Track 13 · Village · 2:07
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Stop twelve. The Vale of Health.
A hamlet of about a hundred houses, completely surrounded by open Heath, with one road in and the same road out. There is no through traffic because there is nowhere to go through to.
The name is a lie, and a very good one. Until the end of the eighteenth century this hollow was a marsh called Hatchett's Bottom, which was drained in seventeen seventy seven when the water company got to work on the ponds. The first houses went up on the drained ground, somebody needed to sell them, and by eighteen oh one the deeds are calling it the Vale of Health. A malarial bog renamed as a health resort, and it worked so completely that the older name has vanished.
Who lived here is out of all proportion to its size. Leigh Hunt took a house in eighteen sixteen and turned it into the meeting place of a generation, which means Keats, Shelley, Byron and Hazlitt all walked down this lane. Rabindranath Tagore stayed here in nineteen twelve, the year the English Gitanjali was being prepared in London, and he had the Nobel Prize within months. D H Lawrence and Frieda lived at number one Byron Villas in nineteen fifteen, the year The Rainbow was prosecuted for obscenity and the unsold copies were burned by order of the court.
Behind the houses, if you look, are the caravans and yards of the showmen who run the funfair that still comes onto the Heath on bank holidays. It is the least likely industrial estate in London.
Free. It is somebody's street, so read the room.
Back up the lane the way you came, and rejoin Spaniards Road at the top. Turn right and follow it north-east along the ridge, with the Heath falling away on both sides, for about twelve minutes. The road narrows to a pinch, and the pinch is stop thirteen.
51.56294, -0.17628 · where this is on a map