The latest cartographic project from Footways London is a walking map of Hackney. It's beautifully produced, it covers the entire borough (and surrounding area) and is currently free.
Footways maps generally start out free and then either go paid for or out of stock, so getting in early pays dividends. I picked up my copy at Hackney Museum where the lady at the desk told me I could take as many as I liked. This seemed a peculiar way to be distributing a valuable resource, but it's also what the bloke at City Hall told me last year when I went in to pick up a London Nature Trail so maybe they just like getting rid of them.
The Footways network consists of specially-selected streets and backways chosen to be appealing and accessible, not necessarily direct. They're depicted on the map as vibrant pinky-orange lines, a bit like the capillaries of a salmon pulsing across the borough, tempting you to follow and explore. Sticking to the routes shown is much easier with a printed map than the online version, which has a habit of resetting, but there's nothing stopping you taking an alternative path where the routes don't quite go the way you want.
I used the summary map on the back to plan a very rough route from Hackney Central to Hackney Wick via Dalston, Clapton and Homerton - estimated duration 1½ hours - then used the detailed map to pick a precise route on the ground. It proved impressively simple to follow because all the street names are clearly marked.
I'd walked round Hackney repeatedly over lockdown so thought I knew the area well, but my Footways route still took me down five roads I'd never been down before. One was Sylvester Path behind the Hackney Empire, place of interest number 11 on the map, and another led to a compound packed with TV trucks filming something at the Kingsland Shopping Centre.
On my journey I also passed a Windrush sculpture, a caffeinated hipsterjoint, much colourful graffiti, an ill-advised woolly hat, multiple charming Victorian terraces, a discarded mattress, several mosaics, a man pushing chunks of halal carcass in a shopping trolley, a half-frozen pond, a woman hurling bread at pigeons, a heck of a lot of delivery vans, a genuine NE postcode sign, a startlingly bricky row of modern social housing, five pubs, a concrete crucifix, a giant floppy palm, a patch of muddy woodland and a narrowboat dressed up as a Viking longboat. So that was fun.
I needn't tell you precisely where I went, that's not the point of the Footways project, it's more a good excuse to get out and explore lesser-known routes from A to B. I'd also say that Hackney is ideally suited to such a map, its dense network of attractive streets making it one of London's most walkable boroughs. But if you do head down to the museum to pick up a map, please don't take them all because someone else is very likely to want a copy too.
