London Loop 20 and 21 – Chigwell to Harold Wood

Sunshine, buttercups, wildlife and panoramic views. On a glorious day, these two stages had much of what is best about the Loop, as well as a good dose of it in slightly desperate mood, trying to create the illusion of a rural idyll from distinctly unpromising raw material.

Even when the illusion is at its best, modernity intrudes unexpectedly. After a stretch of woods and meadows, with no sound except birdsong and passing aeroplanes, the curve of the path brings a sudden glimpse of Narnia, before dissolving into the more prosaic sight of the A1112.

Narnia

At several points there are sweeping views. In this low lying country, even a little height provides a great vantage point. Fourteen or so miles away, beyond the green, the skyline of the City shimmers gently in the haze.
City skyline, 14 miles

Pyrgo gatepostIn the corner of a field there is a rusting gate post, which is apparently the last remaining trace of Pyrgo House, a royal palace where Mary and Elizabeth Tudor spent part of their childhood. This corner of Essex seems to be littered with vanished haunts of the Tudors. Havering Palace came just half a mile before and Elsynge Palace was back in stage 17. Between them just outside Chingford at the beginning of stage 19 was Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge, the only one of the buildings to have survived, and the only one where there is no evidence that she ever set foot.

Walking along a field boundary, a woman accosts me from half way across it. It took a couple of goes to get the message across, but a combination of shouts and gestures tells me that there are five deer somewhere nearby. It’s unclear what she expects me to do with this information, so I press on. Unsurprisingly, there are no deer to be seen, though twenty minutes later three small deer emerge from a wheat field and race across the path in front of me to disappear into woodland. Along the way, there have also been a rabbit, a fox, several pheasants and innumerable waterfowl, which is probably more variety than the rest of the Loop put together.

Signpost lost in trees‘Continue straight ahead, as the signpost in the corner of the wood reassures’, the directions instruct. But the signpost has almost completely vanished, with the finger pointing ahead quite impossible to read. It comes at a point where reassurance is not much needed, rather than at one of the many points where reassurance – and indeed a clear direction – would have been more useful. Along most of the route, the written directions compensate for lost or overgrown waymarking, with the Ordnance Survey as occasionally essential backup for both. Along this section, the directions seem vaguer, and include a passage where the route being described is clearly quite different not just from the waymarking, but also from the sketch map in those very directions.

The last forty five minutes are very different. The Loop designers have done their best, but they haven’t had much raw material to work with. The path follows a brook along what the route description calls a ‘steep sided sylvan dell’, where it is hard to imagine a greater mismatch between the floridity of the description and the dingy reality, before emerging to run in sedate order through parks and housing estates. The final obstacle is the A12, with stern instructions to walk 500m along it to a safe crossing point and then 500m back the other side. The prospect was depressing, the reality a pleasant surprise – not only was there no obstacle to walking straight across, there was a clear path and a central refuge, and even dropped kerbs to ease the way. The nanny state occasionally has a libertarian moment.

London Loop 18 and 19 – Enfield Lock to Chigwell

Teachers get ever younger, policemen get ever shorter – and so it seems do legs of the London Loop. As far as Enfield Lock, the average is seven miles; from Enfield Lock onwards, it drops to four and a half. So there’s a chance to accelerate the apparent pace, without actually going any faster at all.

There’s lots of water on this stretch, most of it artificial.  It crosses the River Lee Navigation and the River Lea decidedly non-navigation. It looks over the vast King George V Reservoir. Much later, it wraps round a flooded gravel pit before a stretch beside the River Roding. And where there is water, there are water fowl – a pair of swans with their cygnets, herons standing in the shallows, geese demonstrating axes of symmetry. My ornithology is somewhere between basic and non-existent, though, so I might be mis-identifying almost everything.

Walking on waterThe now-flooded gravel pit was apparently dug to provide material for building the M11, so presumably dates from the early 1970s. It seems that the Ordnance Survey has not yet caught up with this state of affairs, with rights of way continuing undeterred across the water. The lower map overlays the modern lake on the paths and river course on the OS 6″ map of 1897 (using the National Library of Scotland’s addictive tool) –Map overlay from which it’s obvious that the paths converge on a foot bridge which vanished a generation ago.

Update: August 2017 – Ordnance Survey have now partially corrected the map – and I have added a short post on what has and hasn’t been fixed.

Comparing the maps also shows that the short stretch of the River Roding which the route follows is also a modern artefact – before the pit was dug, the river looped to the west of the lake. So the picture below is a completely artificial by-product of building a motorway. I wouldn’t have guessed.

