The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [112]
The path itself has a slightly different profile to most other long-distance routes. For starters, the people walking it are generally younger than you’ll find elsewhere, especially in London, where the largest slice of the demographic is 25–34-year-olds. They also feel unable to put a foot into a boot without tweeting and blogging about it, uploading their photos of every boat, bridge and bar on to Facebook and/or bespoke websites especially created for The Project. It always is The Project. They make it sound as if they’re hoping to crack the Enigma code or solve the Middle East problem, rather than take a gentle, flattish stroll through southern England. And not even that, for many of them. Terrified of the lands beyond Zone 6, they’re only doing the stretch from Hampton Court to the Thames Barrier, but boy, do we hear about every inch of the way. And see it photographed. Videoed too, if we’re lucky. And measured. And mapped; interactively, of course. Looking at all that is more exhausting than doing the bloody walk. Takes longer too.
I take the mick, but I adore walking in London. As a student there in the late eighties, I’d often roll home on foot from a night’s excess in the West End, past the pimps and dealers of King’s Cross, the goths of Camden, through the kebab alleys of Kentish Town, and the au pair avenues of Hampstead and Highgate. These were the occasions when I most felt part of the city, one tiny cog in a gargantuan, greasy machine that never stopped roaring. The drunkenness helped, I think, blurring the harsh edges of daytime into impressionistic splashes of neon and reflections in puddles. With the collars of my leather jacket turned up against the cold, I shimmied through, feeling like Morrissey, but probably looking more like a walking Soft Cell album cover.
These days, my London walks are a little less dissolute. One of the best lately was from the Tower of London to Hyde Park Corner, via some of the many lovely eighteenth-century churches and old alleyways of the City, and the gluttonous boulevards of the West End. It was hearing my excitement about this walk that made my partner agree to accompany me on the Thames Path from the Barrier for what was planned to be a full day’s romantic promenade into central London. We landed on the north side of the river, in order to take a look at the Thames Barrier Park, and then realised that we had to cross the water to reach the path. The nearest option was walking up to catch the Woolwich Ferry, a treat I’d long been keen to sample. I can’t say he looked too excited by the prospect, and the flyblown streets of Silvertown, its derelict railway and the belching silos of the Tate & Lyle plant didn’t much help, but the rust-bucket ferry across the river was fun, and Woolwich looked interesting. Until we docked, anyway.
I’d promised him breakfast, and pulled out all the stops by getting us a bacon bap from a caravan in a car park. It was enough to send us on our way to North Greenwich and the Millennium Dome. This is another place I’d never been to, and it both fascinated and horrified me. I felt as if we’d been shrunk, like Raquel Welch in Fantastic Voyage, though instead of being pumped into a scientist’s arteries, we’d been dropped into an architect’s model. And one that they’d given up on half-way through, by the looks of things.
The Dome, that cathedral of political hubris, might well have been rescued and reborn as the O2 Arena, but it was still looking mighty tatty, with stains leeching down its sides and acres of redevelopment debris surrounding it. That’s all to change, though, at least according to the massive hoardings everywhere advertising this as yet another brand-new waterside quarter of London. The images were all of glossy