Stepping out of the city in zone 3

I love living in London. There's so much to do - for a start I have 2 opera houses (not to mention the Wigmore Hall, Barbican, South Bank and even a new pub opera house). There are also countless cool shops, bars, cafes and restaurants. It's an amazing place to be - I sometimes wish I didn't live here so I could see it for the first time again (although the view of St Paul's or the Houses of Parliament lit up at night from one of the bridges over the Thames always manages to give me a tiny bit of that feeling).

Sometimes though I want to feel like I'm not in a city at all. That's fine at weekends as I can always go away or just drive out on a Sunday and go for a walk somewhere. What if I want to go for a walk in the woods in the morning before I go to work though? Living in zone 3 in south east London you wouldn't expect too many options would you? I certainly didn't when I moved here.

Then I found this...



Literally a 5 minute walk from my house is a stretch of woodland big enough to walk through for at least 40 minutes without seeing a road! When I first moved here I worked from home so used to walk in the woods quite a bit at lunchtime. When I started my first novel I used to spend hours in there listening to podcast interviews with writers, desperately looking for any clues as to how on earth you're supposed to write a novel. Now I'm on book 2 I've found that getting up and walking before work in the mornings and doing the same really helps get my head back into the ideas stage of the process.

The wood is apparently tiny compared to the area it covered in the 19th century, but it's still a little pocket of the English countryside by my door and that is a blessing.