Walk Report

LDWA in the City, Sunday 30th November 2008
18 walkers, 16.75 miles - leader Peter Russell
This was a great walk to tick all those London sculptures and sights. The most impressive to me was Watt's monumental sculpture of 'physical energy', in Hyde Park, i.e. a naked man on a horse, that was less fussy than the beautifully re-gilded Albert memorial. Half our crew of 18 were very pleased to walk around the gentle Princess Diana memorial fountain whilst I changed my wet socks by the Serpentine lido. After the round pond, without nannies or model yachts today, but the chance of a debutante tea at 14 pounds in the nearby orangery of Kensington Palace I was reminded of the era when the child Alice wanted to marry a hard guard so she could mend his socks, listen maybe after she fed the ducks by a very different Peter Pan to that of the group's panto outing 6 days later. Incidentally we did not find the pelicans in St James Park but counted 13 herons, including 2 on their tree top nests, and saw a flock of very pretty white bar-headed geese. Earlier in the walk we passed ivy-clad graves in Highgate leading down to the pseudo-gothic Angela Burdett-Coutts model village. Blots on the landscape that I tried to ignore were the Royal Free Hospital, the Lancaster hotel, the Hyde Park Hilton and finally the Hyde-Park Barracks. At dusk we saw Scott's statue and the silhouette of Florence Nightingale with her (incorrect) genie lamp before a glance at the white starry nets above Regent street. We then all had 2 cheerful drinks of special beers such as 8 per cent wheat and strawberry (in place of alcopops) at De Hems near China town after completing 16.75 miles.

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