All the Grid Squares

Outside of scrapbooking and other crafting, I follow the blog of Diamond Geezer, a London based daily blogger who manages to create interesting posts on the most mundane of subjects. He writes on a veritable miscellany of subjects, but the majority of his posts are on travel in London and what he finds at places that most of us just wouldn't bother with.

Back in June, he posted his musings on just how much of London he had visited, breaking down the capital by 1km grid squares as per the Ordnance Survey and only counting those squares which are wholly within the London boundary. At that time he'd visited 1386 out of 1463 squares on foot, passed through a further 54 by bus and 6 by train, leaving just 17 unvisited squares. And since then he's been visiting the unvisited with the aim of walking in every London grid square.

At the time, I marvelled at his record-keeping (20 years of walking and blogging) and his interest in visiting new areas, when most of us return to the same places over and over, and I reflected that there can't be many who would take on such a task, me included.

But, it got me thinking. I am never going to visit every grid square in London; I don't even live there (though I could walk to the boundary from home if I was so inclined). I live in Thurrock, a borough bounded by London to the west, Essex to the north and east and Kent across the River Thames to the south. 

(c) Google

I wondered how many grid squares there are in Thurrock, how many I have visited on foot and whether it would be possible to walk them all. A couple of evenings with a map and a spreadsheet gave me this outline. 

White squares are wholly within Thurrock. The purple H square contains my home. 

The Thurrock border runs through the grey squares (land border) and the blue squares (river border).

The black squares are either outside Thurrock or are river border squares with no  Thurrock land.

I've counted 204 squares, but I know that the Thurrock part of some of the Essex border squares is tiny and likely to be inaccessible. We also have  two sets of docks and some other industrial areas that will make certain other squares impossible to visit.

Of course, I've plotted where I've been too, and as of last weekend I had walked in or through 47 of my 204 squares, just over 23%. I did start to mark those I'd driven through too, but it all got a bit messy and I don't count driving through a square as visiting it properly so I'd need to go back anyway.

The black, grey, blue and purple squares are as before, but now I have green for squares that I have visited and walked in, including border squares. The majority are obviously surrounding my home square, as I tend to walk anywhere up to a couple of miles rather than driving. Further afield, I've been to country parks, river paths and even the scout campsite. But it's definitely skewed to the south-west and I have plenty more map to explore.

Of course, I've already started to turn some more squares green, and I'll be back soon to share my first excursion with you.