2023 Walking Dagenham

Being back in the lab this year has really put a cap on my walking around the borough and stepping on bits of it I’ve not stepped on before. To make things easier (& more complicated) I’ve decided that in 2023, instead of seeking out small patches I’ve not trodden on before, I’ll visit entire streets I’ve not visited before. This is in part inspired by Diamond Geezer’s successful visiting of every map square in London.

I’ve mapped out the boundary of Dagenham (I’m not including Barking in this for now to make things manageable), I’ve already visited many of the streets, by some I can’t quite be sure if I’ve ever walked or cycled along them (I’m not including car or bus journeys), so some will definitely require revisiting, others will be entirely new to me (mostly side streets).

The lower resolution view in the image below doesn’t show many of the smaller streets which I know are there, so it doesn’t look like such a challenge, but I think it’ll take a real effort on my part to have actually visited visit every street by the end of 2023.

The boundary of Dagenham, according to google (seems to match with some older sources I have too)

Cold

The first significant snow fall for about a decade has coincided with a cold snap that has meant the snow has laid for longer and on the pavements has thawed and re-frozen to form sheet ice. A short walk today saw me perform feats of acrobatic skill just to stay on my feet.

A happy co-incidence is that my weather station has been up and running though this time, so I’ve been able to get a pretty accurate idea of the temperature outdoors. The digital thermometer was calibrated against a very good mercury-in-glass-thermometer, so I’m pretty confident that overnight we got down below -5.5C and only reached above freezing when the sensor was in direct sunlight (something I need to fix).

I like collecting and analysing data, I’m a scientist, it’s what I do. So adding a few more sensors to the garden and pulling the data into a database seems like a sensible thing to do. More to come in 2023 I think.