Weekday walk #7

We headed to Epping Forest yesterday for our weekday walk.  We wanted something local, and a little shorter than usual.  We also hoped we might see the very first bright green buds and leaves on the trees.

We met up at Queen Elizabeth's Hunting Lodge in the Chingford part of the forest, and after changing into our walking boots and unfolding and re-folding our OS maps for about ten minutes we headed for the trees.  You really do need walking boots in Epping Forest at this time of year - the ground is very muddy in places, and churned up by mountain bikes and horses.

Hoof prints along a bridleway in Epping Forest

The sun shone and we yomped along, happily photographing bits of lichen and new buds, and stopping to say hello to the very many dogs and horses who were also out enjoying the fresh air and spring sunshine with their owners.

New growth

Yellow spring lichen

Irresistable pussy willow

Blue skies

We walked through the forest to the Epping Forest Visitor Centre at High Beach, and then back to Queen Elizabeth's Hunting Lodge, which made an easy six mile loop altogether. 

There are some  hills in Epping Forest, which, although very modest really, were still a bit of a shock after our last couple of months of perfectly flat riverside and canalside walks.  I jogged up a long hill at High Beach to get a photo of Gill at the bottom adding some perspective, and my legs could certainly feel it afterwards!

Gill at the bottom of the hill at High Beach

spring is coming!

buds of blossom

new beech leaves

pollarded tree

the tree-man at the Visitor Centre smells a daffodil

I love Epping Forest so much.  I've been coming here for walks ever since I first moved to East London - long ones by myself or shorter ones with the family.  They're all good.  When O got her first camera a few years ago, she spent the whole of a four mile walk along the bridleways photographing horse poo.  G goes for long runs through Epping Forest all through the year - in the winter months, coming home exhilarated and caked in mud.  Next weekend he's running in the infamous Orion 15 race, which includes the section that Gill and I walked yesterday.

Epping Forest is a properly ancient forest going much further back in history than Queen Elizabeth I.  You can still see an iron-age hill camp possibly used by Boudicca, and I'm sure it was around for thousands of years before that.  Among the beeches, holly and the hawthorn there are some enormously solid oak trees that sit placidly watching the walkers, runners, dogs, horses and school children exploring below.

We sat under one to drink our coffee and soak up the spring sunshine.

Wednesday walk #1

Today was the first of what I hope will be many Wednesday Walks with Miss Moss Stitch, around London.

For our inaugural walk we picked a good, long, local yomp that incorporated:

• one of London's finest public parks
• the 2012 Olympic site
• the sewage system of East London
• the Meridian line
• one of Joseph Bazalgette's elaborate, high Victorian municipal buildings
• a dockside airport

We set off from Bethnal Green tube station at 9:30am and the first landmark we came to was Victoria Park.

Victoria Park is one of my favourite London parks, and really it is quite eclectic and delightful.  Today it was very quiet and empty, with just a few gardeners from the council trimming trees and clearing flower beds.  But on a warm sunny afternoon it is full of local people - walking dogs, running, riding bikes, reading the paper, stopping for a fag break, taking their children to the deer enclosure or the playground, sitting at one of the pubs around the edge or strolling along the canal.

We walked around the southern edge of the park to Hackney Wick, where we weaved through a few residential streets and joined the Greenway.

On a dreary winter's day, the Greenway is emphatically not a green way.

A rather grim start to the Greenway at Hackney Wick

It got us off to a very uninspiring start after the pretty landscapes of Victoria Park, but we knew that in less than a mile would be the sight we had based this whole walk around.  The new 2012 Olympic stadium at Stratford.  And when we got there, we were not disappointed.

The main Olympic stadium, Stratford, East London

The footpaths around the Olympic village are starting to be marked out

The Greenway runs right alongside the Olympic stadium

A wet information board, in front of the stadium

Cranes and diggers everywhere. The building in the centre of the picture, with the yellow grandstands, is the Aquatic Centre

Diggers, lorries and bollards outside the Olympic stadium

I took all these pictures from The View Tube - a cafe and Olympic viewing area at Pudding Mill Lane, at the western end of Stratford.  The stadium is very beautiful, but also very difficult to photograph with a little camera on such a grey day.  The inner struts of the stadium are jet black, and the outer struts and the lighting rigs are pure white - it looks dramatic, impressive and inspiring.  Everything it should do.

The Olympic Park as a whole still has the appearance of a construction site, but all the major structures are in fact complete and are now being fitted out.  The beautiful, timber-clad velodrome is my favourite building, but was sadly about the only one we couldn't spot from The View Tube.  The velodrome is on the other side of the Olympic Park, a short walking distance from our house, and it is the venue which I am most excited about using once the games are over.

After we had taken all our photos and admired all the buildings, we carried on along the Greenway towards Stratford and Plaistow.

Old Ford Lock, near Bow

We passed Old Ford Lock (former home of The Big Breakfast on Channel 4 - remember that?) and then discovered that we were crossing the Meridian Line, just a few miles north of its Greenwich home.

