A walk around the block can take a few minutes or quite a lot of minutes depending on where you live. For me it takes ten minutes, where I grew up it took 30 minutes and for my brother it takes over an hour, such is the paucity of rights of way in Norfolk. Attempted definition: a 'ride around the block' brings you back to where you started on a circuit with no other railways inside the enclosed space. Important clarification: interchanges must be at stations - no walking inbetween. Example: Green Park → Victoria → Westminster → Green Park is a ride around the block via the Victoria, Circle and Jubilee lines. The circuit is 4km long and encloses an area of about 180 acres. The shortest 'ride around the block' on the tube teensy sliver of the West End with the National Gallery in the middle. Charing Cross → Leicester Square: I started on the edge of Trafalgar Square by the top of the steps down to the tube station. Admittedly all these entrances are closed at present because the Bakerloo ticket hall is shut, but that's only temporary. I walked north past St Martin-in-the-Fields and the National Portrait Gallery to the entrance to Leicester Square station. It took me 5 minutes. Leicester Square → Piccadilly Circus: I headed west along the edge of Leicester Square past the Lego store and all the cinemas. Coventry Street was full of tourists and tat and got even busier as I reached Piccadilly Circus. It took me 5 minutes. Piccadilly Circus → Charing Cross: This was harder to walk direct because the grid of streets doesn't align and the National Gallery gets in the way. It's thus the longest of the three sides of the triangle, weaving back towards Trafalgar Square. It took me 7 minutes. Total walk: 17 minutes Charing Cross → Leicester Square: It was a 2 minute hike down to the Northern line platform because this station is seriously spread out, having been optimised for a tube line that no longer stops here. I got unlucky because I just missed a train and the next was 3 minutes away. After all that faff and waiting, the tube journey only took a minute. So far that's 6 minutes. Leicester Square → Piccadilly Circus: It took a minute and a half to follow the side passage to the Piccadilly line. I got unlucky because I just missed a train and the next was 3½ minutes away. After all that faff and waiting, the tube journey only took a minute. So far that's 12 minutes. Piccadilly Circus → Charing Cross: It took a minute and a half to follow the side passage to the Bakerloo line. I got unlucky because I just missed a train and the next was 4½ minutes away. After all that faff and waiting, the tube journey only took a minute. Total ride: 19 minutes The shortest tube rides around the block just shows the tube with no additional extra lines. First I looked for small gaps with stations at all the corners. These were almost all in central London. Then I measured the length of all the circuits. These are the ten smallest blocks I found. 1) 1.4km Charing Cross/Leicester Square/Piccadilly Circus 2) 1.6km Moorgate/Liverpool Street/Bank 3) 2.2km Tottenham Court Road/Holborn/Leicester Square 4) 2.4km Bond Street/Oxford Circus/Green Park 5) 2.5km Oxford Circus/Green Park/Piccadilly Circus 6) 2.6km Liverpool Street/Tower Hill/Aldgate East 7) 2.7km Oxford Circus/Tottenham Court Road/Piccadilly Circus 8) 2.8km Camden Town/Mornington Crescent/Euston 9) 2.9km Oxford Circus/Tottenham Court Road/Warren Street 10) 3.2km Baker Street/Bond Street/Oxford Circus area inside the block, not the distance round the edge, the smallest block changes. It's now Liverpool Street → Tower Hill → Aldgate East because the only gap in the middle is the Aldgate Triangle with an area of about 2 acres. But this is quite complicated to measure and throws up all kinds of anomalies so let's stick with distances instead. The longest ride around the block There are several huge loops in west London but they're all inadmissible because they don't have stations at the corners. The loop from Victoria south to Stockwell used to count but no longer does because the Battersea extension cuts across it. So we need to look to east London instead. The longest ride around the block on the tube turns out to be the Hainault Loop on the Central line. This is 20km from Leytonstone round to Hainault and Woodford, then back to Leytonstone again. That nudges into Essex, so if you want the longest ride around the block entirely within London it's Bank/London Bridge/West Ham/Monument at 18km long, which is just over 12 miles. all rail services, not just the tube. huge circuit from Clapham Junction to Richmond and Kingston and back again, all aboard one train, which is 30km long. However the District line intrudes inside this loop so I'm not allowing it. Instead the longest ride around the block is this loop in Greenwich and Bexley. The Blackheath/Slade Green circuit encloses 35 square kilometres - that's 14 square miles. That's a very large central area with no other rail services, this because the rail network across Bexley is rather thin and the local population isn't well served by London standards. The loop round Richmond and Kingston encloses a larger area at 56 square kilometres, but a lot of what's in the middle is Richmond Park and deer don't catch trains. Perth/Inverness/Aberdeen: 512km (318 miles), enclosing 4300 square miles Carlisle/Newcastle/York/Leeds: 472km (293 miles), enclosing 3000 square miles Carlisle/Newcastle/Edinburgh: 463km (288 miles), enclosing 4000 square miles The shortest ride around the block: Charing Cross/Leicester Square/Piccadilly Circus (1.4km) The longest ride around the block on the tube: the Hainault Loop (18km) The longest ride around the block within London: Blackheath/Slade Green/Blackheath (29km) Useful resources for checking all this: Google maps, Google MyMaps, tube map, tube map showing just the tube, geographical map of the London rail network, maps of the British rail network, Network Rail mileage lists

