London Loop 16 alternative via Woodcock Hill

The view from Woodcock Hill, Borehamwood, as enjoyed by military communications officers since 1588.

Woodcock Hill Village Green, an attractive informal open space with fabulous views which was saved by the local community, now provides a much greener and slightly more convenient way of kicking off LondonLoop section 16 between Elstree & Borehamwood station and Scratchwood. It’s particularly welcome as a little further along this section is perhaps the worst stretch of the entire trail, the long detour up and down the A1 to use a safe crossing, and while the alternative doesn’t address this directly, it does help redress the balance of the overall section.

When the Loop was first devised, access along the east side of the railway from the station wasn’t straightforward, and what’s now the Village Green was private land where public access was only on an informal basis. This is why the official route still grinds uphill along Deacons Hill Road, a rather long and dull residential street, and then along Barnet Lane, a busy local through-route. The alternative route makes use of newly-built and much quieter streets to connect with the Green, and from there stays entirely off-road as far as the A1, apart from a crossing of Barnet Lane. Because the official route involves retracing your steps from the station while the alternative runs straight past it, if you break at Borehamwood, the latter will save you about 500 m, though the two options are about equal in distance if you’re just passing through.

At some point it’s likely that the official route will be diverted this way, but this will require funding for new signing which isn’t currently available. So, for the moment the Loop arrows still point along the road, though the “informal” alternative is included in the latest edition of the official Loop guidebook, as updated by Colin Saunders. The only significant feature you’ll miss compared to the official route is a glimpse of some rail tunnel ventilation shafts. And of course, the road-based route is all along surfaced pavements while the alternative involves unsurfaced paths that might get muddy. But all things considered, I recommend the alternative above the official route, even for first time Loop walkers, and have updated the route description PDF to include both.

Leaving Borehamwood

Poetry in suburbia: Wordsworth Gardens, Borehamwood, out of daffodil season.

There’s lots more about Elstree, Borehamwood, the railway and the most famous local industry, film-making, in my writeup of London Loop section 15. Given its good rail connections and its proximity to London, the area is currently under enormous pressure for housing. At the time of writing the start of work was imminent on a new housing estate on what’s currently derelict land on your left along Station Road. The Elstree & Borehamwood Gasworks was built here in 1872, and gasholders still stood until dismantled in 2016: aerial photographs clearly show their footprints. A fragment of evidence remains on the ground too: a couple of older houses known as Gasworks Cottages.

The housing a little further on was built in the 2000s on the site of the Fire Research Station (FRS), one of the more obscure specialisms of the area. It was founded by a consortium of insurance companies as the Fire Offices’ Committee Testing Station in 1935. The main FRS moved to Watford in 1994 but assessment of fire and security products continued here until 2000, when the site was closed and demolished to make way for the current estate. The streets are named slightly incongruously after poets – Auden Drive, Coleridge Way, Wordsworth Gardens. The latter includes a square of green saved from the wide grounds of the FRS: you’ll need to visit in daffodil season to judge whether it lives up to its name.

Woodcock Hill Village Green

The Armada Beacon on Woodcock Hill.

Reaching Woodcock Hill Village Green itself, you’re in an older area of housing developed by the building group John Laing & Son, which bought up much of the remaining farmland around the town from the Earl of Strafford in the 1950s. All the Laing estates incorporated green space, and it’s likely the area that’s now the village green was deliberately left for this purpose – there’s a local legend that then-owner John William Laing intended to donate it to residents, and from 1959 a community group acted as guardian to the site.

Its status remained unresolved, though, until 1996 when it was earmarked for further housing. A campaign group, Woodcock Hill Open Space Forever! (WHOSE!), stepped in to defend it, beginning the long process of official registration as a Village Green. At the public inquiry in 2007, the key question was whether the land had been unfenced for 20 years, settled in part by a newspaper article about a man who was prosecuted for mistreating donkeys he kept tethered there. The inspector eventually found in favour of the application, and the space has been a Village Green since 2008. WHOSE! converted itself into the Woodcock Hill Village Green Trust, and a team of its keen volunteers now looks after the site.

Had Woodcock Hill been adopted as a formal recreation ground in the 1950s, I doubt it would have as much character today. There’s a pleasing wildness and slightly scruffy informality, with long grass and seemingly random clumps of bushes: much more textured and ecologically rich than a mown glass recreation ground. One of the highlights is the view north over Hertfordshire: on a clear day, you should be able to spot St Albans Cathedral, 13 km away and on the London Countryway sections 10 and 11 (and in my suggested alternative section 11).

The trail passes an armada beacon, dating from George V’s silver jubilee in 1935 but on or close to the site of one of the chain of beacons lit in 1588 to communicate the sighting of the Spanish Armada off the Cornish coast. It was restored and lit again in 1988 to mark the 400^th anniversary of the Armada and again for Elizabeth II’s diamond jubilee in 2012.

The lofty prospect supported another line-of-sight communication system from 1807 when the hill housed one of a chain of stations in the naval telegraph system developed to help coordinate the response to a possible invasion from Napoleonic France. The next station south was at Hampstead, the next one north at St Albans. This particular system was dismantled following the defeat of Napoléon in 1812, though a telegraph chain remained in use between London and Plymouth until 1847: London Countryway section 2 passes a tower that formed part of this at Chatley Heath in Surrey.

From the beacon, the path essentially parallels Barnet Lane, passing a series of small, often dry, ponds within scrubby woodland. It soon emerges onto the road itself to rejoin the official trail more-or-less opposite the path into Scratchwood. All the walk so far has been outside London, in Hertfordshire’s Hertsmere District (and in Watling Chase Community Forest), but a short stroll along this path will take you into the London Borough of Barnet. Cross the road carefully, while congratulating yourself for avoiding a 1 km walk along it.

• Download full route description (PDF)
• View Google map
• Official Transport for London page

London Loop 15 alternative via Harrow Weald Common

Grim's Dyke House: gentility and a grim history.

This short alternative route for London Loop section 15 via Harrow Weald Common avoids a slight dogleg and some road crossings, though it does miss out on one of the best viewpoints on the trail. I’ve also taken the opportunity to say more about the pretty but rather wiggly official Loop link from Stanmore Little Common to Stanmore station via Stanmore Country Park.

Crossing the high ground in the north of Harrow borough, the Loop encounters a continuous chain of open spaces on former common land: Grimsdyke Open Space, Harrow Weald Common and the City Open Space. Yet the route ducks out of the green to cross the relatively busy Old Redding road twice. I suspect this is partly a legacy issue: Grim’s Dyke House and its surroundings form an enclave within the public space and there may have been an issue with access across the drive. But a more positive reason for the dogleg is to visit Old Redding Viewpoint with its breath-taking prospect of central London, and the adjoining historic pub, The Case Is Altered.

For the view alone, my recommendation is that you stick to the official route. But if the view and/or the pub hold no interest, or you’ve already been there and done that, or you particularly want to avoid crossing busy roads if you can, there is an alternative described by Colin Saunders in the most recent edition of the official guidebook. This uses parts of the more recently-waymarked Harrow Weald Common Nature Trail to stay within the woodland to the north of the road. Two more plus points for this option are that it’s 350 m shorter and takes you closer to the house, which is well worth a look.

From Carpenders Park

Although it’s not an official Loop link, there’s an obvious and convenient way of joining the trail eastbound from Carpenders Park station. This is the next London Overground station north from Hatch End along the West Coast Main Line, just outside London but still in the Transport for London (TfL) fares system, in zone 7. Like Moor Park at the end of section 13, it began as a golf halt, originally opening around 200 m north of its current site in 1914.

The current station was built in 1952 at around the time the area was undergoing large-scale development into a new suburb. I’ve said a bit more about this in my original post on section 15, but didn’t realise then that this largely private estate just across the railway from the Greater London Council estate at South Oxhey was the model for Plummers Park in Leslie Thomas’s novel Tropic of Ruislip (1974). More about this in the discussion of the real Ruislip under Hillingdon Trail section 2.

The developers of Carpenders Park left a green ribbon along the course of the Hartsbourne stream, which rises on the slopes of one of the golf courses between here and Bushey to the east, and flows for about 5 km roughly northwest to join the river Colne near Oxhey Hall. A Woodland Walk now follows the stream east of the railway: a street name, The Mead, is a reminder that flood meadows once lined the waterside where houses now stand.

The woodland strip is a panhandle extension of Carpenders Park lawn cemetery, soon visible through the trees: at this point your route bends right to stay under the branches, entering the designated area of Watling Chase Community Forest. As mentioned under Loop 15, the cemetery is something of an anomaly as it’s run jointly by the London Boroughs of Brent and Harrow, although it lies outside both their boundaries. Only at the very end do you need to leave the woodland path, joining a short stretch of the cemetery drive which delivers you to Oxhey Lane just north of the point where the official London Loop route passes Mutton Wood.

Further along, as acknowledged by Colin Saunders in the latest edition of the London Loop guide, the farmland northeast of Grim’s Dyke Golf Course is the site of the Wild Green Project, which aims to create a multi-layered forestry farm producing a range of foods and other products but with a beneficial environmental impact. I bumped into environmentalist and sculptor Lee Lannon, the man behind this, when I was last passing through. He told me that progress has been delayed by issues with landowners, which is why the sign has been taken down – but hopefully things will be back on track by spring 2018.

Harrow Weald Common

You can read more under Loop 15 about Harrow Weald Common and the tragic story of the death of dramatist and librettist W S Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan fame, at Grim’s Dyke House. Following the nature trail diversion, you’ll see a bit more of the common, with its scrubby woodlands, old earthworks and clumps of rhododendrons spilling from the former Victorian gardens. Crossing the house drive, it’s worth a short detour to view the house itself, completed in 1872 by Richard Norman Shaw for the painter Frederick Goodall, and Gilbert’s home from 1890 until his death in 1911. With its tall chimneys and half-timbering, it’s a splendid early example of the ‘Tudorbethan’ style that later flourished in the early 20^th century, though there are various distinctive details like rounded archways that almost anticipate art nouveau.

Following the death of Gilbert’s widow Lucy, the house and estate were bought jointly by Middlesex County Council and London County Council in 1937, and the house was used for rehabilitating tuberculosis patients. It’s still under public ownership, currently with Harrow council, but has been leased as a hotel since 1970. Surrounded by well-kept lawns and gardens, it looks impeccably picturesque and genteel in a late-Victorian way, and it’s understandably popular as a film location. If you were walking the Loop using overnight stays, this would be a delightful, if rather pricey, place to break your journey.

The numbered posts of the 3.75 km nature trail installed by the Harrow Weald Common Conservators in 2008 help you navigate through the space: one of them is placed at precisely the point where the alternative route leaves the official Loop. The nature trail is split into two loops (lower case ‘l’!) identified by colours: a shorter orange loop around Grim’s Dyke in the west and a longer purple loop around the common in the east. In case you were wondering, here’s an outline of what the numbers indicate: for more information, you can download a leaflet from the Harrow Nature Conservation Forum website. I’ve included the posts on the official Loop route too, as a supplement to Loop 15.