River Roding

There’s a circus on Chingford Plain. You can hear it long before you know what it might be, and long after it has become all too clear. Somewhere not far from there, there’s a barbecue, never seen but detectable over quite a distance. And then there is the building roar of the M11, which lasts so much longer than the few minutes spent walking across it.  The illusion shimmers again.

The final stretch offers a view back towards the city. The Shard stands tall, a little over ten miles away. Chigwell station provides the means of getting there – the station with the second smallest number of passengers on the underground, at a point where the Central line seems as acute a misnomer as the Northern line at Mordern.

Brush up your Shakespeare

On the weekend of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death day, a curious commemoration ran along the south bank of the Thames. Thirty seven screens showed thirty seven short films, each summarising and encapsulating one of Shakespeare’s plays.

A lot of thought, wit and good humour had clearly gone into the making of the films. A lot of organisation and technical problem solving must have gone into getting the screens up and running (an achievement emphasised as much as undermined by the fact that on the first day quite a lot of them didn’t work). So it was a shame that even when it all worked, it didn’t really quite work.

Joan of Arc and the London Eye

There were several overlapping reasons for that, some more obvious than others. Each film was trying to do a lot, with a mixture of scenes from staged performances and scenes shot in the locations where the plays were set. Sound was an inevitable problem: quieter dialogue got lost altogether and even the more energetic action stood little chance against passing trains. And it is the nature of the experience that you always arrive in the middle, trying to make sense of things without a great deal of context (and long drawn out credits did little to encourage people to wait for the beginning again). The Shakespearean in our little group was a bit confused. The non-Shakespearean was baffled.

Titus Andromicus under Hungerford Bridge

And yet. Some scenes worked really well. Petruchio chasing Kate round a villa in Padua was visually clear with rapid fire dialogue which was almost all audible. Modern dress Henvy VI on the streets of Spitalfields, interspersed with library footage of rioting and disconcertingly anachronistic decapitations, had enough visual power to hold attention even when the words were inaudible and incomprehensible.

Decapitated

The idea of making films like these was a great one. The idea of bringing Shakespeare’s art to life on screens along the river was another great one. But two great ideas combined don’t necessarily add up to a great experience.

All of that is another reminder – if one were needed – about the need to design services to meet the needs of users in the circumstances in which they actually are rather than in some idealised form it would be convenient for them to be. But those are thoughts for another time and place. Shakespeare can stand up to some pretty rough treatment, and often has done. But these films could be more powerful shown in a different way. I hope we haven’t seen the last of them.

 

Harvesting sunshine

A walk in the Cotswold countryside to the slightly unlikely destination of a solar farm. The panels are in long lines, following the slope of the field, protected by strong metal fences, warnings of death and lines of cameras – but with not a single person anywhere to be seen. SecurityThere is a public footpath through the middle and around the perimeter which hasn’t exactly been blocked but which avoids attracting any attention to itself – only the Ordnance Survey offers any confidence that it exists at all. I wonder whether to be a walker here is to be instantly suspicious, but the cameras do not turn, and even poking a camera over the fence prompts no reaction.

The solar panels stand in grassland which would be hard and inefficient to keep tidy with machinery. There is of course a simpler and long-established method for keeping parkland tidy – and so the impersonal modernity of renewable power generation is supported by some gently grazing sheep. It’s tempting to call it Combined Sheep and Power.

Combined Sheep and Power

Along the way, the light and clouds keep shifting, the threatened downpour never quite materialising.

London Loop 17 – Cockfosters to Enfield Lock

It seems odd to walk out of a tube station and within three minutes to be walking along a muddy path without a building in sight.

Unsystematic study, possibly affected by sampling errors, suggests that more people walk their dogs on Good Friday than on any other day of the year.

The illusion of rurality continues to amuse. Looking across a meadow, gently rising towards a line of trees across the skyline – and a red double decker appears running along the road hidden by the trees.

Country bus

Near what was once Elsynge Palace, the path crosses the spot where Sir Walter Raleigh is said to have spread his cloak over a puddle so that the queen could cross unmuddied. The invention of tarmac has made the gesture redundant – and has made much of this stretch of the Loop feel a bit incongruous: paths along streams and through woodland where there should be some give (and after a few days rain, some discernible squelch) underfoot, but instead there is the hardness of urban pavement. The illusion shimmers once more.

The A10 is crossed by a footbridge, which is a big improvement on the A1, which is crossed by a detour.

There are more cemeteries along this section than I can remember in any earlier one. The last of the three is a bit surreal. A vast lawn apparently randomly interspersed with benches and flowers, which manage to look wholly unnatural while avoiding any suggestion of death. And then, in the furthest corner, a row of fresh graves, the soil still roughly piled on top.

