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We'd been very fortunate all year where weather was concerned. Hardly a single raindrop had fallen on our heads when we walked from Gomshall, via Leith Hill, to Dorking, when Adam led us on a Roald Dahl themed amble to Amersham from Great Missenden, or even last month on our overcast trek from Uxbridge out to Gerrards Cross. It had been positively sunny in May when a larger than normal crowd took Shanks's pony from Hungerford to Newbury, during June's jaunt from Nutbourne to Chichester, and on September's stroll from Bursledon to Southampton. My August birthday walk around Canterbury and our two day's wandering in the West Country has been blessed with countless sunbeams too.
We'd been very lucky and if it seemed like our luck was about to be washed away in a downpour of biblical proportions then, fortunately, that proved to be untrue too. There was plenty of drizzle and a fair bit of wind to kick off with but, as the day developed, our progress through the mulchy autumn leaves and beneath the grey November skies was never seriously hindered. We did it. We finished all nine walks we set out to do this year. Some of us!
Since taking the administrative reins for TADS, I've refrained from describing the year's walks, at season end, as being our best year ever. But as with 2016, 2017, and 2018 it had, for me at least, been a great year full of varied walks, old faces, newcomers, pub, curries, and arguments about politics. As with 2016, 2017, and 2018 we were seeing the season out with a London walk. 2018's final walk had got very wet, very messy, and was a lot of fun so there had been plenty of talk in the run up to the walk about 'mucking about', bringing games in, 'fannying about', and all other manner of silliness.
But to have that much fun, we've deemed it's necessary to do a bit of work first. You have to earn it before you can burn it. I'd travelled the relatively short hop down to Crystal Palace where I took a brie and cranberry toastie (delicious, btw) in the station's surprisingly pleasant Brown & Green Cafe. I washed it down with a tea (they provided more milk than anyone could surely ever need) and, soon enough, Pam arrived. Followed, about twenty minutes later by Adam, Shep, and Tina. Weather having delayed their departure from Basingstoke. Tina's husband, Neil, would be joining us later but had opted to remain at home watching England get comprehensively overwhelmed by South Africa in the rugby World Cup Final in Yokohama.
We left the cafe and braved the wind and rains of Crystal Palace Park (a reasonable amount of which was fenced off in anticipation of the evening's firework display). The area of Crystal Palace is named for the former palace that was part of the 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park and was destroyed by fire in 1936.
After the Great Exhibition ended, the palace's architect Joseph Paxton (that's his statue below - he was also the cultivator of the Cavendish banana, the world's most popular) was told by Lord John Russell's Whig government that his palace couldn't stay in Hyde Park. So he raised £1,300,000 (an astronomical sum at the time I'd imagine, a lot now) to have it rebuilt at the summit of Sydenham Hill on land that previously been part of both the Great North Wood and Penge Common.
The fountains that were added following its move south required construction of two 87m high water towers which, you've guessed it, were provided by none other than Mr Isambard Kingdom Brunel. A park was built around the palace and in 1854 Queen Victoria opened the rebuilt palace. The train station serving park and palace opened the same year.
Eighty-three years since the palace burnt down (there have been occasional mutterings about rebuilding it), the park still stands. There's more in it than a lot of parks. There's the National Sports Centre which hosted the FA Cup Final between 1895 and 1914 (Sheffield Utd, Bury, and The Wednesday won it twice in that era but the top team were Aston Villa who claimed the trophy four times in two decades) and a concert bowl that's hosted gigs by Pink Floyd, Elton John, Yes, Fairport Convention and, on June 8th 1991, Pixies. Supported by Ride, Cud, The Milltown Brothers, and The Boo Radleys it was a gig I attended and a gig I got very pissed at. Me and my friend Rob had smuggled vodka bottles into the booze free concert down the front of our trousers!
Crystal Palace Park also hosted one of Britain's first ever speedway tracks. The Crystal Palace Glaziers raced there between 1928 and 1940. The Crystal Palace Tower (a familiar sight all over South London) was the tallest structure in London when it was erected in 1950 and remained so until the building of One Canada Square (Canary Wharf) forty-one years later. It's now fifth on the list behind The Shard, One Canada Square, The Heron Tower, and The Cheesegrater) and more people get their TV pictures from it than any other transmitter in the UK.
Taking in the Paxton statue and one of Guy the Gorilla (a London Zoo resident between 1946 when he was captured in the 'French Cameroons' and his death in 1978), we were unable to visit the maze or the Italian terraces (complete with sphinxes, that well known symbol of Italy), and headed straight down to what for me, and many others - especially my nephew Alex, is the park's finest feature.
