Walking London, Updated Edition: Thirty Original Walks In and Around London (IMM Lifestyle Books) Routes from 2 to 6 Miles with Photos, Complete Maps, & Details of Sites, Public Transport, Pubs & More

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Each of the 15 sections of this London walk features local landmarks like the Thames Barrier, Eltham Palace, Richmond Park, Oxleas Meadows, and the London Olympic Park. The book is a great companion guide as you walk the ring. You’ll walk by London Bridge, the Clink Prison Museum, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, the Rose Theatre, the Queen Square Park and Garden, and Southwark Cathedral. I had lunch at the then Good Beer Guide-listed Vine pub, but although it’s great a pub pays attention to its beer, its food was rudimentary – no puddings! Now it’s an Indo-Chinese fusion restaurant, sigh. There’s a broad pathless meadow on the way up to the M1 before you skirt round Aldenham Reservoir and cross fields with good trees north of Elstree village. The station lies across golf course 3, not in the village but the more workaday suburb of Borehamwood; you are only passing through.

Another of the top London walking books is Walking Pepys’s London. Samuel Pepys was a 17th-century English navy administrator and member of parliament who was famous for the diary he kept. This book covers London from his perspective. When living in central London it can be difficult to remember that it’s quite a hilly city, and a new guidebook to the hills of London has been written showing off the best spots to get vistas of the London skyline. Similar to The Capital Ring, The London Loop is another of the best London walking books for long-distance London walks. This book covers the London Outer Orbital Path (LOOP), a 140-mile (225-kilometer) ring around the city. Last on my list of the best London walking books is Thames Path in London. This book will take you along the river from Hampton Court to Crayford Ness. It covers 50 miles (80 kilometers) of riverside scenery as it goes. Each of the 50 cards comes with instructions for a self-guided walk in London on one side and a detailed map of the route on the other. They include numbered stopping points, so they’re easy to follow.The walks it contains combine Pepys’s diary with lots of historic facts and details about London. It’s a great book if you love history and want to dig deeper into the city’s past.

There are also a number of literary diversions in the book, darting off to the history of Croydon’s seven hills, water towers, lost hills, notable people and artificial hills.Blue plaques high up on the outer walls of buildings tease us with a tiny amount of information about the people who were born, lived, stayed, died, or did something extraordinary there. This book is a fantastic way to find out more about the people celebrated by over 900 plaques all over the city and bring home the fact that you are walking down the same streets that they once did. 3. London Pub Walks, Bob Steel As with any walking guide, they tend to appeal to people who want to follow a set path to a pre-determined location, whereas I am more of an ambler around town. That is more relaxed, but I wonder now how many vantage points I’ve accidentally missed on my perambulations because I didn’t know there was one a few hundred yards off from where I was walking.

As such, this could be seen as a walker’s guide for routes to follow, or a handy book to pull out when visiting an area to see if there’s a local vantage point to keep an eye out for. The self-guided London walks in this book will take you around to see monuments dedicated to monarchs, military greats, politicians, local heroes, artists, writers, and other notable people. It’s a great one if you like history and art.

One June morning in 1934 the young Lee set forth from the Cotswold village of Slad, where he’d lived for most of his life, to walk to Spain. But before reaching Mediterranean shores, Lee walked through southern England, writing about his wanderings and encounters in characteristically elegiac prose. This was the era when tramps still roved the country lanes, cars were a rarity and Lee was still young and idealistic – before his initiation into the turmoil of the Spanish civil war. Along the way, you’ll meet the Seven Hills of Croydon; the Sewardstone Hills north of Chingford; the string of former telegraph stations stretching from New Cross Gate across to Forest Hill, as well as familiar ascents like Hampstead Heath, Greenwich Park and Richmond Hill. So began the great British tradition of walking, and writing about it. Some authors have accomplished arduous hikes in far-flung lands; others have written just as engagingly about journeys much closer to home. Take Robert Louis Stevenson. Famously, he tramped with a donkey across the mountains of the Cévennes, though it is his gentler ramble across the Chiltern Hills that is the focus of my book, The Country of Larks.