Basingstoke is a large town in north Hampshire, roughly halfway along the M3 motorway. It's simultaneously ancient and modern, a traditional market town selected by the London County Council for substantial postwar expansion which saw its population increase almost tenfold. It's now both a commuter hub and a commercial force in its own right, a sprawl of inoffensive estates where the car is king, and until this weekend was the largest town in southern England I'd never been to. Tourism is not its forte, let's be honest upfront, but there is sufficient stuff to see if you insist on making a day of it. [Visit Basingstoke][10 photos]
The best place to start is probably the Willis Museum at the top of the town, a collection founded by a former Mayor (whose name you can probably guess) which is now housed across three floors in the former Town Hall. Its claim to fame is that Jane Austen used to attend dances here in the previous building on site, the Mote Hall, and a statue of the great author was unveiled out front in the year of her bicentenary. Unfortunately this is also where the weekly market takes place which is why I found the poor woman corralled behind bins, a stack of empty fruit trays and a rack of potatoes. "You've come on the wrong day," said the adjacent fishmonger as he watched me struggling to take a photo, and I had to agree.
The Willis sensibly saves downstairs for its art gallery and cafe, while to find the rest you have to pass the talking Roman soldier and head upstairs. The town history bit is understandably mixed. Head way back and it's all antiquities and agriculture, with a particularly good sequence showing how poverty around the time of the Corn Laws led to a flight from fields to the town. The arrival of the railways brought more people to Basingstoke but it was that key London overspill decision which transformed everything, described at the time as "accelerated expansion... not a new town". I really liked the early 1960s living space lovingly arrayed with Ercol furniture, period tins, a dodgy gas stove and a teasmaid, even a copy of Living magazine, most of which I remembered from first time round. Be sure to grab a chunky Town Trail booklet if you want to explore the town centre properly, it's ace (or download a copy here).
Basingstoke's main street survives mainly intact, now pedestrianised but blessed by at least one former coaching inn and with the occasional heritage alleyway bearing off. The most consequential building is the long Edwardian emporium from which Thomas Burberry once traded. He opened his first drapers shop on Winchester Street in 1856, his business rapidly expanding after he chose to focus on resilient outerwear. The invention of gabardine in 1879 was a gamechanger, leading to Burberry providing trenchcoats for the British Army, jackets for Ernest Shackleton and ultimately naff tartan scarves for social climbers. These days Burberry House contains a Turkish restaurant and South Asian grocery and the nearest outlet is at Heathrow, but Thomas's heart remained in Basingstoke. I found his grave in the cemetery on Chapel Hill.
It's not a showy stone - the cemetery blurb describes it as rustic - tucked away by the outer wall where you'd never think to look unless nudged. In a retail coup the almost-neighbouring grave is that of Alfred Milward who brought shoe shops to hundreds of high streets and who also started out in Basingstoke trading from a cart. At the heart of the cemetery are the evocative ruins of the Holy Ghost Chapel, built as a burial place for Henry VIII's Chamberlain Lord Sandys and inexorably wrecked by generations of schoolboys using it as a playground. It's one of a handful of old churches around the town, chief of which is flinty St Michael's, another Tudor construction and the only Grade I listed building in the town centre. Most of its neighbours never outlived the 1960s.
A massively enlarged town needed a massively upgraded town centre, so it was controversially decided to replace almost everything between the station and the top of the town. The old streets became a brand new shopping centre, delivered sequentially as New Market Square, The Walks and The Malls, all carefully segregated from a slew of multi-storey car parks. The most recent addition is hospitality-focused Festival Place, completing a vast undercover retail playground you can walk round for ages. I thought those milling about reflected the overspill nature of the town and its modern service industries rather than the horsey rural crowd you might expect in other Hampshire towns. Such is the strength of the local economy there's hardly a closed unit in sight.
