I have walked every street in Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

I continue to use MapMyWalk to record where I have been when venturing to places new and CityStrides to keep track of all of the places that I have been.  

CityStrides tracks progress by London Borough and having previously walked every street in Kingston upon Thames, Richmond upon Thames and City of London, I have now also completed Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC).

Given its central location, I had walked through lots of RBKC over the years but it took significant effort to stretch that to every street. London is not a grid and planning the best way to cover every street in an area is a constant challenge and always requires some retracing of steps.

The character of the area varies widely, as you would expect. In the south of the Borough I had to content with many dead-end mews that I had to walk all the way to the end of only to turn around and walk all the way out again. In the north Westway, the railway lines out of Paddington and the canal were all formidable barriers to navigate.

I hope to do Westminster next which is a similar Borough with similar street layouts. I have managed 87% so far and it will take five or six trips there to finish it off; always presuming that I can, I have one road left to do in Hammersmith and Fulham but that was in a construction site when I last tried to walk it.

I averaged 21,517 steps a day in 2025

While the headline, 21k steps a day, is true the graph shows that there is more to the story than a single number.

After averaging almost 29k steps a day in 2024 I set a goal of over 30k steps a day for 2025 and for the first five months I achieved this comfortably.

Then the health issues kicked in.

My health story is long, complicated and unresolved. I would be as bored telling you about it as you would be reading it so all I will add is that the drugs are helping and I am now back up to 20k steps a day. I even managed 40k steps one day recently.

Many of the walks have been to new areas and new streets as I build my CityStrides LifeMap and this remains a great way to discover new things and to build a sense of achievement as the number of streets walked in each area (city/town/borough) grows.

I have set more modest targets for 2026 and these include the reasonably modest Go Jauntly Walk 2026 Challenge and  Two Million March.

I also hope to redo London Capital Ring (anti-clockwise this time) and London Loop; hopes carried forward from last year.

I have walked 20% of Greater London

I used MapMyWalk to record each of my exploratory walks and CityStrides to summarise them all in one place. 

CityStrides also tracks the number of roads that I have walked on each town or city. Of most interest to me are the totals for each of the London Boroughs (I have walked every street in three of them) and the total for Greater London overall.

I have just completed 20% of Greater London. This is in terms of the number of roads walked (7,964 of 39,362) rather than, say, total distance.

The map below shows where I have walked and, more depressingly, those I have yet to do with some large areas hardly touched (there are a few gaps where I did not map my walks, such as the top section of London Loop).

My vague plans is to keep plugging away and to use every opportunity to walk new roads. For example, I have been to Royal London Hospital a few times recently and have walked quite a few new roads around Whitechapel and Stepney,

While walking 20% of London is some achievement iy is only fair to point out that I am only 4th in the CityStrides leaderboard and those ahead of me have managed 27%, 31% and an astonishing 68%. I do not expect to catch any of them.

I have walked every street in Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames (again)

My claim back in May that  I have walked every street in Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames got a slight setback this week. Not that unexpected but unwelcome none the less.

The app I use to keep a record of everywhere I have walked, CityStrides, is based on OpenStreetMap which is maintained by a community of users, including myself (much as Wikipedia is) and it gets updated both with changes to the physical world, e.g. new streets, and by clarifications, e.g. marking streets with locked gates as private.

These changes get uploaded to CityStrides periodically and when these changes create unwalked roads (or parts of roads) the unwalked sections appear as red dots.

The latest update for Kingston upon Thames created a few red dots for me, as shown here.

Frustratingly none of these were new roads, just roads newly marked s walkable, and I would have walked them when in those areas had they been marked as walkable at that time. Still, things are what they are and so I set out to walk them all.

More frustratingly, some of the dots were at the very southern tip of the Borough (I live on the northern boundary) so it was a longish ride on two buses to get me to Malden Rushett. 

From there is was a pretty dreary walk up A243 all the way to the large junction with A3, an even drearier walk along both sides of A3 to the border with Surrey and back then further along A3 to Tolworth and just beyond. That accounted for three of the four groups of red dots.

Then I was lucky. I was expecting to continue along A3 to the final group when I learned that I could directly there on a 265 bus, so I did.

