Bromley - short walks
The London Borough of Bromley is London’s greenest borough and includes extensive areas of countryside just outside the built-up southern edges of London. Their Environment Department has devised more than a dozen circular walks through rural areas of the borough, of between 4 and 7.5 miles in length. Each walk has a short cut option for those who don’t want to complete the full route. All are predominantly rural in nature though some include short stretches of suburban roads.
A downloadable PDF leaflet for each of the walks is available at bromley.gov.uk. Each leaflet includes basic but mainly adequate walk directions, with descriptions of features encountered on the walk and an Ordnance Survey based map of the route with contour lines. Each walk is also waymarked throughout its length and can be walked in either direction, though it is easiest to follow the direction described in the leaflet. The waymark signs are not always easy to spot, and a few appear to be missing, so it could be useful to have a map and compass to hand.
Though fairly short, any of these walks makes a pleasant half-day walk, and the longer ones can be used as a full day winter walk by those who prefer a leisurely pace. Several of them overlap each other or sections of existing SWC walks, e.g. Whyteleafe to Hayes, Hayes Circular, Hayes to Knockholt, Knockholt Circular. They could therefore be linked to create longer walks if desired. In each case the majority of the route is unique and covers parts of the countryside not covered by any other walk.
All the walks are accessible by public transport, and several of them can be reached by train, though some require a bus journey too. However, if you are avoiding public transport during lockdown you may prefer to drive to the start of the walk or to some convenient point along the route. Since all the walks are circular, they can be joined at any point. Expect most of the walks to be muddy in parts after spells of wet weather.
Here are details of how to access the walks by public transport. Buses take you direct to some point on the walk. Some bus services are only half-hourly or even hourly, so check times on the TfL website.
- [Figures in square brackets] are the distance from the station to nearest point on the walk
- Two other walks are available, both of about 3.5 miles: St Mary Cray is an old village now absorbed into the outer edges of Orpington; Cray Riverway is a linear walk comprising the Bromley section of a 13.5 mile walk along the River Cray.