Three walks through London
And the benefits of travelling on foot.
“I love walking in London”, said Mrs Dollaway, “Really it’s better than walking in the country” — Virginia Woolf.
I’ve been walking a lot lately — both for pleasure and for the purpose of getting places. It started about a month ago when Roisin (co-mother to our shared pooch, Lottie) suggested I meet her at Victoria station one evening and walk ourselves and Lottie back to Tooting.
The journey skirted us along the edge of Chelsea — which was dappled with light shining through the plane trees — across the river and into Battersea Park. It was green and lush and full of people enjoying the small sliver of good weather we had in May, and we stopped at the Pear Tree for kombucha and my first ice cream of the journey.
As we left the park, we ran into my school friend Emily who I hadn’t seen in exactly a year and would be seeing the following day at a birthday. Then, we carried on past my first-ever office next to Queenstown Road Station and up the street I used to cycle every day to work. We walked through Clapham Common, came out at Clapham South, and when we got to Balham I bought my second ice cream — a scoop of The Best Chocolate Ever from Jefferson’s. Highly recommend, it really is the best — which I ate on the last leg of the journey back to my door.
My second long walk happened out of sheer convenience and timing. I was meeting a client at the White Horse in Parson’s Green at 3 pm on a Friday afternoon, then having dinner at Margaux’s place around 7 in Maida Vale. Rather than schlep back to mine after the meeting and back out again later on, I decided that from the pub, I would wander north towards Margaux’s. It would take just shy of 2 hours, Lottie would get some exercise under her belt, and I could admire the sites of west and northwest London — an area I so rarely visit.
From Fulham, full to the brim with hot mums, I walked through Earl’s Court, a little blown away by the old brick mansions and the private squares. I always forget that Earl’s Court even exists, and when I do think of it, it sits firmly associated with an older generation of Aussies who, when they “lived in London in the 80s” seemed to all live in this one little area. A bit like the Clapham of the late 2010s and the Angel of right now.
I reached South Kensington as school was finishing and executive butlers opened Land Rover doors and carried tennis rackets for children whose perception of reality must be slightly skewed. By this point, the sky was close, but the air was warm, and as I walked into Hyde Park the grey clouds did something to the green of the grass and the trees — it was the deepest, lushest green that is only really possible when you get as much rain as we had last month. Hyde Park is London’s most famous, and strolling through it, I was reminded of a walk I’d taken with my stepbrother, Matt, when he was visiting in February and a summer afternoon spent crocheting and eating sandwiches under a tree with my friend Emma.
I exited the park at Lancaster Gate and came to a few streets that were a little dishevelled compared to the rest. White townhouses that had once been bright and shiny were now dingy little hotels with chipping paint and a deep sense of nostalgia. But once I crossed the canal into Maida Vale, the polish picked up again and I bought a bottle of champagne from The Winery on Clifton Road. I arrived at Margaux’s ahead of our respective men, meaning that we could pop the bottle and catch up just the two of us before they arrived. Lottie was exhausted and very glad that I had brought her some biscuits to eat before she promptly made herself at home in the garlic bush for the rest of the evening.
This final walk was last week. On Friday morning, I woke up feeling like a slug. Slow, heavy, weighed down by the onset of my period. Not that slugs have those, as far as I know, but I’m sure they feel slow and heavy.
I had a bit of work to do in the morning, but as I ate my lunch I decided it was time to clock off for the week and felt incredibly grateful that I could just do that without asking anyone’s permission.
I got the tube to Leicester Square where I walked up to Foyles to buy some birthday presents (I won’t say what I got because the recipients haven’t received them yet), then through Soho, across Picadilly Circus, and onto the bottom end of Regent’s Street where I bought some bath salts from Earl of East.
I also visited Hatchards — a very old, very classic London bookshop that I had never been to or even heard of until embarrassingly recently. The window display was a delight, all set up in a garden theme, and inside it felt like the kind of place where Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford might come for a browse. I got a copy of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show — apparently one of “the great under-read British novelists of the twentieth century.” Right next door was Fortnum and Mason, which I had also never visited. I popped in, mainly to use the loo but also for a quick look around and was delighted to find my friend Veronique’s pressed flowers and my other friend Izzy’s ceramics for sale.
That whole area around Picadilly is excruciatingly touristy, but it really redeems itself with its architecture. Raise your eyes above street level and the buildings paint such a clear picture of its history. Cities — especially old ones like London — can be such distinct, physical incarnations of all the pasts and stories and lives that have been built and re-built over the years, all culminating in what is there right now, in front of our eyes and under our feet and over our heads.
I didn’t have much of a plan from there, so I figured I would start the slow journey back through Soho, Seven Dials, Neal’s Yard for a matcha and a sit down, before making my way through Bloomsbury.
“Where does Bloomsbury end? What is Bloomsbury?” A couple of very good questions asked by Virginia Woolf in a 1922 talk she gave to her friends in their Memoir Club.
I’ve honestly never fully understood where the boundaries of Bloomsbury lie, despite having worked there for 6 months in 2022, but I do always appreciate its history as home to the Bloomsbury set. Reading through Lauren Elkin’s book Flaneuse: Women Walk the City, trying to get some inspiration for an angle on this newsletter, I discovered that Woolf lived in the area until just before her death. In fact, her home was on the plot that is now home to the Tavistock Hotel where I once stayed when I was 17 doing a revision course ahead of my final exams.
“It was a district that sustained her and inspired her and kept her pen in ink,” says Elkin, and I’m pleased that the same place that kept ink of the pens of Woolf and Elkin alike, today gives me something to write about too.
After a stroll down Lamb’s Conduit Street past Noble Rot where I discovered they do a £22 lunch deal which I will most certainly be taking advantage of, I walked a little further to Quality Wines, where I met Linsey for dinner.
We started with a glass of Alsatian wine and a Gilda each. A plate of fromage — aged comte, blue, goat’s — and some chewy, oily, perfect focaccia. We shared white asparagus with sorrel and, I want to say, a walnut sauce, and Dorset crab with charred shishito peppers. Dessert was a canollo each — the pastry was fried in pig fat (!!!) and filled with pistachio cream.
After dinner, it was still light and warm, so I decided to walk some more — down Farringdon Road, across Fleet Street, over the river on Blackfriars Bridge where Andy and I once drunkenly fell off our bikes and I thought I had broken my elbow (I hadn’t), and down onto the walkway by the river. There, the path took me around Tate Modern which was pulsing with music, and along to Borough Underground where I finally got the tube back to my neck of the woods.
There are days when London feels utterly overwhelming. The sheer scale of it means that getting from one end to the other and then home again can feel like embarking on a journey to the ends of the earth. But in a city that can feel so big, so overwhelming, so unwieldy, walking through it is a reminder that everything is connected.
You realise that taking the tube, as handy as it is, is like stepping into a black hole or travelling with a blindfold on. Not only do you miss the view and the chance to orient yourself, but you also miss out on revisiting moments and memories from when your life’s path took you through those very same spots at very different times. A concept that reminds me a lot of this drawing by John Berger that I love and have used before.
For the first newsletter I ever sent out, I wrote about getting to know the names of the trees in your local area as a way of connecting to it and putting down roots. And I think what I am trying to do with this one is much the same.
Walking around a big wild city, joining the dots, and crucially, taking my time rather than zooming through it or under it without watching where I’m going, has made me even fonder of this place that I didn’t think I could love any more than I already did.
It makes me feel like I know the way, like I can’t get lost, and that I really am at home here.
See you in the next one,
Annabel
Excellent !!
I adored this! Thank you for so vividly transporting me back to the london I know and love and miss so much !