And there are plenty of other great stretches to choose from. If you add the Grand Union canal and the Thames Path into the mix, the possibilities are almost endless, as you say.

One of ‘those’ London Marathon ballot acceptance or rejection magazines will be winging my way soon, too. And I don’t know which one to hope for, either…

Good luck!

Should I get one of “those” magazines through my letter box I will be spoilt for choice – limitless long distance options for me.

I’m still not sure what sort of magazine my crossed fingers are hoping for though.

Keep up the great writing.

You inspire one to pull out those dusty old sneakers from the back of the cupboard … Keep at it.

There was an amusing little ‘news’ clip on the CBC a few weeks ago about some London based runner who is over 100 …I think they said he was 104 … Ever seen him? Thin as a rail, beard, likes to smoke and drink. Did a marathon with ‘pub’ stops to ‘revitalize’ himself on route … A ‘character’, like you, by any other name.

That works for me, Silver Fox.

The advent of the industrial revolution saw the building through the 1800s of huge stocks of Victorian terraced houses which still define the inner suburbs in places like Clapham to the south and Kilburn to the north. But the city’s appetite was far from sated, and the expansion of the transport system between the wars provided the corridors for growth.

Betjeman recorded the transformation of the landscape by the Metropolitan Railway (now the Metropolitan Line of the tube) as it marched towards the countryside northwest of London. The area was portrayed by the railway company as a new kind of rural idyll for city workers. It was a piece of pure marketing genius which proved ironic, as its very success destroyed the vision of green space which underpinned that dream.

In the landscape I describe today, across the outer southwestern suburbs, the story was different, and yet very much the same. Expansion here took place along the path of the overground railway. Ewell East station opened in 1847 on a new section of railway running parallel to the ancient Roman road, Stane Street, in its journey out towards the hills.

Pockets of Victorian housing date back to that time. But the towns and villages here still retained their identity and a landscape in between.

It was in the 1930s that life in these areas on the southwestern fringes of the city was completely and irrevocably transformed. Farms and villages and entire rural landscapes and communities were simply swallowed up.

Housing developments spread out over vast swathes of previously unspoilt countryside. The boundaries between communities were blurred and the link with the underlying landscape more or less obliterated. Exactly the same process which affected Ruislip and Uxbridge on the other side of London during the same period.

It was only the passing of the Town and Country Planning Act in 1947 which belatedly put a halt to that process by defining an outward limit to London’s development and safeguarding a ring of green countryside (the Green Belt) to surround it.

That, in its turn, forced planners and developers to seek new pastures to turn into concrete, a search which provided the flawed utopian vision of the new towns which were built from scratch outside the green belt during the post-war years, with every house all the same. Crawley, where I used to work, is a type example with its bleak 1960s architecture.

The story of London’s voracious and pitiless suburban growth is depressing, in lots of ways, especially when it’s raining. But it’s a human story, all the same. The workforce which drives this city and this country forward has to live somewhere.

And despite the often grey and bleak, inhuman sprawl, there are still clear fragments of landscape and geology and the lifestyles of older times hiding deep within the suburbs, if you know exactly where and how to look.