I mentioned in a previous post that I'd signed up for a challenge which involved me covering 100km under my own steam inside 7 days, and suddenly that gave a bit more purpose to the mused-on idea of the Victoria Line walk. We played about on Google maps - Walthamstow to Brixton as a walking route, dragging the route to all the stations en-route, and it gave us a distance of 14.5 miles - not so bad (The actual line distance is 13 miles) although we were well aware that the physical route walked would end up longer than this by the time we'd meandered off course to look at things, or taken a slightly more zig-zaggy route in places to stay a bit closer to the line. We found a few other accounts online of other people who'd done the walk including this rather jolly Canadian chap who's made a bit of a habit of tube-walking and doesn't look likely to stop any time soon! When we started thinking about potential locations to stop for breaks, and what sort of food to carry with us, we knew that we were hooked on the idea and the walk was definitely going to happen!
My 100k challenge meant that I had to do a fair bit of walking in the days running up to tackling the Vic Line - that would only account for (playing safe) 16 or so of those 63 miles. My week didn't start well with a Bank Holiday Monday featuring a lot of time in the car and horrendous weather meaning only 2 miles clocked up that day. The following days picked up a lot - with a low of 7.15 miles and a high of 10.16 meaning I was very much on track so long as the Vic Line was doable at the end of it...
Wanting to keep "off walk" mileage as low as possible on Sunday we elected to drive into London, parking the car close by where I work and hopping on the bus to Walthamstow where we'd decided to start. The main reason for doing the walk this way round was that it meant we dealt with the bit we knew best at the beginning, meaning that by the time tiredness and sore feet started to bite we'd be onto areas which would hopefully be a bit more interesting.
The bus stops directly outside the original Tube Station entrance - there is a new one across the road in the "new" bus station (it was opened in 1987 if I remember rightly, but it still feels new to me!) but this will always be the entrance to me..
We were off! Along Selborne Rd, past the shopping centre (also "new" - see above!) and then right and left onto High St - or "Walthamstow Market" as it's known. (Think "I'm goin' dahn the market" for context here). No market on a Sunday though - it was blissfully quiet. We then strayed off the route that others have taken as I knew exactly where the line ran at this stage - outside one of my old schools is a Vent Shaft that rather gives the game away - more on this in a future post! Onto Forest Road and a left turn up to Blackhorse Road...
This one probably has to take the award for best station exterior thanks to the plaque of the horse. I loved that when I was a kid! Of course this is the design continued on the platforms below - each Victoria Line Station has its own design, linked in with the area the station is in - so Walthamstow Central has a William Morris design, Victoria has a picture of Queen Victoria, Brixton has a picture of rioters...no, just kidding with that last one! ;-) The next part of the walk is along a busy road with a brick wall one side (concealing the overground Barking to Gospel Oak line) and a palisade fence on the other beyond which are a succession of reservoirs which are also now home to the very new Walthamstow Wetlands Nature Reserve. Crossing over the Lea Navigation brought us to our next station. Tottenham Hale is undergoing refurbishment (again) so this was as good as I could get for an exterior shot. The place seems to have been constantly pulled apart and put back together again for years now - and in the process has gone from an easy to use station to one that simply doesn't work, sadly.
Onwards - round the busy Broad Lane one way system and past the retail park - a short section of zig-zagging through back streets and we encountered the first entrance to Seven Sisters station - there are entrances at all sides of this busy road as well as the "main" entrance (although I suspect used by far less folk than the satellite entrances) so I opted for photographing this one.
The next bit of the walk was probably the part I was least looking forward to. Seven Sisters Road is mostly dull and dreary, very full of traffic and generally not somewhere we'd choose to walk. The distance between Seven Sisters and Finsbury Park is also the longest between two deep-level stations on the network other than out at Heathrow - for me, psychologically, this was the tough bit. This was also the section we encountered our first tube station not served by the Vic Line - Manor House on the Piccadilly line. It also gave us our first bit of "off road" walking as we were able to come off the main road and walk through Finsbury Park itself which was a nice diversion if rather muddy. Finally after a lot of steps we arrived here...
