London Loop Alternative: Upminster Bridge - Chafford Hundred

Stifford Pumping Station, above Davy Down. Engines not visible.

This alternative final section of the London Loop suggests a way of bridging the gap in the trail by crossing the river Thames in the east, albeit by bus on the Dartford Crossing. Diverging from the official route shortly after Upminster Bridge, you’ll traverse several noteworthy green spaces in Thames Chase Community Forest, including three Forestry Commission woodlands, the expansive Belhus Woods Country Park and richly verdant Davy Down with its historic water pumping station. The last stretch finds hidden ways through Chafford Hundred, a new town built in an old quarry, with unexpectedly spectacular views.

There are no bus options for quite a while after the routes diverge, and there’s also an unavoidable stretch of not especially pleasant road walking, though the Forest sites that bookend this are considerable compensation. You could then break the journey at Belhus using a non-TfL bus if you wish. Otherwise the walk ends at Chafford Hundred station, adjacent to the massive Lakeside shopping mall, where, as well as trains to London, an hourly bus (not on Sundays and non-TfL) will take you on a scenic ride across the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge to the suburbs of Dartford. I’ll describe the shortish and pleasant walk that connects this point back to the official Section 1 of the London Loop at Barnes Cray in a later post.

Bridging the gap in the Loop

Charge notice for Dartford Crossing

As mentioned several times in these pages, the biggest disappointment of the London Loop is that, due to the lack of a convenient river crossing, it’s not a loop at all. The lowest point at which anyone can walk from the north to the south bank of the river Thames is Woolwich, where a foot tunnel forms an integral part of the Loop’s inner London sister trail the Capital Ring. Continuing downstream, the next and last opportunity to walk to the riverside and cross to the opposite bank is on the Tilbury to Gravesend ferry. This is too far outside the London boundary to be of any use to Loop walkers, though it does form a part of the London Countryway, the unofficial orbital route through the outlying countryside, described elsewhere in these pages.

Confronted with this issue, the London Walking Forum, original devisers of the Loop, opted simply to start and finish at two stations close to the river and to London’s eastern edge: Erith and Purfleet. Historically, a ferry linked Coldharbour Point at Rainham, a little upriver of Purfleet, with Erith, and both its former termini are beside the trail. This ferry has been defunct since Victorian times, but doubtless the Forum hoped that at some point a boat service might be revived.

With the area now designated for long term development as part of the Thames Gateway, and the advent of the successful Thames Clippers riverbus service which now reaches as far downriver as Woolwich Arsenal, that possibility is a little less remote than it once was, but is certainly not imminent. So, for the foreseeable future, anyone who wants to walk to Purfleet and continue to Erith faces a roundabout rail journey quite a long way back into London then out again, via c2c to West Ham, the DLR to Woolwich and Southeastern to Erith.

There is however one fixed river crossing at about the right point that’s all too visible from the Loop itself but is tantalisingly out of reach to walkers. This is the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, a high and graceful suspension bridge visible for miles around which since 1991 has taken southbound traffic across the river, while northbound drivers use the earlier tunnel crossing.

It’s enduringly frustrating that this expensive and beautiful bridge with its spectacular views of the estuary has always been off-limits to walkers, despite many other equally long and high bridges, both in the UK and around the world, operating safely with walking and cycling lanes. When the tunnel first opened in 1963, it was understandably considered a hostile environment for walkers, and too dangerous for cyclists. But cyclists successfully insisted on provision, and at first a small fleet of specially adapted buses was provided to ferry them through, and for free too, unlike motorists. The buses were soon phased out due to lack of demand, but the provision remained, provided by more conventional vehicles.

During the planning of the bridge, an attempt to cancel the cycle service was resisted by pro-cycling MPs, but nobody successfully argued the obvious point that the public should simply to be able to cross the bridge under their own power, on foot or by bike. The M25, lest we forget, was one of the pet projects of then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a woman who allegedly held the opinion that “a man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure”.

Had the bridge been built just a few years later it’s likely the need for footways and cycleways would have been considered more seriously. As things stand, determined cyclists can still find their way via convoluted routes to assembly areas at each end, where yellow telephones are provided to summon a free lift in a dedicated 4x4 with a cycle rack. Waiting times extend up to 40 minutes, and cyclists friends tell me the people providing the service can be less than helpful, particularly when groups attempt to pre-book. But walkers don’t even have this opportunity.

Fortunately, there is still one way that people without vehicles or bikes can access the crossing, on the X80 bus. This is commercially operated by Thurrock-based private bus company Ensign Bus, so isn’t a public service obligation. Its primary purpose is to link Lakeside and Bluewater, two huge competing out-of-town shopping malls which nestle in former chalk quarries on each side of the estuary. It’s a limited stop route with stops that aren’t as close to the bridge as you might like, and it doesn’t run on Sundays, but it does help provide a viable alternative way of completing the Loop, and one way of doing this is suggested here.

If this is your first journey around the trail, my recommendation is to stick to the official route and enjoy the riverside walk through Rainham and Crayford marshes. But do consider this option as a bonus feature. Apart from an unwelcome stretch of road walking, it has much to recommend it: sites like Belhus Woods and Davy Down equal the highlights of the official trail, and even Chafford Hundred has pleasant surprises in store. Make sure you walk clockwise rather than anticlockwise so you cross via the bridge rather than the tunnel: the southbound bus ride is itself an experience, even if the views are brief and sometimes obstructed. Unless and until sense prevails in retrofitting walkways onto the bridge, it’s the closest you’ll get to what must be one of most exhilaratingly spectacular viewpoints on the river Thames.

Hacton

Horse paddocks in rustic Upminster, Hacton Park Corner Farm

At first, the alternative route simply follows the official one, so I’ll leave you to refer to a previous post to find out more about Upminster Bridge and the Havering Parkways. It’s along Gaynes Parkway that the walk diverges, continuing on a grass path along the east side of the river Ingrebourne approaching Hacton Bridge, rather than crossing to the west side with the official Loop route and National Cycle Network 136.

In my post on Loop section 23 I introduced Hacton as a hamlet of Upminster that grew up beside the bridge around the early 14th century. Its original centre was to the south, at White Hart Corner – the pub of this name, opened in 1854, is still marked on maps though it closed in the 2000s. Hacton Lane, which runs north from the White Hart to cross the bridge, was once lined with cottages, but 19th century rural depopulation saw most of these disappear. The streets you walk down today were developed in the 1950s, and the Optimist on the corner of Hacton Lane and Little Gaynes Lane opened in 1956 as the first new pub in Upminster in the 20th century.

Opposite the pub and set back from the road is one of the remaining historic buildings in the area, the red brick Hacton House. It was built between 1762 and 1765 for William Braund, a successful merchant and financier and one of several well-off Londoners who bought country estates in Upminster around this time. After military use during World War II, it was converted somewhat unsympathetically into flats. Past the house, a footpath leads between playing fields and horse paddocks, the latter belonging to Hacton Park Corner Farm to the south. This once boasted a Jacobean farmhouse, destroyed during the war by bombs doubtless aimed at nearby RAF Hornchurch, though a 300-year-old Grade II-listed barn survived. It’s now a livery stable.

Pleasingly, the horse paddocks soon give way to a genuine fragment of London agriculture: arable fields now preserved as green belt, some of them still divided with the remnants of ancient hedgerows. Along these paths the Loop shares the way with the 16 km Upminster Circular Walk, originally developed by Hillingdon council in the 1980s, and well worth exploring. Though the leaflets are long out of print, the route is well-waymarked and easy to find out about online.

Suburban streets laid out in the 1930s loom ahead, but the path dodges them, stumbling instead into a delightful hidden corner known as Parklands Open Space, where mature trees tower over a stream, a tributary of the Ingrebourne, that has been dammed to create a rather sombre long, narrow lake. This is the only surviving remnant of Gaynes, which as previously mentioned was once the largest manor in the parish, named after the Engaine family who held it in the 13th century. In 1766, it was bought by James Esdaile, owner of a successful cooperage business and later a Lord Mayor of London. Esdaile already owned New Place and added several other local plots, knitting them together into a large estate. He rebuilt the modest manor house on a grand scale and had 40 ha of its surroundings landscaped into a park, with the lake as one of the features.

Last remnant of Gaynes Manor: The lake at Parklands Open Space

The estate was eventually divided up and in 1929 the last significant tranche was sold off for housing development, but Hornchurch Urban District Council, as it was then, bought the immediate surrounds of the lake as a public space. The area fell into neglect in the late 20th century, especially following the Great Storm of 1987 when fallen trees blocked many of the paths. Thankfully it’s been revived more recently with the help of an active Friends Group, formed in 2012. Our route crosses the water and soon leaves the site, but it’s worth a short detour a little further along the north bank of the lake for a view of the elegant Grade II-listed bridge at its opposite end, built in the 1780s by architect James Paine. The bridge is on Historic England’s ‘at risk’ register and in need of restoration, but so far funding for this hasn’t been forthcoming.

Bonnets Wood

Damyns Hall Aerodrome

A parish boundary once ran along Park Farm Road, onto which you emerge when leaving Parklands Open Space, dividing Upminster to the north from Rainham to the south. The trail now crosses onto the Rainham side to enter Bonnetts Wood, one of the first of several Forestry Commission sites on today’s walk. As the official Loop route runs right through Rainham village, I’ve said more about the old parish there.

For centuries, the land to the south of the road was farmland attached to the manor of Gerpins, its name derived from the Jarpeville family who held it from the later 12th century. By the early 20th century, the estate had been broken up, and these fields were farmed by the Bonnetts family, based at Central Farm on Aveley Road. In 2002, the land was sold to the Forestry Commission as one of the new woodland areas in Thames Chase Community Forest (see my post on the London Countryway between Brentwood and West Horndon). In common with several other Forest sites, like Pages Wood on section 22 of the Loop, it’s managed to create a varied environment with a more open aspect than you might expect. Woodland is interspersed with meadows, and paths are lined with wide grassy margins.

In 2012, the wood was doubled in size to 33.6 ha with the addition in the southwest of a former landfill, capped, so it’s said, with rubble left over from building the Shard at London Bridge. This has helped create a linked chain of green spaces westwards via Berwick Glades to Hornchurch Country Park on the official route of the Loop, soon to be improved further by the opening of a new road crossing. Unfortunately, though, there’s still rather a gap between Bonnetts and the next cluster of Forest sites to the south and east, the direction in which we now need to walk. So currently there’s no real alternative to an unappealing trek along Aveley Road.

Considering that it runs through the heart of a community forest, this is a disappointingly unfriendly stretch of road, narrow but straight enough that many drivers exceed the already generous 40 mph limit. There’s no continuous pavement, though there are occasional stretches of verge. The road, incidentally, once formed another part of the boundary between Rainham, to the west (right), and Upminster to the east. One feature of interest along the way is Damyns Hall Aerodrome, opened in 1969 on the site of the parkland surrounding 16th century Damyns Hall, which had burnt down four years earlier. It’s the only privately-owned general aviation aerodrome in Greater London, and is used by light aircraft, microlights and helicopters.

