The path led to the gravel road, but which way to turn? We went right, the wrong way, and arrived on a housing estate where parents were waiting to collect their children from school. It took another hour to retrace our steps and reach our destination, a Victorian church and village green, in the shadowlands of an old country.
Over the winter months we walked the circumference of London. My wife Frances and I began at Erith, on the south bank of the Thames estuary, and followed the London Loop, a full 150-mile circle clockwise to Purfleet on the opposite bank. We were exploring London’s raggedy, liminal borderland, where places lose their contours in a rural urban sprawl. Remnants of villages, market towns and redundant industries are all that is left of an older England overwhelmed and buried beneath the surging, unforgiving modernity of new housing developments, roads and office buildings. It is easy to lose one’s bearings and become lost.
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