Wandering Wednesdays

Not only do we have Museum Mondays, we also have Wandering Wednesdays! And we're soon starting an Alliteration Appreciation Association...

Our first wander took place up in Hampstead. One member has a book of hidden London walks so we followed that through the area. The Hampstead walk has 48 points of interest along a 4.7 mile route. We ended up skipping a few sites due to time constraints, but we did manage to see some of the neighborhood and some of the Heath and eat lunch. Pretty solid for the first wander.

We started at the Hampstead tube station and walked up to Church Row to see some houses and the church and graveyards of St. John at Hampstead. We continued around the Frognals, by the Holly Bush (a pub), we saw the Admiral's House and then went by Whitestone pond, which is actually one of the highest spots in London. Who knew?

From there we entered the Heath and checked out the Pergola and Hill Garden, a very pretty spot in the Heath. In fact the book called it one of the most delightful hidden spots in the Heath or something like that. It was pretty, but at this time of the year hardly any plants were in bloom, although some lovely spring blooms were growing at the base of the trees. We all said we'd like to come back in the summer when everything is in bloom.

We left the Pergola and continued on down to The Old Bull & Bush, also a pub. Interestingly, the book mentioned that they started to build a tube stop here and got so far as excavating the platforms before they abandoned the plan. Churchill toured the platforms with the idea that they would be backup war rooms, but they were never used that way. The old entrance to the station didn't seem to be visible, although the book made it seem like it was. There was construction across the street so perhaps the last remaining signs of it are now gone.

From there we walked through the neighborhood a bit and back into the Heath and at this point we got lost. The book said something along the lines of "follow the road til it curves left, stay right, not the hard right, then go left and follow that til it goes right and then left." OK. And no. We tried to stay on course and failed but we happened upon this very pretty small pond filled with ducks, including a Mandarin duck, a pretty brown and black one we all liked. From there we managed to find our way back to the Pergola, and ended up going in to the main part of the Heath.

We walked through the Heath towards Parliament Hill. There were tons of dogs out, some swimming, one lost and not responding to the owner, and all would have made Riley jealous. We climbed Parliament Hill, admired the view and then made our way out of the Heath and back to Belsize Park tube station. Overall we spent about 3 hours wandering through Hampstead and the Heath. It was pretty and interesting and allowed me to put the new camera to good use. And since we saw the "hidden" Heath, it took us by parts off the beaten path and new to (almost) all of us.

We decided that after such a successful wander we'll keep with the hidden walks book and next week we plan to do a Docklands walk, another area of the city that will be new to most of us.