Thames Path accommodation: where to stay and how to plan it

What makes accommodation planning different here

Ordinary English accommodation, booked property by property. There is no hut system, no central booking route and no stage that requires a package. What matters is that the trail changes character three times and the bed problem changes with it. From the source to Oxford the settlements are small Cotswold and upper-Thames villages, the properties are single pubs with a handful of rooms and farm campsites, and the choice at any one stop is thin. Through the Thames Valley towns, Oxford, Abingdon, Wallingford, Reading, Henley, Marlow, Windsor and Kingston, there is plenty of it, but it is priced for weekend and event visitors: 16th century coaching inns, boutique conversions and country-house hotels, none of them set up for someone arriving wet and on foot. Through London it is chain hotels, where the constraint is simply price and the fact that a Travelodge or an ibis has nothing for a walker beyond a bed, a shower and a bar. Two consequences worth planning around. First, none of the properties we read publishes a drying room, a boot store or a walker's rate, which is unusual for a National Trail and is a fair reflection of who these places are built for. Second, the cheap end of the upper river has thinned out badly: the Environment Agency campsites at the Thames locks, long the classic way to walk the upper river on a budget, are all shut (see camping rules), and two of the caravan sites the map shows near Longworth and Henley are club sites that only members can book. Book each place direct. The trail's own guidance is that 'Many places fill up quickly, so we recommend that you book in advance', and that is truest in the upper river where a village may have one pub with rooms. Three arrangements differ from booking with the owner and are worth knowing before you plan around them. Wetherspoon hotels, of which The Catherine Wheel at Henley is one, book centrally online. Campsites in the Thames Valley commonly impose a two-night minimum at weekends outside the low season and three nights over public holidays, which is a real obstacle to a through-walker and is recorded on the individual sites where we could establish it. And Caravan and Motorhome Club sites, both the small farm Certificated Locations and the larger club campsites, are open to members only, so they are not beds a walker can simply book. Walkable all year. This is a low, flat, largely surfaced river path and nothing about the walking closes down in winter. Two things do change. The first is the river itself: the trail's own advice is that 'The best months to visit are spring through to the end of autumn since during winter the Thames is prone to flooding, particularly upstream of Oxford', and where the path runs on the flood plain above Oxford it can be under water rather than merely wet. The second is that the seasonal accommodation is exactly the accommodation the upper river depends on. Lincoln Farm Park at Standlake runs early March to early November. The council campsite at Wallingford runs 1 May to 30 September. Bridge Villa at Crowmarsh Gifford prices February to December in four seasonal bands and is the nearest thing to a year-round pitch on that stretch. The hotels, pubs and chains along the whole route trade all year. The western end sits in the Cotswolds near Kemble, and the trail's own guidance names Bristol as the nearest airport to the source. The eastern end at Woolwich 'is easily reached from London's airports'. The useful point for planning is the asymmetry the trail states plainly: 'Downstream of Oxford there is good access to many places along the Thames Path by train, bus and even boat, with London and the larger towns and cities through which the Trail runs very easily accessible by public transport.' Above Oxford that sentence does not apply, and the upper river is where a bail-out is hardest. Which individual stages are and are not served by a station is transport work and has been handed to that layer rather than guessed at here. Two things govern camping here and both are restrictive. Wild camping is not a right: 'In England and Wales, there are normally no rights for national trail users to wild camp along the way, so seeking the landowner's permission is recommended.' And the Environment Agency campsites at the Thames locks, which were the cheap, riverside, walk-up option on the upper river, are closed. The Agency's own statement, carried on the trail's accommodation pages for Shifford Lock and Day's Lock among others, is: 'We are sorry to have to inform you that we have closed all Environment Agency campsites at our River Thames lock sites for the remainder of this year. The Environment Agency are reviewing all aspects of our campsite management to ensure we have suitable arrangements in place to meet our statutory obligations and all other legal responsibilities for the sites.' Eynsham Lock, Pinkhill Lock, Shifford Lock and Day's Lock are all listed as currently closed. That leaves commercial campsites, which on the upper river are few and mostly geared to caravans, and it makes a walker-with-a-tent plan for the source to Oxford section considerably harder than the map suggests. Bridge Villa at Crowmarsh Gifford is the one site we found that prices a walker properly, at GBP 12 to GBP 18 for a hiking tent and one person. We could not establish a useful trail-wide picture and would rather say so than invent one. Nothing we read on the operator sites between the source and Oxford, which is where the choice is narrowest, named a single vegan or vegetarian dish; the most any of them offered was generic wording about accommodating dietary requirements, which the scope of this project treats as no evidence of a vegan kitchen. Through the Thames Valley towns and London the practical situation is the ordinary English one, where a town of any size has choice and the constraint is opening hours rather than diet. The stretch worth ringing ahead about is the upper river, where the village pub is often the only kitchen for the evening and the answer depends on the chef rather than the menu. Per-property grades are recorded on the individual records and are mostly 'unknown', which is the honest answer here. Two structural points. Nowhere on this trail is a bed the limiting factor in the way it is on a mountain trail; the limiting factors are price in the Thames Valley and London, and thinness of choice above Oxford. And the property types the map records are unreliable at the cheap end of this route in a specific way: of the five caravan or camp sites we checked between Longworth and Henley, two are Caravan and Motorhome Club sites that only members may book and one of those takes no tents at all.