Diagonal Walking

by Nick Corble

  Town. Yes, not city. Welwyn Garden City is a town, with the ‘city’ an affectation provided by the town’s founders. Not simply a town, it is also a ‘new town’, and I was keen to compare and contrast with Milton Keynes. Whereas Milton Keynes had just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, Welwyn Garden City was gearing up for its centenary. Apparently, the inhabitants of both towns prefer use initials, MK for Milton Keynes, and WGC for you know where. Knowledgeable in all things building-related, my previous night’s hosts Robert and Denise had highlighted how the standard of housing in WGC was much higher than in MK, and my first impressions confirmed this. Whereas MK had experimented with different styles on the principle that it might stumble across something that worked, WGC’s planners had opted for a more consistent approach, with a clear preference for bricks and mortar.

  Furthermore, WGC’s streets were much more open, almost boulevards in the truest sense, with wide verges, pavements and front gardens, as well as the liberal application of random open spaces. It was easy to see where the ‘garden city’ part of the town’s name came from. As with MK, a lot of WGC’s housing was constructed around the same time, but somehow the latter’s came across as more permanent. It was easier to see these houses still standing in another fifty years than MK’s, with the suspicion being that many of the more modern town’s will end up making way for fresh waves of development. Although both new towns, and both the product of pioneers out to create their own version of a new suburban Utopia (WGC had, somewhat optimistically, been advertised as ‘an opportunity to live in the sun’), they’d turned out very different. If nothing else, MK ended up being five times bigger than WGC, and was still growing. WGC operated on a much smaller scale all round and was probably better for it.

  I headed out to Handside Avenue to find the first house in the town to be occupied, back in the 1920s. It stood at number 43 and has a modest blue plaque (rectangular, not circular) announcing the fact. It was actually fairly nondescript, mainly because it looked like it had been built side-on, presenting a large white wall with two windows and a steeply pitched roof. I couldn’t tell if the building to its side was part of the house or part of a separate run of cottages. Earlier, a run of Dutch-style houses had run down the street and I’d hoped number 43 would be one of these, but it wasn’t.

  From there, I headed into the heart of the town, the Howard Centre, named after Sir Ebenezer Howard, the driving force behind the New Towns movement. A large commemorative medallion set into the ground near the shopping centre proclaimed: ‘His vision and practical idealism affected town planning throughout the world.’ That wasn’t something that could be said of many people, nor necessarily an accolade many people would seek. Having said that, my travels suggested we lived in a time when many towns were going to have to reinvent themselves if they were to remain relevant and sustainable, and perhaps a few more with Ebenezer Howard’s vision and practical idealism wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

  The centre came as a very pleasant surprise. A fountain spouting blue water (I think it was something to do with the NHS celebrating seventy years) stood sentinel over a long tongue of green called The Parkway separating two roads, both lined with shops. Whisper it quietly, but these shops were also thriving, with remarkably few of the charity shops and fast food joints that characterised other medium-sized town’s retail centres. The only boarded-up unit belonged to the deceased post office, possibly the victim of no WiFi. For once, there was no sign of homeless people either.

  This hadn’t been the founders’ vision. Their idea was to have one large store which sold everything, a bit like GUM in Moscow – a Stalinist approach when old Uncle Joe was still working his way up (and, at the same time, through) the Politburo. This resulted in the creation of Welwyn Stores, a local monopoly on, well, everything. Not surprisingly, this didn’t go down too well with those who’d fled the big smoke to live in the sunshine, but the store held on for some time, despite being supplemented along the way. In 1984 it was finally taken over by the John Lewis Partnership, allowing the good middle-class folk of WGC to breathe a collective sigh of relief. The centre also has a good selection of places to eat, mostly the sorts of chains that have shunned Luton. I ended up watching the conclusion to the Open Golf Championship in the very pleasant Two Willows pub. Golf had become a theme of this leg of the walk, although even in Scotland where the Open was being played, the fairways looked decidedly straw-like.

