in total though and the David Sharp and Colin Saunders book whose route we're following leads from Erith just south of the Thames via Sidcup, Croydon, Kingston, Uxbridge, Cockfosters, Enfield Lock, Chigwell, Romford, and Dagenham before ending up just over the other side of the river in Purfleet. It's a walk where you can see the finish from the start.
Shep and I have a got a vague plan to complete the entire walk by January 2019 but what with TADS walks, my London architectural tours, and various other constitutionals it's hard to see where we're going to find the time. We'd been talking about doing this for a while before Saturday's schlep from Erith to Old Bexley and then when I was unable to procure a ticket for a London Fortean Society event due to its popularity and we saw the clement weather forecast for Saturday just gone we realised we had to strike while the iron was hot, get out our walking boots, and meet at noon in Erith to commence what, hopefully, will become an epic journey full of sights, sounds, experiences, and, of course, pubs. It's also hoped to open us up to some of the more arcane areas of London and reveal, perhaps, an esoteric history of the city I've called home for over two decades.
I took the train from Honor Oak Park to New Cross Gate and jumped on a 53 bus to Woolwich Arsenal. The man behind me on the bus was watching, and listening very loudly, on his phone some kind of inauguration of the Kenyan deputy president William Ruto and seemed to think I'd enjoy sharing that with him. The bus took us past the rather grand Jacobean pile that is Charlton House. my friend Paola's place, and the Royal Artillery Barracks before I disembarked to take the train a few stops on to Erith.
There was a young lady in Woolwich Arsenal station (a place that brought back plenty of memories to me) wearing brown Ugg boots, a pink onesie with the legend 'HUGS' written loudly across it, and a black Puffa jacket. It was a strong look.
Erith can be quite a forlorn looking place but on a sunny Saturday it seemed to be showing its best side. I wandered down in to town to meet Shep in a coffee shop called Mambocino. It had one of the crappest Xmas trees I'd ever seen (paper coffee cups for decoration) but the grapes and apple were presented in a style worthy of a Renaissance painting and Shep assured me the coffee had been eminently potable.
To begin the walk proper we headed down to the riverside. Across to Coldharbour it was all green fields but our side was as much mud as it was water. This really is the arse end of the city where all its shit, often literally, comes out. It's where people do real jobs. Less media types and more scrapyards, garages, factories, industrial estates, and people making 'components'.
Lots of shopping trolleys too. I counted about twelve half submerged in the muddy banks of the Thames alongside old iron beds and rusting bicycles. In the distance chimneys belched out fumes that soon dispersed into the brilliant azure sky. Occasionally a tug boat would glide silently past doing its important business in its own good time.
It's a strangely relaxed place but it seems unlikely that the Victorian plan to turn Erith into a resort was ever likely to make much headway. Industry bested tourism, the gardens now stand empty, and the jetty is home mainly to fishermen and, as will no doubt become a recurring theme in this walk, graffiti.
We left Crayford through an industrial estate, seagulls ahead, and made our way out on to Crayford Marshes. The vast Queen Elizabeth II bridge rose up in front of us as we passed through scrubland populated with horses. Signposts either carried distance markers or, as can be seen heading up this blog, somewhat rudimental poetry. An enormous scrapyard to our right saw bonfires burn and industrial plant moving the detritus around. To our left we looked down to an amazingly unspoilt stretch of the Thames.
We soon reached the mouth of the river Darent. The Darent flows from Westerham, past Sevenoaks, before emptying into the Thames here. It's twenty miles long and it's one of thirty-eight tributaries that feed London's primary river. Its banks are even muddier than those that flank the Thames here but the creek flood barrier looks spectacular, rising above the river into the winter sunshine like a brutal, concrete Tower Bridge. On a walk some years ago (from Erith to Rochester) me and my friend Dan had imagined that we'd somehow be able to cross it. We couldn't.
Luckily this time we didn't need to. We followed the banks of the Darent for a while until we came to the mouth of the Cray. Our third and final river of the day is just nine miles long and flows from a pond in Orpington, via Bromley and Swanley, to this point. We'd be following the Cray, on and off, for much of the afternoon.
It's not always possible to follow the banks of the river and sometimes we'd have to come off the waterfront and walk along the road for a bit. Such an occasion occurred when we reached the busy A206, the road from Greenwich to Greenhithe. A wooden obelisk marked the point where we were to turn, through a litter strewn park, back to the side of the Cray.
In the words of Sharp and Saunders:- "a sad stretch this - even the Cray has a melancholy feel as it flows unregarded by a run of backyards. You think of streams that add beauty and a rural touch to urban lives, and the river is actually rather pretty here, so you wonder why these houses turned their backs on little Cray".
If the people who live on the Cray's banks have turned away from it it seems the Cray itself has not been kind to its resident rodents. The decaying corpse of what we assumed to be a rat was camouflaged rather well against the baked earth.
Time and again we'd see the puzzling legend "P.STANOCH TO PARONA!" in graffiti form on dog waste receptacles and underneath bridges. We wondered what it could all mean. But not for too long as the route soon took us into Crayford's ever so slightly bustling Waterside district. Modernist sculptures stood proud in the park surrounded by shops, pubs, and restaurants.
