Of all the things I’ve done in the nearly five years (five years!) since my last period of posting on here, there was one in particular where I felt like what I was doing was somewhat pointless without having a place to blog about it. Well, now I do again. To be fair, it was still somewhat pointless.
The context for this was that I had a day to myself in London, and didn’t want to spoil the rest of the weekend by doing things my travelling companion might want to do.1 So he wouldn’t have FOMO, I decided to pick something I knew he wouldn’t want to do, with the added benefit of involving a lot of time spent on public transport.
I decided to get a selfie with the “welcome” sign for all 32 London boroughs, plus the City of London. In a day.
This was a bad idea on a number of counts. For a start, it wasn’t achievable in a day. Maybe if I’d had a whole transport day, sure—you can get to every Tube station in that time, and for my thing you barely need to leave inner London—but I started at ten and needed to be done by about five, so I should have seen it was a non-starter. Suffice it to say it would take me more than a day. How long? And did I manage it at all? Ah, spoilers, I’m afraid.
I did identify that the best way to do this in a day was to go in a loop around London. The problem with this is that London isn’t really a disc, in transport terms: it’s more of a Pac-Man, with the Thames gobbling up the pellets and the occasional ghost.2 So I decided to start on the southern side of the river: specifically, in the London Borough of Bexley. I think this might have been an excuse to ride on the then still-nearly-new Crossrail; Abbey Wood is the only TfL station of any kind in the borough, and even then you cross the Bexley–Greenwich border as soon as you descend from the ticket hall to the platforms. Assuming you count the trams as a kind of railway, Bexley is the only borough that doesn’t even get part-credit.
What I soon discovered, alas, was that for the challenge I’d set myself it’s not enough just to go to a border. You have to go to a point on the border that the council has deemed important enough to put a sign at. Abbey Wood is not such a point.3
I looked at a map of London boroughs that I found online, and found a big road (Woolwich Road) that seemed to cross the boundary, so I thought I’d give that a go. That also gave me an excuse to walk through Lesnes Abbey,4 a picturesque ruin whose existence was bookended by two Thomases: it was founded in 1178 as penance for the murder of Becket, and closed in 1525 by Wolsey (in a precursor to the main Dissolution of the Monasteries).
I reached the main road, now somewhat concerned about how much time it was taking to get even one sign, but relieved that I would at least get two now, one on each side. Well, er, no. It turned out that there was a very good reason why neither council marked the boundary on that road, because the boundary wasn’t on that road. I realised something was up when I noticed the map showing the border slicing wantonly through buildings; eventually, I realised that the map was designed to be viewed on a scale where you could see all of London, meaning it was only approximate when you zoomed in.
No matter, the actual border wasn’t far away, and I got my first sign: welcome to the Royal Borough of Greenwich, at the top of Bostall Hill.
I turned around to get the Bexley sign, but this was yet another lesson learned: the councils don’t have to agree on which boundaries are important enough to mark. For Greenwich, Bostall Hill was in. For Bexley, Woolwich Road was out.
This was the beginning of a sort of desperation. Earlier in the walk, I had vaguely contemplated switching to a picture of a branded wheelie bin in each borough, even taking a backup Bexley picture. I quickly decided that that was a rubbish idea.5 Instead, I decided to trek down to the next plausible point for a sign, which was far into the TfL desert that is Bexley. Via an area with too many near-identical houses, and not remotely enough beverage-selling shops.
Oh, did I mention that it was blazing hot that day?
I trudged through what the internet tells me is “Clam Field recreation ground”, which I haven’t taken any pictures of. As far as I recall it was a featureless grass field, and my search online is not doing anything to contradict that impression. (The only post I could find online about it was, of course, by the inimitable Diamond Geezer.6) All I remember is that I had a choice between taking a longer walk along more-formal paths, or cutting through some long grass despite wearing shorts. I took the shortcut to try and get somewhere, anywhere, else as quickly as possible, but ended up checking my legs repeatedly for ticks as I went. It was a fun time.
At the foot of Lodge Hill I was, at long last, welcomed to Bexley.
I identified the next plausible spot as the area around Crystal Palace. Five boroughs converge there—Southwark, Lewisham, Bromley, Croydon and Lambeth, to be precise—so I was pretty confident of upping my total to seven. Can you see the flaw in the plan, dear reader? Well, yes, you can, but that wasn’t even the first problem. See, to get to that area I needed to go west. And that’s fine, because although there aren’t any TfL lines, there are some lovely railways that run in just that direction. Indeed, I thought that being in the south would make this easier: the north has more Tube lines, but they tend to run in and out of central London, not orbitally as I wanted.
And it would have, except that every single one of them was down. So there was only one thing for it.
I’d have to get a bus.
To be continued…
London borough count: 2/33
- It seems this was the generic description I used to use on here, but in this case a more accurate descriptor might be something like “husband”. ↩︎
- Some say that, if you drop a bunch of cherries off the pier at Woolwich and listen very closely, you can hear a faint “waka-waka” drifting across the water. ↩︎
- I think the transport fun fact should definitely qualify it, but alas. ↩︎
- I decided that this had to be pronounced “lane”, or something stupid like that, but this is a rare example where it is pronounced roughly as it looks: “LESS-niss”. ↩︎
- This is the quality humour you’ve been missing over the last half-decade. ↩︎
- I say “inimitable” as if this blog hasn’t always been a giant attempt at imitation. ↩︎
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