One foot east, one foot west

The Greenway is an elevated walkway, because it is actually built right on top of East London's sewage pipes! That sounds appalling, but for most of the time you forget - the pipes are buried deep underground, and you are too busy enjoying the contrasting views of modern Olympic buildings and beautiful old Victorian warehouses. But every now and then there are reminders of the municipal pipes under your feet.

An old sewage pipe - displayed on top of the Greenway to remind you what lies beneath

And then south of Stratford, close to West Ham station and the Jubilee Line depots, we had our strongest reminder of what we were walking over. The incredibly beautiful and impressive Abbey Mills Pumping Station, and a strong accompanying stench of sewage from the modern water works that lie alongside.

Abbey Mills Pumping Station

The Abbey Mills Pumping Station was built by Joseph Bazalgette in the 1860s as part of his practical but ambitious solution to London's grim sewage problems (I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in finding out more about this most Victorian and intriguing of civil engineering projects). Today his pumping station is a rather unloved, but nevertheless listed, building, with a modern sewage works tucked in behind it (hence the smell). I would have loved to explore the building more closely but sadly it is hidden behind three layers of metal fencing. Gill and I had to stand on tiptoe and stretch as high as we could to take our photos!

Abbey Mills Pumping Station and multiple layers of fencing

Gill, stretching high with her camera

We saw a good sculpture made from more old sewage pipes, that had been given some much needed colour with graffiti.

And then we looked over the bridge to see the Channelsea Creek and the Abbey Creek - both part of the complicated Bow Back River network - gushing past underneath us.

Bow Back Rivers

The very unlovely Channelsea Creek emerging from the bridge

I knew logically that this was river water, not sewage, but the sight of the creekside mud combined with the pungent sewage smell wafting around, still left me a little unnerved.  We picked up our pace, left the smells behind us and continued along the Greenway for a few more miles towards Plaistow and Beckton.  We passed more excellent graffiti as we walked.

Winter-themed graffiti near Newham General Hospital

We ended our walk a few miles further on, overlooking City Airport at the Royal Albert Dock in Beckton. We ate our well-earned sandwiches sitting on a bench on the north side of the dock.  As we ate, we had a fantastic view of all the aeroplanes taking off and landing at the airport across the water.  Next to the airport is the large Tate & Lyle refinery - home of the magnificent Lyle's golden syrup.

Planes at City Airport, with the Tate & Lyle refinery in the background

Twin-prop plane taking off from City Airport

And then we lolloped, really quite slowly, a few hundred yards to the Royal Albert DLR station (we even got the lift up to the elevated station!) and thence back home.

A DLR train pulling into Royal Albert station

We walked just shy of eight miles altogether (actually possibly a little over, as I confidently directed us completely the wrong way in Victoria Park), and my legs know about it this evening!

We both also know there will be more of these Wednesday walks, because there are so many great London walks out there for us to explore.  Today we made use of the excellent Walk London website, and followed all of Section 4 and part of Section 5 of the Jubilee Greenway.  The Jubilee Greenway is a long circular walk around London which is being set up over the next two years and will incorporate all the London Olympic venues and begin and end at Buckingham Palace.  It is being set up to commemorate both the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and the Olympics in 2012.  The East London Greenway existed already, and is being absorbed into the larger Jubilee Greenway over the next year or so.

This was a great start to the new year, and a great start to our Wednesday walks.  Next week we're heading to London's biggest and best map shop to stock up on inspiration, and then we'll be doing a shorter, but more glamorous walk than this week - right through the centre of London from Covent Garden to the City.

If it is packed away tidily, it is not rubbish

I came back from Switzerland with loads of nice maps, exotic-looking train tickets, timetables, brochures and postcards that I had accumulated while I was away.

I didn't need this pile of paper once I was home, but at the same time it was so evocative of our trip that I could not bear to throw it away.  It sat on my desk for a week - a tottering pile of redundant Swiss information.

And after a while I decided that if it all had a nice folder to live in, it could be stored on a shelf and would no longer need to be described as rubbish.  A paper folder might be seen as temporary over time, but surely a custom-made fabric folder would attach some kind of posterity to these souvenirs?

So this week I made myself a folder to store all these sentimental bits of information in.

There are two large pockets (18cm by 18cm) for postcards, timetables and maps.  And there is one smaller pocket (10cm by 10cm) for train and bus tickets.  The pockets are all lined, and have thick interfacing in them as well so that they stay nice and stiff and do not sag under the weight of the paper. 

I sewed the pockets onto a rectangle of quilting weight cotton (46cm by 30cm).  Then I cut a matching rectangle of leftover quilt wadding and final rectangle of quilting cotton and made a quilt sandwich with them.  I sewed through all the layers along the spine of the folder and then enclosed all the raw edges with binding.  To stop the folder from falling open I added velcro tabs to each corner.

