Walking the borough boundaries: Westminster

I’ve always believed that weekend quiet throws up the freshest perspectives on the capital, but today, embarking on my second boundary walk, around the City Of Westminster (a borough with City status), I decide that this 17 mile loop of London’s core, traversing parkland, river, world heritage sites and industrial grime, requires the push-and-pull of an ordinary weekday.

And so it’s a grey Friday morning when I meet old friend Max at our appointed start, the northern entrance of Regent’s Park’s Broadwalk, where trainer-clad commuters are strutting penguin-like towards the Euston Road. “What I love about London is the bits you forget,” he enthuses, as we set off, admiring the creamy Nash terraces, and daffodils dozing in the formal gardens.

Crossing Marylebone Road, like magnets drawn towards the looming BT Tower, we slink down Cleveland Street, a backwater so quiet you can almost hear the rustle of tabloids in its caffs. “Imagine how many cameras we’ll be caught by,” says Max, pointing at the first of many CCTV signs. “Someone could watch us all day.”

At Goodge Street, the city is back into full throttle, a Niagara of sounds. Fitzrovia is always nostalgic, its cheap Italian restaurants the backdrop to our boozy student nights. Centre Point, Charing Cross Road, Seven Dials: “everything in London provides a memory”, says Max.

But the city never allows us to wallow in the past for long: down Shelton Street alleyway, near Drury Lane, we are reminded that this is very much 2009: CCTV cameras whir, there’s a warning of “anti-climb paint”, and a wiry deterrent resembling a medieval torture device is shocking. Rather surreally, a graffitied protest – in the form of lyrics from “Let The Sunshine In” – covers the wall below.

And the strange juxtapositions continue: past Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the windows of the tiny Seven Stars pub behind the Royal Courts Of Justice display sheep skulls in wigs, sinister dummies of judges’ heads, and a skull wearing a single lens: “When he was 17,” reads a plaque, “the surrealist Marcel Marien brought his broken spectacles to the optician and asked them to be made into a single spectacle. He called the result L’Introuvable (The Unfindable).”

Unfindable: an appropriate adjective for the city in general, although not for the river, which soon draws us down to its level. Max has spotted a barge bearing the words working for the tidal Thames. “Why does everything have a banal slogan?” he wonders. “What else would a boat be doing?”

It’s now cold and blustery and, as tourists swarm past, we amuse ourselves dreaming up new collective nouns: a “horror” of children, perhaps? We observe endless floating restaurants, as suburban trains pull pensioners across the river to matinees, pleasure-seekers gawp from the pods of the Wheel, and predatory Euro coaches prowl the kerb for tourists gazing too long at marine timetables. Even on this well-trodden strip, history surprises us: we learn that the Sphinx at the base of Cleopatra’s Needle still bears the scars of WW1 bomb damage.
Trapped in the tourist hell of two hundred mobile phones vying to snap the Houses of Parliament, Victoria Tower Gardens provides instant calm, but the remaining riverside route to Chelsea Bridge is unexpectedly bleak, a flashback to a derelict London, with a view of silent cranes and flat warehouse facades crouching around the fallen majesty of Battersea Power Station. Decay is underlined by boarded-up nightspots from the 70s: “Dinner and Dance”, suggests Villa Elephant on the thunderous Grosvenor Road.

As we pass Pimlico’s Churchill Gardens, the seminal post-war estate designed by Powell & Moya, rain sweeps across the hazy water, gusts of wind nearly claiming the flapping pages of my notebook. “It’s like being on the moors,” says Max, as we fight with waterproofs under a tree.
West London offers few surprises: blondes in outsize sunglasses sucking on fags outside Sloane Square tube; the whiff of strong perfume in Knightsbridge. The naked wind hurries us along Hyde Park’s Broad Walk, and, as we take Chepstow Place in Bayswater up towards Westbourne Grove, we’re now strangely excited by this boundary-following, and the fact that it’s Kensington & Chelsea on the other side if the street, Westminster on ours. Amazing how the mind can focus.
Avaricious West London morphs into the industrial Northwest, trumpeted by Trellick Tower: and suddenly we’re on the Grand Union Canal, against the roar of the Westway, as geese dawdle and coots blow along in the wind.

“Nowheresville,” sighs Max, as we snake round the necklace-shaped boundary at Kilburn Park Road, unbelievably still in Westminster, alpine clouds squatting over Brent’s chewing gum-grey towerblocks opposite. A dazzling blue sky breaks through over the Islamic Centre of England, where the appropriately-named Boundary Road beckons us from Maida Vale back to glossy St John’s Wood, and its idiotic 1970s villas with barred windows even upstairs. Finally, we glimpse our bucolic goal, seven hours after the start.

A knife of sun on the path, a black dog leaping towards us, trainer-clad commuters moving slowly now towards the sanctity of their weekends: we collapse on a bench exhausted, the secret of our 17 mile journey deep within us.