Walking Distance - Merton/Sutton borders

The curious thing about living in a large city like London is how little your focus can be on the area you actually live in. You can't pop home for lunch from a job with a commute of an hour, and friends tend to be made from work colleagues, and they work centrally too, an hour or more from their homes, and those all in different directions. 

Add to that bigger and better shops and museums and art galleries all drawing you in from the periphery, and you might never be at home enough to really consider the spaces that surround it. 

Lately though, with all of us spending so much more time at home, there is scope to notice. 

For myself I'd describe the area I live in as a liminal space - not suburb but not London proper - and you don't have to travel far before you cross a border, whether the borough border between Merton and Sutton, or on the smaller scale that between Morden and Mitcham, as delineated by the Wandle river. The road my block sits on is the London Road in places (because it runs into London) but where I am it's Bishopsford Road, because it's here the river was forded. 

History sits in layers in these places. Mitcham, for example, is at ground level very visibly a village with a duck pond and a green and a church and a cricket pitch and a weekly market and a more than respectable amount of history. A long-standing stopping place between London and the coast, now sadly overlaid with a purpose built and dated shopping arcade and suffering from that main road slicing in through. 

Morden seems to have consisted of big country estates until Metroland - the tube, and slum clearance - created vast estates of the other sort where all the houses might look more or less identical around their squares and crescents of well mown grass, but were of a decent size, with amenities and good transport links, and surrounded by plenty of open space. 

It follows that if you come up any of the major roads in a car or bus your main impression of the whole area will be a line of kebab shops, nail bars, closed pubs and small local convenience stores, but walking is a very different experience. It is possible, for example, to walk along the bank of the Wandle almost full length in both directions, and the path is well maintained.

The stretch closest by me goes through Watermeads, currently closed due to bridge repairs, but another not far away runs through to Morden Hall Park, some of which is owned by the National Trust. The buildings and car parks (and garden centre and charity book store) are closed at the moment, but the park itself is still open, and you can walk the mile or so to the tube and shops at Morden through here.

Another runs along the edge of Poulter Park, a large open space that is home to the rugby club, and has it's own green corridor (once you've crossed the road) running up the hill two miles all the way to St Helier Hospital in Sutton. 

Past St Helier another green corridor runs to Rose Hill Park, divided into east and west parts by the Brighton Road (which may have led to Brighton once but now seems to disappear somewhere just before Gatwick).

Moving from east to west again a metal pedestrian bridge and a hundred yards or so of pavement walking takes you to Reigate Avenue recreation ground (that pedestrian bridge crosses Reigate Avenue, which may very possibly lead to Reigate, or at least definitely goes in that general direction) then the same straight line takes you to Sutton Common recreation ground (which is in Sutton) and into Lower Morden Lane (which is semi famous locally for going all out with the decorations at Christmas) and pedestrian gates (or gateways, Merton and Sutton don't always bother with gates into large green spaces) into Morden Park, which Wikipedia tells me was - again - 'once a country estate', and which I seem to have taken the world's most boring photo of.

But what I wanted to capture was in the middle there on the horizon is Merton council buildings, including the library, and closer on the right the leisure centre, currently closed (and another place I want to come back to for coffee and a nose at the swimming pool when we can do such things again). You may also be able to make out the dome of the mosque if you can enlarge the picture - I've been there on open house day and would recommend it. Not only did we get a tour of the building, but tea, and they had aerial photos of what the site was like when Express dairies had a milk depot there. It's sandwiched between tube and rail lines, so would have been ideal.

(Has anyone ever written a history of milk and the social history around it? Someone surely should.)

Walking through Morden Park takes you unsurprisingly to Morden, and from Morden you can hop back into Morden Hall Park (see first picture) and follow the river home.