For the front I knew I wanted a label.  I started embroidering Switzerland and the date onto some scrap calico, and then realised I would have to embroider a flag as well.  The Swiss love their flags as the Americans do, and Swiss flags were fluttering from almost every shop, restaurant and house that we saw.  Happily the Swiss flag is much easier to embroider than the American one.

The Swiss use a great deal of black in their designs and crafting so I added a black flourish in as well.  I stitched the label onto the front of the folder, and then added underneath a very short length of some Swiss ribbon that I had brought back with me.  I love this ribbon and how it uses such typical Swiss colours and Alpine flowers.  They use this ribbon on all kinds of traditional clothes, as well as bags, dog leads and cow bell harnesses.  I even saw a bicycle saddle decorated with it.

So the folder is done, and now sits on my shelves making me feel very organised in a Swiss sort of way.  And whenever I want to reminisce about some of the walks we did, I now know exactly where to find that map.

  

Maps

I do love maps.  I don't have a SatNav in my car because I am so wedded to my gorgeous A-Zs of London and the Collins Road Atlas of Britain.  Physical maps and atlases are so much nicer to pore over, and dream from, than flat screens.  Not least because you can do such dreaming in a comfy armchair, accompanied by a cup of tea and a bar of Green & Blacks.  I am like this when I visit a place as well; I'd much rather have a guide book than internet access.  I'm not usually such a luddite, but with maps and travel guides I think I always will be.

At the moment these lovelies are on my reading pile, as I plan a European trip with the children over the long summer holidays.  This year might be the only time I have the entire six-week school holidays off with them, so I am going to make the most of it and do some travelling that I've never been able to do before. 

Switzerland is definitely on the itinerary, as is France.  And I am also drawn to those little, tiny countries that I only know about from general knowledge quizzes: Andorra, Lichtenstein and Luxembourg.

Really, I'm almost as excited about our trip as this Michelin man - surfing his way across central Europe!

The only bit of online assistance I've had has been Mappy - an excellent European wide route planner, very similar to the one the AA does for the UK.  I love how it calculates the cost of your trip for you - petrol and tolls.

And in other map-related love, I am very excited about the free exhibition, Magnificent Maps, which is on at the British Library from now until the middle of September.  When I've finished going through my own stack of maps and guidebooks, I shall be paying it a visit.  And I bet there isn't a TomTom or Garmin anywhere to be seen.

Mad about maps

I love maps, and I have collected many over the years. A few are to keep, because I love them, but most are to use.
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Today, I've started gathering maps of Snowdonia and the Lake District together, for our holiday next week. Some we've had for years - fished out of the car's door pockets and assorted bookshelves. Some are new - neatly folded and sent in double quick time earlier this week by good old Amazon.

My favourite maps-to-use are those from the Ordnance Survey Explorer Active range. They show everything you need for outdoor activities: cycle hire, marked walking, cycling and horse riding trails, car parks ... and pubs. Unfolding a map, tracing with my finger the paths I might walk, fills my head with exciting possibilities and plans. Shall I take the cliff path along to the lifeboat station and end up at the pub in town? Or shall I walk up to the ridge, take some photos and then spend the afternoon winding back down to the village through the forest? Planning day long walks with a pile of maps by my side is one of my all time favourite things to do. Now I want to go and find out what that "Fish Ladder" in the map below is all about!


Sometimes, especially with small children in tow, I want to walk more of a tried and tested route - but still feel as though I am a rugged explorer finding my way through the wilderness with a map. For this, the Jarrold pathfinder guides are perfect.


The Jarrold guides have walks of varying lengths and difficulty, and contain excerpts from Ordnance Survey maps as well as photos of key points along the walk - maybe a view, a monument, or the gate where you must turn back on yourself and head up hill.

And this summer, I have two new discoveries that will add so much to our walks and exploration.

Firstly, a whole load of books for C and O from the Usborne Spotters Guides series.


As well as this Night Sky guide (which I think will be a hit during the first week of our holiday, when we are camping) I also have the wild flowers, trees, butterflies and ponds and lakes books. Having something to look for is my second favourite way of keeping children motivated and not moaning on a long walk (my top method is bribing them with toffees).

And finally there is a treat for me. This book by Hunter Davies which has introduced me to the wonderful world of Wainwright.

Before this week, I had vaguely heard of Wainwright and knew that he had written walking guides to the Lake District, but no more. This book has explained to me why he is so revered and admired by walkers, publishers, artists and writers alike.

Wainwright hand wrote and hand drew every single one of his books. He found a local printer who would faithfully reproduce the books as he wrote them, not change them into typeface. His books contain loving prose descriptions of the landscape, evocative pen-and-ink drawings and incredible maps and diagrams. I am now such a fan - after just one evening reading Hunter Davies' book!
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I can't wait to get up to those Lakes now and try out some of Wainwright's walks for myself. Time to go and buy a big bag of toffees....