Swanning Along the Crane
July 5 @ 10:30 am - 5:00 pm
Swanning Along the Crane
On Saturday 5 July 2025
Starts 10.30am from Hayes & Harlington Station – Eventbrite booking coming soon.
A day walk with ornithological investigator J D Swann along the River Crane corridor, observing wildlife and considering the history close to this beautiful Thames tributary. Finding nature growing between major roads and Heathrow airport. Travel south from Hayes & Harlington Station on segment 30 of the Inspiral Trail through Cranford Country Park, Donkey Wood, Pevensey Road Nature Reserve, Crane Park and Mereway Nature Park, the walk ends at Twickenham Station.
This walk is part of InspiralLondon Re/Walk Festival supported by tfl WCGL and with Friends of the River Crane Environment (F.O.R.C.E), a community based voluntary organisation working in the London Boroughs of Richmond and Hounslow – www.force.org.uk – They are developing the Crane Valley Trail as a new walk for West London – https://www.cranevalley.org.uk/crane-valley-trail/
InspiralLondon Segment 30 follows this route as we negotiate Heathrow Airport.
InspiralLondon’s Re/Walk Festival – Excavate, Explore, Exchange – Celebrates the 10th Anniversary of InspiralLondon Trail with a festival of seven plus seven, unique walks as participatory experiences. The festival walks will take you to other hidden and less well-known parts of the city; detouring from the trail, in exploring underexplored, buried aspects of the city or walking together by night.
We wish to share the magic and multiplicity of the city with all its diverse inhabitants, and to get you walking; to explore the city with renewed curiosity, by excavating the other buried narratives and histories that make London so unique. Together, we will re/walk and re/make the city by foot.
Re/walk is generously supported by tfl WCGL grant, the Royal Borough of Greenwich and other walking group partners such as Kinetika T-100, Walking Artist Network and soundcamp.
InspiralLondon is an artist-led metropolitan trail, a collective on the ground mapping, that offers a new walk trail spiralling out and into London. This anti-clockwise walk begins at Kings Cross, unwinding from its centre point six times, to finally end at Gravesend, only to begin again. This unique Metropolitan trail crosses the River Thames at ten locations, using bridges, foot tunnels, a cable car and ferries. At over 300-miles of pathway, the trail is divided into 36 segments all easily accessible by public transport, allowing the public – walkers, urban explorers, excursionists, citizens – to experience the city and its environs as one vast space in which to re-imagine together the built and natural environment. 2025 is the 10th anniversary of the trail’s first festival and opening.
