A year ago the Mayor of Wandsworth and the local MP walked onto Putney Heath to launch a free weekly walk. It leaves again this morning at half past ten, from the same place, without an official photographer.
The walk meets every Saturday at 10.30am at the Green Man, opposite the bus stop. It lasts about an hour, the route changes week to week, and it goes ahead in any weather. There is no booking, no registration, no fee and no form. You turn up, you walk, you talk, you go home.
The first one set off on 6 September last year and drew more than fifty people. The then Mayor of Wandsworth, Cllr Jeremy Ambache, came. So did Fleur Anderson, the MP for Putney, and the borough’s Deputy Youth Mayor, Sophia Dyson. The group was led round past The Pound, the reservoir and Hartley’s Obelisk by a Commons conservator, Sue Bucknall, and the landlord of the Green Man, Tom Richards, put on refreshments at the end.
Everything about that morning is the standard shape of a local initiative that quietly disappears. The dignitaries turn up, the photograph is taken, forty of the fifty people never come again, and by February there are four of them standing in the rain wondering whether to bother. This one has met every Saturday since.
It was not a Putney idea, to be fair. Volunteers from the Wimbledon Village Walk and Talk, whose own group had worked, came over and started this one deliberately, under the Walk and Talk Movement, which provides the guidance and has been using National Lottery money to seed groups across Wandsworth and Lambeth. Putney Heath was on the list alongside Roehampton, Battersea Park and Streatham Common. Rob Noble, who founded the Wimbledon group, was one of the leaders on that first walk, along with Judith Chegwidden of the Putney Society.
What makes it survive, as far as anyone can tell, is that it asks for nothing except to turn up at the same time at the same place each week. No membership, no committee, no subscription, no minimum fitness, no sign-up sheet that somebody has to keep. All it needs is for a few people to be standing outside a pub at half ten on a Saturday.
If you have never been, this morning is the one to go to.
If you are going
Walk and Talk, Putney Heath. Every Saturday, 10.30am, meeting at the Green Man, Wildcroft Road, SW15 3NG, opposite the Putney Heath bus stop. About an hour, routes vary, all ages and abilities. Free, just turn up.
