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

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.

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

London Loop 15: Hatch End – Borehamwood

Caesar's Pond, Stanmore Common, one of the original 'stony meres' that gave the locality its name.

YOU’LL FIND TWO ANCIENT COMMONS AND SEVERAL ARTIFICIAL LAKES with stories to tell, alongside reminders of the entertainment industry, as the London Loop continues to meander along the London-Hertfordshire boundary. W S Gilbert, half of one of the Victorian era’s most successful creative teams, met an unexpected end at Grimsdyke Lake on Harrow Weald Common. Brewers Lake on Stanmore Common is a remnant of a vanished local industry, while Aldenham Reservoir, built by prisoners of war, is now the centrepiece of a more contemporary story about the use and misuse of public space. Other highlights are an ancient earthwork and the command centre of the Battle of Britain. The walk ends at the ‘British Hollywood’ of Elstree – or should that be Borehamwood?

This is a single long Loop section that could be split at several points, passing relatively close to Stanmore Underground station at the end of the Jubilee Line, although some of the bus stops are outside the TfL zone and Travelcards, Oyster and Contactless might not be valid.

Update November 2017. While I'd recommend sticking to the official London Loop route as described here if walking the trail for the first time, there are a couple of alternatives worth knowing about. You can start at Carpenders Park station and follow a pleasant woodland path along a stream to join the Loop at Mutton Wood. In Harrow Weald Common there's a shortcut that doesn't involve crossing the road to the Old Redding Viewpoint, and there's also a fairly long but very pleasant link to Stanmore halfway along, via Stanmore Country Park. Read more here.

Carpenders Park

As mentioned at the end of the previous section, the Loop bounces away from suburbia at Hatch End, roughly northwards on a fenced path with open meadows on the left, and a playing field and then an excrescence of the Pinnerwood Park estate on the right. Across another meadow, it reaches and then parallels the West Coast Main Line railway, discussed in the last section. Converging with the railway, you’re once again briefly leaving London and re-entering South Oxhey in Hertfordshire’s Three Rivers District. Hidden in the undergrowth of the railway embankment here is a coal post of a different and much larger design than the ones we’ve already encountered, but it’s behind the railway fence and hard to spot from the path. It dates from 1851 and was moved here ten years later following changes to the tax boundary.

The Loop follows Little Oxhey Lane across the railway over a historic bridge that dates from before the area was built up, as demonstrated by its inadequate width: the trail uses an additional footway which has been bolted on more recently. On the other side of the tracks, in more ways than one, is Carpenders Park, developed in the 1930s, a little earlier than neighbouring South Oxhey, and by private developers rather than the London County Council. So it’s always had a more upmarket reputation compared to its neighbour, undoubtedly reinforced by the way the railway so decisively separates them: the only links besides the one the Loop uses are several pedestrian subways around Carpenders Park station, about a kilometre to the north.

The Loop runs alongside neat houses set slightly back from the road, and passes a small green space, Romilly Drive Open Space. Walking along the edge of this unremarkable patch of green, you’ll enter the designated area of Watling Chase Community Forest, a gradually improving zone of green space straddling London’s northern boundary which I introduced on the way from Kings Langley to St Albans on the London Countryway. The trail stays within the Forest for the rest of this section and for nearly all of the next.

You pass a big garden centre to reach Oxhey Lane, once a winding country lane but now an important road link between Harrow and Watford. The former core of the old Carpenders Park estate is a little along the lane to the left here: the site of Carpenders mansion, later known as Highfield and demolished in 1960 to make way for married quarters for USAF personnel stationed at RAF South Ruislip nearby, which in turn were swept away in the late 1990s. Close by is Carpenders Park Lawn Cemetery, opened in 1954 and now shared between the London Boroughs of Brent and Harrow and Three Rivers council.

Across the busy road, the Loop glances the edge of a strip of ancient semi-natural woodland known as Mutton Wood, now managed as a local wildlife site. A track through rough ground beside the wood has been much improved in recent years, though still suffers from fly tipping. Then there’s the first golf course on today’s section, Grim’s Dyke Golf Club, created on former farmland by Hatch End residents in 1910. Its land now straddles both Hertfordshire and London.

Three boundaries meet where the path reaches a hedge on the left and passes to the left of a clump of trees. You’ll see that on the other side of the hedge, where there’s another golf course, a second hedge joins at right angles. This is the London boundary: the adjoining hedge would originally have continued straight across your path, but it’s been removed for the convenience of golfers so you can walk back into London unhindered. But the hedge you’ve been following is also a boundary, dividing two Hertfordshire districts: Three Rivers, on your side, and Hertsmere, on the other.

Grim’s Dyke

The mysterious Grim's Dyke, possibly a Celtic boundary feature.

You’ll soon find yourself walking on a hedged track where you encounter a more significant and curious boundary feature identified by a plaque just before a junction with a road. This is Grim’s Dyke, also known as Grim’s Ditch, an ancient linear earthwork consisting of an earth bank and a parallel ditch that stretch for some 3 km from Harrow Weald Common southwest to Pinner, possibly extending into Ruislip. Originally it might have been still longer, but substantial sections are long lost. If you followed the station link at Hatch End you will have already crossed its line, along Grimsdyke Road, but at that location there’s nothing to be seen on the ground. Here, it’s clearly visible: you’ll need to keep a lookout as it’s overgrown with trees, but you can see the metre-high earth embankment on both sides of the track, which appears to have sliced through it.

At this point, the Loop dodges left into the woods, running along the top of the embankment itself. To your right, on the south side of the bank, is the ditch, more recently turned into a decorative canal feature in the gardens of Grimsdyke House.