4. This post, on the orange loop, stands by the side of the lake where Gilbert died. Now it’s filled with marsh plants like yellow iris and willow scrub.

7. This section, also on the orange loop, runs along the boundary between the overgrown garden on the right, with exotic planted trees, and the common on the left, populated with native trees like downy birch, beech and oak.

8. This is where the purple and orange loops meet, and where the alternative Loop route diverges from the official one. From here you follow the purple loop back into old gardens, and then on the other side of the drive back onto the common again, with more downy birch, and some fallen logs providing habitats for birds, insects and fungi.

17. Don’t worry, you haven’t missed anything – walkers on the purple loop encounter this post towards the end of their walk where it directs them back to the Old Redding viewpoint.

9. This is where the two routes rejoin, and is incidentally the highest point on the Loop north of the Thames, at 158 m. The 7 km Bentley Priory Circular Walk also shadows the trail from here. The notes about this post draw attention to the old ditch and bank topped with a hawthorn hedge a little further along on the left, past the cottages, and the rare species like wood sorrel that can be found there.

10. Passing this post, look out for the oak trees planted to mark the boundary of the common in the 1860s, and a pollarded oak on the right. You cross over Len’s Avenue.

11. A strip of grassland marks an area of lime-deficient soil. In the 1980s this was the last vestige of heathland on the common and there are plans to try to restore it.

12. Oak trees dominate this area, with some beech and rowan. Most of the trees here are only 50-100 years old: as with many now-wooded commons, grazing once would have maintained a more open landscape, and the trees have grown up since this practice declined.

Shortly after this post you leave the Common and continue into the Bentley Priory site, described in more detail under Loop 15.

The Stanmore link

Spring Pond, Stanmore Little Common.

The London Loop link to Stanmore station isn’t the usual functional stroll through the streets, but an enjoyable walk in its own right, making good use of Stanmore Country Park, a major green space that you otherwise won’t encounter on the trail. The break point is easy to miss, in a clearing among the various ponds of Stanmore Little Common, and the first reward of breaking your walk at this point is a fuller view of Spring Pond and its surroundings. The pretty complex of red brick buildings on one side was built in the 1860s as staff accommodation and stables for Stanmore Hall. The banks of the pond were once more wooded, but many of the trees had to be cut back to deal with an algae infestation. From the pond you cross towards a wall, behind which is the hall itself, a neo-Gothic mansion built in 1843. I’ve said a bit more about Stanmore in general under Loop 15.

A short stroll down traffic-calmed Dennis Lane soon brings you to the country park (here's a link to the official website, though you'll find much more information on the Harrow Nature Conservation Forum website). This occupies former farmland attached to Warren House, at the top of the hill you’ve just descended: you pass it on the main trail and I’ve said a bit more about it there. The estate had numerous owners prior to 1890 when it was bought by the banker and philanthropist Henry Bischoffsheim. In 1922, his widow left it to her grandson John Fitzgerald, a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, the 21^st Knight of Kerry and 3^rd Baronet of Valencia – not the Spanish city and province but an island off the Kerry coast, today more commonly spelt Valentia.

Fitzgerald, an agricultural enthusiast and livestock judge, showed his national loyalties by replacing the herd of Jersey cows on the estate with Kerry cattle, though some of the park area was used as a golf course. In 1937, as we’ll shortly see, Fitzgerald began to develop parts of the estate for housing, and sold off a large portion including the former golf course to Middlesex County Council and Harrow council as green belt land, though farming continued into the 1950s.

Woodlands in Stanmore Country Park.

The site became a Country Park in 1976 when it was partly managed by the Greater London Council, but is now wholly owned by the London Borough of Harrow following the GLC’s abolition. Designated a Local Nature Reserve (LNR) in 1995, it’s a mix of meadows and fields, including some acidic grassland dotted with the raised nests of yellow ants, and woodland – some of it recent secondary growth but with some ancient semi-natural woodland with wild service trees and mature hornbeams. Much of the Loop link stays within the trees, interleaving with another nature trail and its numbered posts. At post 13 there’s a spiky midland hawthorn, and at post 14 you cross an ancient hedge line by a 250-year-old oak.

The link leaves the park, and the Community Forest area, past a bluebell wood and enters the Warren House housing estate along Kerry Avenue. This is the area developed for Fitzgerald in the 1930s to take advantage of the opening of the railway. He was determined to create something a cut above the average suburban style, as evidenced by the generous lawns, the wooded strips that divide some of the roads and the stylish art deco, or rather ‘moderne’, houses that line them.

Some were designed by Gerald Lacoste (1908-83): an artist as well as an architect, he was also responsible for various World War II propaganda posters. There are some particularly large and fine examples of his work clustered around the junction of Kerry Avenue, Valencia Road and Glanleam Road (the origins of the street names are obvious if you know something of the family history: Glanleam is an estate on Valentia island). Other architects were Douglas Wood and Owen Williams, one of the creators of the old Wembley Stadium.

The last few hundred metres of the link continue along Kerry Court, across a grass patch and through a hedge that strategically shields the estate from busy London Road. Immediately opposite is Stanmore station, designed in cottagey suburban style by the Metropolitan Railway architect Charles W Clarke. Curiously, the station has been on three different Underground lines since opening in 1932. In 1939 the branch was detached from the Met and became a branch of the Bakerloo Line, and in 1979 it was reallocated again, as the northerly section of the newly-built Jubilee Line. Despite discussions in the 1930s about a northwards extension, Stanmore remains a terminus.

Stanmore station, now on its third Underground line.

• Download full route description (PDF)
• View Google map
• Official Transport for London page

Hillingdon Trail 2: West Ruislip - Harefield - Rickmansworth

Ruislip Lido: half-close your eyes and you might be in Switzerland...

This second part of the Hillingdon Trail is arguably even more attractive than the first part, including a lengthy walk through Ruislip Woods National Nature Reserve and a section through the Colne Valley Regional Park, with wide views over the valley itself. You can rejoin the London Loop at Harefield West, or continue to the picturesque end point of the trail at Springwell Lock on the Grand Union Canal, with the option of catching the Tube home from Rickmansworth.

There are other options to split the walk using buses, though no convenient public transport for almost 6 km through Ruislip Woods. For more about the background to the Trail and advice on walking it as an alternative to the London Loop or in its own right, see my introduction to the first section. I’ve explained how my description here fits with the official description published by Hillingdon council at the end of the post.

Ruislip

River Pinn from Clack Bridge, Ruislip: the right bank was once the responsibility of Kings College, Cambridge.

To me the name Ruislip will be forever associated with the 1974 comic novel Tropic of Ruislip by Leslie Thomas, best known as the author of The Virgin Soldiers. For Thomas, Ruislip was the ideal backdrop for his satirical take on the pretensions of social mobility and the hypocrisies of suburban sexual infidelity. But although he included references to actual locations, like the Breakspear Crematorium, the fictitious Plummers Park estate where most of the action takes place is more likely to have been based on Carpenders Park, northeast of here between Harrow and Bushey and on London Loop section 15. The estate in the novel stands just across from a large council estate, from which the residents sharply distinguish themselves – which sounds like the traditional relationship between Carpenders Park and the adjoining South Oxhey estate, originally built as social housing.

Even so, the description might ring a bell with walkers in this and other similar London suburbs. Plummers Park, according to Thomas, was:

…in the country but not of it. The fields seemed almost touchable and yet remote. Wild roses bloomed and blew in seclusion just out of reach; rooks and flashing magpies in elm and rowan were merely distant birds in distant trees; the fox and the rabbit went unseen from the human windows…When [the estate] was built some trees were permitted to remain like unhappy captives spared because they are old. They remained in clusters, sometimes embedded in garden walls as selling points for house-buyers desiring fresh air, twigs, greenness and autumn acorns for their children. It was rumoured that the builders had a mechanical squirrel which ran up trees to delight, deceive and decide prospective purchasers…

The streets had, with commercial coyness, retained the sometimes embarrassing names of the various pastures and fields that now lay beneath concrete, crazy paving and statutory roses. Cowacre, Upmeadow, Risingfield, Sheep-Dip, The Sluice, and Bucket Way…Husbands polished cars; wives polished windows or fingernails. On summer and autumn evenings sunset gardeners burned leaves and rubbish, the smoke climbing like a silent plea for deliverance that forever went unanswered.

The inspiration of Carpenders Park also explains why Thomas refers to his fictitious estate as in Hertfordshire, which the real Ruislip certainly isn’t. Historically, it’s a Middlesex parish, which in the early 11^th century belonged to Wilward Wit, a thegn of Edward the Confessor. Its name likely means ‘rush-leap’, perhaps referring to a place on the river Pinn where rushes grew and fish leapt. It’s recorded in the Domesday survey, and after the Norman Conquest was given to Notre-Dame du Bec, a Benedictine abbey in Le Bec Hellouin, Normandy. In 1211, as England separated politically from Normandy, it was sequestrated and passed through several noble hands, until 1441 when it was granted by King Henry VI to the college he had just founded in Cambridge, known today as Kings College.

Much of the land in Ruislip stayed under college ownership until well into the 20^th century, although substantial portions were leased to private incumbents. This changed after 1904 when Ruislip station opened on the Uxbridge branch of the Metropolitan Railway, and the college began to parcel up and sell off its land for housing. The fact that the subsequent development was a little better-managed than in some similar locations partly accounts for Ruislip’s ‘desirability’, and was a result of the foresight shown by members of the parish council. In 1903, noting the imminent arrival of the railway and the plans of the college to profit from it, the council successfully petitioned to become an Urban District so it would be better placed to coordinate the changes and limit the potential damage.

The District then became something of a pioneer in urban planning, a task made much easier by the unified ownership of most of the land up for grabs. Working in partnership with Kings College and a builder selected following a competition, and in consultation with residents, it produced a first master plan in 1914. Had this been implemented it would have resulted in the destruction of much of the green space and historic buildings, but it was held up by World War I.

Changing opinion after the war, including an intervention from the Royal Society of Arts, secured much of the heritage enjoyed today, which was then further protected by the tighter planning regime, including the Green Belt, after World War II. The new Ruislip was, and is, almost exclusively a commuter settlement, with very little local industry, although the nearby military presence at Northolt and, to a lesser extent, West Ruislip (as discussed in the previous section) also applied pressure on local housing
.

The river Pinn and Cannon Brook

The Grand Union Canal Feeder enters Ruislip under the Chiltern Main Line.
The rather gloomy pedestrian route is through the left arch.

The Trail enters Ruislip by following a footpath alongside the Grand Union Canal Feeder, here with quite a healthy flow of water, under the Chiltern Main Line railway. The Feeder has been shadowing the Trail since Southall and is now not far from its source – I’ve said more about it and the railway in the previous section.

