Capital Ring Section 01

Woolwich to Falconwood 26th November 2025

6.2 miles plus 1.0 miles of station links. Total = 7.2 miles (11.6 km).

I finally completed the London Loop path back in September and now want a new project to get me out and about and walking. Needs to be something that can be done in sections and accessible by public transport. So the logical choice is the Loop’s “little brother”, the Capital Ring.

Capital Ring Overview Map (Inner London Ramblers)

The Capital Ring is 78 miles (126km) long and divided into 15 sections. It’s an urban walk in a smaller and more central loop around London than the London Loop, staying within 10 miles of the Houses of Parliament. Opened in 2005, it crosses the Thames at Richmond in the West and Woolwich in the East and starts and finishes (if you do it in order) at the southern portal of the Woolwich Foot Tunnel. The Inner London Ramblers’ walking guides are available to download at

Inner London Ramblers Capital Ring Guides

I was going to leave it until the Spring to start, with longer days but the sun came out and having waited in for a parcel I reckoned that today was as good a time to begin as any and I could still get to Woolwich and complete the first section by around sunset. The Jubilee Line had other ideas though and I arrived at Woolwich Station a good half hour later than planned. This was to prove less than ideal later on.

From the station I walked to Woolwich Arsenal Pier and then left along the Thames to the official section start at the Woolwich Foot Tunnel.

I carried on upstream beside the river, crossing the Woolwich Ferry approach road and several inlets and dry docks with fine views across the river to the Tate & Lyle Sugar Refinery and aircraft taking off from London City Airport. It was fresh and clear with bright sunshine and I quickly dispensed with my unnecessary woolly hat.

From the raised walkway by the river I could see the wreck of the MV Royal Iris lying partially sunk and burnt out on a mud bank close to Barrier Gardens Pier. A sad fate for the Mersey Ferry of the song.

At the end of the raised walkway I turned inland and then right down Bowater Road, a long canyon between multi-storey industrial buildings. Unprepossessing at first sight this industrial estate was of some interest to this ex-telecoms engineer since it is the site of the former Siemens Brothers Telegraph Works. Between 1863 and 1968 it produced telegraph and telephone cables, electrical equipment, and Strowger telephone exchange equipment, some of which I’ve no doubt I worked on. A lot of the buildings are now part of London’s largest complex of artists’ studios, Thames-Side Studios.

After Bowater Road I made a short diversion to the riverside to see the Thames Barrier. It isn’t strictly on the Capital Ring but there was a sign pointing that way that promised Toilets. Surprisingly they were actually open. I don’t ignore an open toilet on a walk. Also a good view of the barrier in the sunshine.

Returning from the riverside i passed through the strip of green beside the school and crossed Woolwich Road into Maryon Park. I crossed the railway on a bridge between two tunnel portals and into the recreation area. The sun was now dropping behind the trees but since there was still frost on the grass obviously hadn’t risen much above them all day. It was a long climb up the 115 steps out of Maryon Park to cross Thorntree Road and enter Maryon Wilson Park. I headed south passing between the Deer enclosure and the children’s zoo then along a tarmac path through the wooded park parallel to a stream. It was prime dog walking and parakeet territory.

Emerging from the woods opposite Charlton Park Academy I crossed the road, turned right and left through a gate in the wall to reach Charlton Park itself. After passing the cafe (tempting but remaining daylight time was becoming short) the route then went round three sides of the playing fields, passing on the way the Jacobean Charton House built in 1612 for Sir Adam Newton, before exiting the park through a gateway to Charlton Park Lane.

A brief stretch of urban residential walking, weaving around the wheely bins in Inigo Jones Road brought me to Hornfair Park. Can you see a pattern developing here on the Capital Ring route? I passed the heavily fenced BMX track, exited the park through a small gate in the very corner of the fence and crossed Stadium Road onto Woolwich Common. This was the first bit of unsurfaced footpath so far, thankfully still firm under foot. Crossing the common there were far reaching views to the North across Woolwich and Beckton and in the far distance fields in Essex.

