A long walk

I was staying in Buxton in The Peak District recently and before setting off had marvellous dreams of days walking up undulating peaks and standing, windswept and interesting, gazing at the view.

Sadly the days were eaten up with sensible things like a visit to Chatsworth House, and spending time with godsons, so the furthest I got was a walk around Buxton’s beautiful parks.

When I returned to South London I resolved to complete a long walk anyway, and started to think about the walk that I had undertaken from my front door to Central London a few years ago. I was shocked to discover that a few years was actually nine, so decided to try to repeat it on a quiet Friday lunchtime.

The route is one of the least picturesque that it is possible to take, but directness is a requirement. I walked for half an hour through urban Croydon to get to the main road heading north, and then continued northwards, with a few diversions, until I reached the Oval Cricket Ground in Kennington.

The route takes me through Norwood, across Beulah Hill, straight through Brixton and ends at the Thames by Lambeth Palace, home of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The first thing to note is not a revelation at all. In South London, people like fried chicken. I did not count the number of chicken shops on my way, but think that there could be mileage in research to discover how many US States and cities have been appropriated, following Kentucky, to name them.

They are as ubiquitous as ale houses must have been a century ago.

The second thing I realised, which is something that is now firmly entrenched in life as to not be noticed by most people, is that I was the only person who was not looking at a mobile phone all the time. Everywhere I looked, people were staring down instead of looking up. Hardly anyone pays attention to his or her surroundings.

I thought for a while as I walked about the experience of approaching London in this way a hundred, and two hundred years ago. The main geographical obstacle is Norwood Hill, from which you get a first good view of the capital. It is no longer dominated, as it had been for three hundred years, by church spires. In fact, at St Luke’s West Norwood the church comes into view, and behind it, miles away and many times higher, now looms the city.

The experience of navigating from one church spire to another might be something from fiction, an Austen-like creation. However, what is real is how small churches seem today. At the start of the route is the 43-storey monstrosity of Saffron Square, and at the end the huge towers of the city of London.

There are places on interest en route. CamillePissarro painted the area around Norwood from the 1870s when it was a village. He had come to London to escape the Franco-Prussian War. His wife was from Croydon.

 I also unknowingly passed right by the place when the Jules Rimet Trophy (the original Football World Cup) was discovered by a dog called Pickles in 1966.

The villages are gone. From South Croydon, in an unbroken sweep straight to the northern boundaries, one conurbation stretches punctuated only by the name changes of the boroughs and the occasional park. Sometimes an area is poor, and dominated by bookmakers and budget supermarkets; and from time to time is gentrified and marked by expensive looking barbers and bjiou second-hand shops.

Brixton is the last clearly defined town and has retained some of the venues that make it distinct. It still has a proper cinema that is not part of a multinational corporation, and a thriving market. Music venues continue to draw in culture and free thinkers. It still has edge.

It peters out to the north and becomes just another magnet to wealthy developers, and rich young people looking for somewhere with an exotic postcode and identity.

And then it all changes. The roads get busier, the atmosphere begins to feel like that of a major city, and quite suddenly there is a sense of how people are drawn towards the centre, and how they always have been. The Dick Whittington idea persists, as the national centre for nearly everything is London. Having been in Manchester two days previously, it was an interesting contrast. Manchester strives to appear large (which it is), and important. London has no need.

I continued my walk along from Lambeth Palace and met family for a meal that evening on South Bank. In total, I had only walked twelve miles. It is a distance that a long-distance walker of the past would not have even felt, and yet my feet ached and I was glad to sit down. I pondered how people walk all the way to Rome, or from John O’Groats to Land’s End. I would struggle.

A conclusion of sorts is that I should walk further and more often. Too often we whistle past in cars, and hardly stop to look. Too often we never even look up from Candy Crush.