We were about to make a stop in the large, and rather typical looking, Bear and Ragged Staff when we spotted a sign for The Penny Farthing 'Micro-Pub' and thought we'd try that instead.
Something of a gem for real ale fans, if not for vegetarians (the only non-meat food available was crisps), I opted for a pint of Shunter's Pole and Shep took a Hemingway inspired stout labouring under the name The Old Man And The Sea. It was a peculiar place as it had clearly been converted from a taxi rank and when I say converted I mean left almost exactly the same as a taxi rank. There were piles of board games and beer coasters all over the walls and the service was friendly.
Sated after sucking for an hour on a Shunter's Pole I wiped the residue from my lips, put on my coat, and we braved the cold again. Brrr. The temperature had been dipping while we'd been sat there sipping. Perhaps our pints had impaired our spatial awareness and map reading skills a bit too as we managed to take two wrong turns almost immediately upon our egress from The Penny Farthing.
Eventually we gained our bearings and passed by some 60s/70s housing estates that had been jollied up by being named after poets like Keats and Shelley. Poetry was becoming an unexpected theme of our walk, a pleasant surprise. It was, however, hard to imagine what the metal two dimensional cow with the words 'MADDER ROOTS' cut out in its body was supposed to represent. Local youths looked at me with bemusement as I took a photo. To someone who sees a 'MADDER ROOTS' cow every day a 'MADDER ROOTS' cow is no big deal. To me it was a novelty worth recording.
I should've told them my name and they may've been impressed. Because it seems that David Evans is a big deal around Crayford. There's a David Evans Pavilion and a David Evans silk factory and it's for the latter that this imposter using my name made his name (or my name, or both our names, it's very confusing). He was mostly famous for his silk scarves but I like to think he branched out into lingerie too and that his/my/our name can now be found in bras, pants, and knickers all over the world. Or at least throughout the London Borough of Bexley.
We could've done with scarves of considerably more durable material than silk as we walked through open fields to once again become reacquainted with the Cray. The grounds of Hall Place saw the Cray flowing much happier and as the winter games of football were coming to a close we crossed over first the river, then the railway, and finally cut beneath the extraordinarily busy A2. Cars, vans, and lorries roared past, either on the way to London from Dover or vica versa, and the sheer amount of litter that had been thrown on to the side of the road was remarkably disgusting.
Eventually we hopped over a stile. It was a new style of stile and, for some reason, that really impressed me. This stretch was, truth be told, a little dull and it's probably true that amongst the wonderful sights we'll see on this walk there's bound to be some slightly tedious bits.
We were getting cold too and could only think of nice warm pubs and even warmer curry. Luckily we only had another kilometre or so to go before the path and the route of the Cray saw us into the picturesque parish of Old Bexley. The twelfth century church of St Mary's stood proud in the dwindling light but we were far more interested in the roaring fire and warming pint of Rocking Rudolph that awaited us in The King's Head.
After a brace of Rudolphs each it became apparent that we needed to eat. It may've been earlier than we'd normally break for repast but one packet of crisps in The Penny Farthing had not been sufficient to fuel a three and a half hour walk.
Old Bexley appeared well prepared for hungry visitors. There was a modern Indian, the Maharajah, and a slightly less modern Italian eaterie but the Old Bexley Greek Taverna looked the best option. We ummed and ahhed on the Greek v Indian debate before tossing a coin and deciding to go for Greek food. The popularity of the place was so much that at 6pm on a Saturday in December they had no tables at all.
So Indian it was. Even if they did seem to have imprisoned Henry the hoover in a spare room the Maharajah proved to be perfectly adequate. I've eaten in much better Indian places but I've eaten in much worse ones too. The Maharajah was standard but with Indian food that's normally good enough. Amongst their beer options was a brand called Mongoose (brewed in Leicester, apparently) and it tasted dependable if not quite as crisp and refreshing as the legendary Bangla.
We chatted about Iain Sinclair, Patrick Keiller, Peter Ackroyd, and WG Sebald. Authors we'd either read nothing or very little by but whose own experiments into psychogeography, history, and walking seemed pertinent to us. I really should read some more by these people.
We thought we'd take one last pint in The King's Head but it was absolutely packed solid with people in Xmas jumpers so we popped in to The Miller's Arms. There were about fifty people in there and forty-nine of them were men. There were hardly any tables and they served no real ale. It's the sort of place men come to to shout at televisions showing football. There's a time and a place for that kind of thing but it isn't at the end of an afternoon's walk when you're hoping to discuss the theories of Guy Debord and potentially plan walking trips in the Balkans.
Shep had a Guinness, I had a lager, and we got the train back to London Bridge. We'll be back in Old Bexley again soon to commence the second stage of the LOOP which should hopefully take us into our second borough, Bromley, and on to Jubilee Park in Petts Wood. This time we've decreed we'll meet at a local café first so we're fully fuelled for further adventures.
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