Once past the aerodrome drive there are various gaps in the hedge giving access to its large grass field, and nothing to discourage you from walking on the other side of the hedge parallel to the road, although this is strictly private property. An official permissive path around the aerodrome perimeter would be an improvement here. There’s also some hope that the former gravel pit behind the thick hedge on the right may eventually be reclaimed as part of the Forest.

As it is, the road walking is almost done at the junction with Bramble Lane. This was once the gateway to an important site known as Chafford Heath, the meeting point for the ancient hundred of Chafford, a pre-Norman geographical subdivision of Essex not to be confused with today’s Chafford Hundred where the walk ends. Three parish boundaries met here: Rainham to the west, Upminster to the east and Aveley to the south. One of these is still functional, as when Greater London was created in 1965, Aveley remained outside it. The boundary here doesn’t quite follow the road, so when you walk past the car park in Cely Woods and follow the track right, you’re leaving London, though not for the final time.

Cely Woods

Track through Cely Woods, showing the wide margins of the new Thames Chase woodlands.

Aveley was once a large and prosperous parish in Chafford Hundred, centred on a large village off the trail to the south. This was already in existence in Saxon times and is mentioned several times in the Domesday survey of 1086, its name likely derived from the personal name Ælfgyþ and a suffix meaning a woodland clearing. In 1929, Aveley was allocated to Purfleet Urban District, which became a part of Thurrock in 1936 – originally an urban district of Essex, then, from 1974, a borough and finally, in 1997, a unitary authority separate from both London and Essex.

Thurrock’s reputation is not a happy one – in 2012 it was the lowest-ranked of all council areas in England in the government’s Wellbeing survey, and I’ve said more about this and other issues in my writeup of the London Countryway alternative route via Tilbury Town. But I doubt you’ll feel unhappy in the modestly pretty Cely Woods, the second Forestry Commission site on today’s walk.

There were five manors in the parish in Norman times, with this northwest corner occupied by one known as Bretts after the Bret family who rented it from the Swein of Essex in the 13th century. It was bought in 1462 by London wool merchant Richard Cely, and he and his descendants occupied it for the next 70 or so years. During a legal dispute about the inheritance of the estate in the 1490s, the Court of Chancery seized a collection of family papers as potential evidence. This cache of letters, invoices and other business documents written between 1475 and 1488 ended up at the Public Records Office, where it was rediscovered in the late 19th century, and published in edited form in 1900 under the title The Cely Papers.

The papers turned out to be a goldmine for historians researching economics, politics and everyday life not only in England but Flanders, France and the Netherlands in the 15th century. Their importance is better appreciated if you understand that the wool trade accounted back then for much of the English economy: taxes on it contributed considerably to state income, and consequently it was heavily regulated, forcing its practitioners to play politics whether they liked it or not.

The Celys sourced wool largely from the Cotswolds and shipped it via Calais, then an English possession, to customers in the southern Low Countries. Their correspondence records them confronting piracy in the English Channel, sharp practice in the Flemish markets (they weren’t above a little dodgy dealing themselves), losses from constantly fluctuating exchange rates, and numerous wars as alliances shifted between England, Burgundy and France. All the same, they appear to have been among the more prosperous merchants of the day, at least under the guiding hand of Richard – his three sons proved less adept at running the business after his death.

Historian Henry Elliot Malden, who edited the papers for publication, summarised the Celys’ life in his introduction in a way that says as much about his society as theirs:

Taken for all in all, the life revealed is not worse in point of morality than that of the same class at other times. It is more vigorous and manly than commercial life is now. The modem young business man has his holidays devoted to sport. The Celys, besides occasional relaxations — and Richard rode down to buy in Gloucestershire hawk on fist, ready to let fly at heron or partridge as he journeyed — had a continual experience of roughing it in their working days. In peril of robbers by sea and land, in peril of bogs and stones on the English apologies for roads, among the contending troops in Flanders, tossing in smacks across the Channel, they probably became men, more natural and tougher-fibred than those who have to cultivate their manhood by sport and games in the intervals of business. There is very little sensibility about them, but plenty of sense.

In 1568, Bretts became one of numerous plots merged with the expanding Belhus estate, of which more later. When that estate was broken up in the 1920s, the area now comprising Cely Woods was separately farmed, until the early 2000s when the Forestry Commission bought it as part of the Thames Chase project, pleasingly reviving the Cely name.

The Commission’s land is newly wooded in the style of other Thames Chase sites, but also encloses two patches of ancient woodland now owned and managed as part of Belhus Woods Country Park, which very likely would have been known to the Celys, at least on the occasions when they were in Aveley rather than Ieper, Calais or Gloucester. To the west, and off our route, is Warwick Wood; to the east, and to your left before you leave the site, is White Post Wood, likely named after a parish boundary marker which once stood here.

Belhus Woods Country Park

Belhus Lakes, Belhus Country Park. Essex, not Essex.

By the end of the 17th century, Belhus was one of the biggest landed estates in Essex, comprising over 910 ha. It had begun as a smallish post-Conquest manor in Aveley parish, rented from the Knights Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem and variously known as Nortons, Manywares or Coppins Crouch. Its most enduring name is from the family who held it in the 1330s, derived from their original home in the village of Ramsden Bellhouse near Billericay, but the dynasty most responsible for its expansion are the Barretts. John Barrett acquired part of the manor through marriage in 1397 and his distant descendant Thomas Barrett-Lennard sold off the much-expanded estate bit by bit in the first half of the 20th century.

In its pomp, Belhus straddled not only Aveley but the adjoining parishes of Upminster, North Ockendon and Wennington. The manor house, to the south, was rebuilt in 1526 and expanded several times over the succeeding centuries. In 1618, a large tract of land nearby was converted into a deer park and from 1749 this was fashionably remodelled, partly to the designs of the ever-busy landscape architect Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown.

The last family owner, Thomas Barrett-Lennard, preferred his clan’s other home at Horsford in Norfolk and neglected Belhus, selling a substantial tranche to Essex County Council in 1937 for preservation as Green Belt. During World War II, the house was badly damaged by bombs aimed at Hornchurch and the London docks, and was finally demolished in 1957. By then, most of the remaining land had been sold to the London County Council for housing.

Essex still owns an extensive portion of the estate. The northern section, including Warwick and White Post Woods, became public open space, designated in the late 1960s as a Country Park. The southern part, including the site of the house, is leased as a golf course. In between is Belhus Chase, which in the late 1990s was leased to the Woodland Trust. Essex’s ownership is now rather anomalous, as none of its holdings are within its current boundary. The Upminster segment became part of the London Borough of Havering in 1965, while the rest is in Thurrock, a unitary authority since 1997. But the county makes a decent job of running the country park.

As you cross Romford Road and enter Belhus Woods Country Park, you’re once again crossing the old Upminster parish boundary and returning to the London Borough of Havering. Much of the site is ancient woodland, though dotted with open grassland and meadows recalling the former deer park and shrubbery plantings from Brown’s day. There’s an excellent visitor centre right beside the route, with information boards and a decent café. A little past this, in a meadow off to the left, is the Belhus Woods Railway, actually two miniature railways at 184 mm (7¼”) and 127 mm (5”) gauge, built and operated by the volunteers of the Docklands and East London Model Engineering Society. It operates at least one afternoon a month except in winter, normally on a Sunday or bank holiday, and you can ride on it for a small charge.

The path runs through one of the largest patches of woodland, Running Water Wood, before the surroundings open out with Whitehall Wood on the left. A little further on is one of the most popular spots in the park, the grassy bank beside the first of several lakes, a legacy of gravel extraction. Turning south at the corner of the lake you’re following the London boundary again: the area to the east (left), though also part of the Belhus estate, was once another parish, North Ockendon. In 1936 it was divided, with this part allocated to Thurrock Urban District, and therefore remained outside London after 1965. You finally leave London for Thurrock when you cross the redundantly-named Running Water Brook, the south side of which was in the old Aveley parish.

The woodland to the north of the brook is known as Little Brick Kiln Wood; to the south you’re in Brick Kiln Wood. The names indicate these were, and still are, working woods. The brick kiln operated, with the occasional gap, between at least 1603 and the 1890s and bricks for the rebuilding of the mansion in the mid-18th century were likely made here. Some structures still survive among the trees. Hazel trees in the woods are still regularly coppiced and the timber used for thatching, fencing and hurdle making.

Over the brook, you’re officially out of the country park and into the Woodland Trust land of Belhus Chase. Much of this was grassland, but is now being replanted with trees in a layout intended to recall both the 17th century deer park and the 18th century landscaped version. The water channel to the left is artificial, a canal dug to supply water to the house. The original 18th century plans for the estate included a large lake, but the money ran out before this could be completed, and in 1770 engineer Richard Woods widened and expanded the canal to create this cheaper alternative, now known as the Long Pond. A little further on, the water expands into a broader pool, one of the more pleasant and secluded corners of the site.

The sense of seclusion is undermined by the nearby roar of traffic, and soon the trail climbs to cross the M25 orbital motorway. The official Loop route stays well within the motorway, but it’s encountered several times on the London Countryway and I’ve said more about it elsewhere, notably in my commentary on the walk between Oxted and Merstham. The road here, opened in 1982, bisects the Belhus estate, cutting straight across the line of the Long Pond. On the other side is a woodland known as the Ash Plantation. It’s a shame this is now severed from the rest of the site, but there’s the pleasing impression of a secret corner. Futher on, the trees end in a wide grass strip alongside the motorway, ushering you into the modern-day Belhus housing estate.

Belhus

The curious wooden spiral in Dilkes Park, Belhus.

The Belhus estate once extended considerably beyond the Ash Plantation, but the tranche to the east was sold off to the London County Council (LCC) in the late 1940s. Along with an adjoining patch to the northeast in South Ockendon, this became another of the housing estates the LCC built on the London edge, well outside its own territory, as a solution to the capital’s postwar housing problems. The Loop runs through several similar estates, for example at South Oxhey (section 15) and Harold Hill (section 21).

The first house in Belhus was occupied in 1950, and there were 4,000 houses and 1,320 flats by 1959. The Greater London Council (GLC) inherited the estate in 1965, though it still lay just outside London. It’s been managed by Thurrock council since 1980, though retains the appearance of a typical LCC estate of the period. In line with the ‘garden city’ ethos of postwar planning, it incorporates considerable areas of green space which enliven otherwise unremarkable and sometimes rather bleak architecture: there’s a large patch of grass just to the left soon after you leave the Plantation, overlooked by a desultory shopping parade.

