South West Coast Path

The South West Coast Path starts in Minehead, Somerset and snakes its way around the coastal inlets for some 630 miles before arriving at Poole in Dorset.  No doubt some attempt the entire route in one go, maybe in carpet slippers or riding a unicycle to spice up the challenge, but most normal folk attack the UK’s longest walking trail in bite-sized chunks. 

My friends live in Exeter which enables them to supplement week-long assaults on the more distant reaches on the path with day trips to closer stretches.   I had previously accompanied them on a sally to North Cornwall, starting at Tintagel.  I associated this area with fading childhood memories of indolent rock pools and lonely coves. Walking the coastline is a somewhat less languorous experience.  Climbs of cliffs so steep that steps are cut into the surface are followed immediately by knee-wrecking descents; and no sooner is one cliff conquered than another appears.  The whole enterprise resembled trying to cross a London suburb by climbing the front of each house, descending the back, crossing the garden and repeating the process on the next terrace.  Not only was it gruelling (some days we covered barely 6 miles) but the usual sense of achievement associated with summiting a hill is tempered by the immediate prospect of several more.

So it was with some trepidation that I accepted the invitation to accompany my friends on another South West Coast Path jaunt over Easter.  In the intervening period, they had covered some 400 miles, so we were scheduled to walk part of the southern side of the peninsular.

To secure the cheapest train fare, I booked soon after Christmas, peering at the map to discover the closest railway station to the house, selected to accommodate a party of seven, which appeared to be about as remote as is possible in mainland Britain.  The week after buying my ticket a series of winter storms of unprecedented ferocity commenced.   The west-facing roof of my flat, always susceptible to rain when accompanied by westerlies, developed several leaks.  More worryingly, a chunk of Brunel’s massive seawall supporting the railway track at Dawlish was washed away.  Attempts to repair it were hampered by further storms.  Pictures of the railway track dangling in thin air reminded me of my inadequate boyhood engineering skills when ambitious viaducts in my Hornby layouts tumbled to the floor.  These were not comforting thoughts and the chances of the Dawlish wall being repaired by Easter seemed remote.  In the event, Herculean efforts, spurred on by huge losses to the west country economy through having its only rail link with the rest of the UK severed, ensured that repairs were completed in less than the forecast time, just two days before my planned trip.  As we traversed the newly laid section, I was glad we were not the first train to make the passage: it was clear that, although passable, the work was far from finished.

Although the holiday was scheduled for a week, I had to miss the first day owing to a previous commitment to lead a Ramblers walk.  I managed to get an earlier train than I was booked, having slightly overestimated the time required for the Ramblers walk.  Consequently I needed to check the arrival time at Lostwithiel where I was being met.  The guard printed off the times which also showed I need to change at PAR.  I was used to the notion of these three letter abbreviations which originated with airports (Heathrow is LHR, for instance) and had now been adopted by the railways and assume that this was the code for Exeter, which is where I would have had to change according to my original itinerary.  However I thought it best to confirm my interpretation with the guard.  He gave me an old-fashioned look and explained to the stifled amusement of the other passengers that it is the name of a place: Par.  Obviously I was a Londoner abroad.  I consulted the map and discovered that Par is actually beyond Lostwithiel and that I would have to wait nearly an hour there in order to get a train in the opposite direction which would then take less than ten minutes to reach Lostwithiel.  This seemed pointless so I texted my friends to suggest they collect me from Par instead, which would have the added benefit of enabling us all to eat dinner at a more civilised time.  Several days later, as we walked though Par, a bleak post-industrial wasteland, the name became the occasion of much feeble punning which I will spare you. 

The house nestled in a lush green dell and had been architect designed with all the idiosyncrasies that implies, the most annoying one being that there were no opening windows.  Instead, every room had floor to ceiling French doors, including the bedrooms which were all on the ground floor, so that to get any fresh air these needed to be opened.  In one of the bedrooms (fortunately unoccupied as two of our party were unable to join at the last minute) even this facility was missing while in my room the French doors were jammed shut.  Despite these shortcomings, the place was generally well-appointed and, most importantly, well-situated as a central pivot for our walks.  Nevertheless, the physical challenge of the walks pales into insignificance compared to the logistical challenge of actually reaching them.  Linear walks either require ready access to public transport, which is generally paltry and unreliable outside cities, or a complicated, time-consuming and carbon-intensive car shuffling.  On some days, it seemed we spent almost as much time driving as walking and on more than one occasion, one of the cars was abandoned until the following day.

