Length: 6.8 km (4.3 mi)
Net Walking Time: 1 ½ - 2 hours
Meet: St’ James’s Park Station at 18.45 hours
(Broadway exit, at street level). St. James’s Park Station is a stop on the
District and Circle Lines.
Finish: Embankment Station, a stop on the District
and Circle Lines as well as the Northern (Charing Cross Branch) and Bakerloo
Lines and very close to Charing Cross Mainline Station.
Both stations as well
as the whole route are within Zone 1.
The blurb for the full route, split over two Thursdays:
“In 1807, London was the first city in the world to
light its streets by gas, which was much cheaper and produced brighter lights
than the previously used candles or oil lamps. More than 200 years later, there
are still about 1,300 gas-fuelled street lights left, bathing their
surroundings in a markedly warmer, yellower glow than electric lights. About
270 of those are in the City of Westminster, preserved after a campaign to stop
the Council from replacing them all on cost grounds.
This meandering route through the Royal Parks of the
West End, St. James’s, Westminster, Whitehall, Covent Garden, St. Giles and the
Embankment passes a fair few of those gaslights, while leading through parks, squares
and courtyards and along alleyways, secret passages, lanes, paths and (mainly)
residential streets, while also passing numerous well-known and not so
well-known sites of historical, architectural or political interest, many of
which will be new even to born Londoners.
The route is rewarding in light as well as in
darkness, as some of the parks and alleyways are closed at night, while some of
the gaslights in those areas are on even during the day.”
Eat/Drink: Numerous options en route and at the end. Check the pdf for
details.
1 comment:
Knowing that half the people that were on the first part of the walk a couple of weeks ago wouldn't be able to make it today, I was not surprised when no one else had arrived at the meeting point even 4 minutes after the appointed time. A bit sad, but there you go, life can be tough for walk posters! It was great weather for an evening stroll though, even if I knew the route inside out, so off I set as just the n=1.
5 minutes later I received a phone call from another one of those that had been on part 1, asking whether I'd be coming on the walk and proclaiming that 'they' were waiting for me. Turns out another n=8 had met at another exit from the station, and were indeed still there.
I duly waited at Westminster Abbey for them to catch up and on we went together. Unlike part 1, this part of the walk has various areas that are closed at night, so some of the lights and atmospheric squares and parks we had to circumvent.
Group cohesion proved a problem once we hit Westminster tube station and almost all the areas beyond that, purely for the amount of people everywhere: tourists, after-work drinkers, commuters, the lot.
But we always re-grouped after a while. Once in Covent Garden, 2 split off to go home.
5 of the rest stayed in Gordon's Wine Barat the end (outside table with a heater or two) until half past 10, sorting out the world (and areas beyond).
A pleasant evening out in fine company (eventually).
n=9 w=pleasant-and-warm
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