I was walking down York Way north of King’s Cross and realised that it has one of London’s ghost underground stations, opened in December 1906 to serve the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway.   It closed in September 1932.   I am surprised that it hasn’t re-opened now that it is one of London’s property hotspots.   It’s got odd, wobbly lettering:-

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I have occasionally driven past the Green Lanes Pumping Station, a mad, grand Scottish baronial folly which was designed by Robert Billings in 1856 to draw water from the adjacent reservoirs which had been laid out in the late 1820s to supply water to central London.

I had never been to Abney Park Cemetery, London’s first non-denominational cemetery, opened in 1840 but never consecrated, although it has a prominent, now derelict Gothic chapel designed by George Hosking.

One enters by the Egyptian gates designed by Joseph Bonomi junior:-

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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:-

I chose a bad day to visit Gospel Oak on the orange line from Whitechapel.   I wanted to see the two big blocks of social housing, Waxham and Ludham in the Lismore Circus Estate,  designed by Frederick MacManus and Partners in the early 1970s when Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones were working for him and before they went to work for Derek Walker at Milton Keynes.   Edward Jones describes them in his Guide to the Architecture of London as ‘particularly unfortunate’.   I can see why.   They are currently being restored.