On the far side of the common I regained the tarmac of Academy Road and crossed its busy junction with Shooters Hill, which actually has no pedestrian crossings at the traffic lights so you have to take your chances. Bearing off across the grass south of Shooters Hill and then into Castle Wood I followed a winding trail uphill through the trees then along the driveway to Severndroog Castle. This 70 feet high triangular castle was built in 1784 by the widow of local landowner Commodore Sir William James. It’s a great and eccentric memorial for a man who was employed by the East India Company to suppress pirates. It’s open on Sundays, today was Wednesday but any story is improved by the inclusion of pirates. Arr!

The other side of the castle I descended the 72 steps through the rose garden to the accompaniment of many loud parakeets and with a fine view to the South West.

At the bottom of the rose garden I turned left and had an even better view of the setting sun in the South West. I was definitely losing the light. I carried on into Jack Wood following the waymarker posts to a clearing by the remnants of Jackwood House, past the house’s rose garden, downhill through the increasingly gloomy woods then up again to emerge by Oxleas Wood cafe. Which had just closed. At least the toilets were still open. I sat on a bench in front of the cafe admiring the view and since my destination was not far away ate the Twix I’d been carrying in my back pack. Although I wasn’t feeling cold the Twix was almost frozen, to the point that even the caramel bit was crunchy!

There was just enough light to follow the track through Oxleas Wood and down to Rochester Way where the Ring does a loop through Shepherdleas Wood to reach the end at Falconwood Station. I followed the path into the woods a short way before deciding that it was a bad idea since it was fully dark now and if I went arse over tit in the woods I could be there for the rest of my life.

I backtracked and walked down Rochester way to the station instead. I’ll do that loop through Shepherdleas Wood when I start Section 2.

I’m counting that as Capital Ring Section 1 ✅

Flickr Album for Capital Ring Section 1 (46 photos)

Update.

Err, yes, it seems to have been a while since I updated this blog. 😳

It’s not that I haven’t done anything since September 15th, just that I haven’t got my arse into gear and written anything about it. So a few mini entries to fill the yawning gap in content.

Open House London 

18th September

I didn’t get to visit anything big and grand this year but did manage a few interesting smaller exhibitions. First was “Frames of Reference” at Pushkin House, 5A Bloomsbury Square, WC1A 2TA. This is an arts and cultural centre focussing on Russia and the former Soviet Bloc countries. They presented a display of “‘Thaw-era’ photographs that, unlike the staged assemblages of socialist realism, offer a more humanistic vision into everyday life in the USSR.” Next up I went to the People’s Museum in Somers Town, 52 Phoenix Road, NW1 1ES, a small space (single shop unit sized) packed with all sorts of interesting stuff from the area, particularly the Ossulston Estate, a prime example of pre-war Social housing in which it is located. Every part of the space is used with posters, photo albums, videos, and a recreated living room with lots of things you’d maybe recognise from your parents or grandparents homes. The volunteers were lovely. Of the visits I made this day I enjoyed this one the most. 

 

From Somers Town to Soho and the De Lane Lea Studios at 75 Dean Street. I’ve long been fascinated by Soho so couldn’t pass up “Timelines: 300 years of Soho” at the former Warner Bros. Sound Studio. The exhibition space was possibly smaller than that at the People’s Museum but they’d gathered some good artefacts to display “The People, The Places, The Pulse” of the West End’s urban village. My next stop was far to the west, on the way home I dropped in to Hounslow Library at 7 Bath Road for the London Borough of Hounslow 60th Anniversary Exhibition. It took some finding on the first floor and was only a display of a couple of dozen photos taken around the borough in 1965 and with contemporary views with which to compare them but this is (or rather was) my “manor” so had to take a look.