Beyond the railway is Ruislip golf course – refreshingly in these outer suburbs, the only golf course crossed by the Trail. It’s a council-owned course on some of the land conserved for recreation under the original development plans and has been open since 1922. The Trail continues across it alongside the Feeder for a while and soon you can see evidence of the farmland it was moulded from, in the form of old hedgerows.

Then you’re on Clack Lane, an old lane that’s now a footpath. This was part of a route to Kings End from Newyears Green, a hamlet closer to Harefield. It takes you northwards to Clack Bridge on the river Pinn, where there has been a crossing since at least mediaeval times.

The Pinn flows for around 19 km from a source on Harrow Weald Common, on the slopes just below the Old Redding viewpoint visited on London Loop section 15. From there it runs roughly southwest through Pinner and Eastcote to Ruislip, then turns south past Ickenham and the west of Hillingdon village, to a confluence with the Frays river near Yiewsley, so ultimately flowing into the Colne near West Drayton. It was formerly known as the Ruislip Stream, and its current name is a back-formation from Pinner.

As often in London, the riversides have generally been kept clear of development, but in this case the arrangement has something of a history. When the land around Ruislip was inclosed in 1804, the lord of the manor, who held a lease from the college, insisted on a right of way three feet (0.9 m) on both banks so that he and his servants could continue to fish. Today Hillingdon council maintains a 19 km walking trail, the Celandine Route, largely along the Pinn and Frays rivers from Pinner to Cowley where it connects with the Grand Union Canal Walk, and via that to the London Loop heading southeast. Much of the river upstream of Pinner into Harrow borough is also walkable and I’ll explore it in a future post.

Following the Celandine route east from here will take you past the aqueduct where the Feeder crosses the Pinn to the old village centre of Ruislip, which is some distance off the Trail, but might merit exploration on another day. Several historic buildings have been preserved, including houses and shops arranged around a village square with a water pump, and the recently restored buildings of Manor Farm, including a large 13^th century barn. You could perhaps find your own way back onto the route via Park Wood.

A little upstream of Clack Bridge, the Pinn is joined by a tributary known as the Cannon Brook, which rises on the slopes of Duck Hill above Ruislip and flows in a westward-facing bow to the confluence here. The Canal Feeder tracks its valley, with good reason as we’ll soon see, and from Old Clack Farm at a main junction of the lane, we’ll either follow the Feeder or the Brook, both of which have left green ribbons through the houses.

The land to the north of the Pinn here was originally a separate manor within the parish, known as St Catherine’s or Little Manor. This was gifted separately after the Conquest to another Norman abbey, Abbaye Sainte-Catherine du Mont in Rouen, which also held the manor of Harmondsworth, and the two shared the same ownership for several centuries. St Catherine’s was linked to another small manor south of Ruislip village, known as Southcote, and Clack Bridge was once the joint responsibility of the lord of Southcote Manor and Kings College. The manor was broken up in the late 19^th century into smaller farms, and you’ll walk through a few fragments that still retain a rural feel. But the northern part of it was one of the sections of Ruislip developed by the Urban District as council housing in the 1950s and 1960s, and it’s through this that the Trail now threads.

You’ll see the Feeder again with its distinctive miniature brick overbridges alongside the path past the playing fields of Whiteheath School. Then you cross a bridge over the Cannon Brook on Ladygate Lane, and follow residential drives to Howletts Lane, where a typical 1960s housing estate shopping centre stands beside the path. Beyond it is a more open green strip with grassy patches and shady willows: the Trail here more-or-less follows the route of the Feeder, which has been filled in, and the more meandering course of the Brook is over to your right. This path delivers you to a roundabout at the junction of Breakspear Road and Bury Street, the latter an ancient north-south route through the parish.

Leslie Thomas is one of several writers who assume the Breakspear Crematorium nearby is named after Nicholas Breakspear (c1100-59), who as Adrian IV became the only English-born pope to date. In fact, it’s a reference to William Breakspear, who owned an estate to the north in Harefield parish in the late 14^th and early 15^th centuries. A little south along Brakspear Road stands a pub known as the Breakspear Arms, at the junction with Breakspear Road South, an old north-south route linking Uxbridge and Rickmansworth and originally known as Harefield Lane. The pub was rebuilt in the 1970s and is now an Indian restaurant, but there was a pub on the spot for at least a century before that. It’s likely the road names echoed the pub and the crematorium echoed the road.

The preponderance of Breakspear names locally has helped generate a local legend that the papal Breakspear was born nearby, but there’s much better evidence that his birthplace was in Bedmond, Hertfordshire, not far from London Countryway section 10.

Ruislip Lido and Woods

The dappled surroundings of Copse Wood, with hornbeam coppices.

Of the numerous surprising sights to be seen along the walking trails of London, Ruislip Lido is one of the most un-Londonlike. With its concrete surrounds, it’s obviously artificial but if you half-close your eyes, the 24 ha expanse of water with its sandy beach at the foot of a thickly wooded hillside could almost be in Switzerland. Today it’s a flourishing leisure facility almost surrounded by a National Nature Reserve, with a waterside pub and café, boating and swimming facilities. But it was created with the much more practical purpose of topping up the Grand Union Canal, some 11 km away (discussed in more detail in the previous section and in London Loop section 11), to which it was connected by the Canal Feeder.

The canal was only recently opened when in 1804 Kings College began to inclose its lands at Ruislip. To help finance this, the college sold a portion along the valley of the Cannon Brook to what was then the Grand Junction Canal Company for the construction of a feeder reservoir. As often with reservoirs, this necessitated the inundation of an existing settlement, Park Hearne, amid the woodland of Park Wood. It’s not known what happened to the displaced inhabitants, but there’s a local story that they had to be evicted by the militia. By the end of 1811, the stream had been dammed and the valley was filling with water.

As mentioned in the previous section, the system never worked very well, and was taken out of service in 1851. The reservoir remained in canal company ownership and became something of a white elephant. Then in the period between the wars, with a growing local population and increasing numbers of leisure visitors to the area, the company realised it might generate an alternative income. In 1933, it was reopened as Ruislip Lido, complete with an art deco building housing changing rooms and café, a swimming area and boating facilities. A miniature railway was added in 1945.

Most of the canal companies were included in the post-war nationalisation of transport, and the site was inherited by the British Transport Board, which didn’t see itself as an operator of leisure facilities. In 1951, the Board sold the Lido to Ruislip Urban District Council, which by now also owned much of the surrounding woodland. Leisure use flourished into the 1970s, when the site attracted visitors from all over London. It soon boasted a sailing base, and a water skiing club with action-loving Doctor Who actor Jon Pertwee among its members, adding celebrity appeal to regular tournaments. It was used to stage the sinking of the Titanic for the film A Night to Remember (Roy Ward Baker 1958) and featured in Cliff Richard vehicle The Young Ones (Sidney J Furie 1961).

The Lido then entered a more troubled period, triggered by current owners Hillingdon council hiking the admission charges. In 1991, it was leased to a private management company, but this venture failed after two years, not helped by the lowering of the water level to reduce the risk of flooding, which made sailing and water skiing impractical. The situation reached a low point in 1993 when arsonists burnt down the main building. The Lido’s fortunes have steadily improved since then, with the opening of the successful Water’s Edge pub-restaurant, which provided enough income to restore the beach and boathouse and provide a watersplash pool. The lake is still out of bounds to swimmers for health reasons, though there’s an aspiration to change this too.

At the point where the Trail reaches the corner of the reservoir, you can see the original dam, on which the refreshment kiosk and boathouse now stand, roughly at right angles to Reservoir Road. The water originally reached the dam itself, but since the level was reduced, a grassy margin separates it from the water’s edge. This has revealed the intake for the feeder, visible behind a grille underneath the dam in the southwest corner.

Further along at the end of Reservoir Road, a short diversion from the Trail leads to Willow Lawn station at one end of the Ruislip Lido Railway, now the longest 12” (305 mm) gauge railway in the UK. When first opened in 1945 it was much shorter, running from close to the beach in the southeast corner northwards along the eastern lakeside. Following an accident in 1978 it was almost closed permanently, but volunteers formed the Ruislip Lido Railway Society to keep it going, and the society eventually took over its operation.

The rails were extended to Haste Hill on the northeast corner of the lake in 1990 and on around the lake to the current terminus in 1998, where there’s a turntable to switch the direction of the locomotives. The railway operates daily during school holidays and at weekends for the rest of the year, and even boasts a steam loco, Mad Bess, built onsite by volunteers in the late 1980s.

Path through the delightfully named Mad Bess Wood.

Things get even better as the Trail enters the 294 ha Ruislip Woods National Nature Reserve (NNR; see also the Ruislip Woods Trust website) through a gate into Poors Field. The woodland here, like most of the surrounding parts of London, was once part of the great Forest of Middlesex (see for example the discussion of Enfield Chase on London Loop section 17). Not all the area has been continually wooded since then – parts of it are known to have been cleared by grazing, followed by regrowth as secondary woodland when this ceased, and there are some deliberate plantations. But much of the NNR is ancient woodland which has been in existence since at least Tudor times and likely much longer.

Indeed, it’s the largest block of ancient semi-natural woodland in Greater London, and constitutes one third of the remaining tree cover in the former county of Middlesex. Most of it is coppiced hornbeam with standards of penduculate oak (Quercus robur) growing on London clay, but there are sections of sandier soil dominated by sessile oak (Q. petraea). You’ll also find birch, alder and areas of scrub and acid and neutral grassland.

There are four distinct but adjacent woods, and the Trail runs through three of them. The one it avoids is Park Wood to the southeast, on the other side of the lido. This was originally attached directly to the manor, and included some of the parish common land, still known as Ruislip Common. Poors Field was another part of the common, and has been conserved as rough meadowland, but you’re soon climbing into Copse Wood, and further on are Mad Bess Wood and Bayhurst Wood.

As mentioned several times in London Underfoot, nearly all of Britain was once covered in woodland, most of which was gradually cleared for agriculture from the Bronze Age onwards (see London Countryway section 12). There were three main reasons to keep woodland: for sticks and timber, as rough grazing particularly for pigs, and to support game for hunting. All these uses are evident at Ruislip Woods. Coppicing the hornbeams by cutting them back to the stool every 20 years or so produced a ready supply of sticks for purposes like fencing, furniture and vehicle making, while the tall oaks yielded sturdy timbers for use in construction and shipbuilding. Ruislip timber helped build the Tower of London, Windsor Castle and the Palace of Westminster, as well as the nearby barns on Manor Farm.

At the time of the Domesday survey the woods provided a home to 1,500 pigs, and there was also a parcus ferarum or park for wild beasts. Probably the main reason such large woods survived into modern times, though, was their geography. They stood on the high ground between the valleys of the Pinn and the Colne, rising to 90 m in Copse Wood, their soils poor for intensive agriculture and their terrain discouraging for settlement.

