Capital Ring: Woolwich to Falconwood

January is not the most auspicious month to undertake a long distance walk in the UK, even one as mundane as the Capital Ring.  The winter of 2013/14 saw legendary rainfall: London endured half its typical annual quota in three weeks, with the upshot that unpaved ground everywhere is sodden.  A few years previously, in a fit of rookie enthusiasm, I embarked on my first long distance walk, the South Downs Way over four weekends in February and March. Each weekend was wetter and windier than the last, culminating in a downpour so penetrating that the final weekend, undertaken with my son Leon, was abandoned on Saturday night.  Meteorology punished us for our timidity: resuming in June we encountered the hottest day of the year.

The Capital Ring is the kind of enterprise on which my father, a walker of the same metal as myself, might have embarked.  In his youth, I’m told he was a serious Lake District walker, clad in woollen clothes and hauling the canvas rucksack I discovered years later in his loft. In the leisure afforded to him after 40 years of teaching and research, before the modern craze for walking generated the plethora of urban and rural routes we enjoy today, he would take the Underground to its uttermost tips and explore the plangent suburbs.

After resolving to embark on the walk, it was a while before I took any action. The weather was uninviting with periods of seductive blue skies interrupted by unpredictable and torrential showers. Sitting snugly at home and gazing out of the window at the Thames it was easy to delay setting off.  After all, there was no deadline and one day was as good as the next. Eventually I opened the guidebook. The 75 mile route starts at Woolwich on the south side of the Thames, proceeds clockwise and ends on the north shore.  The venerable Woolwich Free Ferry joins the dots. The prospect of that eventual celebratory river crossing did little to inspire starting. The walk could, I guess, equally well have been designed to start at the westerly Thames crossing point, surely a more enticing prospect, especially as I had recently walked the Woolwich environs with the Ramblesiders and it’s not an area which improves with familiarity.  But I will take every precaution to minimise the chance of getting lost so I resolved to start at the official beginning and moreover printed the online directions to the first section as back up to the published guide which, absurdly, shows the route superimposed on OS maps, rather than the more suitable A-Z scale. My print cartridges were almost exhausted so the map emerged in pallid brown, and could have passed for an ancient manuscript recently disinterred after centuries in a vault.  It did not seem an auspicious sign.

The Isle of Dogs is a peninsula so every journey away from the island, as locals call it, begins with the DLR train and passes through the portals of Canary Wharf.  When I moved to the area in 2000, its glittering towers were an anomaly in the post industrial wasteland of docklands, as though a kink in spacetime had allowed a fragment of Manhattan or Hong Kong to penetrate the tumbleweed and deserted shipyards.  Now, with the relentless eastwards expansion of the financial centre and the encroachment on its surroundings of the attendant infrastructure – apartment buildings, shops, transport hubs –the opposite seems true with memories of the east end’s proud manufacturing past confined to a few listed buildings, plaques for tourists and a local museum, an outpost of the Museum of London.

The start of the walk was a mile from Woolwich DLR station, which was adorned with posters exhorting passengers to celebrate its fifth birthday, a reminder of the inexorable growth of the DLR network which originally comprised a single line (Tower Gateway to Beckton, since you ask) and constructed for a niggardly £75m by the London Docklands Development Corporation, a quango charged with regenerating the area.

From its start, the Capital Ring is waymarked to within an inch of its life.  The satisfaction I derive from walking is the simple rhythmical pleasure of putting one foot in front of the other.  I like maps, but wearily consulting gradually shredding paper in steady drizzle and biting winds is a challenge I can resist.  (Sometimes I think that I should simply occupy a treadmill in the gym for the day; a steady 3 miles an hour in warmth and comfort with entertainment and hot drinks on tap would be an easy swap for wrestling with unreliable trains and inclement weather.)  The signs were not only plentiful but also comprehensive.  As well as the Capital Ring, the Green Chain Way and other local routes featured on many of the signs. Charlton, I noticed, was vigorously advertising its own walks; I guess it’s logical that the least appealing areas have to work the hardest to promote their attractions.  With signs appearing regularly, I switched off my GPS.  Predictably, within five minutes I had lost the path.  The hazard of following signage is that you only need to miss a single cue to be completely at sea.  A helpful dog walker redirected me and thereafter I paid more attention.

I was peeved to realised that after Charlton, the route swings resolutely south, evading the gravitational pull of Blackheath and Greenwich, surely the most notable open spaces in the area but presumably not at the requisite radial distance to qualify for the Capital Ring   I anticipate other notable parks, such as Battersea, will fall foul of the same cartographical stricture. We'll see.

Much of the scenery comprised dreary suburbs epitomising middle class preoccupations with loft conversions and mock Victorian conservatories, interspersed with parks which were predominantly flat green fields and whose principal functions are to provide facilities for dog walking and football, pursuits which, in more ways than one, frequently conflict.

I was resigned to the monotony of alternating parks and between the wars semis when an unexpected sight greeted me at Stadium Road.  Here was Woolwich Common, an area of wilderness with scrubby bushes, clumps of trees and, best of all, not pancake flat.  It could have passed for Hampstead Heath.  The downside of this rure in urbs was an unpaved path which unremitting rain had turned into a quagmire which wouldn’t have shamed some of the Pennine Way bogs I had encountered in 2012.  I was grateful for my boots and began to wish for my walking pole.  After a short stretch, tarmac resumed and with it a prospect of encircling grey tower blocks, windows glinting in the low sun.  Not Hampstead after all, then.  All the same, it did feel remote enough for me to indulge in a favourite test.  I ventured a ”good afternoon” to an approaching dog walker and was rewarded with a smile and a reply.  Ha, perhaps this is an island of pseudo-countryside after all: no one responds favourably to an unsolicited greeting on city streets or in urban parks.

This small idyll was bordered by the South Circular, the vehicular equivalent of the Capital Ring and its predecessor by several decades.  Crossing Shooters Hill Road the path enters Oxleas Wood preserved as part of Britain’s ancient woodland dating back 8,000 years.  A steady climb took me to the dizzying altitude of 400 feet, a pimple in Lake District terms but affording a worthwhile view over London, most of which sits close to sea level in the Thames floodplain.  The woods are alive with birds, notably ring-necked parakeets, descendants of escaped exotic pets, whose squawking drowns out the more sedate native species.

I reached the café on the far side of Shooters Hill just before it closed at 4pm.  My request for cappuccino was stonily refused. Studiously ignoring a shiny coffee machine the size of small nuclear reactor, the proprietor offered indifferent coffee, which I drank, shuddering to imagine Seymour’s verdict. 

The remainder of the walk was continuous mud and I nearly slipped on several occasions so I resolved to bring my walking pole on the next walk and risk the ridicule.  It might be a good defence against aggressive dogs, too.  I encountered one in the final section of the wood, called to heel by its owner who shouted the usual unconvincing platitude “eewonurcher”.  By the time I reached Falconwood, the sun had set and it was civil twilight (the sun was between 0 and 6 degrees below the horizon) so I determined to bring my beloved headtorch on future sorties.

My expectations of the Capital Ring had been modest but were pleasantly exceeded by my experience. More than threequarters of the walk was indeed in green spaces, the remainder was along tolerably pleasant quiet roads and the plentiful waymarking and convenient transport connections made for a relaxing half day excursion. I'm a  convert!





© David Thompson 2014