Seven other London boroughs touch Wandsworth, which is a total no other borough can beat. See map. Yesterday I went to all seven (but without going to seven different locations).
n.b. Brent and Lambeth also touch seven other London boroughs, as does the City of London if you're up for counting that, but no borough touches eight.
1) Lambeth
The closest Wandsworth gets to central London is here at Vauxhall, at the southwestern tip of the gyratory where Nine Elms Lane meets Wandsworth Road. Only the quadrant straight ahead is in Wandsworth, the rest is in Lambeth, with the doubledecker bus approximately at the switchover point. I'm standing on the godforsaken wilderness of Vauxhall Island beneath the arched advertising screens that exist to suggest to waiting drivers which radio station they ought to be listening to. It's easy to wander onto the grass but less easy to wander off because all the approved crossing points are elsewhere, at least until the developers get their way and destroy the bus station so they can build build build. They've already done that on the other prongs, originally with Saint George Wharf whose owl-like rooftops now look positively attractive compared to developments elsewhere. Nine Elms is increasingly a forest of slender brick-and steel-coated towers of limited architectural merit flogged to incomers who think a 49th floor hutch in zone 1 is the height of luxury. The tip of Wandsworth is currently a construction site but will include a 203-bed Park Hyatt hotel and behind that a rash of pretentious thrusting highrises called One Thames City (despite not actually being beside the river). "A home for Global Connoisseurs" my arse, this is London very much not for Londoners.
2) Westminster
3) Kensington & Chelsea
Let's have two adjacent boroughs for the price of one. This is Chelsea Bridge, the southern half of which is in Wandsworth and the northern half of which is split between Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea. It's not a complete coincidence that the boundary's here because this used to be a ford before it was a bridge. Originally this was Victoria Bridge, opened by Her Maj in 1858, but that wasn't especially well constructed and got replaced in the 1930s. The new Chelsea Bridge was Britain's first self-anchored suspension bridge, as well as being wider to help the flow of traffic, and was opened in Coronation week by the lesser personage of the Prime Minister of Canada. It's not the prettiest of bridges close up, just a deck with a couple of supported cables and a lot of steelwork with peeling white paint. The pavements are completely segregated from the roadway so it's not possible to walk to the midpoint (which is just this side of the 20mph speed limit circles). Cross here for the Chelsea Flower Show, Battersea Park or the increasingly aberrant Power Station (which is getting closer and closer to reopening).
4) Hammersmith & Fulham
And this is Putney Bridge. It's much older than Chelsea, both in when it was first built (1729) and when it was replaced (1886), and boasts five stone arches. This time you can wander into the road if you so wish but that's not recommended because it's a much busier crossing. The bridge is lit by gold-topped lamps with scalloped detail and a whirl of seven tiny shields, plus some rather more modern parking restrictions underneath. Find the lamp in the middle of the bridge and there are two extras - an Ordnance Survey benchmark and a plaque marking the dividing line between F.P (Fulham Parish) and P.P. (Putney Parish). The two parish churches concerned are plainly visible by the riverside. I turned up at very low tide so got to admire a lot of river bed and to watch a woman picking over some rarely exposed mud, all while dodging out of the way of some much better dressed locals.
5) Richmond
6) Kingston
Welcome to Richmond Park, specifically the southeast corner where the Beverley Brook flows in through a grating. This does its job well, keeping a slew of bottles, boards and boxes at bay, not to mention at least six footballs. While they stay on the other side they're Wandsworth's responsibility, but should they drift through they enter Richmond and the auspices of the Royal Parks. Meanwhile the house on the right is the last house in Kingston, and one of its rear fenceposts marks the actual borough triple point. The Robin Hood Gate is close by, where joggers check their watches, weekend ramblers splay out into open heathland and staff at Stag Lane Stables help small children onto the backs of Shetland ponies. You wouldn't normally head over into this corner except to cross the footbridge and exit towards a half-mile footpath hemmed in behind a golf course. This eventually emerges at the Chohole Gate which is so far away that a sign on the gate warns you to take careful note of park closing times lest you get locked in. All in all, barely borderline bucolic.
6) Kingston (again)
7) Merton
It's not even half a mile upstream to my final triple point, which again is beside the Beverley Brook. By this point we've passed the A3 and the playing fields (and the team of specialists trying to clear up an oil spill with floating barrages) and entered deep woodland. You'd probably call it Wimbledon Common but technically it could also be Putney Heath, indeed there's an administrative argument that this might be the dividing line between the two. I wasn't sure I'd be able to locate the precise spot, even with OpenStreetMap open on my phone, but in the end I needn't have worried because someone kindly marked it with a boundary stone in 1861. Only the year is legible, that and the word Parish on one flank, but not specifically which parish it might have been. In this photo I'm standing in modern Wandsworth with Merton behind the stone on the left and Kingston across the river on the right. I found bluebells over there, but on this side just a stream of jolly dogwalkers, a lot of excitable nest-builders and a track that's usually mud. I also reflected on how far I'd travelled across Wandsworth, from a thrusting 21st century megalopolis to a preserved sylvan backwater - the opposite points of a borough of great contrasts.
