London to Brighton : Day 1
Saturday 27 May 2023 · 58.33 km · Elevation gain: 708 m · Steps: 75,666 · Moving time: 11h 11m
The London to Brighton Ultra Challenge had been on the walking group's radar since we first started talking seriously about longer distances. The original plan had been for several of us to tackle the second half of the route together — the 44-kilometre leg from Turners Hill in West Sussex down to Brighton Racecourse. But I had become quietly determined to do the full 100 kilometres, and for a while there had been a reasonable group signed up for at least part of the challenge. In the end, a couple of members had to withdraw through training injuries in the weeks before the event — which reshaped things considerably. Vanessa and Monty kindly stepped in to join the second day at short notice, but it meant the original camping plan at Tulley's Farm had to be abandoned in favour of a rather more logistically involved arrangement. On the first day I would walk alone.
The logistics of getting to the start line were a small adventure of their own. On the Friday afternoon I drove from Whitfield to Tulley's Farm in Turners Hill — the halfway point and day one's destination — and left the car there. Getting to Richmond then required walking the seven kilometres from Tulley's Farm to Crawley railway station, taking the train to London, and the underground to Richmond, where I had a room for the night at the Premier Inn near Old Deer Park. It was, in a very literal sense, warming up.
The event itself is organised by Ultra Challenge, and the London to Brighton is the original fixture in what has grown into the UK's largest series of mass-participation treks. On this bank holiday weekend over two thousand participants took on some version of the route — some as a continuous 100-kilometre challenge through the night, others, like me, splitting it across two days. Quarter and half-distance options meant the route was shared with walkers at very different stages of their efforts throughout. Pink arrows and marker signs lined the entire course, and rest stops with food, drink, and medical support appeared roughly every twelve and a half kilometres, with larger marquee stops at the quarter and halfway points. Every participant was scanned in at each stop, with progress logged to a central control room.
The start line was in Old Deer Park in Richmond, beside the Thames. The park has a long relationship with the Crown: the Manor of Shene passed to royal ownership in 1316, and it was a favoured home of Elizabeth I, who died at Richmond in 1603. What we now know as Old Deer Park acquired its name after 1637, when Charles I enclosed the much larger Richmond Park across town, rendering the original enclosure the older of the two. In the eighteenth century it became the summer residence of the Prince of Wales who would become George II, and in 1769 the King's Observatory was built within it to observe the transit of Venus. On a May bank holiday morning at seven o'clock the atmosphere at the start area was unexpectedly festive — the low sun catching the marquees and banners, and the slightly charged energy of a large number of people about to put something considerable into motion.
The route leaves Richmond heading south along the banks of the Thames before turning inland through Wimbledon and southwest through Carshalton, Cheam and Banstead, passing through the first quarter-distance checkpoint at Oaks Park near Sutton. The early kilometres were suburban in character, the path weaving through parks and playing fields as outer London gave way to the commuter belt. The cloud that had lingered at the start thinned steadily, and by the time the route was passing through the green spaces around Carshalton the morning light was properly warm. Some of the rest stops along this stretch had their own festive quality — one near Carshalton had been set up with a full corridor of red and yellow London 2 Brighton flags under a cloudless sky, which may have been the start of a shorter parallel event running alongside the main challenge that morning.
The route climbs onto the North Downs near Epsom — the same Epsom whose chalk Downs have hosted horse racing since the 1640s, and where the first Derby was run in 1780. By around the five-hour mark I had passed through Oaks Park and was well into Surrey, my watch showing 28 kilometres and the time just after half past one. The background in the wrist shot I took that afternoon tells its own story: a narrow suburban alleyway between back garden fences, the kind of connecting passage that the route relies on to thread through built-up ground without resorting entirely to pavement. The temperature had climbed into the mid-teens under clear skies, and by the time the route crossed under the M25 — the motorway sitting at roughly the seven-hour mark as an unmistakable boundary between London's orbit and the countryside proper — it was a genuinely warm afternoon.
The North Downs section of the route passes over Box Hill, the National Trust's chalk escarpment 224 metres above sea level and roughly 30 kilometres south-west of London. The hill takes its name from the ancient box woodland on its steepest chalk slopes — woodland that has persisted since the end of the last ice age, which the diarist John Evelyn noted visiting in 1655 for its "natural bowers, cabinets and shady walks." The descent to the River Mole stepping stones is 270 steps of steep chalk path; the stepping stones themselves, first recorded in 1841 and replaced after the Second World War, mark the lowest point of the escarpment before the route climbs back onto the ridge towards Reigate.
Reigate Hill carries its own quietly interesting history. At the summit stands Reigate Fort, dating from 1898 — one of thirteen mobilisation forts built along the North Downs as part of the London Defence Scheme, decommissioned in 1906 when the government concluded the navy's coastal capability made such inland works unnecessary, recommissioned in both world wars, and now managed by the National Trust. Nearby, two pieces of ancient Surrey oak mark the Wing Tips memorial, commemorating the crew of a B-17 Flying Fortress that came down on the hill in 1945 returning from a mission over Europe. The sculpture is spaced at the exact wingspan of the aircraft, with molten metal recovered from the crash site cast into the wood. It is the kind of thing you pass quickly on a long walk but find yourself thinking about later.
South of Reigate the chalk ridge gives way to the Weald — the broad plain of ancient woodland and farmland between the North and South Downs, its name from the Old English for forest. The route crosses this belt through Horley and along field-edge paths towards Crawley, the approach to Gatwick's flight path providing the only real intrusion into what was otherwise surprisingly rural country.
I reached Tulley's Farm at around eight in the evening, thirteen hours after leaving Richmond. The rest stops had done their job throughout — food and drink every twelve kilometres, and the event organisation consistently thorough. Tulley's is a fourth-generation farm that has been on this land since 1937, when Bernard Beare moved east from Devon and established what began as a dairy operation on the edge of the Sussex Weald; his son Denis grew it into one of the area's largest pick-your-own enterprises through the 1970s, and his grandson Stuart has since developed it into a well-known events venue. After a meal in the marquee I collected the car, drove home to Whitfield for a shower and a few hours' sleep, and was back on the road early enough to reach Tulley's again for the seven o'clock start on day two — this time with Sophie, Tamara, Vanessa and Monty.
Totals for day one: 58.33 km covered, 708 metres of elevation gained, 75,666 steps, and a moving time of eleven hours and eleven minutes. The second half remained.