Suddenly there were a lot of people around with red & white scarves and shirts on - yep, Arsenal had a home match in the afternoon! Finsbury Park is the closest Vic Line station to the Emirates Stadium - home of the Gunners - and we were about to walk right past it, but we'd done our homework and knew that as long as we were past the stadium by around 12.30 we'd be fine, and we were well ahead of that. We encountered another Piccadilly Line only station on this stretch too - Arsenal Station. That also gives the game away as to the road we were on - Gillespie Road was the original name of this station until it was renamed Arsenal in October 1932. The football fans continued milling around but we continued onwards and shortly afterwards were able to tick this one off our list...
We decided this would be a good time to stop for a bit of a break so popped into a handy Wetherspoons pub for a sandwich and a glass of juice. 6 stations done and about half the total distance covered. From Highbury we chose to zig-zag through the back streets of Barnsbury to cut across to the Caledonian Road as this kept us closer to the actual route of the line than the online suggested route would. By this stage we'd realised that Google's "public transport" map overlay showed the rough "real life" routes of the lines so were consulting with that on a regular basis to see how we were doing. I deliberately photographed Kings Cross with St Pancras in the background because that is of course the correct name of the Underground stations - the two mainline stations share it so it serves both.
(The statue of Mr Stephenson used to prevail over the "Grand Hall" in the original station - he looks like he wishes he was still there to be quite honest!) Then on to Warren Street in the shadow of the BT Tower just beyond...
The route we took led us past the base of the tower - the closest MrEH had ever been I believe - and then a further bit of zig-zagging to get us to the madness of Oxford Circus while missing as many of the crowds as possible! Tube nerds will instantly spot that this is a Leslie Green station - with its distinctive Ox Blood tiling!
A short stretch of crowd-dodging on Regent Street followed - before we shot off down a side street and subsequently onto the VERY Smart New Bond Street past some rather expensive looking boutiques. We short-cutted through The Royal Arcade, stopped briefly to drool over some rather nice chocolates (we decided that even with 50% off the Easter Eggs we still didn't want to know the price!) then stopped under cover at the end of it to eat a rather more downmarket banana each! A few more left and rights and we emerged on Piccadilly opposite The Ritz and just a few steps from our next station - Green Park.
The next stretch was straight across the park itself to Buckingham Palace - and was probably the most pleasant stretch of the walk. A brief stop to look at the St James' Park lake even netted us a new bird for our year-list with a sighting of a White Fronted Goose. An almost straight line then brought us to Victoria where we decided another break and a cup of tea was in order - once again Wetherspoons came to the rescue!
Once we started walking again we were both aware of starting to feel a bit tired in the legs but this really felt like the home stretch which fired us up to keep going. Google wanted to take us straight along Vauxhall Bridge Road, but instead we chose a slight detour which would bring us straight past Pimlico Station. As well as being the only station on the line that only serves the Vic Line with no other interchange at all it is also without question the most uninteresting station of all those we passed.
Over Vauxhall Bridge, being sure to pause and peer over the parapet to find the emergence of the River Effra into the Thames - it comes out under the MI6 building - you know, the one that got blown up in Skyfall? ;-) Thankfully they've done a great job of the repairs...
Vauxhall underground station sits in the middle of a teemingly busy one way system - even on a Sunday it took us a while to cross but finally we were over and heading for South Lambeth Road.
This brought me back onto a route I knew - I spent a fair bit of time in Stockwell years ago and so knew this last stretch of walking with no need to look at the map. Across the road from Stockwell Station, past the Swan (we didn't bother going in - the far better Priory Arms is not far away and had we been wanting a pub right then we'd have aimed there instead)...
...and on down Stockwell Road. Nothing remarkable here, although there are some really beautiful houses in the streets off to the left. Finally towards the very end of Stockwell road we took one final short cut through Stockwell Avenue and it's little alleyway that pops out onto Brixton Road itself - a right turn under two railway bridges, and there it was...
Two people have probably never approached Brixton Station wearing quite such broad grins!
I tracked the walk using my FitBit - apart from the stretch from Victoria Station where I only realised at the bottom of Belgrave Road that I'd forgotten to restart it again - and the mileage tracked at 16.59 miles - that stretch that didn't track was probably about half a mile. We managed to keep a quite impressive pace of 3.1mph which was a little faster than I was expecting - unsurprisingly our first mile was the quickest - with the slowest being mile 11 for some reason. (I suspect because we stopped for longer at various places on that stretch). I burned 1,997 calories, and we were walking for 6 hours and 9 minutes. I'll do a subsequent post with some of the interesting things we saw on the way - for now though I just intend to say "We did it!" and feel smug!
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