Walking Surrey England

A nostalgic theme park of managed decline. Oh, and Canals, Spoons, and a slip in the mud

(My prior pieces on England: Liverpool to Manchester, Manchester to Wakefield, Wakefield to Hull, Leicester and London, Dover to New Romney, New Romney to Brighton)

I began my trip in a Wetherspoon pub three tube stops from Heathrow, “The Moon Under Water” in Hounslow, in an ebullient mood. I’d managed to pass through customs, get onto the Piccadilly line, and find a peaceful but interesting spot to spend the morning in, all in under thirty minutes. I now had three full hours before I had to be in South Kensington, only forty minutes away on the tube, and I could spend it in my favorite franchise surrounded by gentle retirees reading books, sipping one-pound bottomless coffees and/or pounding two-pound ales, and tables of safety-vested workmen dirty from the overnight, eating full breakfasts while competitively downing pints.

I was also happily surprised, because while I adore England, efficiency isn’t its strong point. While it has all the bits and pieces necessary to be a highly functional country, it never quite pulls that off. Despite possessing a cultural legacy of competence and excellence, which gave us the modern age — one of individual liberty via a political compact forged over centuries of negotiation between their commoners, nobility, and royalty, and of material wealth via the Industrial Revolution — that cultural vitality faded long ago, enveloped by a fog of ignorance, incompetence, and incontinence, like an elderly professor whose mind and body are withering with age.

It’s now in a state of dilapidated glory, which they accepted long ago, or at least acclimated to, a weathered dog-eared tatteredness of the dingy, dreary, and dysfunctional. A landscape of dense narrow roads crawling with workmen trying to halt the decay, and endless roundabouts (an attempt to smooth out the irregular oddly-angled intersections inherited from a less efficient past) punctuated with scenes of august grandeur—a majestic block of grand terraced houses in the midst of fluorescent-lit chip shops and kebab takeaways, or a Tudor manor (gated of course) within stone’s throw of bleak Council housing, as if someone wanted an illustrated lesson in the trade-offs of utilitarianism: Everyone gets a home, but few get dignity.

That point was emphasized hours later, when I arrived back at the tube station to find the Piccadilly line closed and all other lines with “severe delays,” so I needed to take two buses to get into town, both of which inched their way from stop to stop, where lines of passengers struggled to figure out how to pay, few with any sense of urgency, making every stop a minutes-long theater of incompetence.

The next morning was even more maddening, when the twelve-mile bus trip from my Weybridge hotel to Kingston, where I would begin my walk, became a two-hour festival of frustration. I waited an hour in the cold with a mother and her very patient child, as its advertised arrival jumped randomly between thirteen and six minutes, before it finally disappeared entirely. When the bus eventually came, without warning, it was close to full, and with only one door, each stop became a game of human logistics, as people shuffled, shifted, and climbed over each other, to make space for those both leaving and coming. That didn’t stop the driver from combining our sloth bus with the next slightly less sloth-y one when it caught up with us, forcing us all onto a single bus.