  I woke early the next day. I’d shut the windows to keep out the still bubbling noise outside when I’d got back to my room, but the fan hadn’t proved a reasonable substitute for fresh air. Still drowsy, I indulged in a little bit of Radio 4, the news something I usually body-swerved, preferring instead to let my own observations form my thoughts rather than those of crisis-hungry journalists or supine politicians. As the voices rattled away in the background I could see that the sun was already out and the sky was preparing itself for another blistering day. An early start would be prudent, I just needed to get my limbs to work.

  From what I could tell, the Brexit soap opera was coming to some kind of a head. The Prime Minister had finally set out her stall, and even though her proposals didn’t satisfy anyone, that was irrelevant, as they were all that was possible given the parliamentary arithmetic. Armed with this set of proposals, notwithstanding the fact that they satisfied no one, she and her ministers were now going to embark on what was ludicrously labelled a ‘charm offensive’ to sell them to the leaders in other European capitals. At the same time, talk of an ‘accidental No Deal Brexit’ was being warmed up, whether as a negotiating tactic or as a very real possibility, it was difficult to know.

  Meanwhile, in a related story, the head of Amazon UK was warning of possible civil unrest should a ‘No Deal’ come about. Maybe what was really needed was for him to combine with the heads of Starbucks and Apple to set out a real dystopian future, one lacking iPhones, iced lattes and, well, everything else (which was Amazon’s place in the system) to get people to wake up? If anyone wanted a glimpse of what that might look like, I’m sure they could get BT to lay on a demonstration. Just press ‘1’ for ‘Normal service’.

  In the absence of this, there remained little sense that the population at large was that troubled by Brexit. No one on my travels was raising the subject spontaneously, it was almost as if the whole thing was some kind of abstract exercise. This contrasted wildly with Paul Theroux’s experience when he’d undertaken his coastal tour of Britain for The Kingdom By The Sea in 1983, when a similar national crisis of identity, the Falklands War, had raged. Then, the war had been a regular topic of conversation. His American accent may have been a factor, though, with many of those he came into contact with taking the opportunity to rant against the neutral, almost censorious, position his home country had adopted towards the UK and the war.

  I slowly got going, but as I was donning my boots and doing a final check round, another story caught my ear. This was introduced as ‘a success story of the last twenty years’, so naturally my ears pricked up. It concerned recycling, a much greater emphasis on the use and re-use of scarce resources having been a feature of the century so far. Unfortunately, the nub of the story was how a study had shown that a significant proportion of plastic set aside for recycling was being sent abroad and used as landfill. Even the success stories were, quite literally, rubbish. No wonder trust in our leaders was so low.

  Despite the eventual early start, by 8am I was lathered. Still, by this stage I was used to walking around in my own personal sauna. The early clear blue skies persisted, with only the odd vapour trail spoiling their perfection, offering no barrier to a fierce, direct sun. I was going to have to pace myself. Reacquainted with the Lea, after a mile or so my walk diverted south along a track, temporarily leaving the Lea Valley Walk behind. Inconsiderately, nature just didn’t follow my diagonal. Meanwhile, a baby deer was having a whale of a time flattening a field of oats, the first time I’d come across this crop.
>
  A lovely long shaded track, Hornbeam Lane, followed, not dissimilar to that I’d encountered just after the Herts border, and it was easy to imagine this as an ancient right of way, perhaps used to drive cattle to Smithfield, or possibly geese, their feet dipped in tar to help them make the journey, to be sold at Christmas. On crossing a road, the path became paved with black bricks and acquired a sand track to one side. At the top of a hill sat Warrenwood Manor and Stud. Of course, horses. What do horses mean? Money!

  The track regained its former state shortly after, and I enjoyed a number of brief encounters. Folk were friendly here, with my Diagonal Walking T-shirt exciting some interest and the distribution of some cards. By the time I reached Newgate Street, I was beginning to hallucinate about a coffee and a slice of something sweet, breakfast having been a hurried affair. It was around 10:45 and a sign on a local restaurant said they were open from 10:30 Tuesday to Friday. It was Monday. There was nothing for it but to press on for Goffs Oak and an early lunch. A few cumulous clouds began to gather tentatively in the sky, but not enough to threaten to stifle any of the continuing heat.

