Monday September 8. 18.9 km.

 The first day of the “London to Canterbury” pilgrimage. 

Walking out, a little fox almost ran across my feet. I took that as a good sign, and another sign was a tube strike, meaning that for the third time I covered the distance between my lodgings and Southwark by foot. Which seemed right, after a slight grumble on my part as it added an hour and a half to my day.

Lots and lots of bike lanes in London, and lots of cyclists.  This store looked enticing - sticks and umbrellas of all kinds.

The pub I mentioned yesterday, the George, was open and their coffee was good. Apparently Dickens frequented this pub (Dickens was a good walker and moved house from time to time, trying out different areas).  Dating from the seventeenth century, it is the only surviving galleried coaching inn in London.

Why am I walking out of London? Largely because of a passage in Dickens’ novel The Old Curiosity Shop (1906) that has stuck in my mind long after I’ve forgotten the rest of the story.

Little Nell lived with her grandfather, but he had just lost his shop due to his gambling habits.  Chased out of London, they set out very early, walking northward.

‘The two pilgrims, often pressing each other’s hands, or exchanging a smile or cheerful look, pursued their way in silence.’  The streets, at first eerily quiet, started to wake up. ‘Haunts of commerce and great traffic’ gave way to ‘a straggling neighborhood, where the mean houses were parcelled off in rooms, and windows patched with rags and paper.’  Finally the streets started to run out, ‘with many a summer-house innocent of paint and built of old timber or some fragments of a boat, green as the tough cabbage-stalks that grew about it.’ Finally they sat down to rest in a pleasant field, at which point Nell remembered the good man Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress: “I felt as if we were both Christian, and laid down on this grass all the cares and troubles we brought with us; never to take them up again.”

This blog opens with my version of their walk, heading southward, not escaping debts and ruin, but definitely laying down all “cares and troubles” with each step.

For “haunts of commerce”, the most obvious in Southwark is the towering Shard.

My guide book helpfully pointed out that the road I was on out of London was a Roman road, so it was straight ahead all day.  As I progressed, there was no sign of the “mean houses” of Dickens’ day, but the small restaurants and shops betrayed a large variety of ethnic origins and didn’t look hugely prosperous.

In the very amusing ‘Pickwick Papers’ Dickens has a carriage getting stuck in mud going up Shooters’ Hill, with the horses intent on turning around in the middle of the climb.  The road is happily all paved now, but the view from the top offers, as it has since Chaucer’s time, a first or last glimpse of the city to visitors and pilgrims.

Once at the top of the hill, the road immediately goes down the other side and the countryside starts. Instead of the summer houses bereft of paint that Dickens described, there is a posh golf course.  We have indeed grown much more prosperous over the last 150 years!

The only other event of note today came as an unexpected crack, followed by a motorcycle and its rider flipping through the air right beside me on the road. Luckily this road is also a major route to hospitals, and within about 30 seconds two ambulances, each going a different direction, came to a halt and were looking after the rider as he lay immobile on the road. And I guess that would count as both a bad and a good omen! So ends my story today.