London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks. Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
You got it. Here’s your daily London fix.
What have we got today?
You know those Japanese restaurants where little plates of sushi come gliding past on a conveyor belt?
Well, imagine one of those. Only everything on it is London.
A poet. A palace. A scandal. A secret passage.
Ooh, I’ll have that.
And look what’s stopped in front of us today, October 20th.
Enfield.
Don’t let it go past. There’s a lot more on that plate than you think.
Imagine setting out from a railway station with the whole of London ahead of you.
Not a morning’s shopping. Not a couple of stops on the Underground.
The whole city.
You’re going to walk across it.
From the Hertfordshire border in the north to the Surrey Downs in the south.
Fourteen walks. Forty-two miles. London, end to end.
Well, that’s what Charlie and his London Walkers did this autumn. Our London Camino. The Ultimate London Walk.
And before that splendid undertaking disappears too far into the rear-view mirror, we’re going to do a little travelling of our own. Borough by borough. Getting acquainted with the places they walked through.
We’ve already done Croydon, down at the southern end.
Today, October 20th, we’re going back to the beginning.
Hadley Wood station.
About eleven miles north of Charing Cross.
And the borough where our walkers assembled, where the adventure began?
Enfield.
Now, be honest. What comes into your head when I say Enfield?
A rifle, perhaps.
A name glimpsed through a train window.
Somewhere up there. North London. Beyond your usual stamping ground.
Well, pull up a chair. Because “somewhere up there” has a few things to tell you.
For a start, it’s London’s northernmost borough. London with Hertfordshire looking over the garden fence.
And up in its northwestern reaches, London does something rather wonderful.
It loosens its collar.
The buildings thin out. There are woods. Fields. Big skies. Places where you can walk and find yourself thinking, hang on, are we still in London?
Yes, we are.
This was hunting country. Enfield Chase.
And let’s get our Word of the Day in early. Because it’s sitting there, waiting for us.
Chase.
We use it for pursuit. Chase a bus. Chase a payment. Chase a dream.
But a chase could also be a place. Land where deer and other animals were preserved for hunting.
The word came into English from French, from a verb meaning to hunt.
And here’s the lovely thing. “Chase” and “catch” are linguistic relatives. Different versions of the same ancestral word, arriving by different routes through French.
You chase it.
You catch it.
The words have been running together for centuries.
And suddenly Enfield Chase becomes something you can hear. Hooves. Hounds. A hunting horn. Something crashing away through the undergrowth.
Even Southgate, another part of the borough, carries a little scrap of that landscape in its name.
The southern gate into the hunting ground.
A place name can be a tiny time machine. We say it without thinking. Then somebody turns the key, and a gate swings open.
Now, the modern borough is much younger than all this. It dates from 1965, when Enfield, Edmonton and Southgate were brought together.
Three old boroughs under one municipal roof.
And it’s a big mistake to imagine that the result is all leafy lanes and prosperous houses tucked behind hedges.
Go east, towards the Lea Valley, and the story changes.
Water. Workshops. Machinery. Factory gates.
Enfield helped arm Britain.
At Enfield Lock stood the Royal Small Arms Factory. It began producing arms there in 1816 and remained in operation until 1988.
More than a century and a half of making things designed to kill people.
And that rifle you may have thought of when I said Enfield?
The Lee-Enfield.
Lee was a man. James Paris Lee, the designer. Enfield was the place.
A person and a patch of London joined together in a name that travelled around the world.
Carried by soldiers. Taken into battle. Used in both world wars.
It’s a sobering thought. A London place name could be familiar to somebody thousands of miles away who had never seen London and never would.
They knew it because of the weapon in their hands.
Parts of the old factory survive. The machine shop. The clock tower. Much of the site has become housing.
Domestic life where the machinery once thundered.
But Enfield’s machinery didn’t only deliver bullets.
It also delivered ten-pound notes.
And for this we need to go to Enfield town centre. To Barclays Bank. To June 27th, 1967.
There’s a little crowd.
There’s the actor Reg Varney, later familiar to millions from On the Buses.
And there’s a machine in the wall.
The world’s first cash machine.
Here. In Enfield.
Think how extraordinary that must have seemed. The bank could shut its doors, the staff could go home, and you could still get your money.
Money from a wall.
The original contraption didn’t take the plastic card we became used to. You fed it a special paper voucher. There was a PIN. And out came your ten pounds.
Now, ten pounds in 1967 was worth making a fuss about.
But it was the idea that mattered.
A little opening in a bank wall. An enormous opening in the way we lived.
And I do rather like the fact that this particular piece of the future arrived in Enfield, with Reg Varney on hand to give it a try.
Not everything has to make its entrance down a red carpet in the West End.
Now, let’s turn the volume down.
Put away the rifle. Pocket the tenner.
There’s a schoolboy I’d like you to meet.
John Keats.
Yes, yesterday’s literary company is following us north.
Keats went to school in Enfield. John Clarke’s school. And the headmaster’s son, Charles Cowden Clarke, became his friend and an important encouragement to his reading.
Before the famous poems, before the Hampstead house, before Rome, there was a boy at school in Enfield.
That’s one of the pleasures of looking at London borough by borough. You find the early chapters.
The person before the portrait.
The poet before anybody knew he was a poet.
And elsewhere in the borough, in Edmonton, Charles and Mary Lamb lived together in a cottage that still survives.
Brother and sister. The authors of Tales from Shakespeare.
So there’s another Enfield for you. Books open. Pages turning. Literary lives unfolding a long way from the places where we usually go looking for them.
But I’ve saved a particularly good door until near the end.
Trent Park.
A country house in all that green.
During the Second World War, captured German generals were held there in considerable comfort.
And comfort was part of the operation.
Let them settle in. Let them read. Let them stroll. Let them talk.
Especially let them talk.
Because the house was bugged.
Microphones were concealed in its fittings and furnishings. Even garden benches could betray a conversation.
Down in the basement, secret listeners were at work. Many were German-speaking Jewish refugees who had escaped Nazi persecution.
Now they were listening to German officers who thought they could speak freely.
Imagine the concentration that work required. The headphones. The voices. The need to catch a name, understand an allusion, recognise that an apparently casual remark might matter enormously.
Information about weapons. Military operations. Atrocities.
Upstairs, conversation.
Downstairs, intelligence.
There’s a whole podcast in that house. We’ll have to knock on its door again.
But for today, think what we’ve found in a borough that might have drawn a blank a few minutes ago.
Royal hunting country.
A schoolboy Keats.
A rifle known around the world.
A bank wall that changed everyday life.
A country house where the most important people were the ones the guests never saw.
And that’s only a first acquaintance.
Which brings us back to Hadley Wood station.
Charlie. Our walkers. The beginning of the London Camino.
There’s something exhilarating about that moment before a long walk. When the distance is still an idea. When all those places are ahead of you, waiting to become memories.
Forty-two miles of London.
And the first borough has already given us this much.
Good thing they brought their walking shoes.
See you tomorrow.