Trees
On the map, a number of roads existed in South-East London without names.

I wandered the streets of Blackheath, with a crumpled print-out, staring at the names on street signs and trying to decode them as if they were secret messages the roads were passing to me. Estates were full of tangled roads, blending too quickly into other roads, sometimes with different names, but sometimes the same. Other roads just weren't marked at all, not even with outlines on my print-out, and every time I found one of those, I felt like I was discovering somewhere new, as if that road had just sprung into existence as I reached it.

I glanced at boat stencils, advertising a Thames treasure hunt; I passed a graveyard containing the grave of Edmond Halley, who Halley's Comet was named after, as well as the grave of Robert Cocking, 'an early aeronaut who in 1837 fell to his death in a local field when his primitive parachute failed'; I found Celestial Gardens; I found the Queen of Clubs on the ground; I walked past streets that had been adopted and streets that hadn't; I was approached by a cute long-haired guy on a bike and wondered whether I was dreaming, but he was mapping too; I visited Kenya, Nigeria and Grenada; and then there was the most beautiful sunset with pinks and blues and oh, I couldn't stop staring at it.

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July 2025

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