London calling.
No, not that London.
Not sirens, buses, crowds
and a Pret on every corner.
This London.
Fields.
Woods.
Ponds.
A church tower rising over a village green.
Horses once thundering across open ground.
And silence –
real silence –
broken only by birdsong and the crunch of your boots.
Welcome to Enfield.
London’s most northerly borough.
And the starting line of something quietly astonishing.
Because this is where
The Ultimate London Walk begins.
At Hadley Wood Underground Station.
One foot in London.
One foot in Hertfordshire.
A frontier post.
A threshold.
A place where you step off the Tube and –
quite literally –
step out of the city.
And before you do anything else…
You fortify.
Right there, by the station, is Limes Cafe.
And it is a gem.
Green frontage.
Brass fittings.
Hanging baskets doing their thing.
A place that says,
quietly but confidently,
you’re not in central London anymore.
Coffee.
Breakfast.
A bit of anticipation in the air.
Because what’s about to happen is this.
You set off…
And within minutes
London disappears.
Gone.
You dip down into the Broadgate meadows.
Green Belt country.
Proper countryside.
A mosaic of habitats,
as the planners say.
Which is a rather clinical way of saying it’s beautiful.
Pasture.
Open ground.
Space to breathe.
And then you’re into the woods.
Hadley Woods.
Real woodland.
Not a park pretending to be one. This is the genuine article.
Trees closing in.
Light filtering through.
That smell of earth and leaf and time.
And here’s the thing.
You forget.
You genuinely forget you’re in London.
Not metaphorically.
Not poetically.
You actually forget.
Then you emerge.
And what greets you is almost absurd.
Monken Hadley.
A village.
A proper village.
Green.
Pond.
Houses clustered as if they’ve always been there.
Which, of course, they have.
And presiding over it,
like something out of a Constable painting,
the tower of St Mary’s Church Monken Hadley.
You stand there and you think, hang on.
This is Greater London?
Yes.
Really.
And it gets better.
Because the houses around the green –
these aren’t throwaway bits of suburbia.
These are serious houses. Generations of well-to-do living. Centuries of it.
London money, yes,
but London money that wanted air,
space,
a bit of remove.
And then the history starts to stir.
This was coaching country.
The Great North Road nearby. Horses changed here.
Travellers stopping,
moving on.
A rhythm of movement that long predates the Tube line you arrived on.
And then…
The view.
You climb.
Through a field.
Grass underfoot.
Sky opening up.
And you reach a vantage point.
And there it is.
London.
Far off.
On the horizon.
A distant suggestion.
A shimmer of skyline perhaps twenty miles away.
You’ve walked into the country…
And yet the greatest city on earth is still,
just,
within sight.
It’s a moment.
One of those moments that quietly rearranges your mental map.
Because London isn’t what you thought it was.
Not just.
Not only.
And then the land falls away.
Down towards High Barnet.
And you’re walking across ground that once hosted the great Barnet horse fairs.
Romany and traveller families. Buying,
selling,
racing.
A whole world now vanished,
but not quite gone. You can feel it if you know how to look.
And all the while,
this refrain:
This is London.
This is London.
This is London.
And if you widen the lens just a little,
Enfield keeps giving.
There’s Enfield Chase –
once a royal hunting ground. Henry VIII’s stamping ground. Vast,
untamed,
now still surprisingly wild in parts.
There’s Trent Park –
lakes,
woods,
rolling ground,
and echoes of wartime secrets.
There’s the New River –
over 400 years old,
quietly threading fresh water into the capital.
There’s Whitewebbs
Museum of Transport –
a delightful oddity,
full of mechanical ghosts.
And, wonderfully,
Enfield can even claim the world’s first cash machine.
Yes.
Really.
Installed in 1967.
Reg Varney of On the Buses fame the first to use it.
Only in London do you get that sort of juxtaposition.
But these are,
as promised, decorations on the tree.
The tree itself is the walk.
Because what you’re being offered here is something almost nobody realises exists.
A country walk.
In London.
Off-road.
Green.
Spacious.
Restorative.
A beginning that feels like an escape.
And yet is,
in truth,
a revelation.
This is London as you’ve never seen it.
Didn’t know it could be.
Perhaps didn’t quite believe existed.
Until now.
London calling.
London Walks connecting.
Yes, this, too – this walk in the country, is London.
And for sure, this is London Walks. Spreading its wings.
Streets ahead.
And not just streets ahead. Precious few streets for that matter.
Mostly fields, and woods, and streams and village greens and ponds.
And this… is where the adventure begins.
As for tomorrow, April 5th, Easter Sunday, it begins here. With a little mention of the face card we’ll be playing. It’s the Oscar Wilde card.
See you tomorrow.