As the 47th US President is inaugurated, join me for a walk down Trumpers Way over Trumpers Crossing via Trumpers Field to Trumpers Halt.
Today we're in South Hanwell about halfway between Hanwell and Boston Manor stations. Trumpers Way begins on Boston Road amid a cluster of low level shops, garages and paint suppliers. Look for the Boston Manor Hotel on the corner, a self-avowed budget hotel in a heavily-converted building of the kind you often find on the Heathrow fringes. I'd suggest there are far better locations for your banqueting requirements but you might be interested to know that their cheapest single room currently costs less than £40 a night. The road's first peculiarity is that Trumpers Way isn't residential even though the streets to either side are, with no trickle-through pedestrian access, and the second peculiarity is that most of the traffic emerging up the lane is vans, trucks and articulated lorries. This is because it was originally a minor lane leading down to the canalside but these days it heads somewhere a lot more industrial.
The first outpost of scrap metal dealers and motor repair businesses has recently been swept away behind a graffitied hoarding and awaits rebirth as 213 new homes. These two acres of grubby brownfield have been cynically branded Elthorne Village, so I'd strongly encourage prospective buyers to visit now to experience how much of a rural idyll it never was. The adjacent mixed-use development at least had the guts to call itself Broads Foundry. Across the road expect to find a row of long-distance trucks and the run-down HQ of the 7th Hanwell Scout Group, whose £390K rebuilding campaign is still at the £72,000 stage, even five years on, according to the red line on the thermometer outside. More pleasantly a path wends off into the lower end of Elthorne Park, this the wilder, squelchier end rather than the ornamental precision at the upper end.
Trumpers Way once ended at the Grand Union Canal but these days launches across the water on a traffic-controlled steel bridge. This provides a broad panorama across what used to be two large factories and is now a warren of minor industrial units. The sign outside the Waterside Trading Estate lists over 30 separate companies occupying the warehouses beyond, from plant hire to joinery, although so many numbers have peeled off their map good luck in locating them. The largest company hereabouts is Patterson Construction, underpinners of 40 years standing, and the least attractive must be whoever it is has the pile of pallets and rusting containers behind the main gate. The local workforce's refreshment needs are catered for by the Magic Cafe, a reassuringly trad affair in a shack with bottled sauces and formica tables. If you're ever walking Capital Ring section 8, consider breaking off the towpath for a warming Soup Of The Day or an £8 Full English.
On the outside of the final bend we find Trumpers Crossing, one of just eight remaining public footpath level crossings in Greater London. It survives because it's out of the way and because it only crosses a dead-end freight line with barely any rumblings per week. This single track line opened in 1859 as a spur on the Great Western Mainline towards Brentford Docks and was so strategically important that it proved to be Isambard Kingdom Brunel's final project. A passenger service between Southall and Brentford was later provided using single-carriage railmotors but was resolutely underused and closed twice, most recently in 1926. For a more in-depth look at the line's history head here, or for Geoff's video click here.
Crossing the line here requires passing through a swing gate, along a brief footpath and up some steps to match the height of the ballast. Users are reminded to keep their dogs on a lead and also warned that passing trains don't blow their whistle between midnight and 6am, not that I can imagine why anyone would be in this godforsaken spot at this time. During daylight hours a lumbering aggregates train or waste disposal monster ought to be really really obvious, and really really rare, but be careful to Stop Look Listen all the same.
On the far side is the Warren Farm Nature Reserve, a very recent designation, whose 60 muddy acres are slowly rewilding. Climb the steep embankment to the left to meet a herd of cows on Earl of Jersey's Field, or step out onto the large field to the right amid the professional dog exercisers. Previously this was a recreation ground which Ealing council were keen to sell to QPR as a first team training facility until that deal fell through in 2020, and before that it was mostly used by schools and clubs. 100 years ago this was all still a family farm called Warren Farm, which in Brunel's era was owned by a man furious that his meadows were to be divided by the railway... and his name was George Trumper. You knew we'd get to the big name reveal eventually.
If you don't cross Trumpers Crossing a more appealing footpath leads off alongside the railway to a meadow called Trumpers Field. This is part of a chain of canalside meadows including Blackberry Corner, Jubilee Meadow and St Margaret's, and is the only one of the four not to be long and thin. January is alas not the best month for a picnic, a whirl round the orchard or a rest on one of the utilitarian benches, but with the leaves gone you do get a half-decent view of the blue box of utilities on the roof of Ealing Hospital.
At the far end of Trumpers Field is another footpath level crossing, this time officially a private one although anyone can cross. It's called Warren Farm Level Crossing and would originally have been where the farmer drove across the freight line, indeed locked gates are still provided. It's also the unlikely location of a very abandoned station, inevitably named Trumpers Crossing Halt, whose platforms were open to passenger traffic between 1906 and 1915, then again between 1920 and 1926. Bradshaw's Guide reports a half-hourly auto-car service with "a Halt at Trumpers Crossing for Osterley Park and South Hanwell", but not how little used it would have been. I discovered one of the locational drawbacks when I tried to exit towards civilisation on the other side of the canal.
These are Hanwell Locks, London's longestflight, specifically the lowest of the six locks. I looked around for a footbridge but there isn't one, the only way across being via one of the lock gates, which although not necessarily difficult is hardly a good option for the unsteady, the infirm or the encumbered. Escaping the meadows via any of the other locks also requires a gate crossing, the only level route into Hanwell being back across Trumpers Field and up Trumpers Way, a substantial detour which didn't exist when the halt was open. I confess to being somewhat relieved when my muddy boots delivered me safely to the towpath.
So that's Trumpers Way, a lane George Trumper wouldn't have used because it was on the wrong side of the canal, and Trumpers Crossing, disrespectfully named after the man who fought against having the railway built, and Trumper's Field, the remnants of a meadow that's now substantially industrial estate, and Trumpers Crossing Halt, a station that wasn't located at what's now Trumpers Crossing. It's all a tangled mass of inconsistencies, illogical arguments and the fury of old men, so the perfect place to visit today of all days.
