London Place 3: Shooter's Hill

In late October 1996, I walked, with three other people, from Southwark Cathedral to Canterbury Cathedral, over three days. A pilgrim's way.

We did it to raise money for our forthcoming months as volunteers in African countries. These jollies being organised by some tinpot Christian outfit, this seemed a fitting way to raise some cash. Some other guy had the idea, and I fell in with it. I wasn't much of a fundraiser - got a few quid off my family they'd probably have given me anyway, the whole thing was a bit of a waste of time for me, but was pretty fun.

I was working, that autumn and winter, (also to raise money) room service in a big London hotel - shifts were 3pm-11.30pm, 6pm-2.30pm and the dreaded 11pm-7.30am. I appreciate I'm not the best equipped to judge what a tiring job is, since for the last 15 years I've mainly been sitting at home thinking of stuff, but it was a tiring, unrewarding job. I once slept a straight 16 hours after a night shift.

So it seemed a strange thing to do with the first three consecutive days off I'd had in a couple of months to be walking 70 grey miles through some of the more tarmaced areas of the garden of England.

The start was inauspicious. Pre-mobiles (at least for me), the agreed meeting place was "the steps" at London Bridge station. There's more than one set of steps of course. Yet still I could have been livelier. I stood near some steps around the Tooley Street side, I remember I was (I think for the first time) lost in Astral Weeks on my walkman, and I impatiently yet carelessly lost the time, whilst my travelling companions, with more justifiable impatience, waited for me by the big steps inside the station.

An hour passed until finally someone showed some gumption and found the other. A good hour's walking time.

So we set off through a part of London I was very unfamiliar with - Bermondsey, Old Kent Road etc. 

Deep in my memory, at that time, was some car journey when I was little, leaving London by an unfamilar route where, suddenly and without warning, the city disappeared and there was just sloped green. I had come to think it was just a dream.

Then we're walking and we get, suddenly and gloriously, to Blackheath and I know "This was it! This was the dream ..." so that was a cool moment. We stopped for a coffee and cake near Blackheath which at the time seemed the height of decadence, and carried on along Shooter's Hill.

A large guy, oldish, whiskery facial hair, big waterproofy wear, walks towards the four of us scowling, stands in our way, trys to block us, maybe swears a bit.

We deftly evaded and scuttled on, and that was it. But ever since, whenever I've been near Shooter's Hill or seen it on a map, I think of that scary guy's face, that guy being Shooter, and that being his hill, and it's a bit of a demon.

I've been to Blackheath a lot since then. I like it - there are many pleasing large green spaces in the inner-outer London, but something about the curve of the land at Blackheath (not to mention its place in the story of the Peasants' Revolt) really works for me.

We carried on walking. It was tiring, but in a much better way than the room service job was tiring.  The first night we stayed in Gravesend, the second night in Sittingbourne.

The guy who put is up in Gravesend was a trendy vicar called Chris. I remember he had a great CD collection, and I put on Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, and the vicar said he reckoned it was one of the best albums of all time. After we listened to it for a while, one of my fellow pilgrims said "it's good but I don't think it's one of the best albums ever" and I thought, really, 18 year old Christian who's just told me their favourite song is Breakfast at Tiffany's by Deep Blue Something but miraculously happens to have heard every album ever released, really, is it not? Tell that to Rolling Stone magazine in 25 years time, why don't you? That's what I thought.

I also remember that night, watching Match of the Day, and it was a few days after a guy called Matthew Harding, who had been trying to take over Chelsea from Ken Bates, had died on his way home from a match in a helicopter crash, and they showed the Chelsea fans' moment's silence for him, and even though Chelsea FC is, was then, and will always be the club I loathe most in the world, and even though I didn't know anything about Matthew Harding, I was extremely moved to tears, and it just showed the eery power of large scale mourning doing funny things to our brain, which is something the country could have heeded 11 months later, I guess.