A slightly incongruous Regency-inspired street layout featuring a pair of crescents abuts a more extensive green space. The 6.3 ha Dilkes Park incorporates part of the former Dilkes Wood, an 18th century plantation attached to Belhus Park that included fragments of ancient woodland. It’s now owned by the charity Fields in Trust, though managed by Thurrock, and is a valued local amenity. It was singled out for praise by Play England for the way the children’s play equipment isn’t fenced off but “seamlessly integrated with its woodland setting and there is no sense of where the play space begins and ends”. I’ve drawn a blank, though, in trying to find out more about the spiral of small wooden posts that decorates the circular junction in the middle of the park.

Mardyke Woods and Davy Down

Belhus Woods, one of the oldest woodlands in Essex.

The old Belhus estate stretched as far south as the river Mardyke, and the slopes on the north side of its valley were thickly wooded. Like many of the other woods on the estate up until the later 19th century, these were important workplaces: trees were coppiced for timber used for building, firewood gathered and livestock grazed. The LCC bought the woods with the housing estate land after World War II but thankfully conserved a large wooded area as a public amenity. These woods, known as Mardyke Woods, are now managed by the Forestry Commission, and since 2012 have been improved with new paths, signing and woodland thinning with the help of a grant from the Veolia Trust, discussed in my commentary on the London Loop section 24.

Unlike the other Commission sites on today’s walk, these are delightfully thick and tangled ancient semi-natural woodland. Tree cover is classified as ancient in England if an area has been known to be continuously wooded since 1600 (see my commentary on the London Countryway between Welham Green and Broxbourne) but these woods are much older, and were likely well-established by Roman times. The site was once three adjacent woods, under separate ownership before being brought together by the Barretts, and the remains of mediaeval woodbanks still separate some of the portions. The oldest surviving document mentioning the largest portion, Brannett’s Wood, dates from 1339, making it the second-oldest recorded woodland in Essex.

The section of wood you first enter is known as Millards Garden, with a more open green space and playground beside it, then as the walk turns east you’re in Brannett’s Wood. The ruggedness of the paths here makes a pleasant change from the walk so far, and there are some surprising ups and downs, particularly as the path turns south and descends the steep river terrace of the Mardyke. You emerge into a contrasting scene, where the Mardyke itself has created a flat, marshy floodplain, a finger of the Thames marshes clutching its way inland.

The Mardyke rises between Great Warley and Little Warley on the outskirts of Brentford, and runs for roughly 18 km to join the river Thames at Purfleet, where the official London Loop crosses it just above the confluence. Its name means ‘boundary ditch’, as a stretch to the north once formed part of the boundary between Chafford and Barstaple, the next hundred east. Our route temporarily joins the Mardyke Way, an 11-km walking and cycling trail opened in 2007 alongside part of the river. Westwards this will take you to Aveley village itself where there’s an easy link to Purfleet and the official Loop; eastwards and northwards it links to Bulphan and the London Countryway.

You walk under a substantial brick viaduct carrying a railway across the Mardyke valley. Known locally as the Fourteen Arches, this was built in 1892-1893 by the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway (LT&SR) as part of a southern loop between the company’s stations at Romford and Grays. For much of its existence the line had only one intermediate station, Ockendon to the north of here, and it remains single track. An old parish boundary ran down to the Mardyke just the other side of the railway, dividing Aveley from South Ockendon parish, and the route ventures just a few steps beyond this before leaving the Mardyke Way to cross the reedy river on a new foot and cycle bridge.

The Mardyke between Davy Down and Mardyke Woods.

On the other side, the land between the Mardyke and the Thames was once part of another parish, West Thurrock, held before 1066 by the ill-fated King Harold. From mediaeval times this was a relatively prosperous patchwork of farms, market gardens and even vineyards with extensive marshes bordering the Thames. Fruit and vegetables grew well thanks to the chalky soil, and it was the presence of a thick ridge of chalk, the Purfleet Anticline, running through the area that determined its fate in the industrial age. Purfleet, beside the Thames to the southwest and at the end of the official London Loop, began as a hamlet of West Thurrock and is discussed in more detail elsewhere.

The chalk is linked to a longstanding puzzle of the Mardyke: how did an apparently minor river cut such a substantial valley between the chalk to the south and the higher ground to the north. Careful study of gravel deposits has led to the conclusion that, some 300,000 years ago, the Thames flowed this way, north of the chalk, before cutting through the narrow gap at Purfleet and continuing on its present course.

The footbridge delivers you into Davy Down, a delightful 6 ha green space with a verdant mix of grassland, wetland and woodland patches, overlooked by an imposing brick pumping station. In the early 18th century this was a farm, and later a market garden. Its name derives from the family that owned it, and the fact that part of the site was on a finger of chalk ridge. The site was severed when the A13 opened in 1982, becoming economically unviable and falling into dereliction, until rescued by a local trust with the support of the council and the water company, and opened as a green space in 1993. It’s now managed by the Land Trust with the help of local volunteers.

Following the path across the meadow, it’s well worth dodging left into the woodland known as Pilgrims Copse, where a footbridge crosses a pond from which a sculpture of a stork juts up, creating an attractive picture. The path then climbs up the ridge to pass the chapel-like Stifford Pumping Station, opened by the South Essex Waterworks Company in 1928 to pump water from a 42 m borehole into the chalk. Water is still pumped and treated here by successor company Essex & Suffolk Water, but much of the original structure has been made redundant by modern technology. The original massive Sulzer diesel engines are preserved in situ and can be viewed if you call at the right time: the waterworks and the adjacent modern visitor centre are open most Thursday afternoons and on intermittent other days.

The old track south through the farm is now blocked by the A11, so the drive swings back north to deposit you on Pilgrims Lane. Known further south as Mill Lane, this is a very old road linking Ockendon, North and South Stifford and the Thames, and does indeed have an historic association with pilgrims. A ferry ran from Stoneness on Thurrock Marshes across the river to Greenhithe from at least 1310 and, like its upstream counterpart between Rainham and Erith on the official Loop, formed part of a pilgrimage route through Essex to Canterbury. The ferry operated with some gaps until the 1860s.

The lane once formed the boundary between West Thurrock and the next parish east, Stifford, but our route follows this line without crossing it, remaining on the Thurrock side. It rises up onto a modern bridge across the early 1980s dual carriageway of the A13, the current iteration of the main road from London to Southend. Passing a travellers’ site on one side and the main coach park for Lakeside shopping centre on the other, you soon reach a roundabout at a junction with an earlier version of the A13, the West Thurrock Arterial Road, opened in 1925 and now numbered A1306. On the other side of this, the walk continues along Pilgrims Lane, now a footpath and cycleway through the much-redeveloped area of Chafford Hundred.

Chafford Hundred

Gorge-eous Thurrock. The view of Chafford Gorges Nature Park from Grifon Road Outlook.

Even more so than Purfleet on the official London Loop, the modern development of West Thurrock was determined by the existence of a large chalk outcrop so close to easy transport on the river Thames. Chalk is a component of cement, and demand for it rocketed in the 19th century as one of the key raw materials of the ever-expanding city. Gibbs & Co, later Associated Portland Cement, opened a large quarry and works in the area south of Mill Wood and immediately to the west of Mill Lane in 1872.

Two years later, the Lion Cement Works opened on the Stifford side of Mill Lane, with quarrying later extended almost as far north as where the Arterial Road now runs. The same year, the Tunnel Portland Cement Co began operations at Tunnel Farm, on what’s now the other side of the railway: by the early 1970s this was the largest such plant in Europe, producing over 1 million tonnes of cement annually and employing 1,200 people. Other industries then filled in many of the gaps between the quarries.

But chalk quarries have a habit of becoming exhausted, and by 1920s the Associated Portland works were already closed. Production on the other sites ceased in 1976, leaving behind a vast expanse of devastated and dangerous land. Regeneration began in the late 1980s, with the western part of Thurrock colonised by light industry, main roads and retail parks, and a new town emerging to the east, straddling the old parishes of West Thurrock and Stifford. The first new homes here were completed in 1989, and the site now includes some 5,300 houses and flats. The town bestowed itself with fake heritage by borrowing the name of the old Anglo-Saxon administrative division in which it was located, Chafford Hundred, although the original hundred covered a much larger area.

These “near-identikit houses…each one with a regulation rectangle of lawn, a name-plaque and at least one car in the driveway,” as the Evening Standard put in 2001, attracted young East Enders looking for starter homes that were cheaper and more spacious than their London equivalents but still with good transport connections. Property values rose rapidly in the 1990s, when the area became “the most coveted address in Britain”. Today, despite the obvious bland late 20th century look of the architecture, Chafford Hundred remains a relatively desirable address in otherwise-depressed Thurrock.

One of the town’s positive features is its green space, much of it imaginatively reshaped from the former quarries. And despite the Standard’s assertion that it’s “a place where everybody drives, unless they’re pushing a pram or pulling a dog”, there are numerous off-road paths, including the preserved alignment of Pilgrims Lane. Very little of our route through here uses residential streets.

Shortly you pass a lookout on the left with a birds-eye view of the Lion Cement Works, now transformed into the 81 ha Chafford Gorges Nature Park, managed by Essex Wildlife Trust and slightly off our route. In front of you, the ground drops sharply to a lush, sheltered landscape of lakes, meadows and woods, hidden away in an artificial pit like a suburban Shangri-La.

This part of the park is known as Warren Gorge, after a farm which in turn was named after a nearby rabbit warren. With a visitor centre on the other side of Warren Gorge, and two other gorges, Lion Gorge and Grays Gorge, to the south, the site is well worth exploring if you have time or make a return visit. As well as wildlife, it’s noted for geology and industrial heritage, with exposed layers of chalk and sands and the remains of an industrial railway in Lion Gorge. Parts are a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).

Continuing down Pilgrims Lane, the housing to the right, west of the nature park, was built not on reclaimed quarries but farmland. The path emerges by a more modest but well-used recreation ground, Chafford Hundred Park, on the corner of Warren Lane and Mill Lane. A school once stood on this site, and the surrounding quarries must have made it a dangerous location. You’re soon walking through Mill Wood, an area of woodland which somehow survived the quarrying and subsequent redevelopment and is now part of the nature park.

Mill Wood Sand Cliff: legacy of the Thames and Scottish beaches.

There’s another surprise as the trees to your left suddenly disappear and you find yourself striding along a clifftop: Mill Wood Sand Cliff. There’s a breath-taking view across the rooftops towards the industrial structures along the Thames, with the spindly geometry of the Queen Elizabeth II bridge close by to the right. Further south, the ridge of the North Downs rears up on the Kent side.

You’re now overlooking the oldest of the 19th century chalk workings, the Associated Portland Cement Works, also known as the Thames Works, Gibbs Pit or Mill Wood Pit – a significant site for industrial historians, as it was where the first rotary cement kiln was invented. The houses beneath are relatively recent, built in the mid-2000s, by which time the quarry had been disused for 80 years and had become something of a wildlife haven, noted for wild flowers and their associated invertebrates. But local efforts to save it failed, and now only this fragment is left.

