WALK LONDON London borough walks (on London borough websites) who else will? 2008, then again in 2012, then again in 2016, then again at the start of 2021. Four years on, the majority of these borough websites have upgraded. A few have merely reorganised, breaking previous links. Others have substantially restructured, adding or pruning former pages and making themselves a lot more mobile-friendly. And a depressing number have dumbed down, deleting all the interesting stuff and concentrating solely on council services. Here's my borough by borough London guide to free downloadable walks. Who'll spur you outdoors for a bit of healthy leisure and heritage, and whose website teams still need a bit of a kick? Umpteen professionally-produced downloadable walks (five star boroughs) Bromley: Bromley Common, Cray Riverway, Leaves Green, St Mary Cray, Farnborough, Nash, Petts Wood, Cudham, St Paul's Cray, Biggin Hill, Chelsfield, Berry's Green, Green Street Green, Three Commons; Crofton Park, Darrick and Newstead Woods, High Elms, Jubilee Country Park, Scadbury, Ravensbourne Trail, Darwin's Footsteps; Bromley North, Beckenham, Chislehurst Hillingdon (↑1): Hillingdon Trail, Celandine route, Willow Tree Wander, Ruislip Woods, Uxbridge, West Drayton, Manor Farm, Little Britain, Walk The Planets Southwark: architecture & industry, film locations, myths & legends, art & literature, eccentric Dulwich, flora & fauna, regeneration, rebels & revolutionaries, country to council estates, freedom walk, war in Walworth, food & fresh air, East Walworth green links Waltham Forest (↑1): Arts and Crafts, A Wander Down The Hill, Highams Park, Industrial Past, Mosey on the Marsh, Murder and the Orient, Leyton and Leytonstone, Planes Bike and Automobiles, Swimmers Bakers and Olympic Games Makers, Three Boroughs, Walthamstow Village, Waterside Walkabout [click the borough, or click the walk] Several interesting downloadable walks (four star boroughs) Barnet: Dollis Valley Greenwalk, Hendon to Mill Hill, Totteridge, Barnet & Hadley, New Southgate, Mill Hill, Finchley Church End, Golders Green City (↓1): 10 Centuries, Architecture, Art of Faith, Dickens, Finance, Great Fire, Historic Pubs, Mayflower, Plague and Pestilence, Roman London, Shakespeare, Tree Trail Hackney: Lea, South, Canals, North, East, Hackney Marshes Lewisham: Waterlink Way, Brockley, Catford, Hither Green, Grove Park, Deptford Merton: Beverley Brook Walk, Wandle Trail, Nelson Trail One or more interesting walks, at least partly downloadable (three star boroughs) Brent (↑1): 5 healthy heritage walks Ealing: Ealing, Northolt, Southall, Greenford Hammersmith & Fulham: ten short Walkwell walks Islington: Mildmay, Barnsbury, EC1, Clerkenwell Kingston (↑3): Heritage Trail, Hogsmill Stroll, River Thames Ramble Incompletely described walks, or links to walks off-site (two star boroughs) Enfield (↓1): link to The Enfield Society Greenwich: paltry off-site links Haringey (↓1): links off-site Newham (↑2): park loops & links off-site Redbridge: 10 brief walking routes Richmond: links off-site, some broken Sutton (↑1): map showing 'walking routes' Tower Hamlets: lingering links to binned heritage walks Wandsworth: Two audio walks around Putney A page telling you that walking is good for you and (maybe) where you might do it (one star boroughs) Barking & Dagenham, Camden, Croydon, Harrow, Havering, Hounslow, Westminster Nothing about walks or walking, because these websites are repositories of information about council services (no star boroughs) Bexley (↓4), Kensington & Chelsea (↓3), Lambeth The City of London used to be firmly five star but I've downgraded them for concealment reasons. Most of their excellent walking resources remain on the City website but only if you already know where to look, because the official walking page now redirects punters to the jazzier City of London website where everything's more commercial. Of the remaining four star boroughs, Barnet's six Healthy Heritage Walks are the most recent and come with a choice of accompanying podcast or transcript. Lewisham's unusual approach is to encourage everyone to walk to Blackheath from wherever they live. At the two star level councils are essentially abdicating responsibility for walking resources to external sources. Enfield and Haringey have dropped a star since 2021 by doing just that. I'm particularly ashamed that the Tower Hamlets web team have somehow retained the summary highlights of their walks while deleting the associated pdfs, making a long-standing collection of excellent leisure downloads utterly useless overnight. If you're fortunate to live in (or next to) one of the four- or five-star boroughs, maybe bookmark a few of these local walks and walking pages for later use. Even if this weekend's looking much too hot, getting out and about is always an excellent way to explore London and keep active at the same time.

