All the Grid Squares: St Clement's Reach

Following on from my last walk, I have made a few decisions about my project to walk in all the possible OS grid squares in Thurrock:

1. I now intend to visit every square whether I've been there before or not. 

2. If I've never been there before then it should be a substantial walk through the square wherever possible.

3. If I have been there before then a brief in-and-out of the grid square or a path that cuts across the corner will suffice so long as it's part of a longer walk. 

4. I don't want to leave any 'orphan' squares between different walks so I will be working outwards from home, firstly east and south, then north and west.

After my last walk, my 'visited' squares looked like this:

The purple square contains my home; the green squares are ones I've walked in, with dark green for anything after 22 August and light green for earlier visits. The grey squares are land borders and blue squares are river borders; these will turn green (or red if they are inaccessible) as the project continues. Black squares have no Thurrock land.

(c) Ordnance Survey

Having decided to revisit old squares and to work outwards from home, I took a Sunday morning stroll round the block of four squares south of my home square, taking in a section of the River Thames known as St Clement's Reach or Fiddler's Reach.

A bit of road walking to start, and then I picked up a footpath that crosses under and over the railway to reach an industrial estate that fills the space between railway and river. It's a place of high fences and high security, but also pedestrian-friendly with zebra crossings at key points and a gap in the fence to access the riverside path.

Once by the river I checked out the state of the tide and the ship moored at the nearest jetty before heading west following the path between fence and river, a fence that becomes a flood defence wall a little further on. 

It's a highly decorated wall, absolutely covered in an ever-changing display of street art, a stretch that I have visited numerous times and it's never the same twice.

I was struck by the hashtag #knivesdownpaintup and also by this tribute, possibly to the artist's mother judging from the 'Mummy B' sign.

Moving on upstream, I passed a World War II pillbox defence (which I really wish had been left plain rather than painted), and the foreshore opened out to a large grassy/marshy area with Stone Ness "Lighthouse" at its tip. (I've put the word lighthouse in quotes as it's barely worth the name, being little more than a light on a pole.) I kept going round the curve of the river until I could see the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, and then I turned back. 

Walking west my attention had been on the art and the river, but once I turned back Proctor and Gamble's big red factory dominated the view.

I turned inland as I approached it and then dropped in to St Clement's Church. The building is no longer in regular use and is maintained by P&G for the community. It's graveyard is now a Nature Conservation Churchyard and contains the mass grave of 16 cadets (aged 13-18) and an officer from HM Training Ship Cornwall who were killed in a sailing accident on the Thames in 1915.

  

From here I made my way out through the industrial estate where I stopped my tracker and headed home.

The red line on my map shows the walk from when I left London Road (the main east-west road hereabouts) until I rejoined it. It just skims the edge of the NW grid square of these four so I took an alternative route home from work a few days later (the blue line) which ensured that I could definitely tick off that square too.