The Dyke is one of those many large-scale landscape features, both natural and artificial, once considered supernatural, and probably malevolent, in origin. Grim is an Anglo-Saxon term for a devil of goblin, and the earthwork itself has traditionally been given a Saxon origin, although many now think it’s rather older. It’s never been definitively dated, but archaeological finds in the vicinity, including a 1st century fire hearth uncovered during redevelopment of the house in 1979, suggest the early Roman period.

At that time, the Catuvellauni were attempting to expand their territory in the face of Roman power, so the structure might have played a role in this process. Its exact purpose is also unknown. This is high ground, on a ridge between the river Pinn to the south and the Hartsbourne stream to the north, so the ditch may have been defensive. But neither is it especially substantial, so it could just have marked an important boundary.

The land you’re now crossing, Grimsdyke Open Space, once part of Harrow Weald Common, was bought by artist Frederick Goodall in 1856, who began creating gardens and woods as a setting for a planned house, finally built in 1871 by the architect Richard Norman Shaw. At the architect’s suggestion, the name was changed for a while to the less foreboding Graeme’s Dyke, but was changed back by a celebrated new owner in 1890: the lyricist and dramatist William Schwenck Gilbert (1836-1911), one of the most prominent figures in the popular culture of his day.

Gilbert was already a successful playwright, director and comic poet when in 1869 he was introduced to the composer Arthur Sullivan. Between 1875 and 1891, the pair collaborated on a string of enormously successful comic operas in a highly distinctive style which are still regularly performed to enthusiastic audiences today, including The Pirates of Penzance (1878), The Mikado (1885) and The Gondoliers (1889). Many of them were premiered at the Savoy Theatre in the Strand, which impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte opened in 1881 specifically for that purpose.

Gilbert bought Grimsdyke just as his working relationship with Sullivan and D’Oyly Carte was breaking down. Both he and his collaborator were brilliant but difficult men who, as they advanced in age, grew increasingly frustrated that their light-hearted output enjoyed much greater success than their more serious work. They briefly reconciled and collaborated again in 1895 and 1896, but the magic had gone and the results enjoyed only moderate success.

Gradually Gilbert withdrew from theatre work and spent more time at Harrow Weald, continuing to improve the house and its grounds: he even became the inaugural president of the golf club. Climbing down from the dyke and working your way through banks of rhododendrons first planted for Goodall, you’ll soon find yourself beside Gilbert’s most significant and, as things turned out, most fateful addition, a 6,000 m2 boating lake complete with rock cascade and artificial island.

Grimsdyke Lake, built by W S Gilbert, who died in its waters

Gilbert personally supervised the digging of this lake in 1900 and was delighted with the result. On 29 May 1911, a teenage visitor, Ruby Preece, lost her footing while swimming in the lake and called for help. Gilbert plunged in to save her, but had a heart attack while in the water and died. His grieving widow Lucy ordered the lake drained, and so part of it has stayed since.

Preece, incidentally, survived the incident to become the artist, model and Bloomsbury Group associate Patricia Preece, second wife of tortured artist Stanley Spencer, whom we encountered at Cookham on the London Countryway – although she also maintained a long-term relationship with a female partner, Dorothy Hepworth.

Lucy Gilbert, 11 years younger than her husband, died in 1936 and the house became a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients. Part of it was used by the government for secret work during World War II, allegedly as a backup site for the codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park. The estate fell into the hands of Harrow Council when the sanatorium closed in 1963, and eventually the council rented out the house for conversion into a hotel in 1970, while retaining much of the grounds as a public park. Today, the lake is a peaceful, leafy place with a unique atmosphere, silent about the tragedy that unfolded there. You’ll only catch glimpses of the mock-Tudor house as you pass through the site, though you could detour up the drive, further along the route, for a better view. If you’re feeling flush, you could even spend a night: it’s still a hotel, one of the few on the Loop, now known as the Best Western Plus Grim’s Dyke Hotel.

Harrow Weald Common

Harrow Weald Common near Grimsdyke House: note the uneven surface resulting from gravel extraction.

The Loop emerges from the rhododendrons and conifers to track another earth bank, which once divided the more formal space around the house, on your left, from the more natural woodland of Harrow Weald Common on the right. These woods are a remnant of the Forest of Middlesex, a substantial tract of the near-continuous wildwood that had once carpeted prehistoric Britain. In the 1150s, the forest stretched northwards from the City of London boundary at Houndsditch for around 19 km to the edge of Hertfordshire, and was considered City property, with Londoners entitled to hunt there. It was officially ‘disafforested’ by Henry III in 1218 and the land was split between numerous individual property holders, but some of it remained thickly wooded and uncultivated for many more centuries.

This steep ridge with its poor, gravelly soil, rising to 145 m, eventually became the common lands of the Weald, originally a sprawling area of woodland and cottages which gave rise to a small hamlet on the lower ground to the south. The name is from Anglo-Saxon wald, a wooded upland: the designation ‘Harrow Weald’ only appeared in the later 18th century and some locals still call the place simply ‘Weald’ today. Inclosure took place in a piecemeal fashion: by 1759 the common extended to 300 ha and by 1817 it had been reduced to 277 ha. Land was not only taken for farming and housing but for industries like brickworks. But commoners continued to exercise their traditional rights, including grazing pigs and gravel extraction. The latter was particularly vigorously pursued and its effects are still evident today in the undulating floor of the woods.

An 1886 proposal to sell the remaining common lands for development was defeated by local opposition and in 1899, following concern about the impact of gravel extraction, an Act of Parliament set up a board of conservators to protect what remained. In 1965 the freehold passed to Harrow Council who now appoint all the conservators.