The final group was a little bit more of annoying A3 but the final two streets in my quest were in an exclusive private estate so I had lots of impressive houses to look at while tracking the final dots.

And that was it, I have now walked every street in Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames (again).

The Peter Ackroyd Thames Pub Crawl 2025

I had done the monumental, in so many ways, Peter Ackroyd Thames Pub Crawl several times in the past (2013, 2015 and 2017) and loved it every time but was a little hesitant this year as age has caught up with me a little and my walking and drinking were both reduced. But it is such a great walk and talk that when invited I just had to do it again.

Our starting point, as usual, was St. Stephen's Tavern on Parliament Square. A good central location to meet but plagued by tourists which makes the service a little slow. Also on the plus side it is a Hall & Woodhouse pub which means Badger Beers and I could start the day with a pint of Fursty Ferret.

From there we made our way towards Sherlock Holmes by Charring Cross pausing along the way to here tales of the early Thames and how it came to be the river we know today. Not sure what I drank and my limited notes from the day just say "Pale Ale.

Our next stop was for lunch at Mulberry Bush on South Bank. They were expecting us, most of us had preordered our food yet we were still there for well over an hour. The exceptionally slow service was a shame as everything else about the pub was rather nice.

Our next stop was a pleasant surprise.

Our eloquent guide, Robert Kingham, took us on a small diversion into the place where he works which just happens to have panoramic views like this. We lingered for a while over a few glasses of bubbly to enjoy all of the views.

We all took many photographs, because we are all curious tourists too, and while I personally liked the less familiar views looking south I chose this one full of landmarks to help anyone less familiar with London.

 

Our next stop was The Rake South Bank, on the edge of Borough Market. It has an extravagant range of beers from which I selected Verdant This House IPA. A good choice. 

The walking and talking continued as we sauntered towards Tower Bridge and our rendezvous at Dean Swift for dinner. I went for some pretty good ravioli and a decent pint of Bermondsey Pale Ale.

For me the most interesting part of this walk is the section east of Tower Bridge, a path less trodden by tourists but they are spreading! The light was fading when I took this picture looking back towards the City.

Approaching 10pm we hit The Angel which was the one unexpected low point of the evening, it took absolutely ages to get served not being a local and having to try and work out their complicated indoors/outdoors bars and the pint of Sam Smith's Old Brewery was definitely not worth the wait. That was a real disappointment for me as I had lived off that beer when I first started work in London.

The next and final pub, The Mayflower, was much more like it! The pub was lively and offered up a jolly good pint of Juicy Golden Ale, which I drank on a bench by the river with my fellow travellers. It was the perfect end to a perfect day.

And for the record, we walked about 18km.

I have walked every street in Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames

It has been over a year since I completed every street in London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and now, finally, I have completed every street in Kingston upon Thames (bounded by the thick light blue line).

The picture above, a section of my CityStrides LifeMap, helps to explain why it took so long, there are very few routes that I have walked beyond the southern boundaries, and that is because there is little of interest to me there.

I live at the north edge of Kingston (the other side of the road is Richmond) and while I regularly walk south to Kingston town centre and make occasional forays to New Malden, it takes something unusual to take me to Surbiton or anywhere south of that. There are areas of the Borough that I knew little about until I made the effort to walk every street. To be honest, I have no intention of ever going back to most of them.

I had not intended to get this competitive on completing streets but CityStrides makes it fun and easy to do and, generally, I find interesting things when taken into new areas. so I will put a bit more effort into completing Kensington and Chelsea (70%), City of Westminster (69%) and Hammersmith and Fulham (64%).

And just to put that all into some perspective, I have now walked 18% of Greater London and the leader in that competition has done 62%!!!. I will never get anywhere near that.

Walking 15km from Sloane Square to Canada Water

My preference for walking is to go from A to B where A and B are easy to get to by public transport, B is some distance away, and the bit in the middle includes as much new territory as possible. 

My walking companion prefers parks and familiarity. This walk was an attempt to do both.

We started at Sloane Square because we can get there by tube for free from 9am and ended at Canada Water because that took us across south London which is not our usual territory and also through Burgess Park which is more familiar.