By the time urban development resumed in Ruislip after World War I, the amenity value of the woods was gaining greater recognition. The same railway line that threatened to engulf the area with commuter homes also brought visitors seeking a green escape from the city, and the woods became a popular destination for walking and other outdoor recreation. In 1931, Ruislip Urban District Council bought Park Wood from Kings College for £28,100. Originally the college had planned simply to gift the wood, but found it was legally obliged to demand market rates for property it disposed of. The council turned for support to Middlesex County Council, which contributed 75% of the cost, on the not unreasonable basis that most visitors to the site would be from outwith the district.

In 1936, the County Council bought Copse Wood and Mad Bess Wood jointly with the London County Council, another indication the woods were considered of more than local interest, and in 1950 nearly all the woodland was designated a Site of Scientific Interest (SSSI). In 1959, a small portion to the north of the lido near Haste Hill, and off our route, became a Local Nature Reserve, and in 1982 Hillingdon council, which now owned all the woods, began managing them as a single entity under a plan that aimed to restore traditional coppicing, grazing on open grasslands and even charcoal burning. Finally, in 1997 the whole complex was designated a National Nature Reserve (NNR), the first such designation in London and the first in an urban area anywhere in the country, later followed by Richmond Park NNR on the Capital Ring.

Copse Wood was formerly known as the Great Wood of Ruislip and was much bigger: 348 ha in 1565, reduced to 134 ha by 1853. Just to the south of the wood, and the left of the Trail, you’ll pass a more open, scrubby area: this is the site of Battle of Britain House, a mansion built in 1905. During World War II the US Army used it as a spy school. Following an unsuccessful attempt to acquire it as part of an RAF memorial scheme after the war, it became a youth centre, though was renamed in line with the original memorial proposal. It later housed the Ruislip and District Local History Society, but was burned down in 1984. The ruins and garden are gradually becoming overgrown but there’s still a fine view from the site across the Lido.

The Trail crosses Ducks Hill Road, a continuation of Bury Street, into Mad Bess Wood. There’s no obvious explanation for the evocative name, which is first recorded in 1769. The woodland was once part of Westwood Common in the separate manor of St Catherine’s mentioned below, and was once more open than today: only 37 ha of its present 56 ha were wooded in 1587, which might explain why the area to the west of the Trail as you enter the woodland is known as Young Wood. The wood is likely the site of the hunting park mentioned in the Domesday survey: the bulge in the line of Breakspear Road North, to the west of the wood, suggests that it was built to circumnavigate a park pale or fence.

Across Breakspear Road North is the westernmost portion of the NNR, Bayhurst Wood. This has a separate history from the rest of Ruislip Woods as it isn’t historically in Ruislip but in the parish of Harefield: the boundary followed the road. Harefield was held before the conquest by Countess Goda, and passed through several Norman hands until the 1180s when the part of it containing the wood was separated out as the Manor of Moorhall, and given by owner Beatrice de Bollers to the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, the religious order that gave rise to St John Ambulance. It’s not clear if the Hospitallers ever occupied the manor themselves or rented it out.

Ownership passed to the Crown following the Dissolution in 1542 and between 1553 and 1877 it was owned by the Newdigate family, who annexed it to their Harefield Place estate. In 1934, the wood was one of numerous parcels of land bought by Middlesex County Council to conserve as green belt, and when the county was abolished in 1965 passed to the Greater London Council (GLC), who managed it as Bayhurst Woods Country Park. When the GLC was in turn abolished in 1986, the boroughs took on most of its green spaces, and Hillingdon began managing Bayhurst as part and parcel of Ruislip Woods. Following the creation of the NNR, the Country Park designation was officially dropped, though is still used locally. The wood also represents the Trail’s entry into the wider area of the Colne Valley Park, introduced in London Loop section 11.

The open fields of the Colne Valley beyond the trees of Bayhurst Wood.

Bayhurst has a different aspect to the rest of Ruislip Woods, with more sessile oak as well as birch, beech, alder and aspen. In 2008, a 2 km perimeter cycle path was added, also open to walkers and known as the David Brough Cycle Trail. Unusually it honours a living person: Brough is well-known locally as the former head of democratic services at the council and the chair of Hayes Town Partnership. Following the cycle trail is now an option for Hillingdon Trail walkers: it’s more direct and more accessible. The traditional route doglegs deeper into the woods, offering a more immersive green experience, but includes quite a steep climb.

There’s one last fragment of the NNR over on your right: Tarletons Lake, a serene old pond surrounded by swampy grassland and woodland which was previously managed as a Local Nature Reserve by London Wildlife Trust but is now back under council control. As the Hillingdon Trail’s exit from this very special place, it certainly provides a contrast to Ruislip Lido at its entrance.

Harefield

Harefield Church just visible through the mature trees in its churchyard.

I’ve written a bit more about Harefield under LondonLoop section 12, but the Hillingdon Trail will give you more of a rounded view of this old northwest Middlesex parish. Leaving the NNR you’ll find yourself walking through some of London’s genuine countryside, today largely under public ownership as part of the Green Belt. On the right is Middle Lodge, one of the lodges of Breakspear House, and you might catch a glimpse of the house itself through the trees.

This was the nucleus of the Breakspears estate that once belonged to the non-papal Breakspear I discussed above. The Grade I-listed house was rebuilt in the mid-17^th century and has recently been converted to flats. The area to the left may well have been part of the old park attached to the original Harefield manor house, until 1786 when the latter moved to Harefield Lodge further south. Across the fields you can see Park Lodge Farm, which is still operated as a commercial farm and includes a Grade II-listed 18^th century farmhouse. The path you join through a rather damp woodland is known as Breakspear’s Path: the Breakspears and their servants would have walked to church this way.

You’re soon completing their journey alongside the churchyard wall of St Mary’s church, the oldest building in Harefield. As mentioned in my earlier piece on the Loop, it’s some way outside the village to the south, perhaps because for many centuries it was more a manorial than a parish church: for at least some of its history, the manor house was next door. It was a ‘private peculiar’ until 1847 and didn’t become a parish church until 1898.

Inside are numerous lavish monuments to people connected to the lords of the manor, including one by Grinling Gibbons to Mary Newdigate who died in 1692. It’s likely there was a church on the site in Saxon times, but the oldest extant part is a patch of 12^th century masonry in the west wall of the nave. There’s a 13^th century lancet window in the exterior north wall, the nave is 14^th century and the tower 16^th, with the oldest bell dated 1629, though there are the inevitable Victorian rearrangements.

If you wander in the churchyard, you’re sure to notice the Commonwealth War Graves, and in particular a large group with unusual (in fact unique) scroll designs surrounding an obelisk commemorating Australian victims of World War I. The Australian presence here is not only testimony to the international carnage inflicted by that war, but is also a clue to the early history of Harefield’s best-known institution, Harefield Hospital, the specialist heart and lung hospital to the north of the village.

In 1914, the future hospital site was occupied by a mansion known as Harefield Park House, home to a wealthy Australian couple, the Billyard-Leakes. When war broke out, they offered the use of the house and grounds to the Australian Ministry of Defence as a convalescent home for wounded servicemen. It became the No 1 Australian Auxiliary Hospital, the only entirely Australian war hospital in England. By October 1916 it had 960 patients accommodated in over 50 buildings, and even published its own magazine, the Harefield Park Boomerang.

Inevitably some of the wounded didn’t make it, and over 100 of these are now buried here, commemorated in headstones designed by the patients and staff. When the hospital closed in 1919, the site remained in medical use, initially as a tuberculosis sanatorium, and eventually evolved into the renowned specialist facility of today.

Countess of Derby almshouses, Harefield.

The Trail now climbs Church Hill towards the village, passing several historic buildings. The red brick Tudor almshouses with their fairytale chimneys on the right were endowed by Alice Spencer, Countess of Derby, lady of the manor in the early 17^th century. She’s known to have entertained Elizabeth I at the manor house, and is memorialised in the church. The former White Horse pub on the left, a private home since 2010, is largely late 17^th century.

The Trail then turns off along Bird Lane, an old track beside an ivy-clad 17^th century cottage, but the village centre is not much further along the High Street, with its shops, cafés and pubs arranged around a large green.

You’re soon walking alongside hedgerows again, soon with views towards the Colne valley. Off to the left is a little-known Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), Harefield Pit, which isn’t open to the public. The interest here is geological: it’s a former chalk pit where digging has revealed several layers of London’s geology, with chalk below gravelly Reading Beds laced with tiny fossils of algae, topped off with London clay.  You cross the end of a drive that leads up to a splendidly sited posh pub-restaurant, the Old Orchard, well worth a visit, before descending through a meadow into the valley, with the Grand Union Canal visible ahead.

The Trail arrives within a few metres of Black Jacks Lock, with Black Jacks Mill, mentioned in London Loop section 12, on the towpath side. The Loop and the Grand Union Canal Walk share the towpath, but the Hillingdon Trail doesn’t join them quite yet, preferring to stay on Jacks Lane on the east side of the canal. This is also the route of the Colne Valley Trail, which runs north-south through the park from Staines-upon-Thames to Rickmansworth. The lane runs along the foot of Coppermill Meadow, also known as Mount Pleasant, an unusual outcrop of chalk grassland, part of the Mid-Colne Valley SSSI. Unlike Harefield Pit, it’s openly accessible to the public.

View across the Colne Valley from the meadows west of Harefield.

The Trail and the Loop finally reunite at the bottom of Summerhouse Lane in Harefield West, by the new development around Coppermill Lock. A short step away is the bus stop that serves as the transport interchange for section 12 of the Loop, so you could break your walk here, and simply pick up section 13 of the Loop next time around, disregarding the final short section of the Trail. Both share the same paths for 1.4 km, running through Old Park Wood to the hamlet of Hill End, discussed in my post on Loop 13. From here the Loop is additionally signed as the Hillingdon Trail Northern Link as far as Woodcock Hill: when the Trail was first created, the intention was to link it with the Loop in the north but it wasn’t yet clear which way the latter would be going. But there’s a bit more of the Trail proper still to go, and it’s well worth walking.

Springwell

Across the fields at Hill End, on the original route of Springwell Lane.

Leaving the Loop, which heads to Batchworth Heath and Moor Park, the Hillingdon Trail continues through Hill End, temporarily leaving Springwell Lane to follow a path across fields. Looking at the map, it’s clear the lane originally continued ahead along the line of the path here, but when it became part of the modern road network, it was diverted via Cripps House Farm.

You take a farm track past Springwell Farm, which bends down to join another running parallel to the valley, carrying the Colne Valley Trail which has taken a more direct route from Harefield West. The view from here across the valley with its numerous lakes is impressive, and you might even be able to see the Chiltern hills in the distance. Beneath, alongside the canal, is the boatyard of Wood Hall & Heward, which builds workboats, tugs and barges for use on inland waterways. Even more prominent is Thames Water’s Maple Lodge sewage treatment works, a massive site opened in 1950 that discharges its purified water into the canal.