During an indulgent lunch on a rare "non-walking day" during which we covered almost as much ground as on a "walking day", the restaurant was invaded by a large party of hooray Henrys accompanied by noisy children. The kids we could stand, the braying adults we couldn't.  Our peaceful reverie was disturbed and several other diners, we noticed, left quickly.  Two of us were content to mutter about the bad behaviour of the moneyed classes and ignore the matter but our leader bravely decided that, for the greater good, these people needed to understand the disruption they had caused.  We stood well back to watch the fray.  In the event, she handled her admonishment so well (beginning by saying she understood that they were a large party with children so that some noise was inevitable and thus pre-empting an obvious retort) that they were completely contrite.  

Long distance paths provide an interesting insight into people’s personalities.  When I walked the Pennine Way, surely the dullest of all the UK long distance footpaths, I cheerfully abandoned a section across waterlogged fields for a path by a narrow gauge railway.  SWCP adherents are made of sterner stuff and one of our party insisted on covering every inch, on one occasion doubling back to bag a hundred meters which fell between the end of one day’s efforts and the start of the following day owing to the location of the car park.  I devised a set of criteria to determine whether a diversion was acceptable.  First, the alternative route had to be virtually the same length as the original.  Second, both routes should present a similar level of challenge.  Third, the two paths needed to be within sight of one another.  After considerable discussion, no agreement was reached but as most diversions were the product of judicious adjustment of the route by the authorities to avoid recent rock falls or storm erosion there was in any case no option but to follow them.

Next year’s foray has already been scheduled and as it will mark the end of the path for the doughty couple who are attempting the whole circuit, the group will be swelled by extra participants to cheer the triumphal arrival at Poole harbour.

© David Thompson 2014

Capital Ring: Wimbledon Park to Richmond

It wasn't any surprise that this section of the walk was the most pleasant so far.  Putney Heath and Wimbledon Common together form one of the largest open spaces in London while Richmond Park, where it would not seem out of place to encounter a stray sheep, is the largest urban park in Europe.      Yet this section of the walk was also freighted with unexpected memories so the rural idyll was embroidered with unbidden glimpses of long-forgotten past.

Being largely the preserve of the affluent, one would expect tennis clubs to be located in the most desirable neighbourhoods so it is entirely logical that the All England tennis club, representing the zenith of the sport, should make its home in the relentlessly middle class enclave that is Wimbledon.  Large, solid houses coyly visible behind specimen trees placed amid manicured front gardens set the scene, but it was the sight of a home delivery van specialising in fresh fish, that completed the picture.  Such a phenomenon bespeaks quite a different class milieu from the Tesco trucks plying lowlier neighbourhoods.  It also put me in mind of the world of the 1950s, before the advent of the supermarket, when tradesmen would deliver my mother's various household requirements on weekly rotation.  In the days before universal car ownership, retailers felt obliged to bring their wares to customers in much the same way that Amazon would decades later. The daily milkman, until quite recently a feature of most areas, headed a procession which included a baker, a greengrocer and a fishmonger.  The Kleeneze representative would pitch up on the doorstep regularly, laden with all manner of cleaning apparatus and consumables which, after much wheedling and cajoling, she would occasionally condescend to buy.

At Wimbledon Common, a cluster of low buildings nestles around the apparently famous hollow-post windmill.  It included a cafe with the most appealing range of food and drink and comfortable seating I've seen in such places.  Sadly it was too early for my lunch but the place was well-patronised by women with small children and dogs the size of ponies.  A significant area of the adjacent common is given over to a car park, evidently for the exclusive use of Range Rovers.  Behind the cafe, horses were being exercised at the riding school.  I reflect that the transition which was embryonic in the previous section of the walk is complete: neither of those forms of transport would be much in evidence in the easterly reaches of the Capital Ring.

Passing golfers from the London Scottish Golf Club resplendent in their mandatory red tops and then descending into caliginous woodland, my earlier associations with southwest London started to resurface.

London is so large and sprawling that most residents carve out small localities with which to identify.  The most notorious boundary is that between north and south London.  A south London acquaintance complains that her north London friends insist she visits them rather than vice versa as the journey is so tiresome, the implication being that it's somehow less stressful for her to travel northwards than for them to endure the same journey southwards.  Or maybe they deem it an entirely justifiable penalty for her choosing to live in such a declassé area.  My familiarity with southwest London was for many years confined to memories of day trips to Kew Gardens during languorous summer holidays, chaperoned by a succession of Dutch au pairs.  The trip involved a boat from Greenwich to Charing Cross, then the interminable District line.  Acknowledging my indifference to exotic plants and needing to find some effective distraction, they fed me ice lollies ad libitum.  My favourite was the Mivvi, an ice-cream centre with a fruit ice outer shell.  Curiously, the name forms a link with my next association with the area.

