Here is the text I wrote about this walk for My London Diary. If you go to Capital Ring: South Kenton to Hendon you will see many more pictures from the walk.
On August Bank Holiday I walked another stage of the Capital Ring with Linda.
I’m not a great fan of potted walks like the Capital Ring, though it does go through some interesting places. Though it does ring around the capital, it does so wherever possible through green spaces rather than the high streets and industrial areas which are often of greater interest, at least to me. As often we made a few small detours to add interest (and one where the somewhat curious walk directions led us astray.)
Today our walk began at South Kenton, where we had ended the previous section with a drink in The WIndermere. Today it was too early for that and we carried on through suburban streets and parks towards Fryent Country Park, where we climbed to the top of Barn Hill, with views towards Wembley, and then across to another hill.
The directions in the guide from there were rather lacking and we got just a little lost before finding our way out to Salmon Lane.
The graveyard around the old St Andrew’s Church had some interesting gravestones, but by then I was eager to get on the the Welsh Harp where we planned to eat our lunch. We had to make a detour to the garden centre before then, but soon we were able to sit on a seat overlooking the water.
At Cool Oak Lane we left the road briefly to view the West Hendon Waterside, where council and developers are destroying the West Hendon estate to build expensive flats. As one resident put it in a blog:
“local Tory councillors see the place where they live as not a community, but a business opportunity, and under the pretext of ‘regeneration’, and despite a promise to residents of a better housing on the same site, handed the publicly owned land to Barratt London for a private, luxury high rise property development.
The land was worth £12 million, but was given to developers for £3, so as to allow them to maximise profits on their investment, conservatively estimated last year at a mere £92 million.”
Barnet is not alone in following a policy of social cleansing for the profits of private companies both here and in the Grahame Park estate. It is happening all over London and it isn’t just Tory councils, but Labour ones such as Southwark, Newham, Lambeth and the rest who are using the pretext of regeneration to get rid of their poorer residents and replace them by wealthier ones who can afford high market rents. If the council have a duty to rehouse tenants they may find themselves offered a flat in Newcastle, when their jobs and schools are in the London borough they have lived in for years, perhaps all their lives.
Crossing the A5 Broadway took a little time, and then it was a long walk up Park Road to the subway underthe much busier Hendon Way and on to Hendon Park. By now I was getting tired and it was a pleasure to have an icecream at the Hendon Park Café, the first kosher park café to open up in the UK, before catching the underground on our way home.
More pictures from the walk on My London Diary at Capital Ring: South Kenton to Hendon.
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My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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