Richard Mabey is the author of numerous books on Britain's ecology, including the best-selling Flora Britannica and the Whitbread Prize-winning Gilbert White (Virginia).

The first volume of the acclaimed Time Out Country Walks has been fully revised and updated, featuring 52 walks within easy reach of London, all starting and ending at railway stations. The walks take travelers through the glorious countryside, all on scenic footpaths with a minimum of road-walking. Recommendations for the best pubs and cafés are included, while easy-to-use maps and cut-off suggestions help those who choose to shorten the walk.

AN INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR An extraordinary book by a man with a unique and inspiring perspective, SCARP will change the way you view the places and spaces around you, and reveal a forgotten London you never knew existed. Nick Papadimitriou has spent a lifetime living on the margins, walking and documenting the landscapes surrounding his home in Child's Hill, North London, in a study he calls Deep Topography. Part meditation on nature and walking, part memoir and part social history, his arresting debut is first and foremost a personal inquiry into the spirit of a place: a 14-mile broken ridge of land on the fringes of Northern London known as Scarp. Conspicuous but largely forgotten, a vast yet largely invisible presence hovering just beyond the metropolis, Scarp is a vast storehouse of regional memory. We join the author as he explores and reimagines this brooding, pregnant landscape, meticulously observing his surroundings, finding surprising connections and revealing lost slices of the past. SCARP captures the satisfying experience of a long, reflective walk. Whether talking about the beauty of a bird or a telegraph pole, deaths at a roundabout or his own troubled past, Papadimitriou celebrates the poetry in the everyday. His captivating prose reveals that the world around us is alive and intrinsically valuable in ways that the trappings of day-to-day life lead us to forget, and allows us to re-connect with something more authentic, more immediate, more profound.

A must-have guide for any walker looking for a challenge and wanting to escape the city, this explores the London LOOP London Outer Orbital Path (The London LOOP ) which follows a green corridor right around the capital. This spectacular route offers a circular walk among secret countryside that will make you forget you're within a few miles of Heathrow Airport, the A13, or the suburban sprawl of Croydon, Watford or Dagenham. Here is rolling downland near Coulsdon, the forest of Enfield Chase, the lonely Thames marshes at Rainham, the classical parkland of Bushy Park and a canalside stroll at Uxbridge. London could not seem further away. Split into 15 sections that each represent a day's walk of reasonable length, this walker's companion gives detailed descriptions of each walk, including numerous points of interest and key sites numbered in the text and on the maps for easy identification. With background information on everything from local history, architecture, archaeology, industry, land-use and wildlife plus full information on public transport access to the start and finish of each walk, this book shows you how to escape the Big Smoke for the day – without going too far!

Running for 180 miles (288 km) from the river's source in ruralloucestershire to the Thames barrier, the Thames Path is England's newestational Trail and one of the most varied and accessible of the country'song-distance paths. The Countryside Agency's acorn waymarks lead the walkerhrough tranquil water meadows, past the dreaming spires of Oxford and theageantry of Windsor and Hampton Court, through the heart of the capital, toondon's Docklands and beyond. This is the official guide to the Path andill be invaluable to the long-distance walker and weekend stroller alike.