We crossed over the National Sports Centre (on a grey day the concrete looked more brutal than ever and it could easily have been mistaken for a 2nd division football stadium somewhere in the former Eastern bloc) and headed down towards the lake where waterfowl washed themselves, pigeons made shadows in the trees, and the dove from above flew down to greet Tina. A monkey puzzle tree, glistening wet, took pride of place on the lake's shore.
But the lake itself had far more curious inhabitants. These are the world's first sculptures of dinosaurs (and other extinct species) and they were unveiled in, of course, 1854. The designer and sculptor was Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins who worked under the direction of Richard Owen, the man who campaigned, successfully obviously, for the opening of a Natural History Museum in London.
Despite Adam's eagerness to get moving, we stopped for a while and took in this remarkable, and historically interesting, sight while my, now slightly damp, sheet of A4 came out and I tried to tell people which dinosaurs were which. The Palaeozoic era is represented by Dicynodon (the ones that look a bit like turtles), the Mesozoic by the huge Hylaeosaurus, the Ichtyosaurus, the Pleisosaurus, the Megalosaurus, the Iguanadons, and the Labyrinthodons, whilst the camel like Anoplotherium, the Megaloceros, the Megatherium (a kind of giant sloth), and the tapir like Palaeotherion were representing for the Cenozoic.
Of course it was nigh on impossible for us to identify them all but they looked great and they appeared just one year after dinosaurs made their first appearance in popular fiction. In 1853, in Bleak House, Charles Dickens imagined a megalosaurus waddling up Holborn Hill. The Crystal Palace dinosaurs later cropped up in H G Wells' Kipps (1905) and Dorothy L Sayers has Lord Peter Wimsey mention them in 1932's strangely named Have His Carcase.
We said goodbye to the dinosaurs and we said goodbye to the park. A brief saunter along a suburban street brought us to Penge whose name is said to come from the Celtic word Penceat (meaning 'edge of wood'). The arrival of the railways in Penge was the event that changed the area from woodland to busy urban centre. Penge became known for its almshouses and taverns as anyone who's fallen asleep on the 176 bus to the Pawleyne Arms will know only too well. I can't think what sort of person would do that but I can recount that the Pawleyne Arms is rarely, if ever, open at 2am.
It was open yesterday though but of more interest to my friends was a branch of Greggs. Each and every one of them purchased a vegan sausage roll (except me, I absolutely love them but I was still full of brie and cranberry toasted sandwich) which seems to be coming something of walking tradition now! It meant only a few of us stopped to look at the two million year old rock from Bromley and the fancy building on the side of the road, even Adam marched on past a house named for him, but that was okay. The Greggs vegan sausage rolls ARE that good!
Penge dwellers over the years have included Andrew Bonar-Law (Tory PM, 1922-23), Christian apologist Malcolm Muggeridge, Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, and Thomas Crapper, the Yorkshire born inventor of the U-bend. Not the flushing toilet as common sentiment often has it.
Past a grotty looking library, we followed a few more suburban roads until we met the River Pool Walkway Open Space where we turned north and followed it. The Pool is a mere three miles long and has come to Penge from West Wickham and Shirley. In June 2009, Boris Johnson (then Mayor of London) fell in it when volunteering to clean up the waterway. Or, more likely, pretending to do so for a photo opportunity.
We followed this linear park for a bit before emptying out into a very unglamorous industrial estate in which, among units devoted to joinery and other home improvement type stuff, there seemed to be a couple of cult churches. Come for the plumbing. Leave with a new religious orthodoxy.
After Screwfix and Crown Paints, and a regulation abandoned mattress, we turned towards Lower Sydenham station, a forlorn looking place if truth be told, and continued back along the banks of the Pool. It had not been the most scenic part of the walk but it added some gritty flavour.
Past felled trees and fingerposts, and crossing the river at least five times, we soon came to where the Pool empties out into the Ravensbourne. The Ravensbourne is ten miles long and Shep and I, on one of our London LOOP walks, had seen its source in Keston. The river eventually flows into Deptford Creek and, finally, of course, the Thames. Cue a brief chat about Ben Aaronovitch whose Rivers of London book was described to me, by Adam, as having elements of 'Harry Potter for adults' which immediately deterred me from reading it.
Eventually the riverside walk empties out by some large outlets of Wickes and Halfords and in to the centre of Catford, a place whose name either comes a ford where cattle would cross the Ravensbourne in Saxon times or a theory that, during the witch hunts, people threw their black cats in the river so as not to be seen as witches!
The cats who have called Catford home include Ben Elton (born there in 1959), Henry Cooper, Spike Milligan, Jem Karcan (Reading FC & Turkey), Joe Gomez (Liverpool FC), Ray BLK, Robin Trower of Procol Harum, Lucy Mangan, Jacqui McShee of Pentangle, Alexander McQueen, and the band Japan.