The Loop emerges on a road, once a meandering track along the top of the ridge and known by the picturesque name of Old Redding, from an obsolete word meaning a woodland clearing. Directly opposite is a car park and picnic site, the Old Redding Viewpoint, and even though our route heads back into the woods on the north side of the road a little further on, it’s well worth crossing and walking ahead for a few steps. It's possible to avoid the road and walk closer to Grim's Dyke House by staying within the common, if you don't mind missing out the view.

View from Old Redding Viewpoint

The land falls away as steep meadows beneath your feet, leaving a clear view south. Harrow on the Hill, topped with its church and school buildings, is the most prominent feature nearby: we’ll visit it on the Capital Ring. You’ll also see other local hills like Horsenden Hill, landmarks like Wembley Stadium in the distance and, off to the west, the planes landing and taking off at Heathrow. At 137 m, it’s the second-best view on the Loop, after Addington Hills on section 4, to which it provides a northerly complement on similar geology.

Returning to the road, you’ll note the hotel drive with its Grade II-listed lodge on the north side, and, right next to the car park, a picturesque whitewashed pub with the curious name The Case is Altered. A surprising number of pubs in England share this name, which derives from a 16th century legal set phrase, used by Ben Jonson as the title of a 1599 play. As applied to pubs, it could commemorate a change in the legal circumstances of the landlord or the local community. Among the alternative, less plausible, explanations is that it’s a corruption of la casa alta, Castilian for ‘the high house’ – which would at least seem appropriate to the airy setting here.

It’s a little surprising to find the pub still functioning (at the time of writing at least) in this isolated spot. When it was built around 1800, a cluster of cottages lined Old Redding, housing workers at the nearby brickworks, and the locality was known as the City, which must have seemed ironic even then. Nearly all are gone: several have been knocked together into one large house, while the car park now occupies the site of others. The old brickworks is now largely a garden centre just a little further along the lane, with its former use recalled in the name of a house, the Kiln. The locality name survives in the section of common the Loop now enters, which is known as The City Open Space.

Cottage originally attached to Grimsdyke House.

Through the woods to the right is a fenced-off area of common that’s designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) particularly for its geological importance: the exposed gravels which cap the London clay here were deposited during the last glacial period. Further on is an unexpected cluster of cottages on the edge of wood: the more distinctive ones, on the left, were originally servants’ quarters, dating from the development of Grimsdyke House.

The trail now bends east along the woodland edge, crossing several streams that drain down the north-facing slope into the Hartsbourne and then the Colne. Then it crosses the end of a tree-lined path, Len’s Avenue, so-called because it was planted by Leonard Renery, Keeper of the Common between 1961 and his death in 1996. Back through the woods, you emerge on Common Road, which was cut through the trees to link Watford and Harrow in 1759. Across it, the trail enters a rather different but arguably even more historically significant green space.

Bentley Priory

View through the fence to Bentley Priory, command centre for the Battle of Britain, with its distinctive clock tower,

Sometime in the 12th or 13th centuries, a cell of Augustinian friars founded a priory high on the ridge to the northeast of Harrow, known as Bentley, probably derived from an Anglo-Saxon term meaning a clearing amid bent or rough grass. Some sources claim it was established by politician and lawyer Ranulf de Glanvill, who later became Chief Justiciar of England, in 1170. It was always a small community dependent on the priory of St Gregory, Canterbury, and it seems that by 1536, when it was dissolved in Henry VIII’s reforms, it was simply tenanted out as a source of income. After the dissolution it was given to Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was forced to give it back when he fell out of favour with the king in 1542.

The property passed through several hands before being bought in 1766 by James Duberly, who demolished the old priory buildings, which probably stood some way down the slope in the southern part of the site, near where Priory House, a 16th century timber-framed farmhouse, still stands today. He replaced these with a new mansion at the top of the ridge, which, under its next owner John Hamilton, the Marquess of Abercorn, was extended and refurbished in 1788 to designs by the renowned architect John Soane. Although altered several times since, this building still stands today and is clearly visible from the Loop.

Hamilton managed the grounds as private parkland, including a deer park, and welcomed a starry cast of eminent people to the estate, among them prime minister William Pitt the Younger; military commander Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington; actor Sarah Siddons; author Walter Scott; and Emma Hamilton, later the lover of Admiral Horatio Nelson.

The priory had several further private occupants, including Queen Victoria’s aunt Queen Adelaide in the last year of her life between 1848-49. Engineer and building contractor John Kelk, responsible among other things for building the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park, added one of the most prominent architectural features, the clock tower, after he bought the estate in 1863. Between 1882 and 1908 it was a hotel, then a girls’ boarding school, neither of which were particularly successful.

The priory’s period of greatest fame was yet to come. In 1926, the site was split, with a few pockets of land sold for development, the bulk of the parkland taken on as green belt by Middlesex County Council, and the house and its immediate surroundings sold to the Air Ministry for a sum believed to be £25,000. The ministry installed the newly-formed Royal Air Force (RAF) in the house, and in 1936 it became the headquarters of RAF Fighter Command. So it was from here that Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, later Baron Dowding of Bentley Priory, commanded the successful air defence of the UK in the 1940 Battle of Britain, the first important defeat for Nazi Germany. As such, although it was never an airfield, it’s one of two key World War II-related sites on the Loop, alongside Kenley in section 4.

The RAF stayed until 2008, although after 1968 used the site primarily for administration and training. Nonetheless, when I first walked this way in the 1990s, the tall fence separating the buildings from the parkland was surmounted by surveillance cameras and liberally dotted with Ministry of Defence warning notices. It’s currently in the process of being redeveloped as private housing, with the welcome inclusion of a museum run by the Bentley Priory Battle of Britain Trust, opened in 2013. Despite the lowering of security concerns, there’s still no direct connection between the green space and the buildings, so if you want to visit, you’ll need to detour along Common Road.

