Hello Flaneurs!

[mrs_leroy_brown]

My preferred name (if it's different from my username): Bec
My last urban ramble/adventure was: Stoke Newington to Hackney Wick - Capital Ring walk.
My next urban ramble/adventure will probably be: None planned atm.
Favourite type(s) of urban environment: Places with lots of interesting shops and places to eat/snack along the way.
Cities/towns I've explored (and how): Milwaukee: downtown and East Side (where I lived, on the shores of Lake Michigan), Sheffield: ALL THE HILLS, York, along the old city walls, Londontown, still baffled by anything west of Marble Arch ;)
Cities/towns I want to explore (and why): Cardiff (good friend who lives there), Paris (never been!).
Three things I tend to notice when I'm wandering through a city: peoples accents, cafes, interesting looking shops.

A-Z walk, the sixteenth

[kake]

(Note: previous A-Z walks are documented on my own journal.)

Image: A couple of small, two-storey, seventeenth-century brick houses with tall chimneys and gabled roofs. A white picket fence separates them from the road in front, which has double yellow lines painted on it.

Harefield (beginning of the third row) to Ruislip Manor Station (page 39 column J).

After a ridiculously long gap of over two years, I finally did the next walk in my A-Z project a couple of weeks ago in the company of ewan. The project had stalled in Harefield, partly because Harefield is a bit of a faff to get to, and partly because this walk was going to involve a lot of fields, and green stuff, and no street signs, so I kept putting it off.

We met for lunch (photo) at the Harefield pub, and discussed the route. Ewan wanted to drop by a pub that he needed to photograph, the Breakspear Arms on the edge of Ruislip, and this seemed quite plausible given where the footpaths appeared to go on our maps. (Incidentally, Ewan had already had a bit of a wander before we met up, getting photographs of other pubs in the area. He has a project going to photograph every pub and ex-pub in Greater London, which is well worth a look if you're interested in that sort of thing.)

Heading down Church Hill to the point where we would leave civilisation and enter the countryside OMG, I spotted some interesting-looking little houses on one side of the road (pictured above, click through for larger version and more links). These turned out to be the Countess of Derby's almshouses, built in the seventeenth century for poor women of the parish of Harefield. They're Grade II* listed, and still owned by the charity set up by the Countess, though they were converted to bedsits in the 1950s.

Shortly after this, we left the road and headed down a footpath past St Mary's church (photo) and the Anzac Cemetery, where over a hundred members of the First Australian Imperial Force are buried. During World War I, casualties from this force were treated at the newly-established Harefield Hospital, and links remain between Harefield and Australia to this day.

Then we walked over some fields (photo) and through Bayhurst Wood (photo), and it was all very non-urban. We even met some horses (photo), and discovered an impressively non-smelly compost maturation site (photo of sign and some commentary).

The abovementioned Breakspear Arms turned out to be a fairly uninteresting '70s-built Greene King pub, though the pub sign (Ewan's photo) is of some interest, as it depicts Nicholas Breakspear, who was born in the area around 1100 and was the only Englishman ever to become Pope.

This marked the western edge of Ruislip, which itself is one of the most westerly parts of Greater London. The area has a long history, appearing as a parish in the Domesday Book, and even today you can still see the remains of a Norman motte and bailey castle. We didn't go and see this, though we did walk past the Ruislip Manor Farm heritage centre (photo and some commentary) on our way to the J J Moons pub that marked the end of the walk, just opposite Ruislip Manor Station. I ate a very delicious salad (photo), and then headed home.

Next up: Ruislip Manor Station via Ruislip Lido to either Northwood Hills or Pinner. This will be on Monday 30 May (a Bank Holiday) — drop me an email if you'd like to come along. (I don't normally make these walks into a social occasion, so this may be your last chance for a while!)

Walk: Lisson Grove to London Bridge

[rydra_wong]

The muggy weather in London at the moment is making me grumpy, so I decided it was the right day for an epic symbolic walk, seeing if I could link the psychiatric hospital on Lisson Grove (where I spent far too much of 2009) with the Arch Climbing Wall, my favourite place to climb.

I knew various bits of the route, and took a glance at Google Maps, but didn't take a map with me; I like ensuring that my navigational skills have to do a bit of work.

At 10.52am, I sent off from outside the hospital, and promptly ran into one of the nurses, who recognized me, thus ensuring an appropriate symbolic tone for the whole day.

After Trafalgar, I got sidetracked down Whitehall by mistake (at that point, I was mostly navigating based on being able to feel the wind from off the river) and ended up crossing the Thames at Westminster Bridge instead of Embankment, which extended the journey.

(There were also detours involving pharmacies and department stores that stock obscure scents I needed to sniff; I don't think ritual should be taken too seriously.)

Enigmatically, the South Bank is currently covered in beach huts decorated by assorted modern artists and celebrities (including Phil Jupitus.)

Between two of the huts, a sign on the pavement reads,"Do not draw or write on the trees. This is an artwork. Please respect it." Nobody seemed to be drawing or writing on the trees, and I was unsure whether the artwork was meant to be the trees (which seemed to be the regular South Bank trees) or the sign itself.

There was also an artificial beach, a long rectangle cordoned off and filled with sand. A few toddlers were paddling about in it.

The RPSB had a booth with a sign reading, "Take home an albatross today," which, if you're familiar with the Ancient Mariner, does not seem like a winning strategy. They were selling stuffed albatrosses.

At Gabriel's Wharf, there were real geese walking on the real sand beside the Thames.

At 12.44, I got to the Tate Modern and had fish and chips and sticky toffee pudding in the excellent Cafe 2, before walking to the Arch, which is located in the brick railway arches next to London Bridge station.

The toffee pudding made the ensuing climbing somewhat leisurely, but no worse for that.

It was a good walk.

(no subject)

[holdthesky]

Hello all, just thought I'd introduce myself.

My main interests these days are in urban/rural-queer environments: anywhere that dichotomy is challenged. I'm worried that tendency may disqualify me from flaneurdom, but hope you will find me a space! Particularly interests include post-demolition rubble fields, railway shunting yards and "triangles" (where a region of land surrounded on all sides gives to elder, rosebay willowherb, etc), the "outdoor factory" environment of industrial agriculture in East Anglia, colonisation of cities by pigeons, legacies of extractive industries (quarry and mine landscapes), etc. Other interests include city/environment interfaces (eg air conditioning, storm drains, power stations, etc); accidental interstices in the build environment; space as a structuring concept; the dynamics and life of unfashionable towns at around the 20-30k mark.

Amongst the cities, towns and fields which interest me: Nottingham, Leicester, Northampton, Birmingham, Loughborough, Leeds, Cambridge, Norwich, Lincoln, Luton, Bedford, St Neots, Huntingdon, Peterborough, fenland, Stowmarket, the slate landscape around Blaenau Ffestiniog, the Trent, the Ilkeston and Erewash areas, the south Wales valleys, linear development generally, particularly in an industrial context, etc.

But I'm not as serious or boring as the above suggests! :)

Good to meet y'all.