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As, I suspect, do many of us, I have a love/hate relationship with Barnes and Noble. It\'s a huge chain, it drives out small, independent book stores etc. etc.; but it\'s got SO MANY BOOKS. I try to avoid it but its siren call beckons me. When I really, really need some books and have about say, sixteen hours to kill, I must go. When I do, I inevitably, at some point in my fall from grace, find myself plopped happily down in the travel section. I surround myself with books on Greece and the Himalayas and Bolivia and Beijing. Barnes and Noble stocks the usual tomes, Let\'s Go which I may be getting too old for, Rough Guides, and Lonely Planet whose cheeky and irreverent insight I enjoy enormously, Frommers\' and Rick Steves, for which I hope I\'ll never be old enough, and books you won\'t see anywhere else. Want to know the complete BritRail timetable for the year 2000? Have an itch for an incredibly detailed map of the Brooks Range in Alaska? This is the place. So, of course I wasn\'t surprised when I found the slim little book by Roger Ebert (of movie critic two thumbs up fame) and Daniel Curley (academic and short story author) entitled, The Perfect London Walk, first published in 1986. The cover is inviting; a slightly out of focus color photograph showing a green swath of spring yews lining a path to a very British great house. Opening it and quickly flipping through, a first impression says, "Weird." There\'s not much stuff on the pages, some writing, fuzzy black and white photos. It looks like something my twins might have slapped together, a kind of Blair Witch Project of guide books. Apparently it is written by friends about a walk they have long enjoyed over the Hampstead Heath in northwest London. You wonder how many Fullers\' Best ales, Jack Lane, the photographer had on the day they decided to record it for posterity. |
It\'s early fall by the time I\'ve stopped yearning for fresh parmagiano and moonlit strolls through Etruscan ruins. Someone borrows my stack of Italy and the little green book reappears. Both Ebert and Curley offer advice to the reader on the premise that she or he will be actually taking this walk, not just reading about it. Frances Mayles knows that her Tuscany will never be ours, that we will not be purchasing ancient villas and spending our holidays searching for the right house wine. I\'m having to switch gears here.
Ebert credits his pal Curley with introducing him to this "..bracing ramble on the Heath" while Curley himself admonishes us to set off in a timely fashion since there\'s a small window of opportunity between the opening of the pubs (11 a.m.) and the closing of Highgate Cemetery (4 p.m. summers, 3 p.m. winters). He advises us to wear boots.
I start reading and can\'t put this thing down. I am right there, "...about four inches above the top edge of most tourist maps of central London," according to Ebert, and stepping smartly along, accompanied by literary references at all stops. Apparently there\'s been a lot written about Hampstead, and Curley\'s read it all. Some he includes opportunely (I mean why NOT read a little "Ode To A Nightingale" while gazing at the cherry tree which offered Keats the shade under which to write it?) and some is right out of Nairn\'s London which is a favorite of Ebert\'s ("..the most passionate and acerbic guide every written about London"). Mostly it\'s directions written in bold print, "Turn right and walk along the street." Each page has a photograph to accompany the walking clues, along with some brief background info and the inevitable literary quotation. This is a book you could actually use while you are walking without the risk of running into things.
I simply must read aloud from The Perfect London Walk while my husband Tom, is trying to read his own book. I can\'t help snorting at the funny parts, insisting that he look at the picture of "the tree with a curious knob on its trunk, " and Karl Marx\'s enormous marble head on his Highgate Cemetery grave. Finally, out of sheer desperation, Tom reads it too and it briefly becomes part of our bedtime ritual to share bits and pieces. "Listen here, a quote by a writer named Ian Norrie after, \'Cross the causeway between the second pond and the bathing pond\' says, \'Dead bodies are not infrequently found floating....and are not uncommon anywhere on the Heath.\'-presumably he meant in Victorian times?" For all we know, Curley and Ebert are simply providing us with more useful observation.
We finish the book but it stays on my bedside table. Fall advances and we find ourselves serendipitously needing to schedule a week in England . I pack the little green book, just in case we have time to actually take the perfect London walk.
London in November can be miserable-wet, cold, chilblain producing weather. No problem, there are lots of warm, cozy pubs. This late autumn however brings pleasant days, cool nights. We have decided to spend Thanksgiving in East Sussex, exploring the South Downs but extend our London stay one more day-to take The Walk.
Anyone can tell we are out- of -towners in chic Hampstead. We do not have mobile phones glued to our ears and we are not wearing black. Setting off from our hotel, with its enormous Victorian windows and hissing radiators, we are taking Daniel Curley\'s advice. Backpacked, booted and camera-ed , we "turn right and walk across the street" noting things that stay the same and those that, since the 1986 book, are different. The pub on Haverstock Hill is no longer. The George Inn, has sadly given way to one of the new upscale Rat and Parrot chain. Tom, an amateur photographer who uses color film and has not (yet) indulged in any Fullers\' Best, hopes to document the same walk sites as Jack Lane, only clearer. His camera is equipped with automatic focus, and he gets a shot of The Rat and Parrot and of the Kentucky Fried Chicken which is just as Lane\'s picture shows it! The thrill has begun.
We head down the hill past the great crumbling wreck of St. Stephens Church, which shelters a child care center right under its iffy eastern wall and around the perimeter of the hideously sixties- modern Royal Free Hospital on Pond Street. I\'m quite taken with the large sign in the hospital\'s parking lot, politely asking us if we\'ve had an accident and including a detailed but helpful map of where to take our injured selves, presuming that we can both walk and see. We pass (and document) several other mentioned sites, greeting them as long-lost friends, so familiar are we with this route via armchair, three thousand miles away. Having now walked for at least four blocks, we feel we richly deserve a coffee break on the South End Road where we watch the pedestrian traffic coming in and out of the BritRail station