The direct route was not that long so I took us south first and after I made him walk down a previously unwalked road in Chelsea we crossed the river into Battersea Park, probably my favourite London Park.

From there it was largely a question of me trying to persuade my colleague to walk down unwalked roads without making it obvious that we were avoiding the obvious route.

I really enjoyed seeing new parts of London such as the grand houses in Stockwell Park not that far from an enormous new development of identikit flats.

One highpoint was coming across a large mural at a school which had a touch of Niki de Saint Phalle about it and even better was finding the artist there just finishing it off so I was able to pass on my admiration for it. 

Unfortunately I did not pause to take a photo of that mural but I did remember to do so later on and this mural is in St James's Road, Bermondsey which we passed towards the end of our jaunt.

My preference for walking is to go from A to B precisely because of walks like this one.

Walking 16km for several good reasons

The main reason that I was in London this day was for a National Demonstration for Palestine. The route varies each time and on this day we marched from Whitehall to USA Embassy in Nine Elms.

When congregating at Whitehall at 12pm it was obvious that this was going to be another large march and that the enthusiasm for meaningful peace was undimmed by the length of the latest stage of Israel's genocidal aggression or by the temporary lull while hostages help by both sides are exchanged. Trump's plan to turn Gaza into an American beach resort probably encouraged a few more people out.

As always it was a peaceful march and it was lightly policed because of the anticipation of this. We also has the usual Jewish groups out in support and a (very) few Israel flag waving idiots clustered at one point. 

Having completed the march it was time for the second thing on the to-do list and my younger son and I headed to Peter Jones on Sloane Square to buy a mattress. They had a surprisingly large number on display which made making a selection that much harder but we managed to find what he wanted.

The third objective, which is always there when I am walking away from home, was to walk some new roads to add to my City Strides Life Map, hence the wiggly bits at the start end end of the route. That was another success and I added 22 streets.

The fourth objective was simply to do as many steps as possible and in walking 16km I did just that.

The final objective was to take part in a special Pokemon Go event on that afternoon. That was the lowest priority and out of a possible eight raids I managed just two, which was enough for me.

With all five objectives met it as a productive and enjoyable five hours well spent.

Walking 37km to West Hampstead (and then...)

This was a journey in three parts, it was meant to me two but we will come to that.

I was able to start early on my monthly walk to West Hampstead from the British Czech and Slovak Association social so I could take a very indirect route.

My regular walking friend was also going to the social but had a lunchtime appointment so could not walk all the way with me. We agreed to meet at Waterloo at 4pm which gave me plenty of time to get some distance under my belt and also to tick off a few new roads, that is the wiggles around Wandsworth and Battersea.

As always new roads brings new sights and it was a genuinely enjoyable walk, despite the various no-through-toads that I had to walk down and then back out the way I came.

My friend was running late and I was running later so we changed the meeting point to Vauxhall. From there we walked almost directly to West Hampstead where with just a few minor detours I was able to tick off a few new roads in Maida Vale.

We arrived in West Hampstead almost dead on plan at a shade after 6pm.

Then disaster struck.

My friend tripped on the cobbled entrance to a side road and started bleeding quite badly. With a lot of help from concerned passers by and a resident we were able to staunch the initial bleeding, clean him up just a little and, having got no success from the ambulance service, one of the helpers booked an Uber to  Royal Free Hospital. 

That was immensely useful as being strangers to the area we had no idea where the hospitals with A&E were. As it happens, RFH is just of Hampstead Head and we had walked past there several times, most recently on 21 January.

We got to RFH at 7pm and he had his triage soon after that. What followed was a series of fixes and scans (a head injury is always a worry) and while the treatment was good it was very slow.  Sadly the snacks vending machine was broken so my evening meal was three unremarkable cups of instant coffee.

He was admitted for the final stage of the emergency treatment, stitches, after 11pm and was not due to be seen for some time after that. He was in good spirits (considering everything) and was being closely monitored so I left him in their care and took the last train home, which left Hampstead Heath at 11:45. It was a long night for me and a longer night for him.

His adventures continued. He was discharged from hospital around 2pm and ordered an Uber home. He was tired and suffering from a head injury so he failed to notice that he was being taken to a street with the same name in Croydon rather than Richmond. He did get home eventually, sometime after 3pm. 

