Walk this way

Summer is the time to take things easy and hit the great outdoors. And the good news for Londoners planning to spend August in town is that the capital has some of the best green space just waiting to be explored by anyone with a Travelcard and a pair of sturdy trainers.

More than a third of London is open space (parks, commons, woodland, meadowland and farmland) making it one of the world's greenest cities.

On top of this, miles of industrial inland waterways and river frontages are being cleaned and opened up to the public for the first time in decades. Almost every London borough has heritage trails, nature trails and parkland walks; visit your local library for leaflets describing these short walks.

If you want something more sweeping, though, the walk to try this year is the Capital Ring, a new 72-mile route circling the inner-London suburbs. It starts at the Woolwich foot tunnel, swings down through south-east London to Crystal Palace, crosses the Thames at Richmond Bridge and rises to the north at Highgate before it heads back east through Hackney to Beckton. It runs above sewers, under the M4, along canal paths and through every kind of greenery from grass verge to Royal park. If you relish contrast, you'll love this.

The walk, devised by the London Walking Forum, is not yet finished - this walk from Hendon to Highgate is one of four of the completed sections.

HENDON TO HIGHGATE

Start at: Hendon Central station, Northern line Tube (Edgware branch); Zone 3.

Distance: About 5.3 miles.

HENDON

The place: Classic inter-war suburbia that is sliced in two by busy through roads, with shoppers forced underground into subways to cross from one unexceptional parade of shops to another. The most interesting shops are the kosher food stores serving the area's large Jewish community. Things improve dramatically as soon as you escape into tree-lined side roads displaying neatly trimmed gardens.

The space: Hendon Park is the largest slice of greenery on this part of the route, a pleasant stretch of green with avenues of mature trees. After this, the walk briefly touches the North Circular, one of the London's busiest roads, before turning off into Brent Park, where the River Brent meanders gently through trees and undergrowth. Keep walking and you reach Mutton Brook, which flows into the Brent.

The properties: This is well-off suburbia. Medium-sized and large red-brick detached houses, with gables and colonnaded porches, predominate around Hendon Central station on the north side of Hendon Park. Slightly more modest semidetached houses line the grid of streets off Shirehall Lane, on the popular Shirehall Estate.

Stuart Kershaw of Winkworth's Hendon office (020 8202 1031) is selling a four-bedroom, 1930s, detached house in Shirehall-Close for £625,000. The house needs work, which is reflected in the price. On the other side of Hendon Park in Denehurst Gardens, Winkworth has a three-bedroom detached house for £475,000. Kershaw says that prices in Hendon have risen by an estimated 25 per cent over the past year, due to a shortage of property for sale and a lack of new-build.

HAMPSTEAD GARDEN SUBURB

The place: The Suburb, as it's known locally, was created as an experiment in mixed living (rich and poor side by side) in the early 1900s by social reformer Dame Henrietta Barnet. Nowadays, you'd be hard-pushed to find anyone poor here: its inhabitants range from the well- off to the obscenely wealthy in roads such as Winnington Road and The Bishops Avenue, just off the walk route. As in Hendon, there's a large Jewish community, served by kosher supermarkets and butchers, book shops and gift shops in Temple Fortune (aka the north part of the Finchley Road).