During a French camping holiday, I met Mimi, a fey and distant creature to which my gauche sixteen year old self formed an urgent and unrequited attachment.   I had no way of apprehending the extent to which this product of the knowing and sophisticated circles of southwest London outstripped me.  Our lives, although superficially congruent, both being the offspring of liberal professionals, could scarcely have been more different.  She was effortlessly accustomed to life at the epicentre of the cultural and political world (her father was a cabinet minister, mine was a reclusive academic) she was glamorously urbane.  It took just a single visit to Blackheath to expose the gulf and sever the link, and without the benefit of modern social networks we lost touch.  Nearly half a century later, five minutes research on the internet reveals that she now lives in Stoke Newington; doubtless she frequents Fresh and Wild.

Emergence on to the Thames path was a welcome respite to these family memories.  This was an area unburdened by associations and I enjoyed the sense that in being by the Thames there was a palpable link with home, as well as marking the geographical halfway point on the Capital Ring.

© David Thompson 2014

Capital Ring: Crystal Palace to Wimbledon Park

An unexpected bonus of solitary retirement is being able to indulge passing whims or even forming and reversing decisions at will.  Thus it was that when I woke to a photoshop sunrise spontaneously decided to tackle the next phase of the Capital Ring.

These westerly sections necessitate more arduous train journeys.  On this occasion, I was rewarded with a strange visual pun. A passenger boarded the train carrying a clothes airer - not a common sight - and two stops later I noticed a different person wielding an identical object on the platform.  It could have been an obscure coded message, I suppose, but more likely a coincidence and it reminded me of a piece I'd read explaining that coincidences are more common than we expect since we unconsciously stretch the variables.  Running into a cousin unexpectedly on a visit to Vienna is declared a strange coincidence, but so too would be hearing that he had visited the week before...or the week after...or that his father had recently been there.  You get the point.   The only lasting impact of the clothes airer episode was to remind me that I'd forgotten to take my laundry out of the washing machine.

The station at Crystal Place is excessively grand but more importantly also features toilets, a comparative rarity in the tube network.  Having availed myself of the facilities, I churlishly bypassed Crystal Palace park and its resident dinosaurs but couldn't avoid the blue-plaqued home of their creator, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins.  He lived on a steep hill, which shocked my legs more accustomed to easy ambles around flat Docklands and didn't bode well for my forthcoming walk along part the South West Coast Path, notorious for its endless rollercoaster ascents and descents.

In Streatham a eucalyptus tree in a front garden reminded me of the ghost eucalypts in Melbourne and my favourite specimen standing sentinel at the entrance to a park.  I recalled the bark folded neatly where each branch joined the trunk, like the malleable flesh of an animal, and the delicate papery layers peeling off the trunk.

The form of transport used to traverse the suburbs largely determines the traveller's experience. Buses ply shops and the fronts of houses: this is the public face of the district.  Viewed from a train, the suburbs are defined by rears of houses since railway lines intersect the ends of back gardens.  The true nature of the area can be discerned by their content: nail-clippered lawns tell a different story from jagged piles of household detritus.  My journey on foot enabled me to sample both perspectives.  Bereft of tubes, this part of south London is covered in a skein of railway lines, which I crossed through fetid underpasses and over rusting bridges.  Trudging the endless suburbs, I am suddenly struck by the disparity between London's centre where street life abounds and these dreary streets populated only by seemingly empty houses.  For an absurd moment it appears as if people and houses are incompatible alternatives: you can have one or the other, but not both together.

Although there are pockets of larger well-kept Victorian houses and executive homes scattered throughout this section, approaching the more salubrious western zones there is a gradual but inescapable trend to increased prosperity.  Reaching Wandsworth, it was clear that an invisible boundary had been crossed: I hadn't seen any signs requesting the public to keep off cricket squares in Woolwich.

Having read that this section was principally on tarmac paths, I'd elected to wear my Gortex boots rather than the leather ones I favoured previously.  Towards the end of the day, I regretted my choice.  Either the boots had shrunk or my feet had grown.  Both seemed equally improbably, but I decided to revert to the other pair for the next outing.