I bought a 50mm prime lens a couple of days ago. This was its first outing. When I started taking pictures, a zoom lens seemed an unaffordable and unattainble luxury. Now, a prime lens feels almost an indulgence. In the same way that I used to be able judge exposure pretty well without a light meter, I learned to frame a shot by moving myself, not the lens. Both skills have left me, but the second is one I think it’s worth reawakening.

Spring blossom

Five bridges and an eight

Albert is a fine name for a bridge, Battersea a little prosaic. But then comes Cremorne, which is a splendid name for a splendid bridge, even if it was built to carry the less euphoniously named West London Extension Joint Railway over the river. And after Wandsworth, about which there is nothing to say, comes Fulham Railway Bridge, which is unimaginative but exact, with eights shooting unexpectedly from under pedestrians’ feet.

Who pays for footpaths?

Here is a typical English rural scene. It’s early June, the sun is shining, the crops are growing, the footpath skirts the edge of the field, and there is almost nobody about – except a small group of teenagers who have just gone past trying, not altogether successfully, to get their heads round orienteering.

The only slightly odd thing about it isn’t apparent from the picture. This farm is not in some bucolic shire, it’s in Greater London, just 17 miles as the crow flies from Trafalgar Square.

As a Londoner, I think that’s fantastic. I get to go for long walks in the country without going out of range of my oyster card. But it’s also a bit odd. Astonishingly (at least to me), 10% of the land area of Greater London is used for agriculture, with a further (in)decent chunk (or so it feels from walking around and across them) taken up by golf courses. For a city facing acute shortages of affordable housing, that might look like a solution waiting to be seized. But as a post in CityMetric which prompted this reflection notes, the London Assembly Planning and Housing Committee concluded something very different:

There is a good case to be made that commercial agriculture is one of the best and most productive land uses in the Green Belt. The benefits include: opportunities for local job creation, skills development, regeneration, preservation and management of green space, potential for waste management, providing healthy locally produced food and so reducing food packaging and food miles, and the potential for improving food security.

So as ever, there are costs and benefits. I reap some of the benefits (and part of the benefit is that there often seems to be very few other people interested in sharing them) but incur none of the costs. So who is paying for my enjoyment?

One answer is everybody – this is a consequence of a green belt policy and so is a collective self-denying ordinance not to allow alternative uses for the land. There is apparently strong popular support for the policy – but then this is a near perfect example of a policy where a small number of people capture a very large share of the benefits (people who live in or near the green belt) and a much larger number of people share the costs (people whose housing choices are constrained or journeys to work elongated); the first group find it much easier to defend their shared interests than the the second.

Another answer therefore, is that the cost is carried by everybody who could make better use of the land but is prevented form doing so.  The people who would live in the houses which cannot be built are quite literally not in the picture. That leads to suggestions such as the observation by the Adam Smith Institute that a million homes could be built within walking distance of stations in the green belt and in doing so take up only 3.7% of the total area – met unsurprisingly with an equally strong rejection from the Campaign to Protect Rural England (and that such a campaign would concern itself with the rurality of the world inside the M25 is itself cause for reflection).

It seems pretty clear that we are not going to run out of land any time soon – not even of land close to major urban areas. The enjoyment of that land may not have a direct monetary cost, but its preservation does have consequences.

While the arguments continue, I will keep on walking, hoping as I go that if anything is to be built on, it’s the golf courses which go first.

Joining the dots

Lightroom Map

It’s easy to lose sight of ways in which technology can make complicated things trivially easy – not least because all too often, it doesn’t. But it can be a real delight when something just works – and delight multiplied by astonishment when that’s the result of unconnected tools and services interacting with each other.

I go for walks and take photographs. Sometimes it’s obvious afterwards where the pictures were taken, but sometimes it isn’t. So it would be nice if I could tag them with a location. Unfortunately, my cameras don’t know where they are, so they can’t do that. There is a device I could buy which adds GPS to my camera but it costs nearly £200 and by all accounts doesn’t work very well.

It turns out though that I don’t need it. The camera records the time a picture was taken. My phone can very easily – and continuously – record where I am at a particular time. So if the two can be aligned, the problem is solved. The next piece of the puzzle is Adobe Lightroom, which I have used for years without ever particularly noticing, let alone using, its map functions. And it turns out it can do something which feels close to miraculous: give it a standard GPX file with a recorded track, point it to some pictures taken at the same time, and it will tag the latter with data from the former. The only essential to making it work is that the clocks on camera and phone are synchronised.

That’s exactly the promise of the early web, of course: small pieces, loosely joined, as David Weinberger described it. So it’s a little sad that this is in any way noteworthy – but what makes it so is not so much that the pieces can feed each other (there’s no shortage of those) as that it can be done without even the kind of minimal configuration needed by services such as IFTT.