The parkland, meanwhile, eventually passed into the hands of the present-day Harrow council, though it’s largely managed by a voluntary group, the Harrow Nature Conservation Forum, part of the Harrow Heritage Trust. Thanks to its steep geography, its poor soils and its preservation as an 18th century country park through to the early days of the Green Belt, it’s one of the most expansive wild sites within London, with a patchwork of environments including ancient woodland and unimproved grassland that has never been ploughed and fertilised. It’s now a designated Local Nature Reserve and, by virtue of its species diversity, the only biological SSSI in the borough.

The Shard and other London landmarks
from Bentley Priory Nature Reserve

The Loop follows a narrow concrete path through the nature reserve, oddly reminiscent of 1940s aviation though of course it has no link to the RAF site. The sturdily fenced area to the left just after the road is Glenthorne, originally the site of a house of the same name which was requisitioned in 1940 as a proposed extension to the Priory complex. This was never built, and the land has remained undisturbed ever since. It may eventually become part of the reserve, or a city farm. Later there’s a World War II pillbox on the left.

The path runs along the ridge just below the house through an area known as Spring Meadow. There are good views of the historic buildings through the fence on the left, and rough grassland that tumbles down to reveal wide views through gaps in the trees, including all the tall landmarks in the City of London. You’ll also catch a glimpse of an ornamental lake, named Summerhouse Lake after the structure on its artificial island, where Walter Scott is said to have worked on the final revisions to his epic poem Marmion in 1807.

Then the surroundings turn notably scrubbier, with tough grasses and patches of gorse that give this area its name Furze Field. A junction of paths with interpretation boards and a Loop fingerpost seem like they could be in the middle of some remote heath, but you’re soon among the big and expensive houses that line the private streets of Priory Drive and Priory Close, on one of the pockets of priory land developed in the 1920s.

London Loop path junction in Bentley Priory Nature Reserve.

Stanmore Common

The track north from the Bentley Priory fingerpost out of the site follows the old parish boundary between Harrow and Stanmore, which ran through the priory site. The Loop definitively enters Stanmore when it turns east along Priory Drive. The parish, its name meaning a stony pond or lake, was part of the large areas of land granted by the Mercian king Offa II to St Albans Abbey on its foundation in the 790s, some of which we walked through in the previous section.

By this time, most of the cultivated land had already been parcelled up under the feudal system, so the only land available for endowment to new abbeys was woodland and ‘waste’, including this tract of the Forest of Middlesex. Even before the conquest, however, the abbey had lost some of these lands, and following land swaps, the parish was in secular hands by the 13th century, with the abbey retaining land to the north, over the Hertfordshire boundary.

By this time, Stanmore was divided into two separate strip-shaped parishes according to land ownership: Great Stanmore in the west and Little Stanmore in the east. The Loop proper passes almost entirely through Great Stanmore, though if you choose to split the walk at this point you’ll find yourself in Little Stanmore, as the greater part of Stanmore Country Park and Stanmore station are on the east side of the boundary. Today the divisions have largely been lost to modern patterns of development and the use of station names for wider localities, further obscured by the fact that Great Stanmore was often simply called Stanmore anyway.

The term Little Stanmore is still used for the area southeast of Canons Park station, where the old parish church stood, but the easterly division never had a proper village centre. Great Stanmore, in contrast, did, and by the mid-19th century it was quite substantial, and regarded as picturesque and genteel, spurring the building of ‘gentlemen’s residences’ in the vicinity. The railway didn’t arrive until 1890, when a branch of the London & North Western Railway provided a shuttle service from Harrow & Wealdstone to Stanmore Village, partly at the urging of the hotelier at Bentley Park. But this was too inconvenient for commuting, so building in the area remained largely targeted at the better-off who didn’t need to travel to London on a daily basis.

That changed in 1932 when the Metropolitan Railway opened its branch from Wembley Park to a new Stanmore station to the east. The line provided direct services to the West End and good connections to the city, triggering the intensive development of the southern part of Stanmore over a few short years in the 1930s. The earlier line was eventually closed in 1952, though parts of it can still be traced as footpaths.

As in Harrow, the high, gravelly land to the north of Great Stanmore was managed as common, In the 16th century, part of the common was used as a rabbit warren, with associated earthworks, and much of the remaining woodland was cleared for grazing in the 17th century, creating acid grassland and heath. As grazing declined in the 19th century, birch woodlands established themselves, though there’s now a project to restore some of the heathland.

Although there were some encroachments on the common during the period of inclosure, like Harrow Weald it escaped the development pressures affecting many other parts of London, and the remaining areas were protected as public spaces when the former Hendon Rural District Council bought out the remaining manorial rights in 1929. It’s now a Local Nature Reserve which, like Bentley Priory, is managed by Harrow Nature Conservation Forum. It was part of the same SSSI as the neighbouring site until 1990 when the boundaries were redrawn, and currently doesn’t have SSSI status.

The trail runs a short distance along Warren Lane, its name recalling one of the historic uses of the site, and then cuts through one of the strips of remaining ancient woodland. There’s a substantial area of common to the north here, with a maze-like network of paths and curious earthworks, like the mound known as Foxes Earth, related to the former warren. But the Loop turns its back on these and heads south, crossing Warren Lane again to pass the ground of Stanmore Cricket Club, one of the oldest in the former county. It dates itself from a Court Leet – a meeting of the manorial court in accordance with mediaeval tradition – in 1853, thought to be the last such meeting of its kind in Middlesex, which granted this portion of the common to the club.

