A Very Long #London #Photoblog For A Very Long London Wander #EastFinchley #N2 to #CrystalPalace

DC Editor Adam writes…


In December 2016 I posted the The Daily Constitutional's blog post number 5,000.


To mark the occasion I've been digging in the archive and over February 2017 I'll be reblogging The DC's "Greatest Hits" – my 50 favorite posts. 


In addition I'll be sharing my 50 favorite London photos to have appeared here since October 2008. 

I hope you enjoy them

A.S-G
London 
Feb 2017
From time-to-time I blog about my big London rambles – long walks through London undertaken for fun outside my London Walks tours. This post, part of my ocassional Big Walk Wednesday series, from 18th January 2017, details my wander from East Finchley to Crystal Palace……
DC Editor Adam writes…

As regular Daily Constitutional readers and some London Walkers will know, on my days off I like to stride out and walk London. I'm a big fan of the Capital Ring orbital walking route and I love to walk the Thames. Many of the pictures and ideas that end up on this blog are born out of my rambles.

On Wednesdays here on The Daily Constitutional, I'll be sharing some snaps, random observations and the odd bit of trivia picked up along the routes of my wanders.




This week… 

Route: From East Finchley to Crystal Palace.

Date: Wednesday 11th January 2017

Weather: Mostly cloudy, wind Westerly, high temp 8C

Distance: 17.41 miles

(Yup, I've got STATS for this one. Things just got even MORE nerdy. I'm using a new app, on which I'll blog later)

Starting point, as last week, was my own front door in East Finchley with the intention of drifting roughly south east – right across the London clay from high point to high point.

The first hill, an easy one, toward Highgate looking away from East Finchley…

Within a few minutes I encounter my first Luxury Apartments (aren't they all) banner of the day…
Makes me think of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: were the Vogons to arrive today, they would report back that we worship a deity known as Luxury Apartments and praise his name on every street corner.  

Always a dramatic view from Archway. The northbound lane is empty, southbound (out of shot) not-so-much – it is the tail end of rush hour… 

Click HERE for an earlier blog on Archway. And HERE for a wintry photoblog view from atop the bridge.

Down the Holloway Road… 
… past my very favorite work of street art… 

… for an earlier post on Joe Meek click HERE.
And then… BZZZ-BZZZ-BZZZ!!!

I've hit my 10,000 steps before 10 o'clock…

I duly report my stat on Social Media… to little response because I am clearly being SMUG IN THE EXTREME.

I console myself with a visit to one of my all-time favourite caffs, a bastion of culinary sanity in the firework display of ever-changing Islington eateries… 
Where I treat myself to this beauty…

Did you know that black pudding is a superfood? No? How about this from The Daily Telegraph last winter…

"Loaded with protein, potassium, calcium and magnesium, as well as being practically carb free… It's also rich in iron and zinc - two minerals frequently missing from modern diets. Iron is needed to make healthy blood cells and prevent anaemia." Read the full article: www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/22 All I can say is… I KNEW IT! I KNEW IT! I KNEW IT! There are, of course, a number of caveats to the superfood story – eating a pound of sanguine sausage at every meal will probably make you superdead in no time at all. Everything in moderation, and all that. There are others yet who doubt the veracity of black pudding's claim as a superfood. All I can say to them is that I'm typing this with my index fingers jammed in my ears (quite a feat) while singing "Black Pudding! Black Pudding!" to the tune of Night Fever by the Bee Gees in my loudest falsetto. A sentimental detour next. I always try to loop my wanders through Clerkenwell, the place where I first fell in love with London. I blogged about that HERE.

This time, I wandered past the place where I worked back in the early 90s, my first ever office job, at a P.R company. The building is a former ink maker's workshop and was built in 1901…

In 1993 we held the office Christmas party in the vault of the adjacent Middlesex House of Detention – an appropriate venue for debauched media types and hacks.

The Middlesex House of Detention c. 1840

Southward from memory lane lies Farringdon station. Now part of the new Crossrail development, it was opened in 1863 and formed the terminus of the world's first underground railway

More than 50 shades of gray as I cross the Thames via Blackfriars Bridge…

Past the Invisible Bridge – the livery of the London Chatham & Dover Railway and the columns are all that survive of the Blackfriars Railway Bridge which stood from 1864 to 1985…

The chimney in the shot is, of course, the Tate Modern art gallery, the former Bankside Power Station, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. Another of his designs, the famous red telephone box has been pressed into multi-tasking at the southern end of Blackfriars Bridge… 
The Shard looms round every corner… 
Jack Kerouac, in his On The Road, pontificates on the ascending quality of apple pie the further he travels westward from New York. Sweeter, richer, bigger portions. Similarly, as I headed south last Wednesday, the richer the street art became…

A dead pub, recently passed, The Gladstone closed last October and is much missed by music fans and old farts such as I… 

The Avon Place Mural is the work of Morganico and Steven Ball. The building is occupied by a health center and I love how the anatomical painting bleeds into the pipes and arteries of the building itself…

I blogged about Morganico in a previous Daily Constitutional post, click HERE to catch up.
At Georgian Trinity Church Square, Strata tower, the 43-story nosey neighbor at Elephant & Castle peeks jealously over the wall…

Very much alive, the Roebuck in Great Dover Street is a Victorian gem and one of London's best-kept pubby secrets… 

Content Street - no wonder I'm content, given the walking-induced endorphins coursing around my system…

Poor old Willian Ewart Gladstone. The second dead pub named in his honour…

Given the distance I had covered – about 12 miles by this point – I absolutely HAD to visit a cafe bar called Love Walk…

An eccentric gem in Camberwell, I'll be blogging about its delights in greater depth in a later post.
Next up is King's College Hospital, Denmark Hill… 

… where Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall was born in 1947. But more importantly, my favorite walking companion Isobella was born here 60 years later in 2007. Here she is at King's on day one…

… and here she is on the way to conquering the Capital Ring with me in 2015…
(To my knowledge, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, has yet to conquer the Capital Ring but she seems like a game, outdoorsy type. You'll have to ask her for yourself. Maybe she has a blog?)
The shot of King's (above) features the newly-created helipad – London's second, after the Royal London in Whitechapel – which was opened last year.
The King's College Hospital fundraising page is here: http://www.supportkings.org.uk/donate

And here's Woody, having a Starbucks at Dog Kennel Hill… 

No need to ask "Who's a pretty boy?" here. Clearly it's Woody. South Londoners are ALWAYS a more colourful bunch (I speak as a South Londoner trapped in a North Londoner's body.)

