Hilly Fields

The clue's in the name, but I didn't expect the hill. It may have been a result of planning the route on the plane of my ancient A to Z's pages, and on the pastel shades of internet maps. In my head, there were ordinary streets, and then a patch of green full of irregular bumps. Even now, that image coexists with the place I went to - up what in London constitutes quite a big hill.

I read about it in an excellent book called Quiet London, which promises soothing calm to the enervated city dweller. I like discovering strange contrasts of sense experience outside the ants' nest of Canary Wharf, and soon Hilly Fields was on my list of lunchtime escapes.

Lewisham was a mix of sweat and rain. As I made my way out of the DLR station and along Loampit Way, looking up at all the ultra-modern buildings, both complete (the leisure centre) and under construction (the luxury flats and the affordable accommodation across the road), the idea of quiet seemed quite alien. I felt smeared with road grit, and schoolchildren wheeled around despite their mothers' objections.

I turned up Elmira Street, among new-built residential buildings, bland but with enough space between them to give a clear of view the dark, low sky. Despite the gloom, this was early July, and so I sweated even walking on the flat.

On Ellerdale Road, the climb and the rain began. (At the last minute I'd decided to leave my coat at my desk.) A mother ahead of me stopped the pushchair against which she'd been leaning like a miner against a coal truck, and cagouled her daughter. The rain increased as if someone were twisting a dial, and I had to take shelter under a cherry tree in the corner of a garden. I spent some minutes gazing round at the Victorian bourgeois respectability I'd crossed into. The only difference from many roads in Shepherd's Bush, say, was the angle at which the houses rose in front of me. This was definitely a hill, and because I had to climb it fast once the rain had slackened, I felt it was a real achievement when I got to the gate of Hilly Fields.

I'd been here once before, on a bus with wife and daughter to a friend's house. I remembered views across London, more potent because completely unexpected. And I remember someone standing so that my daughter, who was very small at the time, could sit - one of many occasions that give the lie to the idea of the always-callous Londoner.

Off the road, both view and memory dropped away. The rain was still falling, so I stayed under the canopies of plane trees. It felt as though all other sound was draining from round me, as though I had hauled myself out of the sea and onto a green island.

Plane trees lined each side of the tarmac path, cumuli of leaves. A couple of children ran round their father, who was seated on the grass, but otherwise I was alone. It felt far away from London, an impression reinforced by the only fragmentary view possible between the planes - a huge city was down there, but the dark palette of its buildings was almost entirely invisible. In Quiet London, Siobhan Wall mentions an "artificial" stone circle, erected in recent years. Like many real prehistoric sites, it was positioned just down from the crest of the hill, hidden until the visitor is close by (though the stones themselves looked quite newly cut). I spent a little while in there, thinking about the steady hiss of the rain, like that in the background of an analogue radio, or between tracks on a vinyl record. London's prehistory remained obscure, but the present moment was filled by my senses.

But as so often with present moments, this one went on a bit too long, and I was running the risk of being quite late back. I headed down the hill, wishing I could lie on the bench set under plane trees and look up into the branches, or listen properly to the robin that began singing as soon as the shower stopped.

The dot-dash-dot view of London through the trees vanished altogether. I was back among the comfortable houses that lead down into Lewisham. I passed a bus bearing the number of those I used to catch to our first home in London, close to Peckham Rye Park. For a second I felt I could catch it, travel west, let myself in at the old door, slip into a life in parallel, as the Ravensbourne runs alongside the DLR to the Thames.