Fleeting CAMDEN TOWN The two branches of the river Fleet that rise on Hampstead Heath merge two miles lower down in the vicinity of Kentish Town. For my second visit to the river I'm skipping down to the confluence and attempting to follow its path onward through Camden Town. That means I won't be returning to Fleet Road in Hampstead to check if Fleet News still sells confectionery and bus passes (it does), nor going back to Tufnell Park where the river briefly pokes above ground to cross the Suffragette line in a rusty pipe (though I have fresh photographic evidence that it does). Instead let's revisit a backstreet off Kentish Town Road whose name nods back to a time before Victorian house builders covered the lot. This is Anglers Lane, once a haunt of freshwater fisherfolk, indeed 20 years ago the back of this Nando's featured a painted quote from an old Edwardian man who remembered catching fish and bathing here in his youth. That's long painted over and the sylvan river is also long buried, tamed into an arched culvert because it had the occasional habit of flooding on a grand scale. This specific area was residentialised in the 1850s, hence the streets have Crimean names like Inkerman Road, Alma Street and Cathcart Street, the latter built directly on the line of the former stream. Around the same time Europe's largest false-teeth factory was built on Anglers Lane, the premises of Claudius Ash & Co, but they departed in 1965 and the long redbrick building is now flats. Contours make it clear that the Fleet passed by at the foot of the lane via a slight dip on Prince of Wales Road. The name Kentish Town comes from an old name for the upper Fleet - the Ken Ditch, so called because it rose in Ken Wood at the top of Hampstead Heath. Minus ten points if you live locally and always assumed it was something to do with the county of Kent. Originally the heart of Kentish Town was lower down, nearer Camden, but better-off residents migrated up the valley as the Fleet there started to silt up and become more fetid. One regular visitor was Lord Nelson whose Uncle William lived in a house with a garden backing onto the river - cue hilarious anecdotes about the admiral coming to Kentish Town 'to keep an eye on the Fleet'. Nextdoor was a true local landmark, The Castle Inn, which is thought to have existed beside the stream since medieval times. The tavern gets 20 mentions in Gillian Tindall's seminal local history book The Fields Beneath, but longevity didn't save it and the Victorian incarnation only narrowly dodged demolition in 2013. Quinns is another corner pub, this time located in the sweet spot where the two main tributaries of the Fleet once merged. Its shell is a garish yellow, seemingly not repainted since I last blogged about the river in 2005, also the upper windows are in peeling disarray and half the gold lettering has fallen off. Everything about the physical building says 'closed' but everything online still says 'open', so I guess dishevelment is the disguise you need when you're the roughest pub in NW1. It's easier to research historic maps now than it was 20 years ago so I believe the actual confluence was marginally west, outside the pencil-fronted Hawley Primary School, but I'm surprised nobody's yet produced a truly accurate map tracing the Fleet across the urban landscape. Camden Road station and to the west runs Water Lane, the origin of whose name is self-evident, indeed there are reports than in 1826 the Fleet in flood was 65ft across at this point. The Regent's Canal reached Camden in 1816 and engineers faced a decision regarding how to cross the Fleet. They eventually decided that the two should share a course for a few hundred yards while weaving to the east, but with the Fleet relegated to a pipe underneath. A contemporary map shows the river meeting the canal by Kentish Town Road Lock, remaining hidden round the back of what's now the Sainsbury's superstore and re-emerging beyond the bridge at Camden Road. Follow the towpath today and you first pass Nicholas Grimshaw's arresting space-age wall of flats erected in 1989, then on the outside of the next bend the more recent and monumentally-unremarkable vernacular wedge of Regent Canalside. The end result, however you look at it, is that no local resident or tourist passing through would give the Fleet a second thought. There is however one place where the river still makes itself known and that's at the far end of Lyme Street. Stucco townhouses and smart terraces replaced the meandering Fleet here in the mid 18th century, ten of them now Grade II listed. Keep going and you reach the Prince Albert, a glaze-fronted tavern opened in 1843 with a similarly period interior. The pub is now hidden behind an enormous tree the size of a mushroom cloud, which may be why it describes itself as Camden's Best-Kept Secret on social media, although the racket coming from the screened-off beer garden suggests several people are well aware. But perhaps fewer realise that if you stand out front you can hear the sound of the culverted Fleet plain as day through a grating in the street. Look for the circular drain cover, keeping watch for bikes because it's recently been absorbed into a cycle lane junction, and if the light's right you might even see the rushing water as well as hear it. I certainly did. To follow the Fleet out of Camden cross Royal College Street and head for St Pancras Way. This is now a one-way ratrun that shadows the Regents Canal but in fact it follows the alignment of a very old packhorse track alongside the Fleet. To the right of the road the land still dips noticeably, most noticeably by the student accommodation at College Grove, while a Parcelforce depot fills much of what remains a marginal valley bottom. Elsewhere a massive regenerative blast has taken hold, from the hulking St Pancras Campus to a stripe of canalside apartments and a big hole where a life sciences cluster called Tribeca is taking shape. The developmental whirlwind only ceases at the gloomy walls of St Pancras Hospital, formerly St Pancras workhouse, and I'd best stop there before the Fleet trickles into St Pancras proper. 