© David Thompson 2014

Regent's Canal

Resisting the temptation of full-time work has an unexpected benefit: more time for walking.  I don’t mean those carefully planned long distance treks, or day trips to the countryside which take place at weekends or during vacations.  I’m referring to the regular trips to shops and friends’ houses for which I would normally hop on a bus or a tube.  When free time is hemmed in by work, the maximum acceptable foot journey for such errands is about an hour.  Marooned on the Isle of Dogs, you can’t get far on that basis.  But extend the limit to two hours and Shanks’s pony is more serviceable.  Tower Bridge is only five miles away along the pleasant Thames path, amply furnished with distracting pubs and cafes.  Swivel the compass north and my regular weekly destination, the Arcola in Dalston, is in range. 

Once off the island, most of the six mile jaunt to Dalston follows the Regent’s Canal, passing Mile End Park and Victoria Park and culminating in the quirkiness of Broadway Market and London Fields.  A more delightful urban walk is difficult to imagine.

The environs of the canal are almost as desirable as the banks of the Thames and development proceeds apace.  Since my last expedition, a narrow weed-blown isosceles triangle of ground bordered on one side by the canal and on the other by a railway track has been invaded by earth-moving behemoths and lanky cranes.  This unpromising fillet of land will have been crouching on a developer’s balance sheet for years, awaiting the moment when the critical factors – development costs, property prices, business rates – converge and the dormant asset is awakened to generate profit.  In a few months, a tower of apartments, many sold off-plan to eager investors, will arise.

Weeks of rain have topped up the canal and it is now perilously close to overflowing the towpath, or bursting its banks to use the meteorologists’ dramatic language.   If it became the first infinity canal, it would be unlikely to increase the value of those new apartments.

Until the industrial revolution, most people passed their lives within walking distance of their place of birth.  Except for the affluent, there was neither the necessity nor the means to do otherwise.  Today, the desirability of locations is largely defined by their transport connections.  Until the advent of the DLR, the Isle of Dogs was accessible only by unpredictable and infrequent bus services.  In the bleak days following the closure of the docks, none but the most intrepid taxi drivers would accept fares there.  The DLR, and to a greater extent the Jubilee Line, have transformed the area.  The impact of transport is not a new phenomenon.  In his book A Good Parcel of English Soil, Richard Mabey recounts how, using an associated company, the Metropolitan Railway was “prudently buying up parcels of pleasantly rural land around the line far in excess of what was needed for the permanent way itself” in anticipation that the railway would stimulate a development bonanza in its wake.   

Getting to, or away from, localities is not the only factor influencing property prices.  Job prospects, schools, pollution levels and the ineffable dictates of fashion all contribute.  Ironically, while modern communications have made proximity to the workplace optional rather than essential, gritty post-industrial city centres have become even more popular.  Many have adopted models of neo self sufficiency with community shops and pubs, urban gardens, allotments and time banking schemes enabling participants to trade skills without the bother of cash, whether the national currency or the local variants introduced in many of the early transition towns.

The redevelopment of the canal illustrates the vitality of regeneration.  The waterway itself has been cleaned, although even the hardiest are advised against swimming, and water sports blossom.  Along the eastern reaches of the Regent’s Canal, patchy development is punctuated by derelict factories and warehouses.   As well as the new apartments, there are older blocks of council flats.  Even without the clue of their age, each is instantly identifiable.  The council blocks, set well back from the canal edge, are imprisoned by sturdy metal fences and thickets of bushes.  When they were built, the canal was merely a grubby and unpalatable reminder of the industrial past which many of the tenants had lately fled, so efforts were made to conceal its proximity.  The new apartments embrace the canal as a valuable sales feature.  The blocks nestle as close as they dare to the waterside and bristle with balconies cantilevered over the water.  If they are so minded, the new east enders can drop a fishing line directly into the limpid waters below, although they would unlikely to snag anything more toothsome than a rusting bicycle or discarded boot.

Canal barges converted to houseboats cluster together in the more scenic stretches: next to Mile End Park and Victoria Park.  I fail to grasp the attraction of living half under the waterline, but if the rain continues much longer we’ll all have to get used to it.  The boats are a microcosm of the land-based disparities of prosperity.  Wealthier residents have renovated their craft.  They are freshly painted in unfetching naval grey and sport solar panels on their roofs next to traditional smoking flues.  Old tubs, with flaking paint and boarded windows lie askew in the water and are freighted with piles of wood, old bikes and other detritus.  Whatever their state of repair, they all have permanent moorings and the only vessels which seem to use the canal as a thoroughfare are the rented leisure craft, easily identified as their owners’ names are emblazoned on the side and encircled by painted posies of flowers.