Buried beneath the shops are the headwaters of the tiny stream which carved the fairly obvious valley, the River Loddon which flows north from Basingstoke to join the Thames at Reading. It emerges somewhat artificially just beyond the roundabout and forms the spine of Eastrop Park, Basingstoke's favourite linear greenspace. Here I watched pedalboaters on the first lake, a heron eyeing up stupid fish in the second and two teenagers trying to net a few tiddlers where the river constricted again. Walk too far and you end up in very floodable Basing Fen, but from what I saw hardly anyone does that. The last stretch of the Basingstoke Canal once ran parallel to all this but that was filled in long ago, longer than you'd think, and the wharf at the end is now lost under the bus station.
Inner Basingstoke is conveniently encircled by a Ringway, and additionally sliced through the centre by another dual carriageway for impeccable road connections. These also provide access to a multiplicity of commercial districts added so that Basingstoke's workforce didn't all have to commute to London. Closest to the centre is Basing View, a thrusting business park filling the otherwise unliveable strip between the A3010 and the railway. It kicks off at a gargantuan Waitrose and rises past multiple anonymous office blocks which looked much emptier than the council might have hoped. At the far end is Fanum House where the AA has been based for 50 years but they've just agreed to move out... 200m down the road to Mountbatten House, a listed office block known locally as the Hanging Gardens of Basingstoke.
(no photo because I walked past without realising, dammit)
Basingstoke has two semi-outlying attractions, one very old and one pretending to be. The latter is Milestones Museum, a big grey shed full of period shops and vintage vehicles which describes itself as Hampshire's museum of living history. I've seen a fair few Victorian cobbled streets and bakers' vans in my time, and didn't feel the need to see their latest acquisition of 260 teddy bears, so saved £20 by skipping that. Meanwhile out east is Basing House, the largest private house in Tudor England, or rather what's left of it after Oliver Cromwell had his say. The Great Barn and the brick-lined fishponds remain in situ and the gardens are supposedly lovely, but I messed up by narrowly missing a very infrequent bus and that was another £10 saved.
What I did do is walk to another attraction a bit further out of town... past folk heading home with shopping, across a roaring dual carriageway, through streets all named after abbeys, past Saturday classes in a very 1980s church, through streets all named after islands, past peripheral newbuilds along the edge of a crescent haymeadow, past kids on mopeds roaring through woodland, along a grassy lane between undulating arable fields... really quite a lot further than I thought, and more of that tomorrow. Like I said, Basingstoke does indeed have sufficient stuff to see if you insist on making a day of it, and who'd have thought?
As my tour of London's Monopoly board reaches the halfway point, halfway through the year, let's go in hunt of Free Parking.
Parking in central London is difficult, deliberately so, and generally not free. Yellow lines are everywhere, invisible parking meters abound and even if you do find a space it's probably time limited. So the question I thought I'd ask is
How far out of central London do you have to go to find free parking?
n.b. I'm looking for genuinely free parking with no restrictions.
Not for residents only.
Not for customers only.
Not reserved for the disabled.
Not for charging an electric vehicle.
Not somewhere with a maximum length of stay.
Not somewhere that's only free between Xpm and Yam.
Proper free parking, like on the Monopoly board.
I decided it would be too difficult to scrutinise the whole of inner London in search of parking spaces so I settled on a slightly easier task. I started at the agreed centre of London, Trafalgar Square, which is itself on the Monopoly board. Then I walked north and kept walking north until I found somewhere you could park a car for free.
I invite you to guess how far I had to go before I found a road with no parking restrictions whatsoever. This map might help.
Westminster
Trafalgar Square, where I'm kicking off, is not somewhere you can park for free. As well as double yellow lines I also found signs saying 'No waiting at any time' and 'No loading at any time', the underlying message very much 'Please keep going and don't even think about stopping here'. And quite right too. Even in residential streets very close by (and there are some) the bays are reserved for residents 24 hours a day so you won't be slotting in there. Heading north it didn't take me long to find my first paid-for bay, this on St Martin's Lane opposite the Duke of York's Theatre. Every hour here costs somewhere between £4.62 and £9.24 according to emissions, this being Westminster council's charging rationale, with Parking Zone G1 having their joint most expensive tariff. Come after 6.30pm or before 8.30am or on Sunday and it's free, granted, but that doesn't count as free parking under my rules so I walked on.