An extraordinary thing has happened at the cablecar. The bottom of the cabin has been removed and replaced with what I assume is an impressively chunky sheet of glass. It's not a small window, it's pretty much the entire floor, allowing a completely new perspective on a flight above the Thames. Are you brave enough? And there have been a lot of gimmicks over the years: in 2013 the Aviation Experience, in 2014 the Snowman and the Snowdog, in 2015 night flights, in 2016 the Valentines experience, in 2017 Thunderbirds Are Go, in 2018 champagne flights, in 2019 Sky High Dining, in 2020 Nightingale freebies, in 2022 a Sleigh Ride round trip, in 2023 a Teddy Workshop and in 2024 a Hallowe'en Scavenger Hunt. But 2025's glass-bottomed cabin potentially trumps all of those... might it finally tempt you back? I should confirm it's not all the cabins, only a couple. The vast majority of cabin floors are still opaque and the experience is thus exactly the same as it was before. But if you happen to be ushered into one of the two glass-floored cabins you're in for additional thrills, quite possibly a shock, and maybe a little fistbump too as realise you got lucky. Just as those on board can look down so those below can look up, so be careful what you put on the floor. Also I hope that TfL's lawyers have grappled with the upskirting thing, because plonking a glass floor underneath someone without their consent and then hoisting them into the air does have potential repercussions. There are 34 cabins in circulation at any one time on the Dangleway, of which only two had a glass floor. That's a 1 in 17 chance of success which isn't great odds, especially now every single trip costs £7. There is thus a 94% chance that you won't be successful on your first attempt, and another 94% chance of failure on every subsequent occasion, and that's a lot of £7s to fork out in the hope of enjoying a glass bottom. A bit of maths suggests you'd probably end up spending over £70 before you finally got lucky and even then there are no guarantees so it's potentially a bottomless money pit. What I don't know is whether it'll be first come first served or whether it'll need pre-booking. Will cabins 11 and 29 be meted out to whoever's at the front of the queue at the time or will you have to stake a claim, potentially by paying more. It's possible staff in each terminal may be helpful ("You want the glass floor? Sure, stand over here"), especially if you pick a really quiet time like a Thursday morning, but it's also possible this is a full-on money-spinner charging extra for giving you the willies. I wonder what they'll call it. My money's on The Glass Floor Experience because cablecar marketing has been obsessed with the word 'experience' over the years. But yes you read it right, two Dangleway cabins now have glass floors. As gimmicks go, it's right up there.