Springwell Lock near Harefield.

And so the Hillingdon Trail ends on the Grand Union Canal in the picturesque location of Spingwell Lock, number 83. A narrow bridge crosses the canal by the lock, and there’s a lock keeper’s cottage alongside a scattering of other buildings, forming an attractive group: none are individually listed but they form a designated Conservation Area. The bridge and a disused quarry just to the northeast featured in 1974 Doctor Who story ‘The Three Doctors’. You’re in one of London’s furthest-flung corners here, in the extreme northwest of Hillingdon borough, and only a step away from Hertfordshire.

There’s a bus stop with a decent service into Rickmansworth about a kilometre away on the A412 near Maple Cross, though this is over the boundary so don’t expect to be able to use your Oyster card or contactless. To reach it you’ll need to stay on Springwell Lane, which takes you between Inns Lake and Springwell Lake and over the river Colne out of London by Mill End pumping station. Perhaps a more agreeable, if longer, option, is to continue to Rickmansworth on foot, where you can finish this London walk with a proper Tube ride home from Hertfordshire.

Rickmansworth

The Grand Union Canal leaves London at this old City of London coal tax marker, on the boundary between Hillingdon
and Rickmansworth. Photo looking towards London from the Hertfordshire side.

The best way to Rickmansworth is along the towpath, following the Grand Union Canal Walk and the Colne Valley Trail. You leave London just under 500 m along the canal from Springwell Bridge. The point is marked by a coal post – not one of the white cast iron posts typically found on roads, but a waist-height granite obelisk of a type used for canals and navigable rivers, one of only five remaining examples of the design. I’ve said a bit more about these curious posts under London Countryway 22. The inscription refers to the years of the reign of Queen Victoria when the Act of Parliament that required them to be installed was passed, 1851, and the relevant chapter.

You’re now in Hertfordshire, in the modern district of Three Rivers and the old parish of Rickmansworth, ‘Ryckmer’s stockade’. I’ve introduced the county under London Loop 13, while the parish was part of the extensive land in the area granted to St Albans Abbey by Offa, the 8^th century ruler of the Saxon kingdom of Mercia. It remained in the possession of the abbey until the Dissolution in 1539. By this time, the nucleus of the parish had become a small town and an important local centre, with mills along the Colne, and in 1542 Henry VIII granted it a market charter. The opening of a station on the London and Birmingham railway in nearby Watford in 1838 abstracted much of the market trade, and the market hall was demolished in 1868.

By then the town had gained its own rail connection along a branch line to Watford. This stimulated some growth after it opened in 1862 but was never very successful: most of it was closed in the late 1950s and it’s now a cycle path. Far more significant was the arrival of the Metropolitan Railway at a competing station in the town, via an extension from Pinner in 1887. This triggered extensive residential development aimed at commuters, some of it carried out by the Met’s own property arm. Though excluded when London expanded in 1965, Rickmansworth today remains on the Tube and functions as a classic commuter suburb.

The next lock, Stockers Lock, number 82, is if anything even more picturesque. On the southwest end of the lock, at the foot of the steps leading up to the garden of Stockers House, is another coal post, although this time it’s the more familiar cast iron design. It seems anomalous here, beside the canal and some way outside the boundary. The explanation is that Stockers House was originally built in 1862 to house a City of London coal duty collector. It must have been much easier to strongarm the cash from boat operators held captive in the lock rather than at the actual boundary. The post initially stood in front of the house, but was moved here by the house’s occupant, no longer a City taxman, in 1964. As well as Stockers House and the coal post, several other structures round here are listed, including the lock cottage, the bridge, the lock itself and Stockers Farm on the other side of the canal.

Bury Lake, Rickmansworth Aquadrome, partly owes its existence to the old Wembley stadium.

The Trail turns away from the canal and winds through the watery landscape of Rickmansworth Aquadrome and Stockers Lake Local Nature Reserve (LNR) between the canal and the river Colne. Like much of the Colne Valley Park, the landscape here has been shaped by gravel extraction: this was the site of one of earliest large-scale gravel pits in the area, which opened in the 1920s and provided some of the construction materials for the original Wembley Stadium. The pits have since flooded naturally, creating inviting environments for water birds. The LNR supports over 60 species of breeding birds in summer, and in winter welcomes wigeon, goldeneye, shoveler and smew ducks migrating from Iceland and the Baltic. The site has been a public amenity since the 1970s and was designated an LNR in 1984.

There are actually four lakes arranged from southwest to northeast across the site. The smallest is Inns Lake in the southwest, which is on the other side of the Colne, bounded by Springwell Lane and within the Hillingdon boundary. Stockers Lake is next: this is the biggest, and its western part is also in Hillingdon. These two lakes are now owned by water company Affinity Water, although they’re managed by Hertfordshire and Middlesex Wildlife Trust. Then there’s Bury Lake and Batchworth Lake, managed by Three Rivers District Council as the 41 ha Aquadrome, which additionally includes formal parkland and woodland. Activities on offer include sailing, kayaking, water skiing, windsurfing and fishing.

The Colne Valley Trail runs briefly beside the eastern shore of Stockers Lake before turning along the southern bank of Bury Lake, passing the Bury Lake Young Mariners Base, home of a charity promoting sailing to young people that, unusually, has no paid staff. Then it turns north along the bank of Batchworth Lake. Finally, it crosses the river Colne (see London Loop section 11) and joins the road by the roundabout just west of Rickmansworth town centre, where it officially ends.

The Ebury Play Area just by the park gate is named after Robert Grosvenor, 1^st Baron Ebury (1801-93), the local landowner behind the town’s first rail connection, the not-terribly-successful Watford and Rickmansworth Railway mentioned above. My suggested route to the station runs part of the way along Ebury Drive, which also commemorates him. In case you’re wondering, the original station was to the south of the town centre, near the church, but it’s now been demolished. The comparative success of the later Metropolitan Railway was partly due to its ‘Metro-Land’ strategy of creating its own demand: off our route, on the other side of the roundabout to the north of Uxbridge Road, is the Cedars Estate, developed by Metropolitan Railway Country Estates Ltd in the 1920s as part of this approach.

Rickmansworth station, landmark of Metro-Land.

If you follow my directions you’ll cross the High Street just shy of the centre of town, which clusters around the war memorial a little further east. There are some Victorian and earlier buildings here, and a modern library. But otherwise continue to the station, opened in 1887 and still preserving much of its original Met architecture. At first it was a terminus, then the line was extended to Chesham in 1889 and eventually got as far as Verney Junction in Buckinghamshire.

In 1925, the Metropolitan Railway was electrified as far as here, and the station remained the point where trains into Buckinghamshire changed from electric to steam traction until 1961, well into the London Underground era. Chiltern Railways trains between Aylesbury and London Marylebone still call, the successors to the Great Central Railway trains which began serving the station in 1899 under a rather bumpy partnership agreement with the Met. I’ve told a bit more of the story of these various railways in my commentary on Moor Park under Loop 13.

Before you depart Rickmansworth, you might recall its fate as a comic stereotype of middle class Metro-Land was sealed by the author and screenwriter Douglas Adams in the novel version of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in 1978:

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Minutes later, the Earth was demolished by the Vogons to make way for a hyperspace bypass, and the secret of Life, the Universe and Everything was lost forever.

Original sections

The Hillingdon council route cards for this section are divided as follows:

4. Ickenham Marsh. The card covers 6.1 km overall, but the first part of the route, from North Hillingdon to The Greenway in West Ruislip, is included in the previous section. The link from West Ruislip station to the break point is 500 m, then it’s 2.9 km along the route to Ruislip Lido bus stops along the Cannon Brook and the Grand Union Canal Feeder.

5. Ruislip Woods. This is the most rural stretch of the Hillingdon Trail, from Ruislip Lido via Ruislip Woods National Nature Reserve to Harefield Church, a total of 5.7 km without transport. The most convenient bus stops are just a little further into the next section, along Church Hill.

6. Harefield Locks. This card includes a total of 5.3 km, the first 2.1 km part of which climbs Church Hill from Harefield Church, then descends to Black Jack’s Lock and continues parallel to the Grand Union Canal to the bottom of Summerhouse Lane in Harefield West. There the Hillingdon Trail meets up with London Loop and continues for 1.4 km to Hill End. The final part of the Trail is 1.76 km to Springwell Lock, though part of the Loop is also shown on the card as the Northern Link. My recommended links to the bus stop near Maple Cross (1 km) and to Rickmansworth station (2.8 km) aren’t shown on the card.

• Route description: Hillingdon Trail 2
• Official Hillingdon Council webpage: https://www.hillingdon.gov.uk/hillingdontrail
• The Grand Union Canal Feeder on London Canals blog: http://londoncanals.uk/2013/02/01/the-grand-junction-canal-feeder-from-ruislip
• Google map: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1kR1LrzqrpJjVZqKaXjIQqgOWVeE&usp=sharing

London Loop 16: Borehamwood - Cockfosters

The bridge over the Pymmes Brook near Jack's Lake on Monken Hadley Common

THIS SECTION OF THE LONDON LOOP OPENS WITH PERHAPS the least satisfactory stretch on the entire trail. A slog through residential streets and along a busy country road is briefly relieved by a mildly notorious woodland site. Then there’s the six-lane barrier of the A1 trunk road, where the lack of a convenient crossing forces a long detour down one side and up the other. But from Moat Mount things improve considerably as the Loop follows the Dollis Brook across meadows and sports grounds. Then a climb through the hidden fields of Barnet leads to picturesque Hadley Common and a straightforward stride through scrubby woodlands to the end of the Piccadilly Line at Cockfosters.

Officially this is another long single section, although there’s an obvious break point at High Barnet station about three quarters of the way along. Indeed, it’s puzzling why this isn’t an official end point, as the following section that would result is no shorter than several others. There are bus stops at several other points, though be aware that the north- and southbound stops at Moat Mount are separated by the ugly walk up and down the A1.

Update November 2017. Though it hasn't yet been signed as the official route of the London Loop, there's now a much better option when leaving Elstree & Borehamwood station, using much quieter streets and off-road paths via Woodcock Hill Village Green, a fascinating green space saved from development by the local community. More here.

Leaving Borehamwood

Ventilation shaft for Elstree Tunnels off Barnet Lane

Heading south from Borehamwood, the Loop climbs back on to the ridge it descended in the last section, up Deacons Hill Road. This was constructed in 1881 by the owner of Deacons Hill House, on Barnet Lane at the top of the hill, to connect with the station. Today it’s a fairly uninspiring stretch lined mainly by 1930s houses and apartment blocks, though look behind you occasionally as you climb for the view north towards Hertfordshire. There’s a short, sharp final climb to the junction at the top.