As you descend the steps to street level and look back at the cliff, it’s worth studying the layers that comprise it. The bulk of it is yellow Thanet Sand, made from sands washed down over the millennia from the Scottish coast by coastal currents. But there’s an upper crown of gravel, stained distinctively reddish by iron. This is known as Orsett Heath Gravel, deposited by the wider river of about 380,000 years ago, and marks the oldest and highest of the Thames’ series of river terraces.

Finally, there’s a short stretch past the ‘identikit’ houses of the new town, to reach the uninspiring roundabout and square in front of Chafford Hundred station, or Chafford Hundred Lakeside to use its full name. Unsurprisingly, it’s the newest station on the line, opened only in 1993. There’s only a single platform on this single-track branch line at what’s now the busiest single platform station in the UK, serving not only the town but the massive Lakeside mall occupying the site of the old Tunnel works on the other side of the railway. The bus stop for Kent is located conveniently right outside the station door.

Looping the Loop by bus: the X80 waits outside Chafford Hundred station.

The Dartford Crossing

Snapped from the bus: the Thames from the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, looking downstream Note fragment of Kent sign right.

The area between Chafford Hundred and the Dartford Crossing is perhaps not quite as inhospitable now as it was in its quarrying days, but neither is it the most welcoming corner of the London region. Over the past few decades, large-scale industry has been supplanted by an environment more familiar in the environs of US cities, designed to optimise mass retail and travel by car, all big and ugly with no sense of human scale and thoroughly discouraging to anyone on foot.

It’s the sort of place where people drive to work in bleak business parks, drive to shop in hanger-like discount warehouses marooned among vast parade grounds of car parks, then drive to eat in drive-thru chain restaurants, perhaps stopping off to sleep in global-brand hotels. The absence of a sense of place is exacerbated by the knot of major highways that converges here: the A13, M25 and numerous feeder roads from other parts of Essex and East London. These fast roads connect a substantial portion of southeastern and eastern England into the homogenous retail and leisure experience that is Lakeside, the nucleus of a dispersed web of globalised culture.

It’s indicative of the way the place is designed that the bus follows such a convoluted route, up and down slipways, round multiple roundabouts and along service roads. Nobody except perhaps the most obsessive or masochistic psychogeographers would walk a route like this. The fact that such large areas of characterless late 20th century sprawl-scape are mercifully still relatively rare around London gives this one something of a gruesome fascination, but you will probably still be glad you’re whizzing through it on a bus.

The first stop is the small bus station tucked away rather embarrassedly on the edge of the main Lakeside shopping centre, or as it's recently been rebranded, Intu Lakeside. This is on the site of the quarry that once served the Tunnel Portland Cement works, named after Tunnel Farm which once stood nearby. The lake in question is a flooded pit, now the centrepiece of the shopping mall which, when it opened officially in 1990, was the biggest in the London area. It’s still the 11th biggest such centre in the UK, with 133,200 m2 of floorspace. The lake is admittedly well-used within the site, and the area known as the Boardwalk that surrounds it is a pleasant place to sit, at least on quieter days, but all the eating places surrounding it are branches of overfamiliar chains.

To the south of Lakeside, somewhere among the knot of access roads and motorway junctions, is the original parish centre of West Thurrock, but the bus avoids this. Instead it works its way up onto the Dartford Crossing approach, passing further retail parks that are much uglier than Lakeside. So that they can be used by non-motorway traffic, the crossing itself and its immediate approaches are not classified as part of the M25 but instead are numbered A282, running right through the site of the Tunnel Cement Works.

A road crossing at this point was first suggested in the 1920s, and preliminary boring began in the late 1930s before being interrupted by World War II. It was resumed in 1955 as part of the ambitious and later abandoned scheme to build concentric ringways around London, discussed elsewhere. Originally there was only a single carriageway tunnel, opened in 1963 and supplemented by a second tunnel in 1980. As plans for the orbital motorway took shape, it was clear that further capacity would be needed.

This was provided in 1991 by the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, which now conveys southbound traffic while northbound traffic uses the tunnels, so for Loop walkers the clockwise option is by far the best here. But the crossing is of course still regularly congested, as additional capacity only stimulates further demand. Drivers have always had to pay to cross the river here – at first the fee for a car was 6d (2.5p) – and the original promise that this was a temporary arrangement to recoup construction costs has since been abandoned. There’s now officially a ‘DART charge’ rather than a ‘toll’, currently £2.50 for a car, collected virtually and enforced using number plate recognition.

Galleon Boulevard bus stop, Crossways, Dartford:
Queen Elizabeth II bridge piers just visible.

For all the problems and issues, crossing the Thames on the bridge is still quite an experience, and I suggest you sit on the left for the best views. The German-designed structure cost £120 million, and when it was opened it had the largest cable-stayed span in Europe, at 450 m. It is still the lowest bridge across the Thames and the only one downstream of central London to be built since Tower Bridge in 1894.

The two main piers rise to a height of 137 m, embedded in caissons which are designed to withstand the impact of a 65,000-tonne ship. The deck is 65 m above the Thames, enough to allow cruise liners to pass beneath. It affords amazing views, though inevitably partially obscured by passing traffic, both upstream towards Crayford Ness, the Dartford Flood Barrier and the towers of Docklands and the City, and downstream to Swanscombe Marshes and Tilbury Docks. This alone is worth the bus fare, along with the satisfaction of having actually crossed the river.

On the Kent side there’s more convoluted navigation through the Crossways estate on the edge of Dartford, an area not too dissimilar to the jumble of Thurrock, perhaps because it too was built on the site of an abandoned cement works and quarry. The bus drops you on the corner of Galleon Boulevard, and the walk from here to the river Darent and on to reconnect with the main London Loop trail at Barnes Cray is a subject for another post.

• Route description
• Google map: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1kR1LrzqrpJjVZqKaXjIQqgOWVeE&usp=sharing

London Loop 23/24: Upminster Bridge - Rainham - Purfleet

Yes, concrete can float. World War II concrete barges dumped by the Thames at Rainham.

The London Loop ends in style, with one of its most interesting and rewarding sections. It continues to track the river Ingrebourne, first along a succession of green strips south of Upminster, then through Hornchurch Country Park, a former airbase that’s now one of the best open spaces on the trail. The green space now extends nearly all the way to pretty Rainham with its handsome 18th century Hall. A stride across Rainham Marshes in the footsteps of pilgrims takes you to the final stretch along the Thames, passing wartime concrete barges, a large but easily ignored landfill site and the RSPB’s Rainham Marshes reserve to finish at Count Dracula’s former home of Purfleet, just outside the London boundary.

For one last time, I’ve combined two Loop sections to create a longer walk. The official break point is at Rainham, but note that other transport options are surprisingly sparse, with only a couple of bus stops within easy reach between Upminster Bridge and Rainham. The stretch from there to Purfleet is the longest on the Loop without a convenient break point, so be prepared to walk the full distance: 8.5 km on the official route, though it’s all on easy paths and there’s an option to shorten the walk a little while missing some of the riverside features.

Update November 2017. Although I'd recommend first-time walkers follow the official London Loop route as described here, there is an unofficial option of branching off just before Hacton Bridge towards Chafford Hundred for the bus across the Dartford Crossing, currently the best available option for connecting the two ends of the Loop. Read more here.

The Ingrebourne Parkways

Rural past: Upminster windmill under repair.

Upminster today is deep suburbia, but that’s a 20th century phenomenon. The best way to imagine its rural past is to look at the geography. 200 or so years ago, Upminster Road was a country lane crossing a river valley between two ancient settlements, both crowned with hilltop churches so typical of this part of Essex.

To the west, on your left as you leave the Tube station, was Hornchurch, longstanding commercial centre of the Royal Liberty of Havering, discussed in the previous section, which stretched as far east as the river Ingrebourne. Overlooking the eastern slope of the valley was the parish centre of Upminster. On the Upminster side, the road is named St Marys Lane, after the parish church, but was originally known as Cranham Road, after its next destination.

The river has been bridged at this point at least since 1375, though for most of its history the bridge was pedestrian only, with horses and vehicles using an adjacent ford. One of the privileges of living in the Liberty was not having to pay for the upkeep of the bridge, which was entirely the responsibility of Upminster parish. The current stone and brick structure was installed, complete with time capsule, in 1892 as the most recent of a succession of bridges here. The river banks have been straightened and culverted but the water runs as it always did, from the hills north of Harold Wood down to the Thames.

The Loop heads off the road a little past the bridge, but for a more visible reminder of the area’s rural past, it’s worth a detour up the hill to view Upminster Windmill, one of the seven intact windmills surviving in London (another, Shirley Windmill, is just off section 4 of the Loop). The Grade II*- listed smock mill was built in 1803 to serve a new bakery on Hunt’s Farm, which once covered the site. Wind power was supplemented in 1811 with a steam engine, and at its peak, in the 1860s, the surviving mill building was the centre of an extensive complex with six pairs of millstones driven by both wind and steam.

It’s also known as Abraham’s Mill, after the family who owned it between 1857 and 1934, when it ceased commercial operations. Three years later, it was bought by Essex County Council, and was almost demolished but for a public outcry that eventually resulted in its being listed. The mill has enjoyed mixed fortunes since, though it’s currently leased on a long-term basis to a charity, the Friends of Upminster Windmill, who intend to return it to full working order, including an expanded visitor centre. When I last visited, the sails had been removed for restoration, giving the remaining smock a curiously naked look, but they shouldn’t be gone for long.

The Loop regains the Ingrebourne behind Hornchurch Stadium, which despite its name stands not in historic Hornchurch but on the Upminster side of the river. This council-built football and athletics venue has been here since 1956, on the site of the old Bridge House that once guarded the bridge. It’s home to a non-League football club, AFC Hornchurch, successors to the old Hornchurch FC, who play in the Isthmian League, as well as to West Ham United’s ladies’ team.

River Ingrebourne approaching Hacton Bridge.

As we have seen many times before on the trail, rivers passing through outer London tend to paint green strips through suburbia, thanks to their tendency to flood. The open margins of the Ingrebourne between the stadium and Hornchurch Country Park were improved by the council in the early 1960s to create a pioneering 2.5 km riverside walkway. It’s known as a ‘parkway’, a term that’s sometimes employed by planners to mean a motor highway with landscaped surrounds, but the Havering version is blissfully traffic-free. In fact there are officially three successive parkways: Gaynes Parkway as far as Hacton Bridge, Hacton Parkway to the edge of the old St George’s Hospital site, and Sutton Parkway on to the country park.

All three borrow well-established local place names. Gaynes was once the biggest manor in Upminster parish, deriving its name from the Engaine family, who held it in the 13th century. Hacton is still known today as a distinct locality, and we’ll have a lot more to say about Suttons shortly.