Beyond this are the two Brewer’s Ponds, now popular with anglers, but originally created in the late 19th century as a reservoir for the nearby Clutterbuck’s Stanmore Brewery. This was an outgrowth of the brewhouse of the Vine pub at the top of Stanmore Hill, brewing since at least 1749 and closed in 1916. The pub still stands, a little off the route, though after a stint as an Indian restaurant it’s now due to be converted to flats.

Then the Loop runs through an area known as Stanmore Little Common, where the combination of open grass, ponds, hedges, patches of trees and historic buildings provide particularly picturesque surroundings. The two ponds here are the original ‘stony ponds’ that gave the settlement its name, and although they are almost certainly artificial, they’ve been here since at least Roman times. Lower Spring Pond is off the path to the right; a little further is the larger Upper Spring Pond, also known as Caesar’s Pond in acknowledgement of its ancient origin, although of course Caesar himself was never in the area.

The ponds are the break point if you want Stanmore station. The signed link will take you through Stanmore Country Park, created on ancient fields which were farmed until the 1950s, and through the 1930s housing to the station, designed in cottagey suburban style by the Metropolitan Railway architect Charles W Clarke. Curiously, the station has been on three different Underground lines during its history. In 1939 the branch was detached from the Met and became part 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. More about the link here.

Continuing on the main route, on the right as you reach the end of Caesar’s Pond is the rambling 18th century Springbok House, formerly Warren House: the mid-19th century yellow brick wall recessed to accommodate a porte cochère was added by an architect who once owned the property. Then a lane leads past a striking modernist house to the gate of the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital (RNOH), an NHS hospital that’s the biggest orthopaedic specialist in the UK.

The site began as a private house, Verulam House, in 1882, intended for a successful Islington butcher who died before building was completed. It was bought by a trust founded by the philanthropist Mary Wardell as a convalescent home for scarlet fever patients, which opened in 1884 and was substantially extended in 1891 and closed in 1917. The complex became the ‘country branch’ of the RNOH in 1920 and is now its main site. It’s been modified since: the original house has been demolished, so much of what you see dates from the 1891 extension, and there are even some nissen huts installed during World War II that are still in use today.

The London-Hertfordshire boundary running from foreground to background on the edge of Bushey Heath.

Walking between the hospital and the parallel farm drive, you’re once again on an ancient boundary, this time between Great and Little Stanmore. This leads out into fields to a T-junction with another well-defined boundary track, which has divided Hertfordshire, on the north, and Middlesex and then London, on the south, since at least 1595. The Loop leaves London again here, entering a new Hertfordshire district, the Borough of Hertsmere, created in 1974. Appropriately enough, it derives its name not only from the county name but from the archaic word ‘mere’ meaning boundary.

Bushey Heath’s invisible station

The M1 bridge between Bushey Heath and Elstree. The roundabout ahead, where the Watford Bypass (A41) also crosses
the London Loop, was the intended site for the abandoned Bushey Heath station on the Northern Line.

The Loop crosses more fields on the eastern edge of the former parish of Bushey, once another part of the wooded lands granted by Offa to St Albans Abbey. The most prominent landmark today, drawing ever closer on the right, is the embankment carrying the M1 motorway. The trail emerges on the Elstree Road beside a curiously noisy but apparently unattended installation surrounded by a brick wall, actually a gas pumping station. It then crosses two major highways in quick succession, the M1 under a bridge and the A41 across a roundabout, representing two different phases of the transformation of the landscape through road building.

The M1 is the current iteration of one of Britain’s most important highways, from London to northern England and Scotland. The route of this has moved progressively westwards over the centuries, so this is also the first version of it encountered on the Loop. The oldest was Roman Ermine Street, from Bishopsgate via Dalston, Tottenham and Waltham Cross, roughly the route of today’s A10. By the 12th century, due to flooding problems and disputes over bridges across the river Lea, a new route had been created from Aldersgate via Islington, Highgate and Barnet, roughly the route of today’s A1.

These highways inevitably stimulated the growth of settlements along the way, a virtue in the days of horse-drawn and pedestrian traffic, but increasingly a problem as motor traffic grew in the early 20th century. As narrow high streets lined with historic buildings turned into congested bottlenecks, through traffic, once an economic blessing for roadside communities, became an environmental curse. The first solution was to build bypasses, new sections of road avoiding town centres, as well as strategically improving the old turnpikes and coaching routes. For millennia, maintaining roads had been the responsibility of local authorities and, later, toll-charging trusts, but after World War I the creation of a strategic road network became a national concern.

Inevitably, proposals emerged for entirely new roads, optimised for, and legally restricted to, motorised users, with multiple lanes and split level junctions. The first road of this kind, the Long Island Motor Parkway (now long gone), opened in the USA in 1908, and, as is well-known, the fascist governments in Italy and later Germany built substantial networks of such motor roads.

The earliest serious attempt in the UK was an unsuccessful private member’s bill for a motorway between London, Birmingham and Manchester in 1924, followed by detailed proposals put forward by the Institute of Highway Engineers in 1936. The government finally committed to a motorway network in 1946, in the age of radical post-World War II planning. The first UK motorway, which opened in 1958, was actually a short bypass around Preston, now part of the M6. The M1 was the first intercity motorway, with the first stretch opening in 1959, from Junction 5 a little north of here to a junction with the A5 at Crick in Northamptonshire. The section the Loop crosses was added as the first phase of a southward extension in 1966.