  Goffs Oak did not disappoint. At least, The Goffs Oak, a pub, didn’t disappoint; with a fine vegan salad (why not?) and the statutory shandy and multiple pints of water, as custom now dictated. On closer inspection, Goffs Oak didn’t have much to recommend it: a garage, a shop or two, a war memorial, church and a post office, which at least put it one up on WGC. Perhaps the place’s greatest claim to fame is as the place where the little girl who would become Victoria Beckham grew up. It might not have much to offer, but it hardly justified spending the rest of your life looking like your face had been slapped with a wet fish.

  A little bit outside the village stood a gated community complete with the requisite complement of Range Rovers and BMWs. This was followed by the Adath Yisrael Jewish Cemetery, a last resting place for a Jewish congregation based in Edgware. The cemetery banned both flowers and women at internments, as was their faith, although to me a good funeral needs both flowers and women.

  Not long after, the housing quality went up yet another notch with impressive large dwellings complete with fountains and triple garages. If the area outside Wheathampstead was posh, this was decidedly genteel (if not gentile). Another gated community was being built, Halstead Grange. I looked it up later and found that it consisted of fourteen luxury five-bed houses with classical frontages (Doric columns to you and me), and a starting price of £1.6 million. McMansions in other words.

  Despite the early start, the afternoon had passed its adolescence and was considering a midlife crisis, so it was a good job that I’d planned a little luxury of my own for the evening’s stop, justified because it was directly on my route. Or so I’d thought. It was in fact a good mile off it, which by the end of a day’s walking was always a mile too much, and when I eventually tracked down its large iron gates they turned out to be locked. And padlocked. With a note. The note advised using the Lieutenant Ellis entrance. This was about as much use to me as telling me to use the Mr Spock entrance, I had no idea where it was, and neither did my phone.

  I nominated an important looking man at a nearby campsite wearing a name badge to be my saviour, and he delivered. He told me where to head for which was, naturally, the way I’d come, and advised that there’d be a way ‘into the estate’ from there. So it was that, an hour or so later than hoped, I found the reception to my four-star business hotel. I may have been hot and a little bit fed up, but at least I wasn’t in the room behind reception where a speed-awareness course was taking place. I tried to imagine the scene when they’d each arrived for their course that morning and found the gate padlocked, and the dilemma of either putting their foot down to arrive in time or to be late.

  The hotel was in a grand old house called Theobalds Park, which had once been owned by the splendidly named Sir Hedworth Meux, an Admiral of the Fleet during the First World War, and later Equerry to Edward VII and George V. Old Hedworth was actually born Hedworth Lambton, the second son of the 2nd Earl of Durham. He changed his name to Meux in order to inherit a substantial fortune from Valerie, Lady Meux, on her death in 1910, she having been left a fortune herself on the death of her husband Sir Henry Brent Meux in 1900. Hedworth went on to live in the house until his own death in 1929.

  It wasn’t quite on a par with being home to two Prime Ministers, but it would do. In fact, closer inspection revealed that before the current house was built the grounds had been the country estate of James I, before becoming a Georgian family home. The current building was home to a military riding school during the Second World War. Who’d have thought horses had still been important to the war effort then? To that list, it could now add hosting Diagonal Walking for the night. I followed my instructions to the annexe, or cheap seats as I suspected the rooms there were known, only to find that they were located right next to the padlocked gate. Of course.

  During a quick explore of the grounds, I discovered that Lieutenant Ellis was the pilot of a B-24 bomber who guided his laden and stricken aircraft away from the nearby town of Cheshunt in 1944, information that humbled my earlier annoyance. Dinner at the bar called. The menu wasn’t too exciting, but there were a couple of ‘Dish of the Day’ options that offered some hope. Stupidly, I enquired, experience having taught me nothing.

