Like many a London-based Runviewer video, this one starts at a dreary tube station at the foot of the Northern line.
This wasn’t a bright, sunny day in South Wimbledon, but then I’ve never known it to be, most of my visits having been accidental sleep-overs on the last tube home. But bear with me – the Common is lovely, even in October.
For starters, this experience was far more pleasant for being 1) intentional and 2) in the daylight. We set off on this six mile trek heading North up Merton Road and following it round The Broadway, a bustling and rather nice district that snakes past Wimbledon station (District Line) up the steep Wimbledon Hill Road and High Street. It’s a bit fiddly at the weekends so runners may have to be patient and polite to the dreamy Sunday shoppers and walkers.
The Hill Road looks like a piece of cake on this video, but I assure you this is the fault of the fish-eye lens on my camera. Your bottom will be working very hard if you’re running all the way to the top. The main road snakes into the restaurant-heavy High Street and eventually Parkside which flanks Wimbledon Common South to North. It is here that we leave behind the fraught, narrow roads, leaping West across the Common. If you have beady eyes, you’ll notice bicycles, ponies and spaniels abound here.
Be prepared for flying balls – the Common is home to a golf club. We keep it at arms length in this video, veering North and keeping the Almshouses and prep school on our left. Before long we are diving through the Autumnal woodland and wide open spaces that make this area of South London such a relief to escape the city to. There are various intersecting rides that criss-cross the Common so frankly you’re hard-pushed to get lost here. I did diverge from my intended path, winding through the more densely wooded paths that wrap around the golf course in a roughly Northwesterly direction. The “coffee and potter” walkers give over to the people with dogs and proper boots out here, the peaceful brook putting us back on course along the wide, orange rides with their yellowing canopies.
The majestic Stag Ride guides us uphill for about a mile past Putney Vale Cemetery to the silent waters of Kingsmere which provides a conduit along a Northeastern path that throws us out near the glamorous Tibbet’s Corner Roundabout. Personally, I would recommend taking a right once you come to the end of the cemetery. It will feel as if you are ploughing deeper into the woodland when in actual fact you will arrive at the car park and windmill, which dates to 1817 and is now a museum at the heart of the common. There are also loos and tearooms here.
In this video, from Tibbet’s Corner Roundabout, we travel along Tibbets Ride and Putney Hill – a pretty unspecial sort of road for this time of year, but it is at least trailed on one side by the teasing greenery of Putney Heath – technically part of the same 1,140 acreage.
As lovely as central Putney is, my camera was equally uninspired by the traffic at this point and decided to cease recording. Nevertheless this road leads you directly into the heart of the area where the train station waits, to usher you back to London Waterloo. Alternatively, East Putney tube station, on the District Line, is just right down Upper Richmond Road from there.
AMENITIES
Start: South Wimbledon Tube Station
Finish: Putney Railway Station into London Waterloo or East Putney on the District Tube Line
Buses run along Parkside (to the East of the Common) which eventually leads to Tibbet’s Corner and Putney.
There is a legion of shops and restaurants in Wimbledon and Putney but the Common itself has a visitor centre and car park in the very centre.
Visiting the Windmills: