The London LOOP. Part VIII:The Causeway to Uxbridge Lock (The Heat Is On in Hillingdon and Hounslow).

It wasn't just the weather that made me half-expect to hear Glenn Frey's 1984 jazz rock 'classic' The Heat Is On when Shep, myself, and friends walked the eighth stage of the London LOOP on Saturday, but also the sheer amount of eighties music we were 'subjected' to on our walk. In a car park we heard people blasting out The Jam's Eton Rifles, sunbathers in the woods had Our House by Madness on at a fairly decent volume, and a pretty grotty pub in Hayes was playing, shamelessly, stadium era Simple Minds and the Minder theme tune, Dennis Waterman and The Dennis Waterman Band's deathless I Could Be So Good For You.

So it was I met the right people at the right time and not even at the wrong location. Starting with Shep himself. Me and him met back under the roar of jets, and near the bustling A30 dual carriageway, at Hatton Cross tube station. It didn't seem as bad as last time though because this time we weren't arriving there but departing. We knew we'd soon be down by the river and would eventually, our book promised us, be enjoying "the sleepy thump-thump of a canal boat" rather than enduring "the roar of jet engines". It wasn't a false promise.

In 32 degree heat we strolled off down said A30, the Great South West Road, and, eventually, found a service road behind a concrete wall that led us down to the side of the river Crane which we would follow, on and off, until we reached its source in Hayes. There was an elderly man stood in the path and as I looked around, taking in the area, I saw a woman, who I assumed to be his wife, urinating in the bushes.

We would see a lot of piss, a lot of shit, loads of graffiti, and an obscene amount of discarded rubbish (beer cans & McDonalds as usual the chief culprits) but far far more offensive than any of these things were the amount of homeless people we saw sleeping under bridges or just on the towpath. Let me be clear it's not the homeless people themselves I'm offended by but the conscious cruelty, the dire and deadly austerity program, and the woeful Tory agenda presided over by first David Cameron and now Theresa May that has caused this problem to increase so dramatically. If you believe, and if you don't I'd like to know why not, that the very first priority for any government is to make sure its people have food to eat and roofs over their heads then even a cursory stroll around Ralph McTell's Streets of London will tell you that our current government is not just a failing one, but one that has already failed.

Of course, people should take personal responsibility for their own litter and shouldn't go round defacing signs, like the previously rather lovely one in Crane Valley Park, but much more serious aggresions are being enacted by our elected representatives each and every day (and that's not even mentioning the national suicide attempt of Brexit yet).

Still, we always have our green and pleasant land and it was a pleasure to be walking through it. Crane Valley Park was full of broad, expansive,gravel avenues flanked by verdant trees with occasional views through to the shallow river itself. We came out on the A4 and crossed Cranford Bridge (where once stood a ford over the Crane giving the place its name) and along what passed for Cranford High Street, a place that had neither a shop, a pub, nor an eaterie to its name.

From there we dropped in to Berkeley Meadows and eventually Cranford Country Park. We somehow managed to miss a ha-ha and the Earl of Berkeley's mansion was destroyed, already in a state of disrepair, just before (or possibly after, accounts vary) WWII. In the distance we could see the cows that have recently been brought in to graze the 1,000 acre park and we soon made our way to St Dunstan's church, described as "a delightful mix of materials - a 15th century tower of flint with a later top storey of brick and a whole nave of brick rebuilt after a fire in 1710 by the Dowager Duchess of Berkeley".

Giving you an idea of how vast the earlier mansion must be is the red-brick stable block, complete with a clock in a central position, that housed the Berkeley Hunt. A gate was open near here so we looked in to be greeted by two ladies who'd just opened a 'secret' garden to the public and were eager to furnish us with tales of the area and its history as well as to hear about our own adventures on the London LOOP. Meeting people and chatting en route is one of the great joys of walking.

When we started this walk we'd identified crossing under the M4 to be roughly halfway round and it was with some excitement we found ourselves almost immediately passing through St Dunstan's Subway to the north side of that motorway. It had only taken us since December to get there!

We came out on a side road that led us to a textbook brown-brick telephone exchange, a boarded up Indian restaurant called the Yellow Chilli Lounge, and the evocatively titled Watersplash Lane. From here we briefly followed a couple of A roads until we passed over a surprisingly high bridge that afforded us our first views, on this walk, of the Grand Union Canal.

We descended a ludicrously complicated set of twists and turns to find ourselves canalside and took a brief diversion east to Bull's Bridge, the canal junction that leads back in to London proper, down to Brentford, or, as was our case, up towards Birmingham. I proposed a canal walk from London to Birmingham one week to Shep and he didn't seem remotely interested. Interestingly, most of the canal signs point not to Birmingham, but to Braunston, a small village in Northamptonshire known as the "Heart of the Waterways" due to its strategic importance in Britain's canal network.

Sadly, Bull's Bridge (like many others on this walk) was covered in graffiti and needed a lick of paint or two and there were also empty cans and bottles spoiling the ambience. Nobody could deny it would be a great spot for an evening livener or two but is it really so difficult to take your rubbish with you when you leave. Presumably these vessels arrived in a bag. Is it too much to ask they go home in one too?

As we were on their manor we'd arranged to meet regular TADS walkers Neil, Belinda, and Eamon at The Old Crown in Hayes. Shep and I arrived early and bumped into Eamon so we took much needed sustenance (in the form of chips, beans, and buttered rolls washed down with Coca-Cola) in the Pop In Cafe before joining Neil and Bee in The Old Crown.

It has to be said it was not a great pub. Very much a local's place. Despite it's canalside location there were no seats or tables by the water and instead a concrete 'garden' overlooking a busy road near a concrete mixer where workers were suffering in the heat. To Shep's disgust they had no real ale so he, like Neil & Eamon, had a lager while I stuck to a glass of tap water as we caught up on each other's news and listened to said Dennis Waterman and Simple Minds songs as well as Bob Marley and Dubstar's heartbreaking cover of Brick Supply's Not So Manic Now. It wasn't that the pub was rough, just that it completely lacked character. The Uxbridge contingent were very keen to let us know that both Hayes and soon to come West Drayton didn't have much going for them. I would find it hard to disagree with that assessment.

Soon we were back on the canal for a bit before, surprisingly, our book told us to take a diversion through an enormous, and because it was the weekend mostly deserted, tech park. Buses and cyclists passed through but very few fellow walkers. Stockley Business Park felt like it spread out for miles and was an odd mix of the completely soulless and beautifully landscaped. There was even a Wetherspoons pub there so wage slaves dehumanised and demotivated by being tiny cogs in an increasing malfunctioning and crushing capitalist machine could drown their anxieties while funding the Brexit car crash further. The pub was closed. I assumed because it was the weekend but Eamon said he thought it was closed for good.

The carp in the lake seemed to be having more fun than anyone else and if it's nice that companies like Apple, Sharp, M&S, and GlaxoSmithKline try to make the working environment pleasant for their staff that's really just a sticking plaster over the seeping and oozing pus filled wound of late capitalism, as Karl Marx realised as far back as 1848.

The tree roots submerged in the lake made for a sweet photo opportunity although the booth you could apply to go in to 'think' (yes, really) seemed to be corporate bullshit of the highest order. Our book was written in 2001 and this area has clearly changed beyond all recognition since then so we got a little lost until we were able to identify a path that took us across a surprisingly impressive bridge over the A408 and Neil pointed out a selection of places where he'd toiled in soul destroying jobs. Something both him, me, and Eamon probably need to do again soon. Great!

The views over to the control tower at Heathrow Airport showed us how far we'd already walked but we still had a bit to go. To the sound of Eton Rifles we passed a footgolf course and marvelled at the fact that the developers of this 'park', Arup Associates, had brought in 1,500,000 earthworms to activate a soil forming process on this former rubbish dump and brickworks.

We were soon back on the canal and discovering that many of the pubs marked out on our map were either no more or, in the case of those in West Drayton, apparently not worth visiting. No wonder so many people were choosing to crack open cans as they fished in the canal or even, in one case, drink themselves into a stupor in a series of bushes. We even saw one young lady having what looked like a frankly inadvisable swim in the canal. She said the water was fine but would not allow me a photograph.

Once we'd ascertained where West Drayton stops and Yiewsley begins (the railway bridge rather the canal, apparently) we continued along until we reached the Slough Arm of the canal. Apparently a couple of hours would've led us to Slough and from there we'd not be far from Windsor.

Certainly the discarded cans, burnt out mopeds, and the incontinence seat abandoned in the water suggested we were in a very different world to the one our monarch graces. Despite all this crap everywhere the countryside itself, and this stretch of canal, was very beautiful. It got more so too as we crossed a bridge and descended further into Little Britain Lakes, so named, Bee informed me, because they look like a map of Britain from the air.

Sheep frolicked in (and out of) nearby meadows as local youngsters listened to drill and splashed around in the water. It was a pleasing stretch and so enamoured was I of the natural surroundings  I managed to miss a granite obelisk reminding narrowboat traders that they were entering a coal tax area. The coal tax was introduced in 1667 to help rebuild London after the Great Fire.

We were just a few hundred yards from the M25 but you would never know it. We criss-crossed tiny streams, waterfalls, weirs, and wooden bridges before finally ascending some steep stairs on to the B470 Iver Lane to be greeted by a forest of light blue, red, and yellow lifting cranes.

A bridge over the Colne (the Thames tributary that runs from Hertfordshire to Staines) and another over the Grand Union Canal took us to the redoubtable Malt Shovel pub and its lovely big garden. I'd been here with the Uxbridge lot a few times before (most notably once after running an exhausting half-marathon from here to Watford) but rarely in such glorious weather. I had my first alcoholic drink of the day, a Camden Pale Ale, and it went down so well it was soon followed by another.

It would've been pretty easy to stay there getting plastered but we had to get back on the banks of the Colne. The sun was much lower now and everything was bathed in a beautiful and radiant golden glow but that didn't stop a trio of cygnets hissing accusatorily at me as I took their photograph. Philistines.

My stopping to take photographs, and the chafing that was happening inside my denim shorts, was causing me to temporarily lose ground on the rest of the group and I felt a lovely sensation of solitude before I caught up with them again and we came off the river walk, passed through some suburban housing, and made our way back to the canal and pub number two, our final one of the day (a day in which I'd expected, even feared, many more), the General Elliott.

Like the Malt Shovel, the General Elliott was a pub I had a lot of time for. Unlike the Malt Shovel I'd never been before. People played darts, horse brasses hung over a fireplaces, Neil ate a plate of the fattest chips I'd ever seen, and Belinda's friends waved to her from passing barges as we supped an ale in the canalside beer garden. All was well with the world and my only wish was we could've spent more time there.

But we were both getting hungry and, in some cases, had quite a journey home. We briefly completed the final stretch of canal walk, came off near the now closed Crown & Treaty pub (a former haunt, not least for the UX posse, that is both rich in history and, possibly, listed) and made our way to Javitri for some not quite cold enough Cobra beer but, in my case, some very tasty, and bafflingly filling, paneer tikka.

Talk of another drink fizzled out as we reached Charles Holden's wonderful Art Deco tube station and Shep and I bade farewell first to Bee, Eamon, and Neil and then, in Waterloo, to each other. I headed home without a cheeky extra pint which, now, on Sunday morning is proving somewhat beneficial to both my mind and body. It'd had been good to have been joined by friends, for the first time since Kathy joined us for a very wet afternoon near Hamsey Green back in March, and it'd been good, as it always is, to spend the day walking, chatting, drinking, eating, and laughing with people whose company one actually enjoys.

TADS are back, walking round Oxford, in a fortnight and the London LOOP, too, will return shortly. The next stage will see us depart Uxbridge Lock for Moor Park in Hertfordshire passing round Harefield, through Northwood, and via many more, as ever, waterways. Here's hoping the sun will shine and once again, the heat will be on. Caught up in the action.