Camden
By Seven Dials I was already in another borough with different parking rules, but not necessarily more lenient. The entirety of Camden is covered by Controlled Parking Zones (CPZ), with this part of Covent Garden being part of zone CA-C where the same 8.30am-6.30pm Mon-Sat restrictions apply. You can see why, these are narrow streets ill-suited to vehicles let alone parking them, or else urgent arteries in need of free flow. I was well past Russell Square before I saw my first single yellow lines, at Cartwright Gardens, these now in CA-D. Euston Road is of course a red route, then Midland Road (along the side of St Pancras) is bordered on both flanks by segregated cycleways so parking is no longer practical, let alone permitted. I walked on.
Progressing north the restricted hours ease very slightly - in zone CA-D (King's Cross) Saturday afternoons are free and in zone CA-G (Somers Town) Saturday mornings are too. But most streets are still 'No parking' or 'Permit holders only', perhaps with occasional paid-for bays which can be accessed via the RingGo app. I thought I'd finally found a free parking spot at the entrance to Cedar Way Industrial Estate where multiple cars and vans were squished along the kerb but sadly no. A fading sign on the verge warned this was private parking with a towaway fee of £250 for invalid vehicles plus £30 a day for storage, so I walked on.
Beyond the scuzzy end of Camley Street the proper patchwork of suburban streets finally began. Here I reached Camden Square (or CA-N as the council knows it) where the villas are dead smart and the roads are easily wide enough for parking down both sides. But again no, it's still all residents-only with occasional bays where weekday parking costs, and I was starting to wonder if free parking would ever manifest. It finally did outside the shops on York Way, an opportunity to pull into a special bay on the red route and nip into the florist, salon or takeaway without paying a penny. But only for an hour and then no return for two hours, and alas that doesn't count as proper free parking under my rules so I walked on.
Islington
Another borough meant new rules for parking and new hope. But no, the entirety of Islington is also covered by Controlled Parking Zones, every last acre, some of which have additional restrictions on events days at the Emirates. My northward journey thankfully dodged the latter, but zones IS-D and IS-W still have restrictions from breakfast to teatime every weekday on the rare occasions non-residential bays are provided. Beyond Tufnell Park Road I fortuitously found myself in IS-U, Islington's most lenient parking zone, a backwater of a dozen streets where organic veg drops are commonplace and Jeremy Corbyn posters adorn occasional windows. Here the restrictions apply only between 10am and noon five days a week, still just enough to dissuade all-day parking but not full-on free parking so I walked on.
I was now four miles from Trafalgar Square - it felt further - in the vicinity of Upper Holloway station. Another red route intruded, now with a 30 minute upper limit, then the grid of backstreets returned. These felt narrower, hence zone IS-P again had Saturday morning restrictions, then zone IS-Z ditched them again in favour of 10am-2pm weekdays instead. By now I was quite impressed by Islington's unwillingness to slap a blanket ban across the borough, instead matching hours to local conditions and easing off where the deterrent doesn't need to be so strong. I noted I was still walking through streets built before the motor car became a dominant force, i.e. nobody had a front garden large enough to turn over to parking, hence even on wide streets the restrictions continued. I walked on.
Haringey
I crossed into Outer London at the top of Crouch Hill and entered my fourth borough. Haringey display things more diligently by placing numerous parking signs at roughly car-window height along the length of most streets - you can't miss them. They're also a bit more lenient on the length of restrictions, at least here in the west of the borough away from the stringencies of Wood Green and the wider environs of Tottenham's stadium. The streets of Crouch End East (CE-A) only have restrictions from 10am-noon on weekday mornings while Crouch End West (CE-B) switches things round and does 2-4pm on weekday afternoons. It's only ten hours a week, the remaining 94% of the week being free parking, but it's still not 100% so I walked on.
And then finally, just beyond Priory Park, the CPZs finally stopped. Haringey has never felt the need to introduce parking restrictions across much of the northwest of the borough and I had at last entered this golden zone along Park Avenue South. I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't been specifically looking but the low-level signs had ceased and the kerbside was now a free-for-all. The short section outside the fire station still obviously had restrictions but not the rest, perhaps because many front gardens were now large enough for parking. The chief issue was that almost every space along the road was already taken so nobody turning up on spec would have been able to park, but notionally they could have done so I walked no further.