Today the parkways and other land alongside the river are part of the designated area of Thames Chase Community Forest, introduced in the previous section. They also serve as cycle routes, and not long after the Loop rejoins the riverside, it shares its path once more with the Ingrebourne Way, National Cycle Network 136, which has followed a more easterly route via Upminster town centre. Then the trail swaps from the Upminster to the Hornchurch side to arrive at Hacton Bridge.

Hacton likely developed around 1300 as an outlying hamlet of Upminster, to the east of the bridge, which has existed from about the same time. The river bends southwest here, so the route across the bridge runs roughly north-south, linking the Harold Wood area with Aveley and the Thames at Purfleet. It was also important as part of a route to Romford Market from the south.

On the other side of the bridge, the green space opens out a little, becoming wilder and more natural, though the housing estates of Hornchurch are never far away, sometimes pressing on the path which remains on the west side of the Ingrebourne. Soon visible on the right is the site of St George’s Hospital, founded in 1939 as Suttons Institution, originally to treat airmen from RAF Hornchurch. It became an NHS hospital in 1948 but was closed in 2012 and is being redeveloped as housing.

Hornchurch Country Park

The wetlands of Hornchurch Country Park.

Suttons was one of two manors granted by Henry II to Hornchurch Priory in the 1150s, and when the priory was dissolved in 1391, the Bishop of Winchester used the property to endow New College, Oxford. Remarkably, the college still owned Suttons Farm in 1915, during World War I, when the War Ministry leased part of it for a Royal Flying Corps airfield. This original airfield covered only a small part of the site, to the north, and was at first a rather improvised affair. ‘Flightways’, as they were known, were marked out on the grass with flaming torches when needed, and pilots were billeted in a nearby pub. But it later grew into one of the most important military airbases in the UK.

The site was chosen as the Ingrebourne’s flood plain here provided a large, flat, open area strategically close to the Thames estuary. For centuries, the wide-open highway of the Thames had been both a key factor in London’s success and one of the biggest weak spots in Britain’s defences. Much effort had been made over those centuries to protect it from potential seaborne belligerents, from the Spanish Armada to Napoléon Bonaparte, as seen on previous walks such as the London Countryway past Tilbury Fort.

This riparian vulnerability persisted into the new age of aerial combat: before radar, let alone GPS, navigation was one of the many challenges of flying, but the Thames was clearly visible from above even at night and pointed the way to some of the most strategic targets in the country. The first pilots based at Suttons Farm were tasked with intercepting and repelling or destroying any aircraft that tried to take advantage of this.

Initially the threat came not from aeroplanes, which still had limited range, but from airships, the famous German Zeppelins. Although these were essentially huge bags of potentially explosive hydrogen, they initially proved resistant to the unreliable canvas and wood biplanes flown by British pilots, until one night in September 1916 when Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson, based at Suttons Farm, shot down an SL11 airship, which crashed in flames on a field in Cuffley, Hertfordshire, with the loss of all hands. A few nights later, another Suttons Farm flyer, Lieutenant Frederick Sowery, downed a second airship near Billericay, Essex.

These and subsequent incidents were widely publicised and celebrated, helping establish the idea of the air ace as a modern folk hero. The popular image of daring Biggles types with elaborate moustaches intensified in the later years of the war as aerial dogfights became commonplace, and more sophisticated aircraft flew from Suttons Farm to combat a new threat to London from Gotha bombers. Despite this, not long after the armistice that ended the war in 1918, the air base was deemed surplus to requirements, and the following year the land returned to farming.

This pastoral interlude was not to last. In 1922, as part of a major expansion of the newly-formed Royal Air Force (RAF), aviation returned to the Ingrebourne valley, over a much larger swathe of Suttons bought outright from New College. At first the base was known as RAF Suttons Farm but was renamed RAF Hornchurch in 1928 to make it easier to find by public transport.

World War II pillbox from RAF Hornchurch todays surviving in Hornchurch Country Park.

During World War II, Hornchurch flyers played a major role in supporting the withdrawal of Allied troops from Dunkirk in 1940, and in the subsequent Battle of Britain, which, as I noted when the Loop passed the former RAF command post at Bentley Priory in section 15, was the first significant military defeat for Nazi Germany. It was hard won, with Hornchurch alone losing 144 planes in the process of destroying 205 German aircraft. In total 2,662 German and well over 1,500 lives on the British side were lost. The crews at Hornchurch at this time, incidentally, included not just Brits but personnel from the USA, Canada, Australasia, South Africa, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Hornchurch continued to defend the estuary in the years following the Battle of Britain, but by 1944 the planes had been relocated to the mainland, closer to the front, and the site’s history as an operational base ended. After the war, it was used for training and occasionally as a mobilisation depot. During a series of bitter strikes in the London docks and elsewhere in 1948-50, service personnel gathered at Hornchurch in readiness to take over essential services at the command of the Labour government, though these plans were never implemented. The base was also used as a centre for military support following the floods of 1954.

RAF Hornchurch was officially closed in 1962, with most of the structures demolished in 1966. The eastern part of the site, closest to the river, was used for gravel extraction in the 1970s. The western part became a housing estate, and the footprints of flightways, hangers and auxiliary buildings now lie under streets with names like Robinson Close, Sowrey Avenue, Deere Avenue and Tuck Road in honour of the flyers of two world wars.

The gravel workings exposed evidence of a much longer history of human habitation and use of the valley, unearthing artefacts from the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages and Roman times. In 1980, with the gravel exhausted, the site was restored as the 104.5 ha Hornchurch Country Park. Much was then designated as the Ingrebourne Marshes Site of Special Scientific Interest and the Ingrebourne Valley Local Nature Reserve. And though the original layout of the airbase has been obscured by digging and development, a few remnants have survived as reminders of less peaceful times, several of them visible from the Loop.

The main biological interest is in the wetlands bounding on the river, the heart of the SSSI, with their patchwork of reed beds dominated by two different species of reeds, tall fen and wet grassland. According to the official SSSI citation, they form “the largest and one of the most diverse coherent areas of freshwater marshland in Greater London…nowhere else in London do these habitats occur on such a large scale or in such intimate juxtaposition.” They support a rich population of invertebrates, including rare damselflies and hoverflies, and 61 species of breeding birds, including kingfishers, reed warblers and redshank. Elsewhere there are patches of planted woodland, rough grazed meadows and ponds.

The park is owned and managed by Havering council but has benefitted enormously since 2005 from a partnership with the Essex Wildlife Trust, which has set up a Friends group and helped raise additional funds from the National Lottery and sources such as the Veolia North Thames Trust, of which more later. Some of that cash has gone on the Wildlife Trust’s outstanding Ingrebourne Valley Visitor Centre, opened in 2015 with fascinating displays on both wildlife and wartime heritage. With a decent café too, it’s the first of three tempting pit stops along this section of the trail.

The Spitfire that never got off the ground.

Before reaching the visitor centre, it’s worth pausing at the playground to observe the item of play equipment roughly based on a Spitfire, the most famous model of fighter plane to fly from here in World War II. There’s something oddly cheering about the way children clamber obliviously over this tribute to an efficient instrument of death and destruction on sunny weekends and holidays. The car park beyond, only a little further off the trail, is on the site of a former aircraft dispersal bay, and a red brick E-shaped blast pen, like those noted at Kenley aerodrome on section 5 of the Loop, still stands here.

Not far past the visitor centre, a viewpoint on the right gives a fine view of the reed beds and river, and a little further, down a dip, is a half-sunken hexagonal concrete pillbox, one of the surviving installations from World War II. Still further are two much smaller and rather rarer conical structures known as Tett Turrets, actually the tops of submerged concrete cylinders just about big enough to shelter a single gunner in what must have been a very cramped and claustrophobic environment. Just past the turrets, the woodland to the right covers the southeastern end of what was once the longest of two flightways, which ran northeast as far as what’s now Deere Avenue.

Tett Turret at Hornchurch Country Park

The trail then turns away from the river, passing another pillbox right beside the path, to reach Albyns Farm Lake, created from gravel diggings in the 1980s and now a popular fishing spot. The name indicates that this part of the site lay within the bounds of another farm, but still within the airfield. A second, shorter, flightway ran roughly north from the northern corner of the lake, almost to today’s Scotts Primary School, crossing the longer one.

As you round the lake and follow the surfaced lane, you’re walking along what was once the airfield perimeter. You soon pass the farmhouse of Albyns Farm, now an upmarket walled residence in an unusual setting. During wartime, its occupants must have been regularly deafened by aircraft movements – and under constant threat of stray bombs and bullets from attacks on the base.

At the farmhouse, the Loop was originally forced into a frustrating detour through streets, but in recent years a field edge path has opened, connecting directly to a welcome extension of the green spaces along the valley. Ingrebourne Hill is the second of the major Thames Chase Forestry Commission sites along the Loop, a 57 ha area which, like Hornchurch Country Park, was quarried for gravel, until it was restored and gradually reopened between 1998 and 2008.

Like the Commission’s Pages Wood in the previous section, it’s designed to mix areas of tree cover with broad paths and grassland, so will retain a relatively open aspect even as it matures. A major feature is a state-of-the-art 2 km mountain bike course, so watch out for fast and muddy bikers crossing your path. There’s also a viewpoint atop an artificial hill with a line of sight to central London’s high rises, but since this is about 300 m off the trail to the east, I haven’t counted it among my views from the Loop.

The swathe of reed beds continues into Ingrebourne Hill, past the viewpoint, providing a backdrop in the southern part of the site to a landscaped lake, named Stillwell Lake after Squadron Leader Ronnie Stillwell, one of the Spitfire pilots based at RAF Hornchurch. Another aviation reference is the grassy mock-flightway that terminates near the car park at a sculpture inspired by runway approach lighting. One of the Loop’s best stretches of continuous off-road walking ends here as you leave the environs of Thames Chase Community Forest, heading for Rainham along busy South End Road.

Flightway sculpture at Ingrebourne Hill.

Rainham

Rainham Hall

Rainham is an ancient parish and village, recorded in the 1086 Domesday survey, its Saxon name meaning a settlement associated with someone called Regna (the other Rainham, on the Kent side of the estuary near the mouth of the Medway, is thought to have a slightly different derivation, from a tribal name). Like Upminster to the north, it was once part of Essex’s Chafford Hundred. It stands on the northern rim of the Thames marshes, on several significant transport routes.

Two roads, Upminster Road and Wennington Road, merged here to cross the Ingrebourne, before splitting off again as South End Road towards Hornchurch and Rainham Road towards Dagenham. The main route between London, Tilbury and Southend followed Rainham and Wennington Roads, passing through the village. Rainham Creek, the navigable tidal lower section of the Ingrebourne, connected a wharf at the west end of the village to the Thames. Another road, Ferry Lane, led down to the Thames itself, where the Pilgrim Ferry crossed the river to Kent and the ‘long ferry’ from Gravesend to London also called by.

