UNTRODDEN LONDON TQ4461/TQ4562: Hazelwood(Bromley)
The village of Hazelwood is not widely known, nor often visited, nor easily reached. It hugs a country lane between Orpington and Cudham, just south of Green Street Green, on the southeastern edge of Bromley. Its Wikipedia article consists of two sentences, in which case I've already written more. It's served by TfL's least frequent buses, the alternatingly loopy R5 and R10, which offer a direct trip to Orpington only every 2½ hours. I missed one so got to walk there instead, which I could have done down the aforementioned country lane but that's a mile of pavementless danger so I did what the locals do and crossed the fields. The path's not clearly signed, you have to know it exists on the other side of the hedge and then weave along the furrowed edge for up to 20 minutes until you come to the right gap to duck back onto the road. Pretty much everyone in Hazelwood has a car.
At first glance Hazelwood is a long chain of bungalows and unfussy detached homes, all somewhat off plan, facing out across the lane towards one field or another. It does go on a bit, past lots of little suburban fiefdoms with either perfect topiary or scrappy paving. But find the postbox, which is currently bedecked with a prizewinning crocheted topper, and here an unmade lane cuts back to a compact estate of even more varied residences splayed out along the valley bottom. No prizes for guessing that the wood beyond the last row of motley houses is called Hazel Wood. Nothing so useful as a shop exists, and the village hall noticeboard contains no evidence that any activities take place within. If you live in Hazelwood you're very much on your own, as I was thinking while I dodged past the fiftieth front garden with no pavement out front. For London it's both an outlier and an oddity.
But I was really here to gain access to the last trio of London's 1km×1km grid squares I'd never been to. An hour's hike around some fields and I'd have visited the lot...
UNVISITED LONDON TQ4661/TQ4561/TQ4560: Norsted Manor Farm/Snag Farm/Mace Farm
Some London grid squares contain loads of stuff (e.g. Whitehall, 10 Downing Street, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, Lambeth Palace, the Florence Nightingale Museum, St Thomas's Hospital, the London Eye, Waterloo station, Shrek's Adventure) and some contain pretty much nothing of any consequence. Welcome to three of the latter. I can offer you fields and woods, and more fields and more woods, and two working farms and a few houses, and nothing of any long term consequence. It's very pleasant for an undulating rural walk, however, especially if you don't want to meet anyone and quite like sheep.
TQ4661 is best approached uphill from Pratts Bottom, London's most amusingly-named village. The square's connected enough that it has a rusting fingerpost at the junction of three lanes, but remote enough that it's mostly populated by ewes and lambs. Some of these may still be owned by Fairtrough Farm, whose barn has been converted into an overly grand design ideal for anyone who doesn't like windows. But the true agricultural powerhouse hereabouts is reached up a separate driveway emblazoned with notices designed to brush you off - Private Drive, No Through Road, Caution Police Dogs Training, Slow Down This Is Not Brands Hatch. Welcome to Norsted Manor Farm, or rather not very welcome at all.
My thanks to the reader who three months ago advised me to glance off the drive "for fantastic views of London to the north". A gap between the trees on the horizon more than delivered, with a City cluster to the left and a very separate Docklands cluster to the right... if very small and very grey and entirely beyond the capability of my smartphone camera to capture. The first building along the drive was a chimneyed farmhouse, which looked old enough to be listed but isn't, and whose fence mixed friendly flowerboxes with warnings about alsatians.
Further along were a lookout masquerading as the farm's office, a number of keypadded gates and several sealed-off sheds for doing things to sheep. A man on a mower gleefully pointed me down towards the continuation of the path, partly because it wasn't obvious but mainly to see the back of me. And how pleased I was to be back out into, ooh, a lovely dip of open downland seeded with wildflowers and native grasses. It would've been all the nicer had there not been a single bungalow perched at the top of the valley, its patio doors and conservatory carefully oriented to lord it over all of this, and what a glorious view to wake up to.
TQ4561 grazes a few homes in Hazelwood but not quite the main road, which dramatically reduces your chance of ever having been here. You can only drive here by following Snag Lane, a single tracker serving five houses which eventually fades out into a ridgetop byway. Here I met two gardeners doing up the front of Rose Cottage, a horse with youthful rider, a BT Openreach engineer who might have been fixing poles or might just have stopped for lunch, and that was it for all further human contact.
A bridleway headed off up the slope, never quite straight, and with the feel of a woody lane that's been here long before the car was invented. Two of Bromley's excellent circular walks come this way - the Cudham and the Green Street Green - of which I think I'd recommend the former (although you'd need to walk both to tick off all three grid squares).
On the first brow a distant panorama briefly opened up, which I'm pretty sure contained Orpington and perhaps Dartford and maybe Romford. The path soon became more of a chalky furrow, then dipped into a gully to meet the only other bridleway hereabouts. I bore off to follow a shortcut across a harvested field and disturbed two muntjac deer who ran startled from a spinney. This is not your average London day out, and all the better for it.
TQ4560 also contains one road, but this time a dead end leading to a farm so you almost certainly haven't driven up here either. A short row of cottages by the entrance to the farmyard boosts the local population to maybe double figures. The grid square's sole public footpath heads off between paddocks towards the delightfully-named Kangles Wood, a thin stripe of trees along the west-facing slope of a chalk-drained dry valley. The field on the far side is large and littered with telltale droppings, thus guarded by a fading sign warning "Dogs worrying sheep may be shot".
I'd long looked at Newyears Wood on an OS map, right on the very edge of London, and wondered if it might make for a good 1st January blogpost. Instead I found it somewhat malevolent, a thick canopy shielding a dark thrust of spindly trunks, plus a single unnatural clearing unable to decide whether it wanted to grow back as trees or bushes. It looks a lot prettier in May with bluebells. As for New Years Cottage at the end of the path, its outdoor menagerie included a pig, a cockerel and two manically barking dogs unused to anyone stumbling into the vicinity... but that was ultra-marginally in Kent so skippable for current purposes (and don't expect any seasonal bloggage either).
This photo shows the chalky path where I first crossed from TQ4561 into TQ4560, and in doing so finally stepped into my last unvisited grid square. I confess to giving out a little yelp of joy upon achieving my goal, which was fine because there definitely wasn't another human being within any kind of listening distance. Hardly anyone comes out here, just like hardly anyone goes to Bayhurst Wood in Hillingdon, Cockmannings near Orpington, Fen Lane in North Ockendon AND Hainault Farm near Marks Gate.
By my calculations there are 1463 1km×1km grid squares within Greater London, and I may be the only person who's ever been to all of them. 🟥=0