Tina used to work in an estate agents here and she was pleased to see it was still there, clock protruding from window, before we crossed a busy road and took our only wrong turn of the day. A minor one at that. We'd arrive at Ladywell Fields in much the same time but just take a less scenic route. Even though there was a turret to look at - and an ironing board stripped of its surface and hung unceremoniously on a fence near the train lines.
No urinating is permitted in Ladywell Fields (although defecating, it seems, is not proscribed) so we passed through at a fairly rapid clip. Stopping only to take in the stump of a tree that had given life to some enormous mushrooms, a view of the chimneys of Lewisham hospital (my last visit was in 2017, for a diagnosis of gout), and a kiddies playground.
Ladywell Fields was originally an ancient water meadow and the lady's well from which it takes its name is reputed to be effective for curing eye complaints! After 1.5k we reached the end of Ladywell Fields and stopped for our first drink, and to meet Neil, in The Ladywell Tavern.
I slowly supped a local Brockley lager, Neil told of England's collapse in Yokohama, Shep ordered some tasty chips, and Tina proudly presented her 'Love London, Walk London' card holder as if to prove her credentials to the group. All under the watchful eye of a large Pussy Riot poster.
The Ladywell Tavern's a decent pub but we didn't stay for a second. After Tina and Pam posed briefly, and hilariously, under a sign for SLAGrove Place we passed another turret (it's been there for years and plans to convert it into a cinema seemed to have come to nothing), some new flats (on the site of a swimming pool I used to use), and into Lewisham,
Lewisham remains resolutely ungentrified but it's busy, it's thriving, and a lot happens there. After we crossed the eleven mile long Quaggy (another tributary of the Ravensboune and one that starts in Farnborough, Bromley) I told those who were interested (not many, it was last day of term) about some of that history!
Our old friend Alfred the Great (Winchester, Wantage, he crops up everywhere) was once Lord of the Manor of Lewisham and in 1944 the town centre was hit by a V-1 flying bomb which killed fifty-one people. It's also the site of one of Britain's worst rail crashes. In 1957 a steam train crashed into a stationary electric train bringing down a bridge on to the wreckage and ending ninety lives. Only two worse railway incidents have occurred in the UK. In 1952, in Harrow & Wealdstone, 112 died and in 1915, in Quintshill, near Gretna Green, an astounding 226 people perished on the railway.
One hundred years before the deadly Lewisham crash - there was another. In 1857, eleven people died in the same place. More positively for Lewisham history, are the events of 1977 when the Battle of Lewisham (closer to New Cross if truth be told) saw Britain's biggest battle against fascism since Cable Street in 1936.
Lewisham notables include Kate Bush, Gary Oldman, Yannick Bolasie, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Malcolm Hardee, Natasha Bedingfield, Jessica Hynes, Jude Law, Lillie Langtry, Mica Paris, Maxi Priest, Ian Wright, Louise Redknapp, Doris Stokes, and the recently departed Ginger Baker.
We passed the old bowling alley and headed briefly up (a rarity on this walk) Belmont Hill where the modest houses of Lewisham gave way to ever grander abodes. We passed the church where my friend Robert Le Marchand's funeral took place a few years back. A tragic early death at just thirty-eight years old.
Blackheath has always retained a village atmosphere and, much like Crystal Palace, was preparing itself for its annual fireworks extravaganza. I once saw Julian Cope perform (in Daffy Duck boxer shorts, naturally) in Blackheath Halls and it's so la-di-da that they've even got a branch of The Ivy there these days.
We walked straight past it and in to The Prince of Wales pub, quite full with England and South Africa rugby fans who'd, presumably, by now, had quite a day of it. A pleasant enough boozer (with Scrabble, Monopoly, and Chess available for punters) so we stayed for a 'two pint mistake' before embarking on our final, quite short, stretch to Greenwich!
The etymology of Blackheath would appear to speak for itself but there is a persistent urban myth that it comes from 'Black Death' and refers to a burial pit for the 1665 plague (death toll:approximately 100,000 - nearly a quarter of all who lived in London at the time). Another theory holds that it refers to the Black Death of 1347-1351 which was even more deadly and claimed a total of lives estimated at one hundred million people. Or one fifth of the entire population on the planet.
For a fun walk there was a lot of spiel about death! We crossed Blackheath and headed briefly in to Maze Hill before entering Greenwich Park (the sixth largest of London's Royal Parks, Richmond is nearly thirteen times as big). The estate was originally owned by the abbey of St Peter at Ghent and reverted to the Crown in 1427. Henry VI gave it to his uncle Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester who built Greenwich Castle where the Royal Observatory now stands, proudly looking out across the City!
I'd initially planned to have a look at it, to stand on the Prime Meridian, but Adam and Shep were receding into the distance and eager, it seemed - despite Adam sticking to coffee up to this point, to get to the next pub. Or just the end of the walk. So we didn't get to see, precisely, where Mean Time comes from, and I didn't get to waffle on about Charles II's 1675 commission, Christopher Wren's choosing of the site, or John Flamsteed's appointment as first ever Astronomer Royal.
