The Tepid Take

This piece was originally published in CityMetric in 2020. I’m walking through a lush river valley, home to cows, sheep, and even baby Shetland ponies. I can see the surprisingly steep banks of the River Chess ahead, formed when the owner of Latimer House chose to enhance the natural beauty of his rear view with an unexpectedly wide lake. This is the Chess Valley, on the borders of Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire, and it’s totally perplexing that this 15-mile long stretch of rural land, totally outside anything resembling London, gets a good six stations on the Tube map. This is the outermost part of the Metropolitan Line. As the first railway to tunnel under London, it gave birth to the Underground, but it never really stopped being a bit like a heavy-rail train – so once it’s in the Home Counties, the line feels a lot less like rapid transit and a lot more like commuter rail. The Metropolitan Line bore a child, and that child was Metroland: a hugely ambitious attempt to encourage

     The night heat was on slow burn. I imagined a lucid path through a forest, a series of heaths, the back end of Ipswich, and a motorway from the future. I had decided that I would wake up the following morning and walk 28 miles in the space of a single Thursday. It had been a dream of mine for a month, a series of mapping sessions, rationalising trespassing, building a rapport with the land before I’d even touched it. I’d walk from Suffolk’s county town of Ipswich to Orford, a village 20 miles up the coast as the crow flies, with a route off the beaten footpath. I had eschewed the glowing blue dots of the map apps keeping track and printed out an eight-page A4 route instead of reaching for the Ordnance Survey. Yielding to authority here wouldn’t spark my imagination. Surveying all the options would never make me brilliant in the head.      Here I have cobbled together a series of audionotes I kept along the way, in the long stretches when I was alone between the fields. If I