Cardiff Bay

October 6th

I needed a getaway so braved the trains and had a few days in South Wales. I’d spent an afternoon in Cardiff Bay more years ago than I’d like to count but never stayed there. Booked the Premier Inn who then emailed to say that my sea view would more likely be the inside of their builder’s scaffolding so I cancelled and rebooked at the Future Inn, which was fine if slightly further to walk to the waterfront. 

And yes, Torchwood 😀

 

I arrived a bit later than scheduled because of course GWR fucked up but the room was huge and the weather was if not sunny at least not raining. Yes, in Wales, who’d have thought it. 

 

The following day I took a walk out across the Cardiff Barrage and got a bit carried away and ended up on Penarth Pier. 

 

It was a nice walk though and easy to get the train back. The weather was better the next day so I got a train to Caerfilli and visited the huge castle. It’s a good one, well presented and takes a good while to get around. The sun came out (yes, in Wales) and I even went full tourist and bought a commemorative tee-shirt - they even had my size. 

 

The day after that I came home with 156 photos to sort through and a Delay Repay claim to submit. It was a good getaway.

Cardiff Trip Photo Album on Flickr 

The rest of the month was taken up with days out locally and to the coast because I find it hard to resist going to the seaside if it’s sunny. After a meeting in Acton I caught the District Line to Cannon Street and then went for an early evening stroll along the north bank of the Thames, ending with a pint in The Grapes in Limehouse, as you do. 

No sign of Gandalf. 

Steve Knightley and The Winter Yards Band

November 1st

I intended to go to more music gigs this year. I haven’t done very well at that but managed to go and see Steve Knightley at the Haymarket in Basingstoke. This was part of his post-Show Of Hands solo tour with a new band. It was of course an excellent evening and one where the support act, True Foxes, was as good as the main act. (They also provide vocals for Steve and the Winter Yards Band.) Both are well worth seeking out to see live although when not touring with Steve True Foxes are mostly to be found near their native Cornwall. Check out their website.

Computer touching - experiments with GhostBSD

My main desktop and travelling laptop both run Xubuntu. I like the simplicity of the XFCE desktop, no fancy bells and whistles that I don’t need and runs well on older machinery. I’d been playing about with GhostBSD on an old Packard Bell but it was a bit painful especially as it didn’t have a working battery. To find out what it was like on something that wasn’t basically a wreck (which also weighed a ton!) I splashed out on a refurbished laptop, a Lenovo Thinkpad L470. It’s hard to go wrong with a Thinkpad, especially at under £100. It even has the extra capacity battery which lifts the back of the keyboard up and makes it quite comfortable to type on. Essentially this is the same type of laptop as the last one I had at work but without Windows 10 and BT’s corporate crapware which makes it quite a nice device. Indeed I’m using it to type this blog post.

Not however running BSD. It was an interesting experiment, trying out an alternative OS. I had some fun and games installing it which turned out to be something to do with using Ventoy to create the bootable USB stick. Re-creating the USB stick using old fashioned CLI tools solved that. The OS booted quite quickly and ran OK. It was a little like using Linux ten years ago though. A major pain was WiFi. It all connected OK but only at 2.4 GHz, no drivers are available for 5 GHz so it was rather sluggish. More than I’d expect even for 2.4GHz to be honest. Not all the software that I wanted was available, in particular my preferred cross-platform password manager Enpass. I couldn’t find a way to export from Enpass to KeepassXC that worked and manually transferring passwords etc. got old quite quickly. The standard desktop on GhostBSD is MATE, which is OK once you find your way around it. What isn’t OK is when the taskbars/menus randomly vanish and you have to poke about blindly to restart the Caja file manager to get them back. In the end I decided that GhostBSD is an interesting and light weight OS but you need a lot of enthusiasm to run it as a daily and I don’t quite reach that level of geekery. So this laptop is now running Linux Mint (the XFCE version of course) which works much better. I’m going to see if it would be OK as a Snap-free OS to replace Xubuntu on my other machines although so far I’ve found little to favour one over the other.

...and finally

It’s that time of year again, roll on January. I’ll try not to leave it so long before the next blog post. 😉