Busy Barnet Lane is a continuation of the same road the Loop followed in the previous section from Bushey Heath to Aldenham Reservoir. It once marked the boundary of Hertfordshire and Middlesex, but as explained in the previous section, the London boundary receded to the M1 in the 1990s so the big houses set among large plots that line the north side of the road, on land that was once part of Edgware parish in Middlesex, are now all in Hertfordshire. All this area was in line for intensive development in the 1930s, but this was blocked by the consolidation of the Green Belt after World War II, so there are still open fields on the left, sweeping down towards Elstree.

It’s in these fields that you’ll spot the major features of interest on this stretch: two odd stubby cylindrical brick buildings topped by dome-shaped mesh lids, looking rather like a giant condiment set. They crown two of the air shafts serving the twin 968 m Elstree Tunnels through which the Midland Main Line passes under Deacons Hill. The one of the left marks the older tunnel, opened as part of the Midland Railway St Pancras extension in 1968 and now used for fast trains. The other marks the newer tunnel, added to increase capacity in the 1890s and now used for stopping trains. Find out how to avoid walking along so many roads using an unofficial alternative.

You’ll likely feel a sense of relief when the trail at last leaves the road along a strip of grass between back gardens. Where a farm track crosses at the end of the gardens, the Loop encounters the present-day Greater London boundary, which at this point is working its way away from the M1 to rejoin the old Middlesex boundary line a little further down the lane. Crossing it, the trail leaves Hertfordshire for the last time: the rest of this section and all of the next are firmly within London. This is Barnet, the second-largest London borough by population and the fourth by area, at 74 km2. Like all the London boroughs along the Loop, it was created when the capital was expanded in 1964, in this case from five predecessor boroughs and districts in both Hertfordshire and Middlesex: Barnet and East Barnet in the former and Finchley, Friern Barnet and Hendon in the latter.

Scratchwood and Moat Mount

Welcome to Scratchwood. The woodland, not the motorway service area.

Straight ahead of you is the rather imposing wooden entrance to one of the most extensive and valuable public green spaces in the borough. This is Scratchwood Open Space, part of the broader Scratchwood and Moat Mount Local Nature Reserve (LNR). The LNR, designated in 1997, is a scattered collection of woodlands and more open areas including Scratchwood to the west and Moat Mount and Nutwood to the southeast, in turn forming part of a much broader wedge of green belt, not all of which is publicly owned, stretching south from Barnet Lane to Apex Corner.

Once, like the commons in the previous section, this was all part of the Forest of Middlesex, and today there are still patches of ancient woodland, some of which is thought to date back to the last glacial period. Most of the trees are sessile oaks and hornbeams, and there are some wild service trees, a species that indicates very old woods. There are bluebells and anemones in spring, the occasional muntjac deer and more open areas originally used as hay meadows.

Historically the ownership of the wider green areas was split: the band of woodland to the northeast, where you enter, was part of Edgware parish and granted to the Knights of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem (founders of St John Ambulance) in 1331. Fields to the east spilled into Totteridge, then in Hertfordshire. But the bulk of the area was ‘desmene’ land for the manor of Hendon, retained by the lord of the manor for his own management and use, and became part of Hendon parish. The Loop passes from the Edgware to the Hendon section on a footbridge over a brook shortly after entering the woods.

Over the centuries the land passed through various other hands, including those of politician and anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, who spent his last years, between 1826 and 1833, at what was then known as Hendon Park Farm, part of the old manorial complex and since renamed Mote End Farm, to the east of the site. The Loop has passed reminders of Wilberforce before, and I said more about him at the Wilberforce Oak in Bromley in section 3. By 1756, when the manorial lands were sold, a moated farmhouse stood on the high ground northwest of the farm, thus the name Moat Mount. The house was replaced by a new mansion, and this and its surrounding estate were bought in 1866 by a wealthy local landowner, Edward Cox, who significantly expanded and remodelled it, bringing much of the adjacent land into single ownership.

Scratchwood was set aside as rough woodland for hunting and other country pursuits, while the area around Moat Mount became a private park, with an ornamental lake and exotic woodland plantings. Parts of the estate were sold off in 1906, and what remained was bought in 1923 by Hendon Urban District Council, who developed part as a golf course, now in private hands as the Mill Hill Golf Club, and left the rest as informal public space. Following World War II the adjoining privately-owned land, including the farm, was designated as Green Belt. Barnet council is now responsible for Scratchwood Open Space and Moat Mount Open Space, as the remaining public areas are now known.

The name Scratchwood may already be familiar as it was adopted for the southernmost service area on the M1 motorway, opened to the south of the site in 1969 and since renamed with the considerably clumsier and more prosaic title London Gateway Services (incidentally, the services are also the site on which the forward guns of HMS Belfast, moored in the Pool of London, are targeted). Look at the map and you’ll see the obvious outline of an elevated roundabout junction over the motorway adjacent to the services. As the numbering of the preceding and succeeding junctions confirms, this was to have been the site of the missing junction 3, where a motorway spur was planned to head northeast right across the woodland and the path of the London Loop to join the A1 at Stirling Corner. This scheme was mercifully abandoned as surplus to requirements in the 1980s, but as we’ll see, the LNR suffers enough from big roads even without it.

Scratchwood is locally notorious as a rendezvous for public sex – it features on various websites as a favoured site both for gay cruising (“All ages up for all sorts of action,” advises one) and heterosexual dogging. The struggles of the council and police to manage the issue have even been featured in the national press. While I’m personally not prudish about such activities, I do have some sympathy with the council trying to run a site that should also be attractive to young families – and the difficulty is that the features that make the woodland valuable and attractive as a green space, like good access, tree cover and overgrowth, are the very same features that facilitate less socially-approved uses.

The field that opens up to your right as you continue on the Loop is better-known as a venue for less controversial forms of recreation: it’s known as the Model Aeroplane Field and is a favourite with local hobbyists. After another stretch of woodland, the path emerges into a former hay meadow with the main car park beyond. The park café, a wooden chalet-like building overlooking the meadow, has struggled in recent years and was squatted for a time before being relaunched in 2014 under the unlikely name the Django Lounge in honour of the Quentin Tarantino film Django Unchained.

The Loop doesn’t pass the café but turns south along the edge of the meadow and back into thick woodlands, following narrow and sometimes muddy paths to emerge at unarguably the least attractive feature of the LNR, the A1 Barnet Way, which has bisected the site since 1927. This is another of the succession of ‘Great North Roads’ leaving London which I introduced when the Loop crossed the M1 in the last section, built as part of a lengthy bypass of the old coaching route via Finchley and Barnet and subsequently widened further.

Worst example of a missing crossing on the London Loop: the A1 Barnet Way between Scratchwood and Moat Mount.

This is the worst example of where the London Loop is severed by a major road. Across the tarmac, a few hundred metres along to the right, you can see the entrance to Moat Mount, but blocking your way are six busy lanes of fast traffic, most of it ignoring the already generous 50 mph speed limit. The nearest crossing point, a subway provided principally for golfers to link both sides of the course, is almost 900 m to the south, and the Moat Mount entrance is then another 600 m back north along the other side of the A1. That’s an additional 1.2 km of trudging the pavements alongside one of the London’s busiest roads, with the additional frustration of having virtually to retrace your steps.

...and one of London's most littered laybys.

The tall mesh fence installed in the past few years along the central reservation is evidence that a significant number of walkers (including the present author) previously took their lives in their hands by crossing the road informally along the desire line. Such measures are always an admission of defeat in pedestrian design. Really there should be a footbridge or controlled crossing here, which would not only make life easier for Loop walkers but would go some way towards reconnecting the two halves of what was originally a continuous green space. Doubtless the designers of the Loop hoped such a crossing would rapidly follow, but so far such hopes have been disappointed. So you’ll simply have to set your jaw and follow the official route, past one of London’s most disgustingly littered laybys and the main part of the golf course, through the subway and back the other side.

Through the woods at Moat Mount

This unpleasantness is hopefully soon forgotten once you’ve entered Moat Mount Open Space. As an information board by the entrance attests, this is the starting point of another trail, the Dollis Valley Greenwalk, of which more later. The trail heads back into the woods along a handsome avenue of trees installed during the Cox family’s occupancy, then traces a line of earthworks and a small and very attractive stream, a remnant of the old moat. The buildings and campsite you can see through the trees are part of Moat Mount Outdoor Centre, originally a council initiative but inevitably now privatised and run by a charity. It provides accommodation and outdoor activities for schools and young people’s groups.

Leaving the woodland, you also leave the LNR and emerge into the open fields of Mote End Farm, Wilberforce’s old property: at a major junction of paths you’ll see the farm buildings off to your right. Long after Wilberforce, the site was owned by Sydney Box (1907-1983), a producer and executive for Gainsborough Pictures and the Rank Organisation, who renamed it from Hendon Park Farm when he bought it in 1948, and sometimes used it as a filming location. Still in private hands, since the early 2000s it’s largely been used as a livery stable, but retains the look of an old rural landscape, crossed by several public paths.

The Dollis Valley

Source of the Dollis Brook at Mote End Farm

From the junction near the farm, the trail follows ancient hedgerows down a shallow valley to reach a pond on the left. This is the source of the Dollis Brook, which runs for about 10 km, first heading east towards Barnet then curving south and southwest via Finchley to Hendon. Here it joins the Mutton Brook, which rises in East Finchley and runs partly underground, and the combined streams become known as the river Brent, flowing a further 26 km roughly southwest to join the Thames at Brentford. The name is of obscure origin, perhaps related to the word ‘dole’ which originally meant a share of land, or the same Brittonic Celtic route that gives us modern Welsh dylif, ‘flood’.

Like several other rivers encountered on the Loop, most of the immediate margins of the Dollis have been left undeveloped for flood management reasons, creating a green corridor. In 1992, Barnet council used this as the basis of a continuous signed walk, the Dollis Valley Greenwalk, which is happily still maintained today, following the Dollis and a section of the Mutton Brook for around 16 km from Moat Mount to Hampstead Heath. The Loop and the Greenwalk share the same alignment for the first 6 km of the latter along the upper reaches of the Dollis, although there’s no public riverside access at first, so you’ll need to walk straight past the pond and continue northwards up the other side of the valley.

Over this first stretch of the Dollis, you cross another old boundary: this was where Hendon, Middlesex, ended and Barnet, Hertfordshire began although both are now part of the London Borough of Barnet. This explains the name of the small woodland ahead of you, Barnet Gate Wood, another remnant of ancient forest largely made up of venerable mature hornbeams, now managed by the council as a public space. It’s named after the adjoining hamlet of Barnet Gate, the first settlement within Barnet on the road from the west. The trail doesn’t go through the wood, instead heading east towards Hendon Wood Lane, but it’s worth a minor detour.