'Tracking the Fleet' by Mark McCarthy, an 18-page historic analysis of where the river ran through Camden 22 Fleeting photos so far (10 from round here)

Last week I was walking along the Greenway between West Ham and Plaistow when I spotted some new notices. A lot of the Greenway is closed at the moment so I assumed it was about that. The title on the first notice was 'Manor Road NOS Improvements', explaining underneath that NOS stands for Northern Outfall Sewer. But nowhere on the poster did it say anything was closed or closing so I didn't give it a second look. the map a second look. It showed a closure on the Greenway much longer than at present, with big 'no entry' signs at Abbey Creek and Upper Road. It seemed to suggest the section of the Greenway I was standing on was closed, except it plainly wasn't because I'd just walked along it. No dates appeared on the map, just as on the poster, nor any text confirming a closure. I carried on walking to BestMate's and we finished off watching Squid Game. on their website! The Greenway will indeed be closing here, additionally incorporating the bridge over the District line, but not until October. Why they didn't mention October anywhere on the printed notices I have no idea, but my best guesses are that either i) Thames Water don't want to frighten anyone yet, or ii) the people who designed the posters are incompetent. I've made this summary to show what's closing when. It's not official but I hope it makes things clearer. (normally you'd colour the Greenway green, but I've used brown for hopefully obvious reasons) I know the Northern Outfall Sewer is critical infrastructure and also Victorian, hence long-term maintenance is essential and works are likely to be major. But three years is a bloody long time to be sent off on a diversion, and given the lack of alternative routes locally it's a horrific diversion too. Thames Water's closure map shows two diversions, a green one and a blue one, both substantially longer than the direct red. Blue runs north and connects to Stratford town centre rather than the other closed end of the Greenway. Green runs south and has to skirt the whole of West Ham Recreation Ground and the East London Cemetery. Bafflingly blue is described as northbound and green as southbound, despite direction being irrelevant in this case, so I can only assume that i) they meant northern and southern, ii) the people who designed the posters are incompetent. closed section of the Greenway will be 1.3km long. green diversion is 2.5km long. blue diversion is 3.1km long. The map also includes an orange line, a 'route connecting' blue back to the Greenway. This it turns out is the shortest diversion of all, a mere 2.0km, but you'd never draw that conclusion from the colours on the map. The diversion could be even shorter if the orange line followed Stephens Road instead, a reduction to 1.9km, and for both these reasons I conclude i) the people who designed the posters are incompetent, ii) the people who designed the posters are incompetent. Look, I said, the background map you've used doesn't even show the rest of the Greenway, only a blank grey background. the notice and the map. But I hope he passed on my observations and suggestions, and that the information provided by Thames Water evolves as the closure date approaches. If you're going to make everyone's journeys hugely worse for three years the least you can do is warn them competently.

post-Mansfield housekeeping 100 largest towns and cities by population. At the start of the year I had 13 to go but since then I've ticked off Sunderland (32nd), Hartlepool (84th), Stockport (60th), Chesterfield (85th) and Mansfield (99th). In this endeavour even 99th counts. Of the eight towns that remain the largest is still Huddersfield (33rd), the southernmost is now Warrington (34th) and all lie in a narrow stripe between Lancashire and Lincolnshire. Chesterfield/Mansfield under £45 by taking advantage of an East Midlands Railways sale (last day today). It's still the least-good-value gadabout I've been on recently. Pronto, which was an illuminating ride threading through former pit villages. Normally I'd have cursed getting the trainee driver reticent to pull out into traffic, but in this case it gave me longer to stare at things. To see the country sometimes you have to get off the train. Blackburn: £56.60 07.30-10.33 (via Wigan Bolton) (£31.30 up) (B-B £5.15) Burnley: £55.45 07.33-11.01 (via Leeds) (£37.65+£17.80) L-Black £31.30, B-B £5.15, Burn-L £17.80 (07.30-23.08) = £54.25 Huddersfield: £54.95 including rail replacement bus from Stockport (or STocport + £15.70, arrive 12.10) St Helens: £56.55 arrive 09.50 back 22.05 (or £14.65 from Crewe) Warrington: £52.60 7.16-10.25 (or £10.75 from Crewe) (Warrington St Helens £4.50) Scunthorpe: £30.50 09.48-12.03 19.08-21.29 Barnsley: £54.85 07.30-10.09 18.00-2036 £57.40 (Hudder bus £3.30 1h30) Stockport £18.60 6.43-10.26 19.19-22.24 Crewe: £13.90 06.43-08.51 19.13-20.27-->