Читать книгу Walking in London. Park, heath and waterside - 25 walks in London's green spaces онлайн

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The Capital Ring is a well-signposted London trail

This book asks you to invert your view of London – to see it not as a city for humans, but as a range of habitats for wildlife – and this is incontrovertibly best done on foot. A corollary of London’s greenness is that there are remarkable opportunities for the walker – one National Trail, six regional trails, and many more local ones, all taking advantage of over 600 miles of signed footpaths and countless extra miles of informal paths. You will from time to time encounter roads and houses – but on every one of these 25 walks, you will often wonder where all of these have gone.

That said, London is clearly a city that the hand of man has shaped in extreme ways, dating back now over two millennia. It would be foolish to say that even the off-the-beaten-track stretches, which you might visit with this book, are immune. Even the verdant open landscapes of the Lake District are highly artificial in their way, the result of centuries of tree-clearance for sheep pasture which, if mute economics were allowed to take its run, would soon become afforested again. Perhaps a better way of looking at things is to accept that no landscape of Britain – from the great hillscapes of the Scottish Highlands to the long level fields of Fenland – is free from human influence. The question is, where is the line drawn between influence and overt domination?