And so to last weekend’s stroll across the prime meridian. Or rather, it turns out at the point this picture was taken, 0°0′31″W.

31 seconds west

London Loop 16 – Borehamwood to Cockfosters

It’s been three months since the last leg of the Loop and suddenly the angle of the light and the colours it picks up are very different.

I went unintentionally off the route three times – more than in any other leg of the Loop. Once was because I was paying attention to the OS map (which was wrong) rather than the Loop directions (which were right), once because I read too much into the angle of a waymarking arrow, and once because the path ahead was broad and tempting and the waymarking which should have alerted me to the turn I should have taken missing or obscure.

And there was one I caught – an avenue rolling out ahead but a turn to be taken to the left. There was a substantial finger post – but it was carefully positioned behind a mature tree so as to be almost completely invisible. Instruction manuals are all too frequently written by people who know how the thing works. They would in many ways be better if written by – or at the very least, tested by – people who know nothing about the thing at all. In the same way, I suspect paths are too often way marked by people who know the way.

Dual carriageway detourThere was another kind of diversion earlier in the route. When the path meets a busy dual carriageway, there is no alternative to walking down one side and up the other, in order to cross the road safely. It adds the best part of a mile in the slipstream of fast moving traffic, a twenty minute reminder that the Loop is in part a grand illusion, rus in urbes.

I walked the last couple of miles through fading light. As the trees became monochrome and their shade steadily darker, only the fallen leaves held some residual colour, almost fluorescing against the surrounding darkness.

 

Route map for a customer journey

The leg of the London loop I walked in July prompted a paragraph on the glories of the Ordnance Survey map app. The leg of the Loop I walked at the weekend elevates the app to a post of its own, though not in a good way.


I knew I had the Ordnance Survey sheets I needed loaded on my Nexus 7 and that they would be available whatever the state of my data connection along my route. OS stuck update.pngBut the OS app took it into its head to update itself. Or rather to fail to update itself. It got to 33% of something and froze with the excuse that it could not access the internet. There was in fact a perfectly good – if not outstandingly fast – internet connection so the excuse was a pretty thin one. After a few frantic minutes of prodding and restarting, the penny dropped: it was only prepared to update over wifi (though that’s not what the error message said). I got round this absurd problem with an absurd bodge: setting up my phone as a wifi hotspot made the app happy that it was getting data the way it wanted, even though the underlying source was exactly the same as the mobile data connection it had turned its nose up at.

It should be pretty obvious that  updates – particularly updates requiring significant amounts of data – should happen when the user chooses. It should be pretty obvious that the fallback to a failed update should be that the earlier version continues to work, not that the whole app locks up completely. And if progress is being stopped by a preference setting, it should be pretty obvious that giving the choice of changing the preference is better than defaulting to failure.

Eventually the core app did update itself – at which point a new problem appeared. I have 36 OS sheets linked to the app, all labelled according to OS grid referencing, with snappy names such as SH62 and TQ37. OS map install screenAnd every one of them now had to be reinstalled. But of course at that moment, I didn’t want all of them, I just wanted the two needed for the walk I was about to start. There is, as far as I can tell, no way of identifying from the list of available sheets what each of the map areas covers, and while I am proud of my cub scout badge in map reading, I can’t guess the ones I need. There is a decidedly non-intuitive way of working round this problem too, by going through the process of buying the sheets I already own, since doing it that way does show map coverage (though not the map reference numbers) and does install the updated versions without charging for them again. Had I been at home with a good data connection, I would have taken a much simpler approach, and just clicked on update all. Except that there is no such button: to get the app back to the state it was in before OS started trying to be helpful will require 36 manual updates.

All in all, it took over twenty minutes to get a usable map. The one saving grace is that I was on a train – if I hadn’t discovered the problem until I had started walking, I would have been much more irritated.

OS error.pngThen about five miles later, I discovered a very different kind of problem: the map was plain wrong. The screenshot show the west to east footpath passing two footbridges, crossing from the south to the north bank of the Dollis Brook at the more easterly one. It actually crosses at the westerly bridge. Other than the pointless circumnavigation of a field, no great harm was done – but it’s curious that the path on the south bank not only doesn’t exist but can’t have existed for a very long time as there is not even a trace of a gap in the hedge for it to get through to the second footbridge. But at least by that point, I had a map.

Walking round the London loop, an OS map is a luxury rather than an essential. But there are plenty of times and places where a good map is more critical and where a data connection is somewhere between shaky and non-existent. If you can’t trust the OS not randomly to want substantial data downloads and to stop working if it doesn’t get them, you can’t trust it at all. This really needs fixing.