Evening Walk - Burgess Park & some gritty parts of Inner SE London: Elephant & Castle to Peckham Rye (SWC Short 59 in Reverse)

Length: 7.1 km (4.4 mi) 

Ascent: negligible 

Net Walking Time: 1 ½ hours

 

Meet at Elephant & Castle station (railway, not tube!) in the downstairs ticket hall at 18.25.

From Central London, take the 18.21 Sutton train from Blackfriars or the Bakerloo Line or the Northern Line (Bank branch) and walk to the train station entrance in Elephant Road (SE17 1LB). 

From Outer London: take either the 17.32 London Blackfriars train from Orpington (via Peckham Rye, arrives 18.14) or the 17.46 Thameslink train from Sutton (arrives 18.19).

 

Return trains from Peckham Rye are frequent in many directions: Canada Water/Dalston Junction; South Bermondsey/London Bridge; Denmark Hill, then Victoria or Clapham Junction or Blackfriars; Nunhead, then Sevenoaks or Lewisham/Dartford; East Dulwich, then Streatham/South Croydon or Crystal Palace/Beckenham Junction.

 

An urban route entirely in the London Borough of Southwark, leading through some gritty parts of inner southeast London but largely along green corridors or through parks.

 

The blurb in the normal direction: “You walk through some quiet streets in North Peckham and along a linear park on the line of the Peckham Branch of the infilled Grand Surrey Canal to Burgess Park, created on land formerly filled by industry around the canal as well as dense housing but heavily bombed in WWII, and now with only a few listed remnants of its industrial and canal heritage, such as almshouses, a well-preserved limekiln and the ‘Bridge to Nowhere’.

You follow a meandering westerly route through Burgess Park to the Camberwell end and the splendid Addington Square, and walk back on a loop through the park and then on further through Walworth with its very large brutalist Aylesbury Estate. From there, the route links up a handful of small and not so small parks, leading eventually to Elephant Park, a new development on the site of the former brutalist Heygate Estate, and to Elephant & Castle Station on the boundary of Newington.”

The areas walked through are a mix not atypical of the Borough of Southwark: well-kept parks and open spaces, some old and worn council estates (often of brutalist architecture), plenty of reused or part-replaced former industrial buildings, some new and more enlightened council accommodation as well as some fully gentrified areas, culminating in the still not quite finished Elephant Park.

Terrain & Access : Almost only hard surfaces. The parks and open spaces on the main walk are open 24/7.

Shorter Walks: 

- Bus stops are never far away. 

- Outbound and return route meet in two places in Burgess Park, enabling cutting off a part of the route. 

Extension: A longer loop around Burgess Park’s fishing lake is described (add 450m).

 

Tea Options: Plenty en route and near Peckham Rye station, starting with Ganapati (South Indian restaurant).t=short.59