The fall put a rather obvious dampener on the evening which was a shame as the 37km in the seven and a half hours before that had been a lot of fun.

Walking 19km from Kings Cross to Canada Water

After the great success of last week's point-to-point walk (Gloucester Road to Waterloo) we went for something similar this week.

I wanted to go a little further east to visit some lesser known areas and, hopefully, a few unknown ones. 

The immediate constraint on the route was river crossings going east of Tower Bridge meant the Greenwich Foot Tunnel. A second constraint was only being able to use the tube before 9:30am so that gave us Kings Cross as the best start point.

And so, once again, we were at Richmond Station waiting for the barriers to open to old people at 8:57. As always, I walked to Richmond which gave me a 6k head start on the day's step count.

From there I had come up with a rough route to Greenwich that took in several parks, notably Shoreditch Park, Haggerston Park, Weavers Field, Stepney Green, Bartlett Park, Jubilee Park and Mudchute Park. None of these was brand new to me but usually I had walked past them and the intention this time was to walk through them.

Shoreditch Park was an immediate success...

... though finding any information on this impressive sculpture ws a complete fail - there was no information board nearby that I could see and the best that I could find online was a reference to the "javelin man statue" being moved within the park to this location.

Weavers Field lacked interest except for this centrepiece.

From there we continued our drift east and south with me constantly on the look out for new roads to walk which were more or less on our route.

We were also on the lookout for a cafe and had to wait a while for this as we were in areas of large housing developments with few shops and nothing to attract us. Google mentioned Beans & Beyond in Limehouse so we headed there.

I was expecting a trendy cafe, going solely on the name, but it was an odd, but effective, amalgam of a working me's cafe (all day breakfasts) and a coffee shop. I ordered a Red Velvet cake to go with my coffee and was very surprised when it arrived with three scoops of ice cream! We had thought at the start of the day that we might end with a full meal somewhere but this coffee break made that unnecessary.

Getting into Canary Wharf was not a lot of fun as we had to cross a busy dual-carriageway on the footbridge serving Poplar DLR station and then follow that road a little way before walking past a construction site to get into the centre of Canary Wharf.

Our route then was basically due south and I managed to find a route that included a few new roads without us being trapped on the wrong part of the isle by docks. Luckily there is a bridge by Crossharbour.

Before we headed underground and under water, we looked back across Mudchute Park towards Canary Wharf.

We had thought about walking all the way to Vauxhall but time and age were working against us so we walked up to Canada Water in Rotherhithe instead. We followed main roads for directness and this suite me as we had not walked them before because walking beside the river is much nicer.

Last week's point-to-point walk set a very high standard and I think this one equalled it. We are going to have to think hard about where to go if we hope to match these walks next time.

Walking 19km from Gloucester Road to Waterloo

This walk with my regular walkee was essentially his plan, and one we have used many times, with a few diversions suggested by me. 

His plan was to walk through Hyde Park, through Covent Garden, cross Tower Bridge and finish at Waterloo. My variations were to include some roads we had not walked before which explains the indirectness of the route through the West End and the more southerly route south of the river back to Waterloo,

The weather forecast was not great and we were prepared to abandon the walk early if it became unpleasant to continue but the rain was little and infrequent and in the end we went further, 19km, than the 15km originally planned.

That also meant that we were out long enough for us to stop at a proper cafe where I had the customary all-day vegetarian breakfast which, uncustomary, came with chips. I forgave them the chips and was grateful for the respite that Al's Cafe in Bermondsey Street offered.

The walk took us to several interesting places thanks, I will claim, to my hunt for new roads. Amongst these were Lincoln's Inn, a new shopping plaza off Long Acre which Stanfords had relocated to, the former Prudential building by Chancery Lane, and Phoenix Garden on Stacey Street.

A lot of the familiar places, such as Covent Garden and Tower Bridge, were well worth another visit too.

Familiar and unfamiliar, there was lots to enjoy on this walk and we went home a little tired, well fed and very satisfied.

Walking from Wood Green to Knightsbridge

Wood Green and Knightsbridge are 15 stops apart on the Piccadilly Line and they are also 18km apart using the route I took today.

