A New Project

I've been looking for a new project for some time - since I finished the London LOOP. For a while I thought about walking the Grand Union from London to Birmingham but wasn't sure if the transport links would be suitable. I could do part of the Thames Path from Oxford eastwards but west of Oxford transport gets too time consuming (and expensive!) so that one will have to wait, I may do the western sections when I'm visiting my relations in the Cotswolds.

So I was just browsing in the wonderful Pitshanger Bookshop a week or so ago and I came across Walk The Lines by Mark Mason. This details his walk along and around London's underground network. Within a few pages (while still in the bookshop) I had been inspired to do the same. I'm not as hard-core as Mark so I won't be doing 30+ miles in a day, instead I'll be splitting it up into smaller sections (6-10 miles a day) so it will take me a few years to complete.

Once I got home I found someone else, with the confusingly similar name of Mark Moxon had done the same thing and detailed it on his website. This is divided up into legs of a more manageable length and it is this approach I will take, but I won't be following exactly the same route. Instead I will look at the area around the line and see what interesting sights I can find and the route is likely to change as I walk the route as I get distracted easily! It will be interesting to see how I feel about:

• A walk that is predominately urban in nature
• A walk that I will be planning myself rather than following someone else's route
• A walk that will revisit some places more than once (the Jubilee and Metropolitan lines share the same route for example as well as some stations being a nexus for several lines).

I'll be starting with the Metropolitan Line from Aldgate to Finchley Road.