In Hackney, the canalside carnival reaches a discordant climax.  Looming gasometers, the Victorian filigree of their steel girders silhouetted against the sky, are cheek by jowl with modern office blocks.  Office workers in shirtsleeves are visible through vast plate-glass windows.  I wonder whether they tire of the novelty of the canal view or whether, occupied in the creative industries, it is a constant source of inspiration.  Do they speculate what empire-building enterprise previously occupied the site as they generate web copy and video games, or simply gaze vacantly at the water as they drink their morning coffee?

An enduring index of the desirability of an area is the proportion of period properties. Although houses in Victorian and Georgian terraces and squares are less commodious than their modern counterparts, they will always command a premium. No one nowadays would consider demolishing these gems and London’s gap-toothed terraces are largely the legacy of wartime depredations.  Decades later, it is still the Luftwaffe’s errant bombs which have shaped the finances of London’s property demographic, especially in east London.   

Attractive architecture is a necessary but not sufficient metric of an area’s allure.  Across London, there is an invisible meridian dividing the undesirable from the aspirational zones, palpable to any property owner.   This border gradually moves eastwards, like mist being burnt off a field by early morning sun, revealing fresh pasture below.  On my walk, it is currently paused in Broadway Market, a short thoroughfare linking Regent’s Canal and London Fields and creaking with bookshops, gastropubs and the other services essential to the daily life of hip professionals.  Estate agents surely use an algorithm to track the progress of this boundary. It must include the increase in density of coffee shops, wholefood retailers and independent video stores and the corresponding decline in the number of charity shops.  These are the vanguard marking the first tentative stages of gentrification.  The final transition to established middle class, when property prices are unaffordable to all but heiresses, is marked by the arrival of Waitrose.

As I reach Dalston, I reflect how it has leapfrogged this evolutionary path.  The arrival of the second Overground station was a mutation which is set to catalyse rapid development, including the demolition of the popular Dalston Eastern Curve garden, ironically utilising the site of an earlier railway track.  Only the Arcola, occupying an old industrial building, renovated using state of the art recycling and harnessing alternative energy technology which is well on the way to fulfilling its ambition to be the first carbon neutral theatre, stands as a model of sensitive urban regeneration.  

© David Thompson 2014

Capital Ring: Falconwood to Crystal Palace

There was something missing during the train journey from Lewisham to Falconwood.  In the days when I used that line to go to school, I would alight at Eltham Well Hall and the next station was Eltham Park.  Both had disappeared and been replaced by a new station called simply “Eltham”.  I didn’t grieve for Eltham Well Hall; my journey to school necessitated a short train journey followed by a bus ride and the connection was not coordinated.  In the days when train destinations were displayed on wooden boards manually swung into slots above the platform by porters and before the advent of electronic time indicators at bus stops, buses and trains heard a different drummer and I could wait for ages on draughty platforms unsure when, if ever, transport would show up.   This section of the Capital Ring passed through the school grounds, I knew, and it was not a prospect I relished.

My friend Andy had been staying for the weekend.  On Saturday evening, we’d been to the Arcola to see the chilling tragedy Punishment Without Revenge, part of the Spanish Golden Age season.  Its message contrasted vividly with the film we saw on Sunday evening The Railway Man which was an object lesson in the redemptive power of forgiveness.  Discussing these and other matters kept us up late on Sunday evening so it was after 11 on Monday morning by the time I set off.  Despite the late start, I planned to complete two sections of the Capital Ring.  Falconwood to Grove Park is only 4 miles and continuing to Crystal Palace would bring the total to a more respectable 12 miles.

The weather started bright and Eltham Park South was, for a weekday morning, busy.  After a while I realised that, almost without exception, everyone was accompanied by a dog.  Most people had one or two clearly genetically related beasts while paid dogwalkers, a profession of which I had been unaware until recently, stood out as they towed an odd assortment of breeds.  I began to feel slightly fraudulent touring the parks without the excuse of exercising a dog, my walking pole marking me out further as unorthodox.

As in the first section, most of the walk alternated between parks and nondescript suburbia punctuated by the occasional place of interest.  A handsome brick dome, semi-submerged in the ground I guessed to be an ice house.  The plaque proved me wrong, but only physically, not chemically: it was part of a 16^th century water supply system.