Totteridge Fields Local Nature Reserver

At the bend in Hendon Wood Lane the trail happens on the brook again, running under a petite brick bridge, but there’s still no riverside access, so follow the lane a little further to reach another attractive Local Nature Reserve (LNR), Totteridge Fields. These fields have been managed for centuries as hay meadows, and are particularly noted for spring flowers, butterflies and birds. They’re criss-crossed by old hedgerows and dotted with patches of ancient woodland. Protected as Green Belt, the fields are now owned by the council though managed by the London Wildlife Trust. The westernmost 7 ha portion of the site, through which the Loop enters, is the designated LNR, but it’s part of a broader 97 ha area recognised as a Site of Metropolitan Importance for Nature Conservation (SINC).

Contrast these meadows with the field to the north, a little further on: this would once have been managed in the same way but is now the Old Cholmeleians Sports Ground, neatly mowed for cricket and similar activities. Old Cholmeleians are former students of Highgate School, an independent school founded as a charity in 1565 by Roger Cholmeley, thus the otherwise curious name of its alumni association.

Dollis Brook through Totteridge Park Fields.

Beyond the sports ground, through another damp meadow, the trail at last reaches the side of the brook and turns to follow it through a succession of green spaces. At first these are rural fields, now under council ownership and known as Totteridge Park Fields, but then the Loop crosses to the other side of the brook and the surroundings, though still green, are more formal: expanses of mown grass designated as recreation grounds, with rows of houses beginning to appear across the grass to the left and drawing ever closer. I can’t help thinking this environment, though spacious and airy, is just a bit too bland and underexploited. Here and there are play areas, and curious patches of concrete and tarmac where structures once stood. Otherwise only the brookside, and the hedgerows and mature trees that survive from more agrarian days, add interest.

First, once you’ve crossed to the north bank of the brook, is Quinta Open Space, then the Grange Playing Fields, a strip of ground between the brook and the housing estates. Eventually the trail reaches a street, but only touches it briefly before continuing through the irregular strip of Dollis Valley Open Space, now on a surfaced path. To the north here is the Dollis Valley Estate, developed as social housing by the council from the late 1960s on the site of a former sewage works: a long planned regeneration aimed at turning it into a “smart garden suburb” was just beginning when I last visited. Finally, the Loop crosses a road and runs through the car park of Barnet Table Tennis Centre to a path junction in Barnet Playing Fields, where the Loop and the Greenwalk part company. The southern section of this space is one of the King George V Fields discussed elsewhere.

The Dollis Valley Greenwalk continues ahead and soon turns south with the brook, providing a convenient signed link with the Capital Ring, which also shares a stretch of it between Hendon and Hampstead Garden Village. This is also a relatively straightforward way of walking into the West End, via Hampstead Heath, the Belsize Walk and Regents Park. And from Hendon the Capital Ring and other paths track the Brent in a southwesterly direction.

But the Loop turns north away from the brook, through the playing fields. Looming ahead is the Underhill Stadium, originally opened in 1907 as a home for Barnet Football Club, nicknamed the Bees, founded in 1888 and now playing in League 2, actually the fourth rung of the English football league. In 2013 the club relocated to the Hive Stadium in Canons Park, in Harrow Borough, and Underhill is now largely used by the London Broncos Rugby League club and non-league Edgware Town FC.

Barnet

Site of the Old Red Lion on Barnet Hill in May 2016.

Barnet first appears in the written record rather late, when in 1199 King John granted it a charter to host a weekly market. It became one of the most important market towns close to London, not only with a rich agricultural hinterland but with a direct line to the capital via the Great North Road. The original nucleus of the town grew up around the junction of this road with Wood Street, the continuation of the road from Watford and Elstree which our route has either followed or paralleled for some time.

The charter was renewed by Elizabeth I in 1588, who also granted Barnet the right to host a cattle and horse fair twice a year. By the end of the 16th century the town boasted the biggest meat market serving London, although it was eventually overtaken by Smithfield on the edge of the City. The horse fair, with its associated races and entertainments, became so famous that ‘barnet’, from ‘Barnet fair’ for ‘hair’, is still one of the best-known remaining examples of Cockney rhyming slang.

Thanks to the road, Barnet was also an important coaching town, and upmarket houses began to appear in the area from Georgian times. The arrival of the railway in 1872 and subsequent transport improvements saw the town growing into the far northern suburb of London it is today. This status was confirmed in 1965 with the enlargement of London and the creation of the London Borough of Barnet, though for a while the borough’s name was undecided and it almost ended up as Northern Heights.

Its current name likely means a woodland clearing created by burning, and there are several different places in the area that bear it. Used on its own, ‘Barnet’ either refers to the borough or to the market town, but the latter is known more fully as Chipping Barnet or High Barnet. ‘Chipping’ is an indicator of a market, related to ‘cheap’ which once referred to markets, as in the City of London street names Cheapside and Eastcheap. The prefix ‘High’, referring simply to its elevated location, came into use in the 17th century and today the names are used interchangeably.

New Barnet is the residential suburb that grew up to the east after the first station in the area was opened on the Great Northern railway in 1850: this was originally known simply as Barnet even though it was a long way from the historic town, but was renamed New Barnet in 1884. Before the creation of the London borough, this eastwards extension fell within a separate Urban District known as East Barnet, and this term too is still in use. Friern Barnet, some way to the southeast around today’s New Southgate station, was a separate rural parish considered part of Barnet even though it was in Middlesex rather than Hertfordshire: it was once known as Little Barnet, and its current name derives from French frères, ‘brothers’, referring to the Knights of St John who once owned the manor.

Barnet is also famous for the Battle of Barnet during the Wars of the Roses in 1471, although, to add to the confusion, this didn’t actually take place in Barnet, but in Monken Hadley, a little further along the Loop to the northeast, and traditionally in Middlesex, so I’ll say more about it then. Compared to Hadley, Barnet was a much more well-known place already, and also had the advantage of alliteration, so has enjoyed the association ever since.

The Loop reaches the Great North Road in the locality known as Underhill, as it’s at the foot of Barnet Hill, which the road climbs towards the town centre. Underhill was the original site of Barnet Fair, on the slopes south of Mays Lane now occupied by the stadium, the recreation ground and the housing estate, and on meadows to the other side of the main road. The fair still takes place, though only annually in September and at a much smaller scale, on a site to the north of Mays Lane.

Until very recently, a large pub, the Old Red Lion, stood right by where the trail emerges along Fairfield Way. A coaching inn occupied the site since at least the 17th century, previously known as the ‘Lower Red Lion’ to distinguish it from the other Red Lion in the town centre. The Red Lion where Samuel Pepys ate “some of the best cheese cakes of my life” in 1667 was almost certainly the lower one. Rebuilt several times, it had a long history of serving visitors both to the fair and, later, to the football stadium, but after Barnet FC quit the latter, the owning brewery, McMullen of Hertford, declared it unviable. It was demolished early in 2016 to make way for a residential development, with only an empty pub sign holder left as a forlorn reminder.

The road itself is the second iteration of the main highway from London to the north of England and Scotland, in the 13th century succeeding what’s now the Cambridge Road, further along the Loop. It ran from Clerkenwell along several major Middlesex high streets – St John Street, Upper Street, Holloway Road, Archway Road, Highgate Hill – via Finchley, Barnet and Hatfield to rejoin the older route towards Stamford, Darlington, York, Durham, Newcastle and Edinburgh.

As with other strategic roads, prior to the 18th century its maintenance was the responsibility of local parishes and was inadequate for the weight of traffic. In 1413, Barnet High Street was “'so blocked with dung, dung heaps, pigs, pigsties and laying of timber trunks and other filth that the transit of men was much hindered and some had sustained much damage by falling with their things and harness there.”

In 1712 the Whetstone Turnpike Trust took on the section between Highgate and Underhill, and what you see today is partly the Trust’s work, as the road was not only originally narrower but followed a more curvaceous course up the hillside to the south and west of the present alignment. It presented a challenge not only for horses and livestock but, more importantly in official eyes, for marching troops on their way to repress troublesome Scots. The road was straightened in 1812, then realigned again in 1823 on a landscaped causeway that reduced the climb.

The earthwork on which this sits is still obvious today, falling away on the west side as a steep grassy bank. Such was the importance of this route that when national road numbering was introduced in 1923, it was labelled A1, and became a sort of prime meridian of the numbering scheme. Only a few years later, it was superseded as a through route by the lengthy bypass we encountered earlier, and in the mid-1950s received its current designation, the almost as impressive-sounding A1000.

The London Loop also contrives to bypass central Barnet, but you will get closer to it if you climb partway up the hill to break at High Barnet station, and I’d recommend that if you have the time you make the effort to climb the rest. Though you’re unlikely to be troubled today by dung heaps and timber trunks, you might be bothered by the traffic, but aside from this, the town still preserves some of its past as a market and coaching centre and is now partly a Conservation Area.

St John the Baptist church, which still dominates the original nucleus at the junction, was rebuilt around 1400 on mid-13th century foundations, though was unsympathetically altered in Victorian times. There are also a handful of remaining coaching inns, including the Grade II-listed Mitre (or “Ye Olde Mitre Inne” as the sign has it), now much smaller than it originally was but retaining its 17th century timber frame and still genuinely atmospheric. It numbers Samuel Johnson among many famous former customers.

High Barnet station was opened to the east of the road on its own levelled-out section of the hill in 1872, at the end of a branch of the Great Northern Railway from Finsbury Park via Highgate. It still retains some of its original country branch line-style brick architecture. As London grew, the line proved inadequate, and in the 1930s it became a centrepiece of the ambitious Northern Heights scheme to extend London Underground’s Northern Line.

The branch line was improved, electrified and connected to the existing Northern Line to Archway via a new tunnel to Highgate, reopening in 1940. As recounted at the intended site of the never-built Bushey Heath station in the previous section, much of the rest of the Northern Heights scheme was eventually shelved, and the section of line from Highgate to Finsbury Park is now the Parkland Walk footpath and cycleway, used by the Capital Ring.

The Loop runs under the Northern Lane rail bridge then across the Great North Road to follow a very old road, Potters Lane, its name a reminder that the clay round here was particularly suitable for pottery. Then you walk along the side of a pretty meadow, Potters Lane Open Space, a remaining fragment of an expanse of fields on the east of the main road once also used as fairgrounds.

The view back across King George V Fields, on the Hadley/Barnet boundary.

A brief dodge through residential streets leads to a much more extensive agricultural remnant, King George’s Fields, so named as it’s one of the many open spaces claimed for public use as a memorial to George V after his death in 1936. Many of these are plain, flat recreation grounds, but this one is a rich patchwork of grassy meadows, thick hedgerows and woodland patches dotted with mature trees, rolling down a steep slope from Hadley Green. It’s one of the nicest little surprises along the Loop.

Monken Hadley

Pond on Hadley Green. No battle in sight.

Shortly after entering King George’s Fields, the Loop crosses a brook which once carried the boundary of Monken Hadley parish. Prior to 1889, you would have crossed again from Hertfordshire to Middlesex here, but in that year Hadley was transferred to the former as part of the piecemeal smoothing out of what was once a very convoluted county boundary. Once Hadley was a part of the manor of Edmonton, but in 1136 it was granted to Walden Abbey in Essex, thus its ‘Monken’ prefix. Big houses for rich Londoners began to appear in Georgian times, and it’s now one of the most select parts of the capital, though often curiously overlooked as a picturesque example of a London ‘village’.