So in response to my original question, how far out of central London do you have to go to find free parking, my answer is 5½ miles. This is of course only applicable to the compass direction I chose to walk, which is crucial because had I been only a tad further east I'd have had to continue through Wood Green to the far side of the North Circular. No doubt some of you will know of free parking nearer to Trafalgar Square in other directions, spaces which anyone can turn up and use any time for as long as necessary. But I think what my two hour slog taught me is that of all the spaces on the Monopoly board, the only one you won't find near central London is Free Parking.
Sat 1: Kept bumping into Spanish and German football fans all over parts of London nowhere near where the Champions League final would be taking place. It's amazing how far a stadiumful spreads out. Dortmund had by far the better kit, and by far the worst outcome. Sun 2:Unblogged fact from my Brockley Three Peaks Walk: In 1905 One Tree Hill was laid out as a formal park with regimental rows of London Plane trees. These have since been interspersed with more typical woodland infill (sycamore, ash, oak, blackthorn), a combination it's thought is unique. Mon 3: The News At One on BBC1 has just been extended to an hour, ostensibly by adding another 15 minutes of national news after the local news. It's also relocated from London to Salford. The extra bit seemed quite lightweight, mostly padding, speculation and plugs, and the run-up to the local segment now feels much the same. I kept watching for a week but it didn't improve, it just felt like costcutting, so after many years of lunchtiming I think I'll be switching to the evening bulletins instead. Tue 4: Even after all these years, I see they're still releasing the work I did. Maybe that's why they didn't need me any more. Wed 5: The big hilltop Olympic rings in the Olympic Park always used to be one-sided. I hadn't noticed this before but they're now coloured on both sides. Apparently a discussion was held to decide whether the sequence of colours should be backwards or forwards, and thankfully the correct option won.
Thu 6: In Crayford I found five places I'd never crossed the Greater London boundary before, one with a coal tax post, and you'll be pleased to realise I restrained myself and didn't blog about them. Fri 7: In my quest to spot all the numberplate letter pairs, I've seen another four this month bringing my total to 513 out of 519. Yesterday I saw XW on a Mercedes in Crayford, and today I saw XG in Hainault and RL on a Ford Fiesta outside a surgery in Gants Hill, meaning it's taken just over six months to get the X's and R's done. FYI the pairs I've yet to see are NR, UE/UT/UV and VH/VJ. Sat 8: I was a bit surprised when my westbound District line train pulled in at the middle platform at Tower Hill. I knew they'd removed the buffers and reconnected the tracks, but I didn't realise trains occasionally used them. n.b. the normal platform contained an Out of Service train. Sun 9: Went for a ride on an 74 year-old RT as part of the London Bus Museum's excellent 406 Heritage Running Day. All the buses leaving Kingston were rammed. Driver really struggled getting up Epsom Downs so we spent 10 minutes parked up overlooking the racecourse while the engine stopped steaming. Conductor had to nip off at Tadworth to buy 6 litres of water. Arrived at Redhill 51 minutes late.
Mon 10: Today Bin Days are changing across Newham. It's not just different days, it's also a new insistence that bins must be placed at the edge of your property or they won't be collected, and that's another weekly faff you can blame on budget-squeezing. Tue 11: I was sitting on the tram in New Addington when a bloke and a large slobbery dog boarded and sat behind me. I was somewhat startled when the dog's head appeared over my shoulder. Moved elsewhere sharpish. Wed 12: The listed gents conveniences beneath the Gladstone statue at Bow Church continue to deteriorate. The railings have been bust even more, probably after being hit by a vehicle, and the broken listed bollard has been rolled above the staircase so risks falling and smashing. As a sticking plaster it's all now been surrounded with cones and orange barriers, but someone needs to fund repairs fairly soon or this Victorian delight risks decaying beyond hope of resurrection.