The construction of the motorway network was the first nationally coordinated road building programme in Britain since Roman times, and over the 40 years between the late 1950s and the end of the 20th century it had transformed the landscape with the addition of over 3,200 km of new and very wide and obtrusive roads. Not that this solved the problem of congestion: indeed, it seems new roads simply encourage further use of the car and can exacerbate the problem rather than solve it. Bypasses and motorways may have diverted through traffic, but town centres are now clogged with cars making local journeys that would previously have been by walking, cycling or public transport. Yet the association of motor transport with prestige and economic success has been hard to shake.

The road you cross at the roundabout immediately after the flyover dates from the earlier ‘bypass’ period. An old highway through Watford, another strand of the tangle of roads north from London, connected Roman Watling Street (roughly, the modern A5) with Aylesbury in the Chilterns and on to Warwick and the West Midlands. This was identified as a key radial route from London by 1920s planners, with a bypass to relieve Watford town centre as a top priority. By the end of that decade, the lengthy Watford Bypass was taking traffic east of the town between Apex Corner in Edgware to Hunton Bridge. The whole length has been numbered A41 since the 1950s, and between 1959 and 1966 this stretch would also have acted as a feeder route to the M1.

This roundabout has one more story to tell about a transport scheme, this time one that might have been but never was. Had things turned out differently, on the other side of the A41 as you rounded the corner back onto Elstree Road, you’d be walking past a splendid Tube station called Bushey Heath, at one of the extremities of the Northern Line, and on through a whole suburb surrounding it.

In 1935, the London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB), created two years previously to take the capital’s local transport services into public ownership, embarked on its ambitious New Works programme for the Underground. This included a major extension of the Northern Line known as the Northern Heights, largely based on taking over and electrifying several existing local lines then operated by the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER).

The LNER route ran from the East Coast Main Line at Finsbury Park to Highgate and High Barnet, with branches from Highgate to Alexandra Palace and from East Finchley to Edgware via Mill Hill East. The LPTB planned to dig a new tunnel from Archway to connect with the LNER lines north of Highgate, incorporating all three branches into the Tube, and linking at Edgware with the existing Northern Line branch via Hampstead.

It also intended to realise the LNER’s long-held ambition of extending northwards from Edgware to Elstree and Bushey Heath, for which the rights already existed. At the time, open countryside surrounded the northern end of the planned extension, but it was confidently expected that, as with previous extensions, once the Tube arrived, the houses would follow. A major development was envisioned around the station, ringing the roundabout with shops, pubs, restaurants, a bus interchange and even a cinema.

Work on the project was already well-advanced by 1939. The Highgate tunnel was completed, the Edgware branch had been electrified as far as Mill Hill East, and work had begun on the northern extension, including the construction of two intermediate stations and an extensive depot to the east of the Bushey Heath site. But the outbreak of World War II severely disrupted progress. Underground trains ran to High Barnet from 1940, but the rest of the plans were put on hold. The half-completed depot was hastily converted for the war effort into an aircraft factory.

When peace returned, the Northern Heights proposals faltered. Not only were money and resources short, but all the undeveloped land along the northern extension was now designated as part of the Green Belt and unlikely to be built up, so potential passenger numbers were substantially reduced. The proposal was formally dropped in 1954, and the remaining unelectrified sections of the old LNER lines were closed in the rationalisations of the 1960s. Some sections were built on, though substantial stretches of trackbed can be followed on foot today, most notably the section from Finsbury Park to Highgate, now known as the Parkland Walk and forming part of the Capital Ring. The abandonment of the rest of the scheme left the short stretch of line from Finchley Central to Mill Hill East as the anomalous stump it remains today.

Work hadn’t yet started on Bushey Heath station before the war broke out, so today there’s no visible evidence for what was planned here. The roundabout remains surrounded by fields rather than art deco retail units, except for the more recent intrusion of the M1 bridge.

The depot site nearby became a bus overhaul facility known as the Aldenham Works, where 2,500 people worked at its peak. It features in the opening sequence of Cliff Richard’s most famous film Summer Holiday (1962), which was shot during the summer shutdown, using real employees as supporting artists. The complex ceased to be part of London Transport in 1970 when ‘country’ bus services were transferred to the new National Bus Company, and finally closed in 1986. After several years of dereliction, it was demolished and replaced with the Centennial Park Industrial Estate.

Aldenham Reservoir

The unreliable dam at Aldenham Reservoir, originally built by French prisoners of war.

After a rather dull stretch of road past business parks, you round a bend to walk with an expanse of water on the left and a patch of tree-covered wetland on the right. Both are in fact part of Aldenham Reservoir.

Historically this was Aldenham parish, although the village itself is some distance away to the north, and the southern part of the reservoir site now falls within Elstree and Borehamwood. The name means either ‘old homestead’ or ‘Ealda’s homestead’. This was another one of Offa II’s monastic land grants, although for centuries it was disputed between St Albans Abbey and Westminster Abbey. A court case in 1256 resolved the issue essentially by confirming it as under Westminster’s control but with concessions to St Albans. The southern boundary of this land, incidentally, followed the road you’re now walking, Elstree Road: beyond the reservoir, the right hand side, including what became the Aldenham Works, was actually in Middlesex, as part of Stanmore, and joined the London Borough of Harrow in 1964, although it was later taken out of London, as we’ll soon see.

The area to the north of the road became a large common, though most of this had been inclosed by 1801. The fact that a substantial part of it is now covered in water links back to a previous section of the Loop along the Grand Union Canal between Hayes and Harefield. The canal’s developers, the Grand Junction Canal Company, under pressure from mill operators who feared abstraction of water from local rivers, agreed to build their own reservoir to feed the canal, and in 1793 bought 27.5 ha of the former Aldenham Common for the purpose.