At the top of the hill you emerge opposite a section of Hadley Green, actually only a few steps away from Barnet High Street and the Great North Road. Crossing the Great North Road has brought us into the area of Enfield Chase, a part of the Forest of Middlesex converted during the 12th century into a royal hunting ground. But Hadley Green, then a very boggy area, was excluded from its bounds and has been a village green since at least the 14th century. A whipping post, stocks and a cucking stool survived on the green until 1935 when they were accidentally burned down in the bonfire celebrating George V’s silver jubilee.

The green is the traditional site of the Battle of Barnet, though historians are divided on the actual site, which may have been even further north. The battle was a key engagement in the Wars of the Roses between the houses of Lancaster and York for the throne of England. Kind Edward IV, the Duke of York, had been overthrown the previous year by supporters of the Lancastrian Henry VI, led by Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick. Edward fled to Flanders, then part of the Duchy of Burgundy, to drum up support for a counter-invasion.

The two sides clashed here on 14 April 1471, a foggy day which was destined to be Neville’s last. An obelisk, now known as the Hadley Highstone, was erected some way to the north of our route, near the junction of Kitts End Road and Great North Road, in 1740 to mark the spot where he supposedly fell, although there’s no good evidence for this. Edward followed up his victory by defeating the remaining Lancastrian forces at Tewkesbury on 4 May. Henry was later assassinated and 12 years of Yorkist rule followed. The conflict was only finally resolved, though, with the victory of Henry Tudor, a Lancastrian, at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485: as Henry VII, he established the Tudor dynasty.

Livingstone's Cottage, Hadley Green.

The trail traces the edge of the green, passing ponds and some fine houses. Nearing the road junction, look out for Livingstone Cottage, a white stuccoed late 18th century house with a prominent central dormer window, now Grade II listed. A plaque identifies it as a former residence of David Livingstone (1813-1873) who lived here briefly in 1857 after returning from his journey across the African continent from Luanda to the mouth of Zambezi.

A Scottish missionary and explorer, Livingstone is best known for his last and unsuccessful expedition to find the source of the Nile, which turned out to be the death of him. When contact was lost, he was tracked down by American journalist Henry Morton Stanley, who greeted him in Ujiji, Tanzania, in 1871 with the now-famous words “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” While his success in achieving his missions’ immediate goals was mixed, Livingstone’s work contributed significantly to European geographical knowledge of Africa, facilitating the imperialist ‘Scramble for Africa’ which began later in the 19th century.

A little further along, on the corner as the Loop turns, are the Wilbrahams Almshouses, built in 1616 as a local charity bequest to house “six decayed housekeepers.” It then passes St Mary the Virgin church, largely built in 1494 on a site that had been a chapel at least as far back as the 12th century, but was tweaked significantly in 1850, with a row of Gothic cottages next door. The white gates beyond this, originally planned to prevent wandering livestock, mark the western entrance to Monken Hadley Common.

The common was originally a part of Enfield Chase, which I’ll say more about in the next section. Locals had traditionally used some of this open land for grazing, so when the Chase was inclosed by an Act of Parliament in 1777, the area adjacent to Hadley was declared a common and placed in the hands of a board of trustees elected by the ‘commoners’ – those local residents who had grazing rights. This arrangement persists today, now the remaining 70 ha space is the only remaining uninclosed section of Enfield Chase, and largely covered with woodland. Today your walk is likely to be a quiet one, but from the late 19th century, ‘Hadley Woods’ as it’s sometimes known, became hugely popular with Londoners as a destination for days out, with over 40,000 visitors over one Whitsun bank holiday Monday in 1953.

Through the trees of Monken Hadley Common.

The trail runs just inside the trees, parallel to a lane known as Bakers Hill. This dwindles into a public bridleway, the only one in Barnet borough, at a car park, where information boards introduce not only the Loop, but also the Pymmes Brook Trail, of which more later. A little further on, the bridleway crosses a substantial bridge over the East Coast Main Line railway line, constructed for the Great Northern Railway under the supervision of William Cubitt and George Turnbull and opened between London and Peterborough in 1850. Initially the line served a temporary London terminal at Maiden Lane (now York Way), to the north of Kings Cross, before that terminal opened in 1852.

Further on, the striking building just visible through the trees on the right is the Jewish Community Secondary School (JCoSS), which occupies the site of Folly Farm, somewhat ironically a former pig farm and slaughterhouse that also once housed a funfair and tea rooms. A comprehensive school was built here in 1961, and relocated in 2008. It was replaced in 2010 by the current building, designed by RHWL Architects, the first cross-denominational Jewish secondary school in the UK and the most expensive British state school ever built, though some of the money was raised privately.

The path leads across an unusually decorative red brick bridge with four pillars beneath which a stream rushes. This is the Pymmes Brook, named after William Pymme, a 14th century landowner, and it’s a sign we’ve crossed a major watershed. While the Dollis Brook, not all that far back, drains via the Brent into the Thames at Brentford, the Pymmes Brook is a tributary of the river Lee, one of the largest rivers in the Thames basin, which joins the major flow considerably further downstream, at Leamouth near Blackwall. The brook rises as two streams a little to the north of here, the Monken Mead Brook and the Green Brook, in the suburb known as Hadley Wood, and runs for around 15 km via Palmers Green and Edmonton to join the Lea at Tottenham Lock.

The brook is the basis for yet another London riverside walk, the 16 km Pymmes Brook Trail, established in the 1990s by Barnet and Enfield councils and the Lee Valley Park. As the very uppermost part of the brook is largely inaccessible, this route has two start points at more convenient trailheads: Bakers Hill car park, as we’ve already seen, and Cockfosters station. The Loop borrows both of these linking paths but eschews the main riverside section, which follows a rather squashed 90° arc from west to south to connect with the Lea Valley Path at Picketts Lock.

In the 1880s, this sliver of the common was rented by Charles Jack, owner of Beech Hill Park, an estate to the north that had been carved out of the former Chase following its inclosure. He incorporated the area into his own private parkland, thus the elaborate bridge. Just a few steps to the north, and worthy of a detour, is another of his additions, a placid fishing lake officially dubbed Beech Hill Lake, but still known locally as Jack’s Lake.

Jack's Lake,, Monken Hadley Common

Though there was probably some sort of lake or pond here in the 17th century, Jack had the area of water significantly enlarged by channelling and damming the two brooks. The lake straddles the boundary between the common, in Barnet, and Beech Hill Park, which is now Hadley Wood Golf Course, in Enfield, and is the largest of three lakes, the other two within the golf course. Jack was also responsible for developing the suburb of Hadley Wood itself, to the west and north of Beech Hill Park.

From late Victorian times until the 1960s, this was a public boating lake, and a well-known landmark in the common’s recreational heyday. In the 1950s it was a notorious rendezvous for teddy boys, the moral panic-inspiring youth cult of the day. The common’s official website quotes a verse current at the time:

If you go down to Hadley Woods today, you'd better go in disguise,
In drainpipe trews and fancy shoes and something intense in ties.
Don't bother to wash - it's sure to rain;
Remember your cosh and bicycle chain;
Today's the day the Teddy boys have their picnic.

Over the following decades, the lake fell into disrepair, but in 1982 it was licensed to Hadley Angling and Preservation Society (HAPS), who cleaned and restored it as a fishing lake. In a clear sign you’re in multicultural London, the rules and regulations governing fishing licenses are displayed in a variety of languages including Bulgarian, Polish and Romanian.

The eastern end of the common narrows, and the path eventually merges with a street, Games Road, which runs along its south side. Through another set of white gates, you’ve left not only the common and the old Monken Hadley parish, but Hertfordshire as it was between 1889 and 1964, the designated area of Watling Chase Community Forest (entered at Carpenders Park in the last section) and the London Borough of Barnet.

Cockfosters

In Anglo-Saxon times, the biggest manor in this northeast corner of Essex was Edmonton, another of the lands assigned to St Albans Abbey by Offa in 790, with its nucleus some way to the south, on Roman Watling Street. By the time of the Norman invasion, part of the Forest of Middlesex in the north had become a hunting park, later known as Enfield Chase. By now Enfield itself, a little off the Roman road to the north, was significant enough to be noted in the Domesday Survey, and in 1303 it became a market town. The area was gradually developed after the 1777 inclosure of the Chase, and was populated enough by 1894 that it became an urban district of Middlesex. In 1965, it was put together with Edmonton and Southgate to create the current London Borough of Enfield.

To most Londoners, Cockfosters is merely the place with the snigger-inducing name at the northern end of the Piccadilly Line. For centuries there was nothing here but a lonely road running from Southgate, the main southern gate of the Chase, northwards to Potters Bar. But the name is recorded locally as far back as 1524, and there are records from 1714 of the sale of a house called Cockfosters, possibly on the Hadley side of the road. A foster is a forester, one of the people who managed and supervised the forest, and ‘cock’ was sometimes used to mean ‘chief’, so there’s speculation that the house was once the residence of the chief forester. After 1777, a small settlement developed largely as an estate village for Trent Park, which I’ll discuss more in the next section, and there were enough people living locally by 1839 to justify a new church.

Growth remained modest until 1933, when the Tube arrived, prompting the urban sprawl that had already engulfed Southgate to spread north, filling the gap between Trent Park and Hadley Common. Cockfosters Road became a suburban high street, complete with modestly art deco shopping parades. This development would have spread further, but as elsewhere on the London fringe was halted by World War II and the Green Belt. So today, appropriately for somewhere on the extremity of a Tube line, Cockfosters is one of those places where the built-up area of London simply stops. There’s no significant building on the east of the road once past the station, though a couple of sprouting streets and single houses line the west side as far as Hadley Wood.

The trail passes a big pub set back in its own grounds, the Cock, originally opened to serve the growing settlement in the late 18th century but now in an early 20th century building. Further along, past the cricket ground and bowling green, is the aforementioned 1839 Christ Church. It was extended in 1898, which necessitated reconfiguring the interior so that now, unusually, it faces west rather than east.

Cockfosters Station, not just the silliest name on the Tube map.

If you don’t want to break your walk here, you can reduce the total walking distance a little by heading straight from the Cock to Trent Park, but you’ll miss the church and the station. The latter in particularly is worth seeing, as its building largely survives from the opening of the Piccadilly Line extension from Finsbury Park in 1933. It’s the work of celebrated Underground architect Charles Holden, who designed an elegant, low-profile structure in what was then the modern European style. The main entrance on the east side of the road, in red brick and glass, is echoed by a bus shelter and subway entrance opposite, while the train shed makes impressive use of reinforced concrete. It’s a worthy gateway to the delights of Trent Park which Loop walkers can look forward to in the next section.

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