London Strolling
from The Economist:
Urban pedestrians buck a national trend
Aug 3rd 2013
LONDON is a city made for walking. Unlike, for instance, Los Angeles its centre is easily accessible on foot. Outer boroughs are no more than an hour or two away. Its curved streets, in contrast to the rigid grid of New York, welcome idle wanderers and busy commuters alike. But despite traffic queues and teeming underground carriages most prefer to drive or to squeeze on to the Tube to get around the city. This is starting to change.
Between 2001 and 2011 the number of trips made daily on foot in London increased by 12%. Nearly a third of the Londoners sampled made a continuous walk of 30 minutes once a week between 2010 and 2011 to get from place to place, rather than for exercise. Each day 6.2m walks are made across the city.
And both rich and poor walk a similar amount. In areas such as Kensington and Chelsea 11% walk for at least 30 minutes five times a week or more. In Tower Hamlets 12% of residents do. One of the largest changes in the city over the past decade is the number of pedestrians, says Michèle Dix of Transport for London (TfL), which runs the city’s transport networks. On July 10th TfL launched the Roads Task Force, with plans to spruce up pavements.
Several reasons account for the walking boom. The number of Londoners increased by 12% from 7.3m in 2001 to 8.2m in 2011, and Tube trains are broiling and overcrowded. But other factors also encourage pedestrians. In 2004 Ken Livingstone, then mayor of London, vowed to make London a “walkable city”. Some of his plans were carried on by Boris Johnson, the current mayor. These include a scheme to create clearly-marked maps for use across the city. Of 33 boroughs in London 22 now have the distinctive yellow-branded signs on their streets. All TfL-owned property (such as Tube stations and bicycle-hire points) is covered by the scheme. This deters tourists from popping on the Tube to travel one stop from Covent Garden to Leicester Square, a distance of 0.3m (0.5km) says Tony Armstrong of Living Streets, a charity for pedestrians. ........................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21582576-urban-pedestrians-buck-national-trend-footfalls?fsrc=scn/tw_ec/footfalls
= new reply since forum marked as read
It can be quite surprising to see the 'true' Tube map:
http://www.nothingaboutpotatoes.co.uk/2010/08/things-18-layton-squares-lesson-learned-iwiwal/
Covent Garden is about the same distance from Embankment (3 stops) as from Holborn (1 stop).
Me to my grandmother's late '50s. 
being just outside the HS2 blight zone ?
On the subject of the Northern Line I always found the most interesting thing to be the ghost station , North End Station / Hampstead Garden Suburb , between Golders Green and Hampstead. You could see the platform in the gloom as you passed it.
This is a ‘ghost’ station on the Northern Line which would have served a new residential development being planned for the north of the Heath on part of Eton College’s Wyldes Farm. However, although larger-diameter station tunnels and low-level passageways were excavated as part of the works to extend the line from Hampstead to Golders Green which began in 1903, Hampstead Heath Extension council was also formed in 1903 by Henrietta Barnett and the purchase of the 80 acres of development land, which came to be known as the Heath Extension, was completed in 1907. Work on the station was ended in 1906 after it became apparent that the removal of the proposed residential development would significantly reduce the number of passengers using the station. The uncompleted platforms and lower passageways remain, bricked-off from the tracks. The remaining 243 acres of Wyldes farm were transferred to a trust in 1907 to become the site of Hampstead Garden Suburb, Henrietta Barnet’s utopian experiment in suburban planning.
During the 1950s the station, which at 200 ft below ground level would have the deepest in the network, was rumoured to be London Transport's potential emergency headquarters in the event of a nuclear detonation in or near London and at around this time access to the station from the surface in the form of a rectangular staircase was finally provided. Later, it is believed to have become one of the control centres for the Underground's floodgate system. Signs on the gate and on the building's door indicate that the site is now a designated emergency exit point for the Underground network.
http://www.hampsteadramblers.org.uk/self-guided-walks/15-themed-walks/7-ghosts-hampstead-and-highgate-walk.html
Although Edgware is the end of the line there are 3 curious humps in open land to the north of Edgware. Story has it they considered extending the line north to Elstree / Boreham Wood.
Early sixties when I was considerably fitter and the old Northern Line Strand Station was still there I could get in and out of town for the jazz clubs from Edgware for 6 pence in old money. The ticket collector was in the lift which I could outrun up the long winding staircase which most in their right mind wouldn't have even consider using at a leisurely pace.
The Northern line Strand station was closed on 4 June 1973 to enable the construction of the new Jubilee line platforms. These platforms were constructed between the Bakerloo line and Northern line platforms together with the long-missing below-ground interchange between those two lines. In anticipation of the new interchange station, from 4 August 1974 Charing Cross was renamed Charing Cross Embankment. The Jubilee line platforms and the refurbished Northern Line platforms opened on 1 May 1979 from which date the combined station including Trafalgar Square was given its current name; simultaneously Charing Cross Embankment reverted to the original BS&WR name of Embankment, ending 109 years of association with the name Charing Cross. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charing_Cross_tube_station
our freedom to drive from one parking lot to another. IN the same shopping complex. To go to 2 different stores 150 feet from each other. Because people do that. Because we're American and we have freedom. Unlike you people from the united kingodm of England. OR whatever...
...what Brits call walking.
When we got tired there was always a nice pub to stop and have a rest.