Length: About 10 km (6.2 miles) to Twickenham, 15 km (9.3 miles) to Richmond. Toughness: 1/10
Take a Piccadilly line tube to arrive at Hatton Cross (TfL Zone 5/6) by noon. It's a 45 minute journey from Leicester Square; if necessary, use the TfL Journey Planner from your local station. Meet upstairs in the ticket hall.
If you finish at Twickenham (Zone 5) there are four mainline trains an hour to Waterloo, at xx:03, xx:23, xx:32 & xx:53. These all call at Richmond (Zone 4) around five minutes later, and this station is also the terminus for a branch of the District line and Overground trains to Stratford.
NB. British Summer Time begins this Sunday. While we all welcome an extra hour's daylight in the evenings, some of us will complain at the loss of an hour in bed this morning. Since there's no great pressure to get to a lunch pub or tearoom at a certain time, I'll try to mollify these grumblers with this one-off experiment of an Afternoon Walk starting at the crack of noon.
This walk's author tells me that the River Crane Walk made an ideal lockdown outing: from Twickenham station you could go out and back along a thickly-wooded stretch of this urban tributary of the Thames and soon imagine yourself in a much more rural environment. Noting that its northernmost point isn't far from a tube station has led me to try out this linear version of the walk, with an attractive stretch of the Thames Path as an optional extension.
As it wasn't really designed as a club walk there aren't any designated lunch and tea places as such. I suggest having a break at the first refreshment place you'll come across (a café with picnic benches in Kneller Park), although it's only 20 minutes before Twickenham station. If you want something more substantial it's not much further to the town centre where you'll find plenty of eateries. There are also some appealing riverside pubs both here and at Richmond if you do the Thames Path extension (the first of which really is called “The Barmy Arms”, no doubt the spiritual home of England supporters abroad).
Remember that there's no walk leader. The L=swc.376 page has a couple of maps showing the main walk route, plus the short link route from Hatton Cross (both also available on GPS, though might be some doubt at a few places where the river is out of sight). You shouldn't have any difficulty finding your way to the Thames if you want to carry on to Richmond. The SWC page lists the main features en route; you might also like to check out the notes and directions in this pdf document produced by Inner London Ramblers, since part of the River Crane Walk overlaps with Section 9 of the LOOP.
