London calling.
London Calling again.
Yes, two for the price of one today.
Another bonus podcast.
Anyway, yes, London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead. Story time.
History time.
Picture this if you can. Well over half of London is a hayfield.
I don’t know if the regular figures help.
London’s over 600 square miles. That’s slightly bigger than bigger than the Hawaian island of Oahu. Or about half the size of Rhode Island. Or if you prefer, two Nantuckets.
Now acreage is trickier. But acreage is where we have to go. London’s coming up to 400,000 acres.
Now I’d like you to imagine well over 50 percent of that old familiar London being a hay field.
That’d be all of south London and all of Zone 2 north of the Thames.
Quite a big chunk of London.
ok, here it comes. London was a horsy old town 150 years. It will have smelt like Tombstone and Dodge City and Deadwood and Abilene. Actually considerably worse.
There were about 300,000 horses in London. The horse is an extremely efficient manufacturer of horse manure.
Raw material in, finished product out. Hay in. Horse manure out.
How much hay? An average sized horses needs upwards of 3 tons of hay a year to survive.
A hayfield produces about 4 tons per acre.
Well, you can do the math. 300,000 horses. That’s over a million tons of hay a year to keep Dobbin happy and healthy.
At 4 tons an acre to get a million tons of hay a year you need a 250,000 acre hayfield.
As I said,, that’s all of south London and all of Zone 2 north of the river. That’s a lot of hayfield. And a lot less London.
And those are some of the thoughts you’re entertaining when you’re walking through those large hayfields and pastures that are part of the London undreamt of in your wildest imaginings.
Up at the start of Charlie’s Great London Walk – right across London – Hertfordshire to the Surrey Downs. 42 miles. In 14 sections. 14 walks.
Which as i’ve banged on a bit about here, starts this Saturday. The first day – the first two walks in the sequence. Up in Hertfordshire. In farmers’ fields and pastures and hayfields. And through woods. And over bridges over burbling streams. Burbling happily overhead, lots of birds. Well, you get the idea.
And you’re pinching yourself all the time. This is London? This can’t be London. But it is London. I’m in the countryside. But I’m in London.
And then, I suppose it’s about halfway through that walk, you stroll up that grassy slope. You want to put a name to it, it’s Hadley Green – it couldn’t be more pastoral, right down to the name – it’s Hadley Green you’re shimmering along. Blue sky, fleecy clouds, soft grass underfoot, a pond or two, woods on either side of you and a sea of green. And then you get up top. And there it is. A sea of London. All of it spread out before you.
You feel like stout Cortez. He was staring at the Pacific. You’re staring at the ocean of London. And looking at your fellow walkers with a wild surmise.
You can’t quite believe it. It’s laid out like a map before you. Your eye starts picking out the landmarks. Way off, on the horizon, the glass-and-steel spike cluster of Canary Wharf rises like a mirage.
Those towers – One Canada Square and its neighbours – are usually the giveaway. They catch the light. They gleam. They say, “there’s the East End, there’s the Thames bending its great elbow.”
Pan slightly right and there’s the ghostly outline of the City of London skyline – the Gherkin, the Cheesegrater, the Walkie Talkie. Not always sharp, often a bit atmospheric, like a Turner painting that hasn’t quite made up its mind.
On a clear day, there’s St Paul’s. Faintly visible. If Canary Wharf is a trumpet blast on the horizon, St Paul’s is a whisper.
And let’s not forget closer in.
The patchwork – North London suburbia. Roofs, trees, church spires pricking up like punctuation marks. It’s the slow transition zone: countryside to metropolis, field to street, sheep to suburb.
And then there’s the history under your feet. This isn’t just any patch of green. This is the edge of Monken Hadley Common, where in 1471 the Battle of Barnet was fought in thick fog. Armies blundering about in the murk, not unlike you on a bad-visibility day trying to pick out Canary Wharf.
You want it in one, that walk’s worth going on just for that view. And hey the rest of the table is, as I’ve already indicated, groaning: with streams and ponds and cottages and pasture and hay fields and woods and village greens and with, well, the sentiment bears repeating, groaning, orgasmicing with a London undreamt of in your wildest imaginings.
On that note, see you tomorrow.
And if you nee