Or how the park had once been used for hawking and Henry VIII had introduced deer for hunting (there are still deer in one of the park's enclosures), how James I/VI built the brick wall around the park, or how, during the 2012 Olympics, it was used as the venue for equestrian and modern pentathlon events.
It was no great loss (certainly not to them, but not even to me) and we got to take in the views and grab a few snaps. In Greenwich proper we passed The Star & Garter (where I attend Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub on the first Wednesday of most months), strolled down to the banks of the Thames, took in a view of the Millennium Dome/O2 (a building whose roof I walked on for my nephew Daniel's 21st birthday just one week ago), and popped for a drink in The Cutty Sark pub. A pub I'd spent an enjoyable afternoon in 2012 having stag day drinks with my friend Dan and others.
It was busy but we were able to secure a table upstairs for an hour before the diners who'd booked it arrived. It was long enough for a very enjoyable pint and for me to announce next year's walks (see below) and to book our curry, at Mogul - a previous favourite, for later.
On supping up, we passed down an alley where the pubs The Yacht and The Trafalgar Tavern (scene of my 40th birthday party and subsequent shenanigans) stand and along the front of the Old Royal Naval College, a World Heritage Site and an impressive architectural set piece that UNESCO has described as the "finest and most dramatically sited architectural and landscape ensemble in the British Isles).
It was originally constructed to serve as a Royal Hospital for Seamen (no sniggering) and designed by Wren (1696-1712). As Pam and I spoke briefly about it, we lost track of the others. So we rushed past the Cutty Sark, paid scant attention to St Alfege's (though that was covered in last year's Hawksmoor walk), and arrived at Mogul at exactly the same time as Shep, Adam, Tina, and Neil. Who, it must be presumed, had taken a more circuitous route!
Greenwich saw the births of both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I (a step up from Jem Karacan) and during Ethelred the Unready's reign the Danish fleet attacked Kent from here and took Canterbury. Other Greenwich luminaries include Boy George, John Vanbrugh, Simon Day, Jools Holland, Vanessa Redgrave, Mitch Mitchell, Cecil Day-Lewis, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Dr Samuel Johnson and Edmund Lear wrote this very crap limerick about the place:-
"There was a young lady of Greenwich
Whose garments were bordered with spinach
But a large spotty calf
Bit her shawl quite in half
Which alarmed that young lady of Greenwich"
Yep. Lear did that 1st line/5th line rhyme of the same word thing, the lazy git. I didn't read that limerick in the Indian, despite a long wait, because Neil and Adam were busy having a heated debate as to the morality of voting for Jo Swinson and the Liberal Democrats. There were many opinions on that but what wasn't in doubt, on the table, was that getting the cruel and amoral Tory party, and their disgusting and pathetic excuse of a leader Boris Johnson, out next month is absolutely vital.
Away from politics, we downed a Cobra or two, I had a paneer saslick (that's how they spelt it) , roti, and pulao rice, and Shep put a napkin over a light so the ambience was more to our liking. The service was slow (luckily, we'd arrived with time to spare) but the food was perfectly decent and we did get a table in one of the booths as I'd requested on the phone.
Adam shot off after the meal while the rest of us retired to the surprisingly quiet Coach & Horses pub in Greenwich Market for a couple more drinks and a lot more talking nonsense. It hadn't been anywhere near as chaotic and decadent as last year's finale but it'd still been a lot of fun. It usually is. There are only a couple of other things in my life that give me as much pleasure as writing, leading, and, most of all, partaking of these walks. They've been a life saver. Possibly literally.
March 7th - The Immensity of Vacancy in Which the Dust of the Material Universe Swims (Woking - West Byleet, with a slight H G Wells/War of the Worlds twist).
April 11th - Wittenham Clumps (Didcot Parkway and Dorcheter-on-Thames, named for an area the artist Paul Nash was so fond of).
May 2nd - The Walk That Space Managed Time (Reading:in memory of Bugsy and to mark his birthday and a year since his passing).
June 6th - To Rye, Hey! (a city walk around Rye and maybe to a nearby coast).
July 4th - Oil City Confidential (Canvey Island, play some Dr Feelgood to set the mood).
August 29th/30th - Abaty Tyndrn Ac O Gwmpas (our first jaunt outside England, a two day walk around the Wye Valley, Chepstow, and Monmouth).
September 5th - Snare 'em in Sarum (a return to Salisbury).
October 3rd - Stations of the Crass (North Weald Basset, Dial House, Epping Forest).
November 7th - Docklands Shite Trailway (an awfully named amble from Woolwich to Waterloo, to be followed by 'mucking about').
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