16km from Whitehall to Clapham

I was in London for another National March for Palestine and I combined that with some general walking and some new roads to add to my CityStrides LifeMap.

I love CityStrides but it is built on map data from Open Street Map (which I also love) and, for reasons, that does not distinguish between, say, High Street Kingston and High Street Richmond and so you have to walk every High Street in Greater London for it to count as a completed street. Of course there is no problem when streets have a unique name like Lennox Gardens Mews!

Despite that difficulty in completing roads in London I managed to add 31 roads to my total making it 6,022 London roads completed, which is 15%.

Most roads have several nodes, including the two at each end, and there were another 47 roads that I walked part of, most of which I do not ever expect to complete. But perhaps one day ...

CityStrides also keeps totals for each London Borough (where there are far fewer duplicated roads) and on this walk I pushed my completion rate for Wandsworth to 38% and Lambeth to 15%. I really need to go to those places more often.

The National March for Palestine explains the straight lines at the top of the map and the hunt for new roads explains the wiggles in the middle. For the final section I took a fairly direct route to Clapham Junction Station but still managed to find a couple of new roads.

Of course walking new roads is about far more than just ticking things off on a very long list, it is about discovering new things.

And this new things was a great discovery.

If I was not walking every part of every street in that area then I would never have walked around Carey Gardens Housing Estate and I would not have found this mural by local artist and activist Brian Barnes. Called "A Brief History of Time" it has lots of (mostly) local references, including Stephen Hawking in the top left.

There was other street art and interesting estates, some fine middle-class homes in Clapham Manor, some impressive Victorian schools, and a few green spaces.

It was a good walk.