The route was suggested by my usual walking companion who likes walking through parks and there were several on this route.

We had dome something familiar before, in 2020, but I managed to find a few different paths along the way and we also went a little further this time.

We wanted to start at Alexandra and Wood Green is the nearest convenient station. We joined the 8:57 queue at Richmond Station, changed at Hammersmith and were in Wood Green just under an hour later.

The route from there was pretty straight forward series of parks: HIghgate, Hampstead, Primrose, Regents and Hyde.

When walking between them I took us onto some new streets and managed to add 19 to my CityStrides LifeMap despite this being pretty well walked territory for me.

We took a short coffee break just after leaving Hampstead Heath and revisited Euphonium for the first time since 2019!

The transition from Hampstead Heath to Regent's Park was problematic because a) I tried to walk several new roads and b) all of the footpaths that I proposed to use were gated. Hence the awkward squiggle in the middle of the route.

There is no best way between Regent's Park and Hyde Park and in my quest for new roads we have walked a lot of them but there are still quite a few to do. Luckily this is an area we walk through several times a year so I expect to eventually complete all of the roads there.

Unusually, I took a few photos along the way. Normally I do not bother as the act of taking a photograph interrupts the walk but this time I wanted to show more than just a map.

I had not walked through the centre of Muswell Hill before and made a point of doing so this time and that is where I found this impressive steakhouse.

This is as close as we got to Kenwood House before we turned south again to battle with the muddy paths on Hampstead Heath.

It is impossible to go through the Primrose Hill, the park, without climbing the actual hill to get this popular view of London. I liked the greyness of the sky that still left visible the prominent landmarks from Shard to Eye .

The statistics say we did 18.5km in 4 hours and climbed 200m along the way (is that all?!) but map and the pictures tell a more accurate story and this was a delightful walk.

Walking to West Hampstead (8 Jan 25)

As long as I have sufficient time and the weather is not too unbearable,  I like to walk to the monthly British Czech and Slovak Association Get To Know You Social at Bohemia House ("serving the Czech and Slovak community since 1946") in West Hampstead. The factors driving my choice of route are the time available, location of Pokemon Go target gyms and finding roads I have not walked along before.

This time I had six hours available (I would have preferred more!) which had to include some sort of a break for lunch.

I started with a well walked path to Richmond, Isleworth and Brentford before following the canal north then west.

The time limited how far west I could go, it was walking in the wrong direction, and I turned off the canal at Glade Lane Canalside Park and headed through a part of Southall I had not walked before.

Previously I had walked thought the commercial centre of Southall which was far more interesting that the suburban area I went through this time.

I turned east to walk through parts of Ealing that I had hardly touched before. The map below is part of my CityStrides LifeMap with this walk highlighted. There is a very obvious barren area in the centre of the map around Park Royal. This proved to be a very industrial area and I will not be rushing back, despite the numerous unwalked roads there.

The aim of seeing new interesting things was not really achieved, though anything new always has some interest even if it is an industrial estate, and there were a few nice new places on this walk, such as the west to east crossing of Brent Rive Park.

The substantive aims of the walk were definitely met, I arrived in West Hampstead almost spot on 6pm having covered a decent 30km in a little under six hours.

I averaged 28,811 steps a day in 2024

I very mixed year for walking mainly thanks to health issues, generally I am fit and can easily manage 30k steps in a day but I had several stays in bed for a few days and a couple of operation too both of which seriously eat into walking time.

At times during the year I was hoping to average 30k steps, and was on target to do so, but flu type illnesses hit me hard in November and December and in the end I had to settle for just under 29k steps, which I am very happy with.

My totals for previous years are:

• 2023: 27,080
• 2022: 29,142
• 2021: 26,128
• 2020: 27,919
• 2019: 23,908
• 2018: 19,365
• 2017: 18,047

The big jump from 2019 is because I retired and had lots more time for walking. That shows that I am spending my retirement well!

Parks and more

We had a rough plan for this walk, which we built on successfully.

The plan was my usual walking companion's idea and, not surprisingly, that included some parks; this time it was Holland, Hyde, Regents and Primrose.