A simple plank bridge crossed the Ingrebourne in 1356 when Edward III used it regularly on hunting expeditions. He granted local landowner Thomas de Hoggeshawe special protection when de Hoggeshawe undertook to repair it. The current bridge, known as Red Bridge, dates from 1898 when it was rebuilt by Essex County Council. By then, the tiny hamlet on the east bank had grown into a relatively prosperous village, boosted by proximity to the Thames, with several grand houses appearing in the 18th century. The railway from Fenchurch Street arrived in 1854, and from the 1920s, upwardly mobile East Enders built houses and smallholdings on plots which were said to be cheaper per square yard than linoleum.

Just before the bridge, the Loop crosses New Road, built in 1926 so the Tilbury road, by now numbered A13, could bypass the village centre. It’s since been superseded as a through route by a much bigger road we’ll walk under later. After the bridge, the Loop follows Bridge Road around another roundabout, beside which is a curious garden stocked with Australasian plants, created as a legacy of London 2012. The trail now finally bends with Bridge Road away from the creek, as there’s no convenient way of following this to its mouth. Then it reaches a triangular space on the left, the old village green, at the point where the Wennington and Upminster Roads meet.

Two buildings dominate the scene here. The Grade I listed Church of St Helen and St Giles is the only remaining mediaeval building in the village and the only church in the British Isles dedicated to these two saints. Much of the structure, built partly from clay eroded from the cliffs of the Essex coast, dates from around 1170. Until 1327 it was administered by Lesnes Abbey, across the river near present-day Thamesmead, the ruins of which we’ll encounter on the Green Chain Walk. The stumpy Grade II-listed red brick clock tower and war memorial topped with an unlikely Portland stone balustrade, as if waiting for someone to preach from the top of it, dates from 1920.

Despite its dearth of truly old buildings, Bridge Street retains a quiet and pleasant character, with several 18th and 19th century buildings. The most significant of these, and arguably Rainham’s greatest architectural gem, is Rainham Hall, a little further on the left. This fine three storey brick townhouse in Dutch Queen Anne style was built in 1729 for former sea captain John Harle, then the owner of Rainham Wharf. A later owner, Colonel Herbert Hall Mulliner, used it to house his collection of furniture and pottery. The colonel gave the house to the National Trust in 1949, but for many years it wasn’t fully open to the public. That finally changed in 2015 following Lottery-funded refurbishment and the opening of a café and reception centre in the adjoining coach house.

Even if the café doesn’t tempt you, it’s worth a slight detour to view the opposite side of the house, which presents its back to the street. The front façade is especially handsome, framed by original wrought iron railings featuring the intertwining initials of Harle and his wife Mary. It’s thought they were created by Jean Tijou, who also provided ironwork for Hampton Court Palace. You can wander freely in the large and charming garden, which includes vases listed in their own right and a recently replanted orchard that’s now one of the largest in London.

Much newer, but still incorporating elements of traditional vernacular architecture such as red brick and pitched roofs with end gables, is Rainham Library, opened in 2015. The building incorporates residential flats, shops and a café and is supposed to be highly sustainable. The design, by Maccreanor Lavington, does a good job of fitting into the street scene without seeming fake or nostalgic.

Rainham station, right by the library, was opened in 1854 on the original stretch of the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway (LT&SR) between Forest Gate and Tilbury: originally trains followed existing lines from Forest Gate to London Fenchurch Street until a more direct route into the City opened in 1858. The current buildings, though, are much more recent. Then, running parallel to the LT&SR here, is High Speed 1 (HS1), at the time of writing Britain’s only modern high speed railway line, linking London St Pancras International, Ashford and the Channel Tunnel portal. This stretch was part of the second phase of the line, opened between London and Ebbsfleet, on the Kent side of the Thames, in 2007.

The Loop crosses HS1 on a massive foot and cycle bridge, opened in 2006 as a fine entrance to Rainham Marshes. From the top, there are wide views across the flat, wet land, down to the Thames and across to the Kent side, with the North Downs rising up in the distance. A lengthy ramp supported on timber columns, designed by architect Peter Beard, majestically descends on a gentle slope to deposit you in the unique environment of the marshes, ready to enjoy a network of paths that were also improved as part of the construction of the railway.

Rainham Marshes

View across Rainham Marshes from the ramp across HS1.

The very first section of the London Loop, from Erith, spends most of its time in the Crayford Marshes to the south of the Thames, so it’s fitting that the trail ends with a lengthy stride through their counterparts on the north bank. As explained in section 1, large parts even of central London were once marshes, though much was drained in mediaeval times. Thankfully, the marshes survive here on the fringe, and Rainham’s now comprise the largest area of marshland in the upper part of the estuary. Not only are Rainham Marshes larger than Crayford Marshes, they’re also comparatively less developed. There are patches of industry, in big blocky buildings close to the river, as well as a massive landfill site. But surrounding these are vast tracts of wetland more-or-less unchanged since mediaeval times.

How this will be affected now that Rainham is part of the massive Thames Gateway development area remains to be seen, although the wildlife and amenity value of the marshes is well-recognised and protected. Since 1986, the marshes between Rainham and Purfleet have been included in the 479 ha Inner Thames Marshes Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), as “the largest remaining expanse of wetland bordering the upper reaches of the Thames Estuary…of particular note for its diverse ornithological interest and especially for the variety of breeding birds and the numbers of wintering wildfowl, waders, finches and birds of prey, with wintering teal populations reaching levels of international importance.”

The marshes are a largely natural landscape, protected from the worst of storms and floods by the way the river bends around Coldharbour Point. It’s thought only a small part of today’s land area, to the southeast, was artificially reclaimed from the Thames during the 17th century. The marshes were long used for grazing sheep and cattle, with some market gardening for both local and London markets.

This latter use increased in the 18th century when Captain Harle improved Rainham Wharf, using it not only to ship produce to the capital but for the decidedly unglamorous purpose of importing London’s horse muck to fertilise the expanding fields and gardens. At one point Rainham was notorious for its unpleasant odours rather than renowned for its riverside charms, although a small resort, with pubs and pleasure grounds, did develop by the mouth of the creek in the 19th century, catering to day trippers from upriver. This has long since vanished beneath industry.

Originally the Loop followed Ferry Lane here but now a new path continues ahead from the foot of the HS1 ramp through open grassland. It carries not only the Loop but National Cycle Network route 13, which will eventually connect Tower Bridge with Fakenham in Norfolk, and the prosaically named Rainham to Purfleet Walk. This last is rather obsessively waymarked, with posts every 100 m counting the distances between the two ends.

The trail passes under the A13 flyover, between the two Thames Gateway roundabouts with their unlikely public art welcoming you to the Ferry Lane industrial zone. The most recent incarnation of the Tilbury and Southend road, roaring above your head, was opened in 1997 as part of a new raised causeway across the marshes. It’s the last radial trunk road from London, and indeed the last A road, crossed by the Loop.

Re-entering the marshland on the other side of the A13, you have a choice of paths. The official Loop line is still shown on many maps as simply following Ferry Lane from here, but it now takes a narrow off-road path that’s sometimes slightly overgrown, continuing to track the lane but at a pleasant distance from the heavy traffic heading for the industrial estate. This route isn’t entirely accessible, so NCN13 and the Rainham to Purfleet Walk follow a broader path across a particularly verdant and lonely stretch of marsh, which rejoins the Loop at Rainham riverside, though is slightly longer and misses out a couple of riverside features.

A third alternative, also part of NCN13, branches off from this second route at the entrance to the riverside car park to rejoin at Aveley Bay: I don’t particularly recommend this as it misses out much of the riverside stretch, though it’s considerably shorter overall.

I’ll restrict my description to the official Loop route, which crosses Coldharbour Lane and nips down a green strip between buildings on the Easter Industrial Estate to cross Ferry Lane. Straight ahead is a slope surmounted by a wall, and on the other side of the wall, at last, is the river Thames. The Loop has almost completed its journey.

Along the Thames

The lighthouse at Coldharbour Point, with Erith Deep Wharf and the start of the Loop visible across the Thames.

This is the same broad and slightly briny stretch of the Thames, widening towards the estuary, that we enjoyed in section 1, but seen from the other side. And once again it’s worth pausing to note the contrast with the last time we saw the river, much narrower, non-tidal and more genteel, at Kingston on section 8. There, the passing traffic consisted of narrowboats and pleasure cruisers. Here, you might spot substantial ocean-going freighters on their way to and from the various commercial terminals upriver.

A plaque on the river wall, corresponding to the one we noted at Erith riverside, commemorates the Pilgrim Ferry, which operated between 1199 and the 1850s. The Erith plaque is on the actual site of the former ferry pier, but for some reason, this one is a long way off, as the ferry served Coldharbour Point further downstream. It was also known as the ‘Short Ferry’, to distinguish it from the Long Ferry mentioned above. This wasn’t a ferry in the modern sense at all, but more like a riverbus service that ran between Gravesend and the City of London, calling at several points along the way, including a pier by the mouth of Rainham Creek, a little upstream. It’s first recorded in 1279, and was withdrawn in the face of railway competition probably in the 1860s.

The trail now turns to follow the river downstream, though when I last walked this way the path along the very top of the river wall was overgrown with buddleia. This improves past the Tilda Rice Factory, the self-proclaimed “home of genuine basmati rice”. The company began in 1970 to serve the UK’s South Asian community, and claims to be the first importer of the fine basmati variety of rice into Europe. It’s since grown into a familiar supermarket brand, and its success is attested by the size of this plant, opened in the late 1980s. You walk between the factory itself and its private jetty, where bulk brown rice arrives by boat to be processed and packed. Some finished products are exported from the jetty too: the company, now owned by a US-based group, is active in 50 countries.

The trail soon reaches a riverside car park, where it’s rejoined by the first alternative route described above. This is a popular spot for river watching, with a couple of curious features close by. First is Rainham’s celebrated collection of abandoned concrete barges. If you think that the notion of a concrete barge must be a wind-up or a conceptual joke, here’s the proof that they exist, in the form of 16 substantial vessels, each one around 25 m long and 7 m wide, some of them half-submerged in mud. They were made in the early 1940s by the building firm Wates, at a time when more traditional boatbuilding materials were scarce due to the war effort, using the same precast concrete techniques as prefabricated buildings. As they’re reinforced with steel mesh, they’re technically known as ferro-concrete barges, with the model number PB200.

The barges, which were unpowered and designed to be towed by another vessel, were used for transporting bulk liquids, particularly fuel and drinking water. The frequently repeated claim that they were used as part of the temporary Mulberry harbours during the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944 has been called into question, though the harbours were made using similar techniques, and some of the barges may have helped to supply the operation. These examples have apparently languished here since the high tides of 1953, when they were used as improvised flood defences.

The sometimes submerged Diver sculpture at Rainham.