French prisoners of war dug the reservoir by hand between 1795 and 1797, building a clay dam across its northern end. But the work was poorly designed and executed, perhaps a reflection on the advisability of using forced labour. The dam had to be repaired, enlarged and strengthened in 1802 when further land was added to the site. In the early 20th century the clay dam was replaced by a concrete structure, but continues to leak, crack and subside to this day.

The site first became a public amenity in the 1920s when the canal company opened it for boating, angling and swimming. In 1938, a consortium of councils bought 38 ha of adjoining land as public space, and agreed with the canal company to preserve the reservoir, now also used for mains water, as a Green Belt amenity. In the late 1960s, Hertfordshire County Council chose the site as the basis for its first Country Park, taking a long term lease on the reservoir from the canal company’s successor, British Waterways. The integrated park opened in 1972.

Unfortunately, Aldenham is now one of the sites on the Loop where the current era of austerity in public funding looms most menacingly. In the early 2010s the council decided the park could no longer be funded, especially as the dam was once again in need of major repair, and threatened it with closure and sale. In 2012, the parkland area was handed over to a private management company, Aldenham Renaissance Ltd, which now runs it on a much more commercial basis than might be expected from the label ‘country park’.

Car parking charges have rocketed and the longstanding rare breeds farm, once free, has become more like a private zoo, with several other paid-for activities like ‘woodlands adventures’, pony and tractor rides and personal appearances by Winnie the Pooh. It’s a vision of the future for our public open spaces which many will find unattractive, though it remains popular with local families on fine weekend days.

The council’s withdrawal from the reservoir has left even more of a mess. The lease was taken on by a development company and has since been sold on to the current leaseholders, Liberty Lake Leisure Ltd, who are proposing a private housing development on green belt land on the other side of the road. This, they promise, will enable them to endow a community interest company that can repair and maintain the lake as a public amenity. The proposals are embroiled in local controversy, with opponents claiming the developers are simply using the lake as a bargaining chip. One planning application has already been rejected; another is under consideration at the time of writing. As you might gather from the notices granting “temporary” permission for the public to use the waterside path, the future of public access is by no means secured.

The trail passes the premises of Aldenham Sailing Club, which has operated here since the lake was first opened up in the 1920s. It then heads off east out of the country park, but it’s worth walking a short distance further along the lake to see the troublesome dam. About halfway along, in the scrub to the north, is a pumping station built in the 1930s to divert some of the water into the mains supply. The other end of the dam is near to the refreshment kiosk, toilets and farm. The area to the left of the drive leaving the park has been designated 100 Aker Wood, where the encounters with Pooh take place.

On the other side of Aldenham Road, the Loop crosses fields that form part of the old manorial estate of Aldenham Park. To the north is Aldenham House, a mansion built around 1672 and extended in 1870, which since 1961 has housed the independent Haberdashers’ Aske’s School for Boys, rooted in one of the mediaeval City of London Livery Companies. The corresponding girls’ school moved nearby on the same estate in 1974.

The British Hollywood

Barbara Windsor commemorated on the Elstree Studio
Heritage Trail. And fling...

Even locals sometimes find it hard to tell the difference between Elstree and Borehamwood. The name of the local station, Elstree & Borehamwood, doesn’t help (it’s actually in the latter). The application of the name Elstree to a much wider area than the original village also reflects the preferences of the area’s most famous local industry, film-making. All but one of the studios that secured the reputation of this leafy suburb on the Hertfordshire-London border as the British Hollywood were in Borehamwood. But clearly the name Elstree tripped better off the tongue than the alternative, which perhaps sounds too like ‘boring’ for a publicist’s comfort.

Elstree is historically the more prominent settlement, though by far the smaller today. It was also part of the Aldenham land grant that St Albans and Westminster abbeys quarrelled over, and in 1188 was confirmed as belonging to St Albans as a separate parish. Its village centre stood at the crossroads of the road to Bushey Heath and Watford (now A411) and Roman Watling Street (A5183) as a typical settlement along a major highway.

Curiously, though, only the northeast quadrant of this settlement was actually in Elstree parish, as both these roads were boundaries. The village ended up spreading across four parishes and two counties: Aldenham, Hertfordshire northwest of the crossing; Stanmore, Middlesex southwest; and Edgware, Middlesex southeast. Although Elstree and Borehamwood Town Council has covered all the northern part of Elstree since it was constituted as Elstree Parish Council in 1894, the anomaly wasn’t resolved completely until surprisingly recently.

When the GLC was created in 1964, it cleaved to the old Middlesex boundary here, so the southern part of the village found itself split between two London boroughs: Harrow west of Watling Street and Barnet east of it. In 1992, following a Boundary Commission review, the London boundary was displaced south along this stretch to follow the M1, placing Elstree entirely within one administrative division for the first time.

Boreham or Barham was originally an outlying hamlet to the east, with its own common and an area of woodland for grazing the abbey’s pigs, which ended up giving its name to the whole settlement. Despite the arrival of the railway in 1868, like its neighbours it remained rural up until World War I. But its good transport links attracted the attention of London-based film producers looking for more space and light and more varied surroundings for location shooting.

The first ‘Elstree’ studio is one of the only two still functioning. It’s the Clarendon Street studio to the north of Borehamwood’s main street, Shenley Road, opened in 1914 by the Neptune Film Company. It passed through several hands, most famously those of Douglas Fairbanks Jr in 1953. He remodelled it to focus on TV production and so it has stayed, used by Lew Grade’s ATV in the 1960s and 1970s and by the BBC since 1984: the latter’s first production there was EastEnders, and the Albert Square set still occupies a backlot.