Starting at Earls Court meant the ritual of waiting for the barriers to open at Richmond Station at 8:57 and joining the swarm of old people using our 60+ Oyster Cards at the earliest opportunity.

From Earls Court is was more or less straight north to Holland Park with a slight detour on the way to take in a new road for my CityStrides LifeMap.

I wanted to take in some new roads in Notting Hill on the way to Hyde Park but that would have meant more hills which my companions, quite reasonably, objected to.

We took an unusually simple route across the top of Hyde Park simply to avoid as much traffic as we could and also the Hyde Park Winter Wonderland!

The transition from Hyde Park to Regents Park is a confusion of choices with most of Fitzrovia laid out in a grid and with no clear best route. So we did the only sensible thing and hit as many new roads as we could! Of course these were all roads that we had walked only not when mapping the route.

Regents Park was something as a failure as Broad Walk Cafe was closed for substantial refurbishment. Luckily we had a Plan B.  

While avoiding hills is generally a good idea it is impossible to go to Regents Park and not climb Primrose Hill. The view their is always worth seeing because of all the notable landmarks but I was surprised to see so few cranes and the few that were there were all clustered in the Far East (Tower Hamlets?).

Plan B was to have coffee in cake in Alma jst to the north of Primrose Hill. We had discovered it on a previous walk and knew that it was good.

I had expected that to be more or less the end of the walk as, when he suggested the plan, my companion said he wanted a shortish walk but over coffee he said that he was good for another hour or so which meant that we could walk back all the way to Waterloo.

Overall we walked 19km in 4 hours (including the coffee break) which was a pretty fine start to the day.

Walking 35km to West Hampstead

This was a variation on a theme but it has never worked so well before!

The simple aim was to get to West Hampstead around 6pm for the monthly BCSA Get to Know You social taking as many steps as possible. And as I had a reason to leave the house around 10:30 I had a lot of time to do that.

The first part of the journey, as far as Southall (north side of Osterley Park), was driven by PokemonGo and the few target gyms that I have in that area.

After that it was a simple (!) matter of finding new ways to walk to West Hampstead in the time available.

My CityStrides LifeMap shows the roads that I have walked previously and all I had to do was avoid those whenever possible. Of course that was not always easy, or possible, as the significant constraints like railways, major roads, rivers and canals, have limited crossing points and so I kept been drawn into familiar territory before crossing the obstruction and then picking a new route from there. 

For example, the little bulge in the top left of the route was me walking to Wembley Central station to cross the railway lines.

As always, one of the great joys of deliberately walking along new roads is you find new things and Alperton was something of a revelation in a couple of ways. The area by the station has become swamped with nondescript high-rise blocks (bad) and around the corner there is Shri Vallabh Nidhi Hindu Temple (good). 

I had walked to West Hampstead via Wembley a few times previously so had walked all the obvious west-east routes before and that forced me to walk north-south a few times to hit new territory. That was expected and it was good to find things like Wembley Brook.

Soon after crossing the North Circular, and setting a new record for the number of pedestrian lights I had to wait for to cross one road, I came across BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, also known as Neasden Temple.

While walking, I was mostly following my LifeMap to find new roads but I was also checking Apple Maps to see how far away I was on foot from West Hampstead so that I could time my arrival, I walk at 6km/hour which makes the maths very simple. I made one final turn north towards Dollis Hill from where it was almost a straight line to the finish.

I arrived in West Hampstead just a few minutes before 6pm (seven hours after starting out) perfect timing.

I had objectives targets for this walk (steps, PokemonGo, new roads, arrival time) and I achieved every one of them. A perfect walk.

City of London churches and more

Over the years I have got very used to being the one who plans the regular walks that I do with a friend, either I plan absolutely everything or he comes up with a rough idea and I have to turn it in to a route with suitable start and end points and a reasonable walking distance. This was one of the later cases.

While I mostly worked in Central London he was in places like Libya and Angola so he likes walking in London to discover places he does not really know and where I seem to have been to every pub. His idea this time was to visit churches in City of London.

That meant joining the queue of old gits at Richmond Station waiting for the barriers to open at 8:57 to catch the tube. We went all the way to Tower Hill to start our exploration on the east side of the City.

