Since I had to be in Archway at noon, I decided to take the slow route and walk from Stoke Newington to Highgate by way of the so-called Capital Ring, a footpath that circles inner London. It’s surprisingly rustic, some of its route following the track of the old Edgware, Highgate and London Railway, which was due to be joined up to the Northern Line in 1940 until war intervened. It was then going to be turned into a motorway. It’s now just a footpath. There’s something faintly eerie approaching Highgate Woods not by the Archway Road or the Northern Line, but along the track of an old railway, passing the phantom station of Crouch End:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
My son, Tom, used this section of railway line (the old platforms of Crouch End station and the graffiti-covered tunnel in particular) as a setting for his first short film which was about urban fox hunting – did you know there was such thing as a ‘fox handler? Tom’s latest offering, ‘War and Peace’, was shot in rather grander locations and instead of chasing foxes, they chased wolves (or the French).
I think I sat opposite him at lunch yesterday. Charles
Was that the art/science lunch he mentioned he was going to? Did you get to speak? Sara
Yes and no…. Charles