The studio everyone knows as Elstree Studios was opened by British International Pictures south of Shenley Road in 1927. Between 1969 and 1985 it was owned by EMI, whose original home we passed at Hayes (Hillingdon). When EMI moved out, parts of the site were demolished for a supermarket, but following a local campaign the rest was bought by Hertsmere Council, which still owns it. Among the many famous productions made here are the first British talkie, Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1927); Stanley Kubick’s The Shining (1980); and the first five Star Wars films.

Gate Studios operated in Station Road between 1928 and 1957, when it became a cinema screen factory. It was demolished to make way for flats, also known as Gate Studios. British and Dominons Imperial Studio in Elstree Way opened in 1930, hosting among others Alexander Korda’s production of The Private Life of Henry VIII, but was burnt down in 1936, though the site was later used by Rank for documentary production, and as a film vault and sound effects library.

MGM British, also on Elstree Way, was built in 1937 but didn’t make its first film until 1944 and closed to be replaced by housing and industrial units in 1970: its most famous production was Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Oddysey (1968). More recently, Millennium Studios operated on Elstree Way between 1993 and 2010 when it moved to Bedfordshire. The only ‘Elstree’ studio not in Borehamwood was the Danziger studios, active between 1956 and 1962. It was actually in Aldenham, on the other side of the reservoir from Elstree village, in a wartime aircraft engine testing shed.

Inevitably the studios drew developers’ attention to the area. A major scheme for a ‘garden’ estate launched in 1937: progress was halted by war, but resumed afterwards in earnest, with both private houses and London County Council estates such as those at South Oxhey swallowing up former farmland. As Borehamwood was closer to the station, most of the development has concentrated there, and it’s become the main shopping and business centre. The stretch of Shenley Road which runs northwest between the station and Elstree Studios has become a bustling postwar high street though, it has to be said, not an especially attractive one.

All this is still some distance away when the Loop deposits you on Watling Street, here known as Elstree Hill. This point is a little to the north of the old village centre, so you’ll need to detour to admire some of the 18th and 19th century buildings and the historic Holly Bush pub, which in part dates back to the 15th century.

The Loop has crossed Watling Street before, at Crayford in section 1. As part of Roman Iter II, it runs from the Channel ports in Kent, through London and on via St Albans to Wroxeter in Shropshire. It later became a coach road and parts were turnpiked in the 18th century. This is another of the important roads from London northwards, which gained an additional importance after the Act of Union between Britain and Ireland in 1800, as it formed a key part of the route between London and Holyhead on the Isle of Anglesey, the main port, then as now, for ferries to Dublin.

Following an Act of Parliament in 1815 which authorised the first centrally-funded civilian road building project in Britain since Roman times, engineer Thomas Telford was tasked with creating a new through route, partly following Watling Street, partly a different alignment via Birmingham. The work culminated in the opening of the famous suspension bridge across the Menai Strait to Anglesey in 1826. The road was identified as one of the key London radial routes in the 1920s and numbered A5. The stretch through Elstree, though, was detrunked when the M1 was opened, and renumbered A5183 in the late 1970s to discourage through traffic.

Junction of London Loop and Watling Chase Trail

On the other side of Watling Street, the trail runs through meadows and then across today’s second golf course, Elstree Golf Club. On the other side is a 16 ha expanse of semi-natural grassland owned by Hertsmere Borough Council, known as Parkfields. This has been managed for centuries as a hay meadow: in the 17th century, its produce was sold at London’s Haymarket. Part of the golf club land is also leased from the council and there’s a long term plan to extend the public space into this. Improvement works in progress will increase tree cover, restore some of the old hedges, encourage wildflowers and return a concrete-lined ditch that runs through the middle to a more natural course.

At a fingerpost on the edge of Parkfields you’ll meet the Watling Chase Trail, opened in the mid-1990s as one of several trails through community forests sponsored by footwear maker Timberland. This starts at Elstree & Borehamwood station and runs north from here through the Community Forest via Radlett and London Colney to Smallford, just outside St Albans, where it links with the London Countryway, a distance of 17 km.

There’s one other small but attractive green space on today’s route, a strip of woodland adjacent to Parkfields and also owned by Hertsmere, known as Allum Lane Spinney. It was originally part of the grounds of a mansion, Boreham House, but has overgrown into thick woodland with numerous mature hornbeam and oak trees. The broad pathway through it was improved recently by Network Rail to replace access for maintenance vehicles and equipment that was lost when a road bridge leading to Parkfields was replaced with a footbridge, and makes a pleasant final stage to the walk.

Into the woodlands of Allum Lane Spinney, Borehamwood.

The Loop then follows the suburban streets of Borehamwood to end this section at the unlikely locale of a mini-roundabout by an Asda petrol station, where the next section heads off south back towards London. Just a few paces further on is a railway bridge with the station immediately on the other side. The station and the line were originally built by the Midland Railway, which began as a regional company serving places like Derby and Nottingham, relying on its competitors to provide connections to London. In 1868 it realised its ambition for a route of its own to the capital by opening this line from Bedford to a new station at St Pancras, still the most spectacular London main line terminal.

Elstree & Borehamwood Station.

No historic buildings remain at the station here, which was ‘modernised’ in 1959 and now has only a dull single-storey building that looks like an overgrown bus shelter. Of much more interest in the forecourt are the murals, Hollywood Walk of Fame-style pavement stars and information panels installed by community group Elstree Screen Heritage as part of a heritage trail. This continues among the undistinguished architecture of Shenley Road, where panels commemorating such luminaries as Dirk Bogarde, Peter Cushing, Peter Sellers and Barbara Windsor might prompt you to ponder how such visionary masterpieces as 2001 could have emanated from such a prosaic-looking place.

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