One Stop Beyond: Thames Ditton In this series I'm taking the train one stop beyond the Greater London boundary, getting off and seeing what's there. Today that means Thames Ditton, one stop beyond Surbiton on the Hampton Court line. Obviously it's beside the Thames, in this case on the south bank (in Surrey) opposite the broad sweep of Hampton Court Park (which is in London). Thames Ditton is historic, well-off and quaint, but also post-industrial, over-private and lacking in river. If you live here, well done. Long Ditton to the east, but the two have inexorably coalesced over the years. Thames Ditton got the station which is why you're more likely to have heard of it. That's where I arrived yesterday morning to complete my challenge of visiting every station in London and its outer zones, this being zone 6 which keeps local commuters' fares down. A white-haired lady from Thames Ditton In Bloom was watering the flowerboxes and flowerwheelbarrows on the up platform, whipping open her portable stepladder as necessary, and also being thanked by passing passengers for all the work she was doing. She has horticultural competition from Thames Ditton Men In Sheds who've knocked up three wooden habitats called Bug Halt, Bug Central and Bug Junction in an elevated garden above the ramp opposite. Even before nipping into the cosy waiting room with its small mornings-only cafe and stack of local leaflets, I could tell this was a community that looks after itself with pride. The heart of Thames Ditton is its snaking high street, a cottage-lined thoroughfare that wiggles down to where the ferry used to be. A lot of weatherboarded frontage is still evident, also a couple of old pubs of which Ye Olde Swan is the real deal with a waterfront terrace and a backstory as the site of a Tudor hunting lodge, what with Henry VIII's palace being just across the water. The Red Lion, by contrast, is merely a fine free house with an obsession for hanging baskets. For groceries there's a smart Budgens, the bank has inevitably become an estate agent and for plump pastries it's got to be the Nice Buns Cafe. The top row of the newspaper rack goes 'Telegraph Mail Times Mirror', for what its worth. As for the very long building with the cupola that's a Georgian mansion built for riverside status, later sold for £5000 to an Anglican hospice fleeing from Deptford. For over a century it's been known as the Home of Compassion, even after being sold off as a luxury care home, until last year the owners decided to tone down the mortality angle and glibly rebranded it Thames View instead. Ferry Works, a former boat-building yard that diversified into marine engines in the 1880s. You can track the site's subsequent history through three plaques and a To Let sign... manufactured the revolutionary central valve steam engine, moved to Rugby, the amazing Auto-Carrier car made here, Character Riverside Offices To Let. AC Cars arrived in 1911 to build open 2-seaters, coupés and chuggy saloons, also the first British car ever to win the Monte-Carlo rally. The company spent 75 years in Thames Ditton with its motor works just off the high street, in its later years churning out the pale blue three-wheeled invalid cars that used to crawl the nation's streets. All of that's since become flats, as has the site of the foundry that forged the Quadriga that bestrides Hyde Park Corner - also suitably blue-plaqued. The one scrap of riverside still accessible is a narrow slipway that now doubles up as Ye Old Swan's car park. You can tell access is limited because one workman had chosen to sit amidst the hatchbacks to eat his lunch. This is also the landing point for the footbridge that joins Thames Ditton Island to the mainland, and no you will not be visiting because it's private and the gate has a black pad. The island is 300m long and consists of a single central track faced by 48 detached properties, each of which started out as a weekend bungalow and is now a desirable hideaway with its own individual mooring. Despite being much closer to the south side of the Thames the island had always been part of Middlesex, and only in 1970 did residents manage to be officially relocated to Surrey. Alongside are two much smaller eyots, Boyle Farm Island and Swan Island, whose sum total of two properties get their mail delivered to a red lockup box at the top of the slipway. The Church of St Nicholas has been here since the 12th century, the oldest part of its structure being its broad squat flinty tower. It also contains what may be the oldest font in Surrey, a sturdy stone bowl dating back to 1120 with a carving of the Lamb of God on one side. Above the chancel the oak panels are an even rarer survivor, these depictions of the Day of Judgement from 1520 having somehow escaped destruction during the Reformation. Today the church is very welcoming of visitors so the door will likely be unlocked, or maybe I just got lucky while the Bereavement Cafe was meeting in the church hall. A particularly attractive exterior feature is the path that wends quarter of a mile from here down to the station, known as Church Walk. It's too narrow for vehicles so of the 60 houses only two have parking spaces, which must be fun on removals day, but the Victorian semis and cutesy cottages are so desirable that residents are all too happy to suffer the inconvenience. Vera Fletcher Hall where the local amdrams occasionally put on shows, wove through occasional leftover shards of woodland and eventually found my progress halted by a 90 acre sports ground. This is Imber Court, purchased by the Metropolitan Police Service in 1919 with recreation in mind. Not only is it the home of Metropolitan Police FC, a team who've reached the first round of the FA Cup five times, but also the training centre for the Met's mounted police. Looking across a sea of tennis courts I could see floodlights and the Des Flanders Stand in the far distance... and I presume someone was also watching me. headquarters of the Milk Marketing Board, they of "drinka pinta milka day", until watered down by William Waldegrave in 1994. It's now a housing estate and the MMB's sole local legacy appears to be that they helped pay for Thames Ditton Cricket Club's snazzy pavilion. I should also mention the Thames Ditton Miniature Railway, a teeny straddled treat, but their next open day isn't until 6th July. tip the river was again fenced off and the slipway hidden within a modern boatyard. Instead the local populace are left to make do with City Wharf Open Space, a scrap of waterfront mostly shielded by trees with a brief opening where the full sweep of the main river is finally revealed. The main problem with living round here, it turns out, is rather too much Ditton and nowhere near enough Thames.

