SHINE Night Walk 2022
Saturday 24 September 2022 · 45.02 km · Elevation gain: 164 m · Steps: 55,847 · Moving time: 7h 46m
The SHINE Night Walk is a Cancer Research UK marathon-distance charity event that takes place annually in late September, sending thousands of walkers through the streets of London after dark, past some of the city's most recognisable landmarks, all lit up in the small hours. It is one of those events that sounds slightly improbable on paper — 45 kilometres on foot through central London, starting at seven in the evening and finishing some time around dawn — and turns out to be one of the most atmospheric walks imaginable. Vanessa and I signed up for the full marathon distance, and on the evening of Saturday 24 September 2022 we made our way to Southwark Park for the start.
Southwark Park opened on 19 June 1869, designed by Alexander McKenzie and laid out by the Metropolitan Board of Works as one of its first public parks — 63 acres of lawns, ornamental gardens and bandstand in what was then one of the most densely populated and least green parts of inner south-east London. On a September evening 153 years later, it was given over to something rather different: food stalls, noodle vendors, a stage, and several thousand walkers in varying states of fancy dress, most of them draped in glowsticks and battery-powered lights. The SHINE name earns its keep. The event has always had a particular emotional weight to it — it raises money for cancer research, and the reasons people choose to walk it are often carried visibly, on the placards and dedication tags attached to rucksacks and bib numbers. Vanessa's tag that evening read: “I’m walking for my mum, Cathy Green, taken aged 46”. That was more than thirty years ago, when Vanessa was in her early twenties, but it is the kind of loss that does not diminish with time. The atmosphere at the start was warm and generous rather than competitive; this is not that kind of event.
The route leaves Southwark Park heading north and west, picking up the south bank of the Thames for the first major stretch before crossing Tower Bridge at around the five-kilometre mark. Tower Bridge opened in June 1894 after eight years of construction, designed by Horace Jones and John Wolfe Barry as a combined bascule and suspension bridge to allow both pedestrian and river traffic to pass simultaneously. In the small hours of a September night, with the bridge lit in blue and white and the road largely clear of traffic, it is a very different experience to crossing it in daylight. Vanessa's photo from the roadway captures something of that quality — the speed blur of the few passing taxis, the light flooding off the north tower, the other walkers moving steadily alongside.
From Tower Bridge the route heads north through the City of London, through Smithfield and Clerkenwell and on towards King's Cross and Camden, before looping west through Marylebone and back down through Hyde Park and the Embankment. At around the 20-kilometre mark the route passes the London Eye, the 135-metre observation wheel on the South Bank that has been a feature of the riverside since it opened for the Millennium celebrations in March 2000. The wheel was designed by architects David Marks and Julia Barfield, and its 32 sealed capsules — one for each of the London boroughs — carry around 3.5 million passengers a year. At nearly three in the morning, with the surrounding trees bathed in pink and purple event lighting, it provides a backdrop that no amount of deliberately artistic effort could quite replicate.
The route then continues west through Chelsea and loops back through Battersea before crossing the river again and picking its way back east through Westminster and the City to the finish at Old Billingsgate. The building that houses the finish line has been on the north bank of the Thames since 1875, when architect Horace Jones — the same man who would go on to design Tower Bridge — completed the new market hall on Lower Thames Street to replace an older structure on the same site. For well over a thousand years before that, some form of Billingsgate market had traded on this part of the riverbank; a parliamentary act of 1699 formalised it as "a free and open market for all sorts of fish whatsoever," and the Victorian building became, by the late nineteenth century, the largest fish market in the world. The market itself relocated to West India Dock in 1982, and the Grade II listed building has since been used as an events venue, its Grand Hall and vaulted basement given an industrial refurbishment by Richard Rogers. It is a fittingly significant building for a finish line.
We reached Old Billingsgate at around four in the morning. The bacon sandwiches that had been sustaining the thought of a finish-line breakfast turned out to have run out — a small but keenly felt disappointment after seven and a half hours on the road. A taxi took us into central London in search of alternative options, which, at four in the morning, proved harder to locate than expected; a further hour of walking and some optimistic navigation eventually led us to a McDonald's near Victoria Station that was open, staffed, and willing to serve breakfast. We settled in among a small population of night-shift workers and late-night stragglers, and ate with some gratitude.
Totals for the night: 45.02 km, 164 metres of elevation gain, 55,847 steps, and a moving time of seven hours and forty-six minutes. The near-flat profile of a London walk makes for a different kind of tiredness than the hills of Surrey and Sussex — no single moment of particular effort, just the steady accumulation of pavement kilometres through a city that looks nothing like itself at three in the morning. We caught the first train back to Canterbury as the sky began to lighten.