  ‘Can you tell me your salad of the day?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know, I haven’t been told.’

  ‘Do you think you could ask?’ A pause. Maybe it was conversations like this that turned people to Deliveroo?

  ‘Yes, I could ask.’

  ‘Well, would you, then?’

  A look of surprise filled the waitress’s face like a blush. In the end I ate a burger. It gave me indigestion all night.

  12

  Higham Dry

  The Met Office was now advising people to stay indoors as temperatures threatened to break records, but that wasn’t an option for me. My legs were feeling it a bit after a week’s walking. I hadn’t planned a break into my schedule on this part of the walk mainly because neither of the obvious choices, Luton or WGC, seemed to demand an extra day. Sticking with my new strategy, I got up early and had breakfast as soon as the restaurant opened. Thankfully it was self-service, which at least meant I didn’t have to ask what the egg of the day was.

  Once walking, a clear landmark appeared on the horizon: the distinctive towers of Canary Wharf, shrouded in a low-lying haze and covered in a cobweb of cranes. Like buses, you can wait all day for a landmark and then get two in a matter of minutes. In my case, the second one was the M25, which I crossed via a footbridge, the path’s more ancient rights presumably trumping those of the upstart motorway.

  As was now perfectly normal, the sun was shining brightly and I found myself beside water again, this time the intriguingly named Turkey Brook, heading east along the long-distance path called the London Loop. This is a 150-mile route which more or less follows the M25 and acts as a companion to the shorter Capital Ring, which describes a tighter circumnavigation around London. Annette and I had completed this latter route the year before and had been pleasantly surprised by how it managed to combine open spaces with interesting urban stretches, and this turned out to be true of the Loop also.

  The path was wide and well defined, and yet another muntjac leapt out to greet me. I’d seen a lot of these on the walk, mostly in the early mornings. Otherwise, fellow users of the path tended to be either joggers or mothers with children. Although the M25 didn’t act as a demarcation between urban and rural (the scenery was still open and pleasant), I was now unambiguously heading towards London, with my route cutting a line across its north-eastern corner.

  Urbanity crept up on me. Stretches of walking amongst housing started to accumulate, without yet dominating. I went past Turkey Street, after which the brook was named (or maybe it was the other way around?); noticing empty and eerily quiet schools, where workmen we
re now chipping away at window frames and generally measuring things. Rail and tube lines also began to feature, with Turkey Brook now channelled and wearing a topcoat of algae underpinned by discarded baby buggies. Reeds and bulrushes by its side added a splash of colour to the otherwise colourless concrete at its edges.

  The brook flowed into the Lea, which had been silently wending its way further south where it became navigable to boats. Like a newly married woman, it acknowledged this change in status with its new name, although the difference involved only a single letter. This new status was confirmed by Enfield Lock, where I stopped to watch a narrowboat go down. The owner, who was on his own and therefore obliged to use the slimy ladder inside to get back onto his boat, was hoping to get back onto the Grand Union Canal. He didn’t give the impression of being too chuffed to be on this more urban route, although to me it looked idyllic, but perhaps I’d just been away from boats too long? The river is actually navigable for forty miles along this stretch, and as well as going past the Olympic Stadium offers a couple of routes onto the Regents Canal which, together with the Paddington Arm of the Grand Union, cuts an arc across the north of London.

  After the lock, I repeated the error I’d made in Luton, slavishly following the signs for a designated cycle and walkway on the assumption they were taking me the right way. I was also probably lured on by the thought of staying with the Lee, whereas in fact my route should have been taking me down the eastern edge of the massive King George’s Reservoir. In mitigation, I’d been looking for signs of this before realising that it nestled behind a high embankment that rendered it invisible. What I could see was a flood relief channel, which unsurprisingly looked decidedly low, with a fluorescent green growth on its surface and banks of rosebay willow herb and bamboo-like bushes lining its banks.