I have been to all the stations in London. It's a lot of stations. I'm including tube, DLR, Overground, Crossrail and all National Rail services, even trams, and that's why it's quite so many stations. Also when I say 'been to' I mean properly used, not just passed through on a train. At each station I either touched in or touched out, sometimes both. » What precisely counts as a station is a moot point. Is Canary Wharf one station or three? Is Marylebone one station or a rail terminus plus the tube? I got round this pedantry by going to both of them, just to be sure, also both halves of Shepherd's Bush, both sides of Mitcham Junction and the two Heathrow Terminal 5s. Don't nitpick, just do the lot. It's not easy to visit all the stations in London, and also not easy to know you have. You need a list and you need excellent record keeping, also patience, drive and time. Are you absolutely certain you've been to Albany Park, Eden Park and Grange Park? Have you really been to West Drayton, Drayton Park and Drayton Green? I'm certain because I made a spreadsheet and ticked everywhere off. I wonder how many others can say the same. this year. I broke down the challenge into two halves. All the stations in London z1-3tramsz4-6 about 350 stations39 tram stopsabout 230 stations JanuaryFebruarymid-March-mid-June It turns out visiting all the z4-6 stations is harder than visiting all the z1-3 stations, even though there are fewer of them. That's because they're spread across a much wider area, usually further apart and because train frequencies in outer London aren't so good. There are a lot of half hourly services in zones 4-6 so you can end up waiting for a while, also the next station may be too far to walk, also there may not be a decent bus service connecting the two. The optimum solution is often to bounce back and forth, first two stations forward then one back, but sometimes the timetable conspires not to make that work. Ticking off the ten stations in Bexley took over three hours, for example. Yes I do have a lot of time on my hands. I was impressed by the community heritage on the Enfield Chase line where posters and artworks give the place a lift. I was surprised by the masses of nigh empty carriages rattling through the suburbs of Bexley and Bromley. I was amazed by the number of staffed ticket offices in backwaters with even fewer annual passengers than the lowliest tube station. I was mighty glad I don't live on the Hounslow Loop because that is one miserably infrequent service. I discovered that catching a bus is usually quicker than waiting for a train down some of the south Croydon valleys. I checked out the crumbling platforms at Berrylands, the nexus that is Bickley and the massive gap in the middle of Cheam. Basically I caught up on all the outer station knowledge I should have gained over the last quarter century but didn't because I had the wrong ticket. I've visited every tube station since the start of the year including the 16 that are outside London. I finished off the tube by exiting Rickmansworth last week. I have in fact been visiting every station in zones 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, even the 41 that are outside London, because my 60+ Oyster card permits that too. Even Swanley and Dartford in Kent, even Elstree & Borehamwood in Herts, also the two Ewells in Surrey, I've done the lot. I didn't just whizz round the Banstead Loop for a laugh, I was station-ticking all the way. (some time after ten o'clock) which will also mark the final completion of my Visit Every Station challenge. All the stations accessible with a 60+ Oyster card z1-3tramsz4-6beyond z6 350 stations39 stops230 stations41 stations JanuaryFebruarymid-March-mid-June The rest of the year is looking brighter already.