Thu 13: Sometimes people you knew 20 years ago but fell off your radar fall back onto your radar again suddenly and without announcement, and that's nice. Hi Chris. Fri 14: The demolition team have now moved into the second half of Robin Hood Gardens, the brutalist estate by the Blackwall Tunnel Approach. The building looks fairly intact for now, despite the noise, but its months are numbered. Sat 15: In my local corner shop the normal-sized packets of crisps, Wotsits, Quavers, Skips, etc are all pre-printed with a price of £1.25. I suspect this is to stop shops overcharging but it seems wildly overpriced to me, especially compared to supermarket multipacks. Plan ahead! Sun 16: The Great Exhibition Road Festival in South Kensington was extensive and looked absolutely brilliant fun if you were a curious child (which I no longer am, but this is not a criticism). Also I got to walk right to the back of Imperial College for the first time, and it's enormous.
Mon 17: The list of monthly closing times on the gates of Greenwich Park includes March 19.00 (20.00 from start of BST) and October 19.00 (18.00 from end of BST)... and I would definitely have listed them as "from end of GMT" and "from start of GMT" instead. Tue 18: Thanks for your recommendation to read Laurie Lee's As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning as part of my classic A-Z library book odyssey. Unfortunately it wasn't in stock so I borrowed Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively instead and that was affectingly brilliant. Today I swapped it for On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (and wow, premature ejaculation has never been so dramatic). Wed 19: The tram network now has one of those nice "Out and about" posters (in conjunction with Time Out). Of the ten highlighted locations five are west of Croydon town centre, four are in the town centre and only one is to the east (Lloyd Park), suggesting Time Out doesn't think much of New Addington, Elmers End and Beckenham. Thu 20: My bank emailed to say they were making three of my bank accounts paper-free. I rang back to request they didn't, and was told I had to wait until after they'd done it and only then I could request them to be switched back. B'stards. Fri 21: Another thing I spotted before the Taylor Swift concert at Wembley was a mass gathering of crowd control operatives, each donning their numbered orange or pink tabard and clutching a brown paper bag containing a bottle of water and their food rations for the day. It's not all sparkly glamour.
Sat 22: Why in Doctor Who finales does Russell T Davies always destroy the universe only to magically bring everyone back with an improbable act of faith and emotion? Every time. Still, it's been a great series compared to some recent ones, and Ncuti is just magnetic. Sun 23: Was very surprised to wake up and find the sun shining in through my bedroom blind because it never normally does that. It did today because a) the sun's at its highest in solstice week b) I don't normally sleep that late. Mon 24: Spotted travel journalist Simon Calder in a coffee shop near Waterloo. He was very on brand, wearing a cycle helmet and carrying a Brompton. Tue 25: I discovered a mysterious tweet from a Chinese blogger which was sending thousands of clickers through to my blog. After translation the text said "I found an awesome blog that has been updated almost daily since 2002. The style of the blog still looks like it was in 2002, but every picture posted in it is actually very beautiful." I'd disagree that it's every photo, but thanks laixintao!
Wed 26: Got off the bus in Totteridge and walked down the ridge in dazzling heat through hay meadows alive with butterflies, right down to the trickly Dollis Brook, and there was absolutely nobody else around and it was glorious. Peak summer can be so fleeting. Thu 27: The latest show BestMate is treating me to, in weekly streaming chunks, is Ted Lasso. It's not bad for a show about football - think Ned Flanders meets Footballers Wives - and I like how it's set within a small chunk of Richmond. What I can't take seriously is every time they mention it's the end of the 2020 Premier League season because that's very much not how it played out. Fri 28: Westfield Avenue E20 (between the Park and the shops) is being seriously dug up at present, this to a) improve the cycling experience b) improve the pedestrian experience c) add extra pedestrian crossings d) add more greenery e) move the bus stops to more desirable locations. Good news, and yet all I can think is "How did they get it so wrong just 12 years ago?" Sat 29: Route 211 has finally been permanently diverted from Waterloo to Battersea Power Station. The Men Who Change Tiles have done their job and The Men Who Change Timetables have done theirs, but The Developers Who Change The Map Online have messed up spectacularly, combining old and new in an improbable ultra-zigzag mess.
Sun 30: Cost of ticket to Glastonbury = £355. Cost of 3 days of TV licence = £1.39. I have got phenomenal value out of my £1.39 over this weekend (plus I was much closer to a fridge, a sofa and a flushing toilet).
