One year on, an update about my lockdown boundary.
When restrictions were first imposed I restricted my horizons to a narrow strip containing the Olympic Park. By May I still hadn't ventured more than two miles from home inside a rectangle two and a half miles long and one mile wide. By July I'd extended my reach to three miles from home inside a rectangle five miles deep and three and a half miles wide. By late summer I was still keeping within the three mile limit but now treating it more like a circle than a rectangle. During the autumn I nudged up to four miles, in places, and during the winter I've been filling in the gaps. It now looks like this.
It's like a big circle but with the Thames chopping off the bottom part, and the radius of that circle is pretty much exactly four miles. This is a distance that I can comfortably walk, there and back, in three or so hours. The boundary bulges out as far as five miles to the west, because I've made it to the West End a few times, but mostly we're talking four. Peripheral locations include Islington, Stoke Newington, Walthamstow and Wanstead. That annoyingly large indentation on the northeast edge is the City of London Cemetery which only has one unlocked gate.
I'm aware there's nothing stopping me going further, indeed this isn't meant to be a saintliness competition. Travel for exercise has never been legally restricted, and for much of the last year use of public transport has been entirely acceptable. But I haven't needed to go anywhere, so have chosen not to, and have instead focused on exploring the area within walking distance of home.
My current lockdown boundary in fact covers 37 square miles and is home to at least a million people. It's only 6% of the area of Greater London but it does contain a lot of the more interesting bits. It's not a bad place to have been confined, as evidenced by the fact I've walked over 3000 miles since last March while exploring it.
I'd also like to praise my accidental strategy of starting the year within a very small area and gradually broadening out. Had I taken on the whole 37 square miles from day 1 I'd be bored by now, but instead I've always had a boundary to push, a new frontier to explore, which has helped keep things interesting. Last summer Dalston and Forest Gate seemed impossibly exotic but now they're commonplace and my eye's on Holloway and South Woodford instead. I might even try pushing on to Barking, Tottenham Hale and King's Cross, just to be able to bring you somewhere new.
