Crouch End

It's funny, but the more we see and do in London, the more we realize that there are seemingly endless places to explore in this huge city-have we even begun to make a dent? Today we ended up exploring a neighbourhood close to home, amazed (yet again) that we hadn't been there yet. We walked along part of the Parkland Walk, which makes nice use of an abandoned railway line running through northern London. At times along the way, we saw into people's back gardens,

walked across bridges with views of the streets below,
and had a sense of being removed from the busy city all around us.
It wasn't exactly the Promenade Plantée, but it was still a lovely walk. We returned to the streets to explore the neighbourhood of Crouch End, centred on its clock tower:
Crouch End had the nice feeling of a village, albeit a village with an astronomical number of places to eat treats (lots of French and Italian shops) and drink strong coffee! Since we were neither hungry nor thirsty, we resisted all the smells and sights and just wandered the high streets. Before we left the area, I stopped at the library to sign up for a Haringey (the borough just north of ours) library card and check out a few books. The library was in an odd location, almost hidden behind the town hall, with this sculpture obscuring the window that revealed the building to be a library.
We walked through nearby Priory Park, whose "Philosophers' Garden" was adorned with three cute mushroom sculptures.

Although we wanted to visit two other green spaces in the area, we ended up getting a bit lost since we only had our mini A-Z mapbook with us and we had wandered off the map! It all worked out fine though, since now we know we'd like to return to the area and we can save those parks (along with a Crouch End coffee stop) for another outing.