Just beyond the barges and likewise mired in the Thames mud is one of London’s quirkiest and most playful pieces of public art. It’s sometimes hard to spot, though, as it’s regularly partly and sometimes completely submerged at high tide. This is The Diver: Regeneration, a 4.6 m-tall galvanised steel cage in the shape of a figure wearing an old-fashioned ‘copper hat’ diving suit, placed here in 2000. It was created by self-taught local sculptor John Kaufman (1941-2002), inspired by his grandfather who was a diver in the London docks. The piece is both melancholy and comical, particularly when a gull chooses it as a convenient perch.

If you’ve a good memory of the first section, the surroundings may now start to look a little familiar, although viewed from a different angle. There are glimpses of the central London high rises upriver behind you. Ahead, a large grey and drab green hanger-like structure extends over the river. There’s an urban myth that the ubiquitous yellow barges full of rubbish towed down the river by tugs are taking their cargo out to sea for dumping, but in fact quite a lot of it is heading here, to the Veolia Waste Management Terminal jetty, for processing and, often, for landfill on the adjacent marshland.

Veolia, a multinational descended from a French water company that once also owned Universal Studios, states on its website that a landfill site has existed here for 150 years. Today, the facility has swelled to 177 ha, and currently accepts 1.5 million tonnes of waste every year, some of which is recycled at the onsite materials recovery facility, the rest buried. Note the plastic pipes sprouting from the grassy hills, to release the methane and carbon dioxide generated by decomposing waste: some of the gas is captured onsite and used to generate up to 15 MW of electricity for sale to the National Grid. There’s also a ‘leachate processing plant’ for dealing with the large quantities of foul liquid drained from waste.

The landfill was due to close in 2018, but Veolia successfully applied to the council for an extension and it will now be operational until 2024. After this, it’s due to be re-landscaped and opened as a further significant extension to the riverside public space. With those forbidding plastic tubes and the succession of smelly lorries coming and going, it’s hard to imagine the peaceful place this will eventually become, but there are other places on the Loop with a similar history, including just beyond Bexley on section 2 and at Stockley Park on section 11.

Meanwhile at least some of the company’s profits are diverted to public benefit, including through various charitable trusts, now united as the Veolia Environmental Trust. This has helped fund improvements along the Loop, including at Central Park in Harold Hill (on section 21), the Ingrebourne Valley Visitor Centre and the RSPB reserve a little further along. The riverside walkway itself was secured partly as a condition of Veolia’s operation of the site, and the company has been made to fund extra mitigation measures at the RSPB site, as landfill attracts predators like foxes and gulls, creating a disproportionate threat to breeding birds.

A little past the waste jetty, the river bends sharply left. The corner here is known as Coldharbour Point, and is marked by a small automatic lighthouse, one of only nine remaining along the Thames, to warn shipping of the change of direction. The spindly 12 m-tall steel gantry remains more-or-less as it was when installed by Trinity House in 1885, and is now the responsibility of the Port of London Authority (PLA). When I last visited, it was undergoing maintenance and sheathed in a protective cover which made it look more substantial than it actually is.

If you’ve walked section 1, you should be able to identify several landmarks on the opposite bank. Right opposite, seemingly reaching out towards the lighthouse, is the long pier of Erith Deep Wharf. To its right are the riverside gardens where the London Loop first encountered the Thames, and a way over to the left is the rectangular outline of Dartford Creek Flood Barrier, straddling the mouth of the river Darent. In the distance, downriver, is the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, the southbound section of the Dartford Crossing on the M25. Coldharbour Point was the location of the northern pier of the Pilgrim Ferry, and standing here you may well ponder how wonderful it would be to hop on a boat or stride across a bridge here to complete your journey back where it started. But for the time being at least, the Erith side remains frustratingly out of reach.

Round the bend, the path passes a cluster of industry known as the Freightmaster Industrial Estate, on the site of an old freight depot, but this is soon left behind on one of the loneliest stretches of the whole trail, as you thread between the river and the area of marshland known as Wennington Marshes. After a while, the trail turns slightly inland, temporarily losing sight of the river to follow the landward side of the river wall across Aveley Bay, once a much more watery inlet. It’s here that the second alternative route rejoins, having followed Coldharbour Lane.

About 100 m or so along Aveley Bay, the Loop crosses the Greater London boundary for the last time, leaving Havering and entering the Borough of Thurrock, once also part of Essex but since 1998 a separate unitary authority. There’s no obvious sign on the ground, although on the left, to the north, the boundary follows one of the ditches across Aveley Marsh. You might well spot Eurostars and other high speed trains whizzing across the marshes on HS1 to your left here.

Then a substantial fence marches towards you from the left, although the panels that once blocked the path have been removed. This is a reminder of an even less appealing former use than landfill. In 1906, the War Office bought the swathe of land downriver of the fence as a rifle range. Gun emplacements here were used to defend against Zeppelin raids during World War I, and beacon fires lit as decoys. Some of the structures from these times are still visible, with the site of an old gun emplacement off to the left soon after the fence. But after World War II the site was little used. As in several other places with a similar history, the military occupation had the side effect of leaving the natural environment relatively undisturbed, and in 2000 the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) took advantage of this by acquiring the former defence lands as its Rainham Marshes nature reserve.

RSPB visitor centre, Rainham Marshes.

The reserve opened to the public in 2008, and you’ll soon see its rather unobtrusive infrastructure of boardwalks and hides appearing on the landward side. The star species here are avocet, lapwing, little egret, peregrine and ringed plover, and the wetlands also support water voles, grass snakes and dragonflies. There’s an admission charge if you’re not an RSPB member, but you have a good view from the trail. This now runs back alongside the river for a while then splits again: the official route is along the lower path on the left, closer to the reserve, and there are notices deterring you from the upper path, but no actual blockages, so you may prefer to spend more time closer to the Thames.

Soon visible ahead, although well-camouflaged, is the reserve visitor centre, designed by van Heyningen & Haward architects to be as sustainable as possible. The distinctive conical structures on the roof are part of a natural light and ventilation system, and the design also features solar cells, rainwater collection and a ground source heat pump. Open free to the public, this is a third highly recommended stop on today’s walk: inside you’ll find extensive information and displays, an inviting volunteer-staffed café and massive windows providing a fine view over the marshes.

The trail turns away from the river to pass the visitor centre entrance and cross one final Thames tributary. This is the Mardyke, which rises in Holden’s Wood between Great and Little Warley, and flows for around 18 km. Its name means ‘boundary ditch’, and for much of its length it formed parish boundaries. Until 2010, it was something of a barrier here, necessitating a diversion further inland to get across, but now there’s a convenient cycle- and footbridge, funded by the Veolia Trust and known as the Veolia Mardyke Bridge. Crossing this, you’ll pass through the Sun Arch which, together with the adjacent wave-themed seats, was designed by artist Edward Allington.

There are paths along much of the Mardyke, and a partially-completed project to upgrade them into a walking and cycling trail, the Mardyke Way, which links with the London Countryway at Orsett. If you try following the Mardyke from here, though, you won’t get very far before the way is blocked, so if you want to explore this option, it’s best to continue along the Loop a little further into Purfleet.

Purfleet

Gumpowder Magazine No 5, now the Purfleet Heritage and Military Centre.

In Bram Stoker’s seminal Gothic novel Dracula, first published in 1897, estate agent Jonathan Harker describes a potential property of interest to his mysterious client, the Transylvanian Count Dracula, who unbeknown to him is a bloodsucking immortal vampire:

“At Purfleet, on a byroad, I came across just such a place as seemed to be required, and where was displayed a dilapidated notice that the place was for sale. It was surrounded by a high wall, of ancient structure, built of heavy stones, and has not been repaired for a large number of years. The closed gates are of heavy old oak and iron, all eaten with rust. The estate is called Carfax, no doubt a corruption of the old Quatre Face, as the house is four sided, agreeing with the cardinal points of the compass…The house is very large and of all periods back, I should say, to mediaeval times, for one part is of stone immensely thick, with only a few windows high up and heavily barred with iron. It looks like part of a keep, and is close to an old chapel or church…There are but few houses close at hand, one being a very large house only recently added to and formed into a private lunatic asylum."

Dracula buys the house, and has 50 large boxes delivered to it, which he then distributes to several other properties he has discreetly acquired around London. The boxes are coffins of Transylvanian soil to be used as refuges for the vampire as he proceeds to infiltrate the Victorian establishment. The driver who collects the boxes from Carfax is astonished at the Count’s vigour:

“There was the old party what engaged me a waitin’ in the ‘ouse at Purfleet. He ‘elped me to lift the boxes and put them in the dray. Curse me, but he was the strongest chap I ever struck, an’ him a old feller, with a white moustache, one that thin you would think he couldn’t throw a shadder…Why, ‘e took up ‘is end o’ the boxes like they was pounds of tea, and me a puffin’ an’ a blowin’ afore I could upend mine anyhow, an’ I’m no chicken, neither.”

Dracula recruits Renfield, one of the patients in the adjacent asylum, as his thrall. The doctor in charge of Renfield's case, John Seward, is a would-be suitor of one of the vampire's victims, Lucy Westenra, and teams with his former mentor Professor Abraham van Helsing and with Harker in an attempt to save her.

The house, which for added Gothic atmosphere became Carfax Abbey in the famous 1931 Universal film and in several subsequent adaptations, turns out to be fictitious, though Stoker drew on fact. Local historian Jonathan Catton, of Thurrock Museum, says (in ‘Purfleet’s Dracula Connection’, a fascinating piece on the Thurrock website from 1997), a house known as Carfax stood in Purfleet until 1980, though it wasn’t built until 1900 and didn’t match the description in the novel.

Instead, Catton identifies the original inspiration for the vampire’s lair as Purfleet House, not mediaeval in origin but built in 1791 for brewing magnate Samuel Whitbread, who at that time owned extensive property in the village. The house was sited in a former chalk quarry, secluded from surrounding streets, and the philanthropically-inclined Whitbread built a chapel and school next door. By the 1890s the site was a minor visitor attraction for day trippers, who could obtain the key from the caretaker and explore the winding paths and grottoes in the grounds.

Catton suggests Stoker may have been among the visitors, on a day off from his duties as acting manager at the Lyceum Theatre. He identifies the asylum with Ordnance House, a secure building nearby which was the residence of the Clerk of the Royal Gunpowder Magazines. Purfleet House was demolished in stages in the 1920s and 1950s, Ordnance House in the 1960s, although the chapel and school buildings, now private homes, still stand and are Grade II-listed.

The above account touches on several important aspects of Purfleet’s history: chalk, gunpowder, the Victorian leisure industry and the presence of the Whitbreads. In mediaeval times, it was a small riverside hamlet and manor of West Thurrock parish in the Chafford hundred of Essex. The parish centre was further east, under what’s now the suburban sprawl on the other side of the M25. The economy then was largely based on grazing and market gardening on the marshes, but from at least the 15th century chalk was dug from the large deposit that rises here as a cliff to the immediate north of the marshes, and kilned to produce lime for agricultural and building use. The convenience of transport on the nearby river encouraged this industrial development, and by the end of the 19th century there were major concrete works in the area.