Oh and here's the dog in the kennel at Dog Kennel Hill… 

Dog Kennel Hill is said to have been named for the kennel facilities used by the old Surrey Hunt. It is adjacent to Champion Hill where Dulwich Hamlet F.C ply their trade in the lower leagues of the English football pyramid.

The most famous of all Dulwich Hamlet players, Edgar Kail, the last amateur to play for England, married a girl from Tintagel Crescent… 

… Irene Ramsay, daughter of the Hamlet groundskeeper.

For an earlier post on Dulwich Hamlet click HERE. (The post dates from 2011.)
East Dulwich, up-and-coming for years, has now achieved full gentrification. The street art is often startling… 

And look! It's Camilla's mutti-in-law… 

For earlier photoblogs on East Dulwich Street art click HERE and HERE.
With the "G" word, however, comes change. And it was only a matter of time before The Irish Shop in Lordship Lane ran aground… 

Sidebar… I once saw Mick McManus sauntering along on Lordship Lane, East Dulwich. Mick was a British wrestler, star of World of Sport's Saturday afternoon wrestling coverage on ITV. Dubbed "The Man They Love To Hate" (he was a baddie) and "The Dulwich Destroyer" he lived to the age of 93, losing the final count in 2013. It remains my most impressive star-spot in London.
Here's Mick in action from 1975. I was 6 years old at the time and I LOVED THIS stuff…

The last prefab on Lordship Lane… 

Pre fabs – pre-fabricated houses – were brought in by the post-war Labour government of 1945 to provide quick housing for bombed-out communities. At one point there were prefabs on both sides of Lordship Lane.

Only one prefab remains.
Erected in 1946 and 1947 they provided, for many of their occupants, not just shelter but a modicum of luxury: they were equipped with an inside toilet. Many people would only have lived in homes with outside toilets at the time.  
The development to the left of the pic is very new – the second-to-last prefab on Lordship Lane was cleared to make way for it. It may only be a matter of time before this last surviving prefab disappears along with all the others.
Heading southward, the next stop is Dulwich Wood, one of the largest surviving parts of the Great North Wood… 

… for a spot of lunch. 

That's the last portion of my homemade Christmas dinner soup from my Dennis the Menace flask (a gift from Isobella).

(I'll share some of my soup recipes on another day!)
The bar of Bournville keeps me going. 
When the Bournville is finished, it's time to turn back and go home. 
Bournville is The World's Finest Chocolate (sorry, Belgians, yours is a VERY close second) dubbed thus by my grandfather. Wullie was his name (Willie if you want to be posh) and I called him Pops. (I mentioned him in a previous blog post about cartooning.)
I'm sucking up to Bournville here in the hope that the Bournville folk will read this and send me a truck load of free samples. That's how it used to work on TV in the old days, wasn't it? No? Well, it was worth a try…
The bag (above) I've covered before - click HERE for earlier post. It is Matthew the Day Pack from Millican. It's the sturdiest, the best bag I've ever used - I stuff it full every day, and have done so for a year now, and it barely shows a sign of wear. Has its own waterproof cagoule, too. Great design.
The Millican website is here www.homeofmillican.com/ 

The last leg. Off to Crystal Palace Park, my favorite park anywhere in London. I lead a special Crystal Palace Park walk (enquire HERE for private walks) but the people who work in and care for the park lead their own excellent, genuinely free walking tours which are always fascinating. Keep up with events here: www.bromley.gov.uk

There's also a fantastic volunteer-run museum. Their website is here: www.crystalpalacemuseum.org.uk 
The Museum staff run tours in the summer for a mere £3.50 per head and the money goes to the museum.

You can also become a friend of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs here: cpdinosaurs.org/visitthedinosaurs

Catch up with my earlier post on the park: londonwalkblog.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/a-makeover-for-sphinx-and-dinosaurs-are.html
What I wanted to see, the point of my trip, was the freshly painted sphinxes (click the last link above to see what they looked like before restoration).
What I didn't know was that the collective noun for sphinxes is a finery. I found out on this banner 'ere… 

So heading past the spot where Michael Caine barked that his over zealous criminal colleague was "only supposed to blow the BLAHDDY DOORS ORF!" (See earlier post on The Italian Job)…

… I came upon a finery indeed…

Catch up with the sphinxes' refurb story in The Bromley Times.
Meanwhile, it was time for me to catch the train at Crystal Palace… 

… I arrived back to a finally sunny East Finchley for a long soak in the bath (the "recipe" for which I'll blog another day)…

Here's a map of the walk…

You can book me for a private London Walks tour HERE

Here are few previous Big Walk Wednesday posts for you to enjoy…
Old Kent Road to Whitechapel Cornhill to Camden Town East Finchley to South Kensington North Greenwich to Richmond Part One North Greenwich to Richmond Part Two
A London Walk costs £10 – £8 concession. To join a London Walk, simply meet your guide at the designated tube station at the appointed time. Details of all London Walks can be found at www.walks.com.