When I approached the environs of my school, I anticipated with foreboding being ambushed by a spot which I would suddenly realise was familiar from nearly half a century ago.  That moment arrived when I reached the unlovely Sidcup Road.  It harboured painful memories.  One evening I was cycling along the pavement in the dark and, not realising I’d descended a dropped kerb and crossed a side road, crashed into the opposite kerb at speed.  The front wheel was mangled but fortunately I was only bruised.  I hobbled to my friend Richard’s house, which was a few minutes walk away.  His sister still lives there so must perceive some hidden attraction in inhabiting a small semi next to a busy dual carriageway.  The next section covered familiar streets.  Victorian manses were interspersed with newer properties designed by young architects determined to make a name for themselves, even if it required the most grotesque novelties.  One carbuncle had its name, Grange View, etched in enormous letters on the staircase window.  Too bad if the next resident prefers Dunromin. 

Only arriving at school was worse than travelling.  For reasons that continue to baffle me, my parents, both ardent atheists, favoured a school which had been founded for sons of missionaries.  Even in the 1960s, the smuggest boarders were the scions of religious houses, their missionary parents still plying their toxic trade in Africa.  My parents’ disdain for sport, a god worshipped at school hardly less enthusiastically than the church based deity, amplified my alienation. Our physical distance from the school catchment area also made it difficult to nurture friendships with the other pupils.  When friends did visit, they were perplexed by our family’s idiosyncrasies (my father’s vegetarianism, the absence of a television) and rarely returned.

Unlike most of the boys who exhibited no aptitude for sports, I was not redeemed by academic prowess and kept my head down to avoid the regular physical violence meted out by teachers for minor transgressions.  Corporal punishment was an accepted feature of primary and secondary education in those days; to my distress, my pacifist parents didn’t bat an eyelid when, aged 9, I was summarily caned for playing hide and seek in the street while wearing school uniform. 

Partly as a temporary refuge and partly because even in those days I was developing a taste for walking, most lunchtimes a friend and I would set off across the playing fields, buy a sandwich from a newsagent and occasionally share a bottle of cider in preparation for a particularly dull afternoon of Latin.  Usually we would head for the grandly named River Quaggy, in reality a small brook that bordered the school grounds.  Like characters out of an Arthur Ransome novel, we’d dare one another to jump across ever wider places.  On one occasion, the branch I was using to execute a particularly daredevil transit snapped and I found myself sitting in a foot of water.  Oddly, no one back at school commented on the fact that I attended afternoon lessons wearing soaking trousers.

As I turned into the narrow passage bordering the school playing fields which was the scene of these exploits I noticed it was now separated from the grounds by a 2 metre steel fence.  Since the path had also been used by boys living in Grove Park as a short cut home they presumably now need to take the long route via the road.  The Quaggy, previously a muddy meandering stream, is now canalised in a soulless concrete channel.  The far side, which had been a low bank with scrubby bushes, is guarded by impenetrable Leylandii.  No schoolboy leaps across the Quaggy now.

Despite my abhorrence of the school, I am grateful for the brand association which boosted my early career in much the same way as my employment with PWC and IBM did subsequently.   

After the relative prosperity of Mottingham, Grove Park was run down and depressing.  Endless neglected council houses were moated with discarded garbage and burnt out vehicles littered the cul de sacs.  I was getting peckish and paused to investigate a small parade of shops.  There was a fried chicken shop, a kebab place and a chippy.  All looked equally uninviting and I decided to continue, spurred on by the vision of a cosy café and hot cheese panini.   The guidebook mentioned a cafe at Beckenham Place Park and since the sky was becoming overcast I estimated I could reach sanctuary before the inevitable downpour. 

In the woods, the Capital Ring signs, normally so reliable, became ambiguous and I found myself back at a bridge I’d passed 15 minutes earlier.  The woods didn’t offer many clues, especially as I’d been even more inattentive than usual, fantasising about my upcoming snack so I reached for my GPS, always a symptom of defeat, I feel.  As I did so, a couple of dog walkers emerged from the gloom.  They said there were two ways to the house: either through the woods or across the golf course.  I confessed I’d already got lost in the woods and they cheerfully admitted that they had too, which made me feel better.  As I set off across the golf course, torrential rain started and I was steaming by the time I reached John Cator’s eighteenth century mansion.  It must rank as one of the ugliest Grade II listed buildings and the interior, now home to a golf club, was malodorous and dilapidated.  Nevertheless, hot coffee and a grilled ham, cheese and tomato sandwich was on offer.

The rain had abated during my late lunch, although there were intermittent showers on the way to Crystal Palace so that I was glad to get on a train without properly exploring the famous dinosaur park which will have to keep for next time.

© David Thompson 2014