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London's streets, squares, alleys and lanes; its parks,
heaths, gardens and open spaces; its palaces, villages,
docks, canals and rivers – all offer an amazing
variety of terrain for the dedicated urban explorer.
One minute you can find yourself breezing down some
grand thoroughfare or strolling nonchalantly round an
elegant square as though you owned it. The next you
could be treading cautiously down narrow lanes and dark
alleys, peering into cobbled courtyards, squeezing through
gates and wickets, tramping through woods or puffing
up hill and down dale startling deer and other creatures
rare even in the countryside.
Walking London contains nearly 100 miles of walks through this endlessly surprising landscape, more than enough to keep even the most hardened city walker on his or her feet for a good while to come.
There are 30 walks altogether: 29 in London and one
– mainly for the benefit of overseas visitors
— in Windsor. All the walks are original, invented
by me over a winter and a summer and then individually
checked by a small army of pedestrian friends.
Each walks acts as a guide to a different part of London. In general, these are the most historic and attractive parts of the capital, the two usually going together.
As in conventional guidebooks, the walks take you to
most of the well-known places – but they also
steer you off the beaten track into forgotten corners
of London. Wherever the walk happens to be, the emphasis
is always on the visually attractive and stimulating,
not on trying to cover every single place of interest
that
a guidebook would mention. As you will discover in this book, views take priority over venues.
History plays a strong part in the book – you
cannot get away from it in London – but anything
interesting, unusual or simply puzzling, whether old
or new, gets a mention. My overall aim has been to try
to anticipate any questions you may have about anything
you can actually see en route and, subject to limitations
of space, to provide satisfying answers.
As a relative newcomer to London, I set out to write this book with a pretty average knowledge of the city: in other words, I knew where different districts were relative to each other, and I could navigate my way around the various places where I had lived and worked without using an A-Z Street Atlas.
By the time the book was finished, I had got to know large areas of London quite intimately, and I realized that in the process my attitude to the city had been quietly but radically transformed. Although never a sufferer from the rootlessness and alienation which blights the lives of so many city dwellers, it suddenly dawned on me that I had actually begun to feel at home here. So much at home, in fact, that I was no longer troubled by dreams of returning to the dales and moors of my native Yorkshire. As my outlook changed, so London became a much friendlier place and life in general that much better.
Walking London in its various editions has been guiding visitors and residents around the capital for over 15 years now. Many thousands of people have bought the book, and thousands more have borrowed it from public libraries. If (and it's a big if) all these people had walked all the walks between them, they would have clocked up something like 10 million miles (16 million kilometres). I hope you enjoy making your own contribution to this somewhat staggering figure! |
