While I was in Enfield, heading away from the power station, I decided to depart across Sewardstone Marsh. Why exit the dull way when you can cross the Lea and walk through a minor Essex village? The riverside path passed nosey ponies and a pumping station and crossed three footbridges of various ages. And halfway across the third of these, which is the Cattlegate Footbridge, I realised I was exiting Greater London somewhere I'd never exited the capital before.
So I wondered how many ways there are to exit the capital, how many paths and tracks and roads and railways in total around the periphery. A footpath here, more footpaths further upriver, and goodness knows how many more around 200 miles or so of boundary. Some ways out are big and obvious like the A10 or the Central line or Woodford High Road, but others are just tiny tracks in woods or paths across fields, not to mention minor bridges across a river.
More to the point, would it be possible to cross them all? I must have crossed the Greater London boundary in more locations than the average person, so how much of a task would it be to cross the rest? With the Cattlegate Footbridge now ticked off, could I become the first person to do them all?
I got a map out and just considered crossings of the boundary in the London borough of Enfield. Bridge✔ bridge✔ bridge✔ M25✔ towpath✔ railway✔ High Street✔ roof of tunnel✔ railway✔ A10✔ aqueduct✔ footpath✔ country lane✔ was a strong start. But then came several subways under the M25 I'd never tackled, and on closer inspection there was another minor subway I'd missed back in Waltham Cross which might or might not have been private, and did a path criss-crossing the boundary count as one or several, and this was actually a lot more complicated than it looked.
Also on closer inspection I had crossed Cattlegate Footbridge before because it's part of London Loop section 18, which I'd originally assumed had crossed the footbridge to the north. I'd even included a photo of it on the blog, this being 10 years ago, and then forgotten about it... so there was now another exit from the capital I hadn't actually crossed. If just Enfield is this complicated, I thought, I don't think I'll bother.
I still reckon I've crossed the Greater London boundary in far more places than most people ever have, including some ridiculously unimportant footpaths in Havering, Hillingdon and Bromley. But I won't be deliberately trying to do the rest, nor even cataloguing them, because life's too short. Also I'd have ended up visiting lots and lots of quite dull places, like Sewardstone, and then probably writing about them and nobody wants that. A lucky escape for all of us, I think.