This time I had not done a detailed route and it was just a question of looking for the nearest cluster of churches and heading that way, there being no obvious route between them.

Where possible, we went inside which is something I had never done before so I was discovering something new too.

I forgot to checking on to the first few churches on Swarm but I did do the final nine so I knew that we went to some places with great names, including St. Botolph without Aldersgate, St. Vedast-alias-Foster and St Sepulchre-without-Newgate.

We had a coffee break in the one below, St Mary Aldermary.

This is also one of the several places where either we got lost or the church did. The maps show that Saint Nicholas Moldavian Church is next door but we walked all away around the block and could not find it. The two churches may be sharing one building, as we found elsewhere but there was nothing obvious to show this.

I am nothing like an expert on churches but I was pleasantly surprised at how varied and interesting the interiors were. The stained glasses were my favourites and I also appreciate grand architecture. There were several surprises to, such as the statue by Damian Hirst of St Bartholomew being skinned alive in St Bartholomew the Great (we failed to find St Bartholomew the Less).

The mural below is in St Alban the Martyr, a somewhat hard to find church in Holborn.

Somewhere along the way, St Lawrence Jewry I think, a helpful guide gave us a paper copy of the map at the top, which would have been very helpful a couple of hours earlier!

We saw enough in our haphazard wanderings to tempt us back to look at more churches, we only saw around 15 of over 50.

Our walk took a more usual course after that and we headed more or less due west to Hyde Park and the ever so familiar Serpentine Cafe for lunch.

My friend had to leave at that point and I took the opportunity to tick off some more roads in Kensington and Chelsea.and I surprised myself by completing 40 new roads in under two hours. A great way to end a fun series of walks.

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.

Walking from Becton to Crystal Palace (37km)

One of the reasons that I wanted to walk Capital Ring again was that I had not always mapped my walk (using, er, MapMyWalk) the first time so sections of it did not appear in my City Strides Life Map leaving a lot of white space in the Lewisham area.

Another reason was that I would not have gone to Woolwich if not for walking Capital Ring and I liked what I saw there, enough to want to see it again.

Capital Ring is 15 sections and 126km and my rough plan was four days of 30km each but that was a hard square to circle as the sections are of uneven lengths and SE London has two long sections (over 12km) which brought the four Sections 15 to 3 up to 37km.

I suspect that the sections are longer in SE London because of the relative lack of public transport for convenient start/end points and that certainly made this day harder than the others, it took me best part of two hours to get to the start point and more than that to get home.

Woolwich was again my highlight of the walk and I would have liked more time to explore (the app actually made me walk further than I needed to, which was a bonus!).

Woolwich is one the up and there is no greater proof of that than this collection of sculptures, Assembly by Peter Burke. There was also a trendy cafe next to it where I had a coffee and cake break.

After that it was a succession of parks and hills, none of which were particularly remarkable.

This is Oxleas Wood and, to be honest, is not the sort of view I go walk for; give me buildings any day.

The relentless stream of parks and suburban roads meant no pubs for several hours and I finally got a much needed pint in a Wetherspoons in Brixton; why Brixton and why a Spoons is a story that does not need to be told.

That only leaves three sections of Capital Ring to go and, while that is essentially home turf, I am quite looking forward to it.

Walking from Hendon to Becton (33km)

My aim of walking Capital Ring for a second time took a good step forward with another four sections, 11 to 14, taking me from Hendon to Becton.

The walk was something of a mixed bag for me as I have walked parts of this several times, including the somewhat long and dull section starting south of Olympic Park.

I also took a different route through Highgate Woods from the last time and I failed to find the nice cafe there. I took the easy option and made up for this my going to the cafe in Finsbury Park and having their all-day veggie breakfast, not for the first time.

There were some highlights and I liked walking through the new development on the lakes at Woodberry Down. I also enjoyed the slight detour through Middlesex Filer Beds Nature Reserve thanks to the industrial remains. Previously I had always continued along River Lee and I do not know how official the detour is regarding Capital Ring but I am glad I took it.

The stop for the veggie breakfast through y schedule and after almost six and a half hours I called it a day; I was tempted to do Section 15 too but I had to get home and leave it for another day, another day soon.