In 1760, the government also took advantage of the river to build the Royal Gunpowder Magazine at the mouth of the Mardyke on its east bank, a storage facility replacing one at Greenwich. When the Royal Gunpowder Mills at Waltham Abbey (on the London Countryway) were opened in 1787, powder was shipped down the rivers Lea and Thames for storage here. Later it arrived by rail, with a private rail system connected to the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway (LT&SR). At its height in the 1890s, the 10 ha site housed around 3,200 tonnes of gunpowder and cordite in seven magazines, with more in disused ships moored in the river. Remarkably, it suffered no serious accidents before its closure in 1962.

The railway facilitated not only industry but leisure, with cheap excursion tickets sold at weekends bringing Londoners to the various local watering holes and to the pleasure gardens, also operated by Whitbread, that now covered another part of the old chalk quarry.

All this is hard to imagine today, as Purfleet suffers from the same malaise that affects many other parts of Thurrock, named the most miserable local authority area in England following a government survey in 2012. The modern-day bloodsuckers that cast their pall over the place are economic and political. I noted at Tilbury, on an alternative section of the London Countryway, the woes of a deindustrialised zone that misses the benefit of being part of London by lying just outside it. There have been attempts to cheer the area up, notably by the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, which in 2010 established a scenery production facility on the edge of town, since evolved into the flourishing High House Production Park. Purfleet isn’t as dilapidated as Tilbury, and most of the Loop’s route is through a conservation area, but there are still signs of boarded-up neglect.

The trail rounds the worn-looking 1970s Garrison Estate that replaced the gunpowder magazine, soon passing one of the surviving red brick heritage buildings. This is Magazine No 5, built in 1759, which was kept for storage when the estate was built, and saved following a local campaign in the 1990s. It opened in 1994 as the Purfleet Heritage and Military Centre, and survives in this role today, with an old shell casing and other exhibits on display outside. It’s open on Thursday and Sundays, staffed entirely by volunteers, and contains displays not only on the Gunpowder Magazines but on other aspects of local history, including the rifle range, Whitbread and the Dracula connection.

A little past this, near the beacon in Riverside Gardens, you have one last opportunity to admire the Thames before turning your back on it. The trail winds past the Royal Hotel, rebuilt in grand style with a stucco façade on the site of an earlier pub by Whitbread in the early 19th century, and still in use as a hotel today.

Opposite where you emerge on the High Street beside the hotel is a war memorial and open space, and beyond it St Stephen’s Church. This was built in the 1920s by the Whitbread family, from masonry largely recycled from partially demolishing Purfleet House. So the church is now the epicentre of the Dracula connection, somewhat ironically given the traditional vampire aversion to Christianity. There’s the opportunity for a detour not only to the church but to the historic Whitbread buildings in Church Hollow behind it. If you want to follow the Mardyke, it’s best to leave the riverside a little earlier, following Tank Hill Road and Tank Lane.

And finally, the London Loop reaches its conclusion rather anti-climatically, at Purfleet station a little further along London Road. The station was opened in 1854 as the next stop down from Rainham on the same stretch of the LT&SR, though the current rather undistinguished single storey yellow brick building, with large rectangles of forbidding grey shutters, is from the 1960s. It’s quite a schlep to link the two ends of the trail by public transport from here, though not quite as bad as it once was, thanks to the Docklands Light Railway (DLR). You’ll need to take a c2c National Rail train to West Ham, the DLR under the river to Woolwich Arsenal, then Southeastern National Rail to Erith, where, if you wish, you can start all over again.

Purfleet station, the rather unimpressive end point of the London Loop.

Looping the Loop

To write these posts, I walked the London Loop for the third time. Strictly speaking, though, the Loop didn’t yet exist on my first time round.

In the early 1990s, I stumbled on a leaflet published by the London Walking Forum, the pioneering partnership between local authorities and volunteer bodies that championed a coordinated approach to walking in London at a time when coordinated government in the capital had been abolished by Thatcherite spite. The leaflet included a map illustrating the Forum’s plans for a network of green London trails, some already in existence, some planned, some aspirational. That map was a revelation, and I set about walking all the existing routes shown on it that hadn’t already passed beneath my feet.

At that stage, the Loop and its sister trail the Capital Ring were merely gleams in the Forum members’ eyes, still known by the rather more prosaic titles Outer Orbital Path and Inner Orbital Path respectively. The map was certainly not a practical walking guide: it fitted the whole of Greater London onto an A4 sheet, and the only additional details besides the route lines were a few place names, the Thames and the borough boundaries.

But it was clear that the orbital routes were planned largely to make use of paths and access that already existed: indeed, sections of them followed already recognised trails like the Cray Riverway and the Green Chain Walk, and obvious features like rivers, canals and the ‘Greenway’ sewer. By carefully comparing the route map with more detailed street atlases and Ordnance Survey maps, it was possible to work out with some degree of accuracy where they were intended to go. And this is how I became one of the first people outside the London Walking Forum to walk the London Loop.

I walked the trail again in the early 2000s when the first edition of David Sharp’s guidebook was published, and then completed sections of it yet again over the years, sometimes because I was leading walks along it for Walk London. The only section, incidentally, completely new to me this time round was the final riverside one between Rainham and Purfleet, which was inaccessible until 2009 or so.

Based on these excursions, I developed a View of the London Loop which I expressed in print on a couple of occasions. My View was that the Loop was fine, but the Ring was much better. The Ring, I reasoned, was an unavoidably and unashamedly urban walk, constantly challenging expectations about urban walking by revealing London’s surprisingly extensive reserves of green space and a succession of ‘I never knew this existed’ features that you’d only ever find on foot. But the Loop, with its mix of large green urban fringe spaces, genuine countryside and inevitable built-up areas, seemed neither one thing nor the other.

People who liked country walking would enjoy the more rural bits, then carp about lengths of waterside tarmac and complain bitterly about streets and industrial estates. Less prepared walkers meanwhile found themselves grappling with muddy paths, rickety stiles, absent waymarks, ferocious nettle patches and all the other dubious pleasures of a classic English ramble. And to the would-be flaneur, the urban bits were not the multi-layered and vibrant streets of the inner city, but the apparently undifferentiated sprawl of boring old middle class suburbia.

Having walked the Loop again, this time digging into the background of the areas it passes through in considerable detail as I went, I can say I enjoyed it much more than I expected to. Yes, there are still issues, particularly where golf courses and interwar residential streets lap across the desire line or major roads sever paths. The sections between Banstead Downs and Warren Farm, between Bushy Park and Hospital Bridge, and up and down the A1 are a particular drudge in this respect.

On the other hand, if you find yourself sinking ankle deep into the mud at Pinnerwood, you may recall the kilometres of identikit semis with fondness. But such issues only trouble a minority of the Loop’s total length, and elsewhere there’s so much to enjoy, in terms of views, wildlife, natural beauty, landscaping or often-overlooked heritage. It’s still gobsmacking that environments like Rainham Marshes, Farthing Down and the Wellingtonia avenue in Havering Country Park can be found within the bounds of London.

And in the end London’s fascination is surely in its variety. Suburbia is as much a part of this great city’s story as its Roman and mediaeval core and its inner Victorian ‘villages’ and post-industrial zones. Seeing the way that the streets simply stop just north of Cockfosters, the result of the conjunction of historical circumstances that locked the built-up area into its current envelope while simultaneously preserving the magnificent adjoining country park, itself the result of successive waves of world history overlaying the natural endowment of the Forest of Middlesex, is surely as instructive as stumbling on urban woodlands and commons or tracing the industrial footprint of the East End on the Ring. All environments have something to teach the observant walker, and those on the Loop are no exception.

I concluded my writeup of the London Countryway with a rather lengthy reflection on the stories and places visited. If I did the same thing here, I might easily find myself writing an alternative version of the entire past 16 posts. So, to indulge a personal preference, I’ve picked out a dozen places along the way which I quite likely would never have found without the Loop, and which I’m delighted to revisit again and again, as they’re just so surprising, and so beautiful.

1. Hall Place, Bexley (section 1), a haphazard but delightful building, well- refurbished in a riverside setting, with bizarre topiary to enjoy.

2. Scadbury Park moated manor (section 2), a pile of very significant old stones in surely one of the most rural parts of Zone 5, with links to Christopher Marlowe and Elizabethan intrigue.

3. The Wilberforce Oak (section 3), a significant site in the development of civilisation, tucked away in Bromley’s countryside and only reachable on foot.

4. Farthing Down (section 5), London’s very own chalk down, with prehistoric heritage. Adjacent Happy Valley lives up to its name too.

5. The Lavender Farm (section 6), because where else would you expect to find fields full of commercially-grown lavender but in the London Borough of Sutton?

6. St Dunstan’s, Cranford Park (section 10), where the lad himself, Tony Hancock’s ashes are scattered close to the river Crane, a Georgian coach house, and the roaring M4.

7. Hatch End Station (sections 14/15), a miniature Romanesque masterpiece that’s all the more impressive for being so unexpected, thought by some the most attractive station in England.

8. The Obelisk, Trent Park (section 17): its setting, with a keyhole view of the house across sweeping parkland, is a monument to the tasteful flamboyance of a previous owner.

9. Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge (section 19), one of London’s most historic buildings, effectively evoking a Tudor past against the backdrop of Epping Forest.

10. Wellingtonia Avenue, Havering Country Park (section 20), lined with towering giant sequoias, one of the most awe-inspiring walkways in London and indeed the UK.

11. Hornchurch Country Park (section 23 above), combining intriguing fragments from its days as a wartime RAF base with a generous and rich expanse of wetland and marsh.

12. Rainham Riverside (section 24 above), for its improbable and unexpected collection of concrete barges and tidally-revealed public art, and its magnificent views of the Thames.

The Loop’s major flaw remains the fact that, owing to the lack of a convenient river crossing in the east, it isn’t a loop at all. On my first circuit, I was so frustrated by this that I attempted to find a way of linking the two ends via the Dartford Crossing, and I’ve revisited this idea again recently. As walkers aren’t allowed on the Queen Elizabeth II bridge, the only viable way of crossing the river here involves a bus ride, using a service that’s primarily intended to link the two massive shopping malls at Lakeside and Bluewater. There’s a good walk to be had from Hacton Bridge via several improving sites in Thames Chase Community Forest to the nearest convenient bus stop at Chafford Hundred station, and at least a couple of pleasant options from the first bus stop on the Kent side through the outskirts of Dartford to rejoin the Loop at Barnes Cray. I’d certainly recommend walking the official route first, or you’ll miss the highlights of the Thames Estuary. But for the benefit of those who understandably can’t get enough of the Loop, I’ll give more details of this alternative in future posts.

More about the unofficial alternative.

• Download full route description (PDF)
• View Google map
• Official Transport for London page: Upminster Bridge to Rainham
• Official Transport for London page: Rainham to Purfleet