Forest Hill Walking Festival 2025 – A Weekend of Steps, Stories, and Community
- Forest Hill Society
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Once again, Sunday brought perfect walking weather to Forest Hill and Honor Oak Park — just in time for the second annual Forest Hill Walking Festival. While Saturday’s skies were a little less kind, the weekend as a whole offered a great excuse to lace up our walking shoes and get out into the local area.
On Saturday 7th and Sunday 8th June 2025, around 100 residents, visitors, and members of the Forest Hill Society took part in one (or more!) of the six walks on offer. As ever, the aim of the festival was to celebrate the green spaces, history, creativity, and strong sense of community that make SE23 such a special place to live — with a good dose of exercise thrown in.
Together, our walkers covered an impressive 340 miles — that’s roughly 680,000 steps between us. A brilliant team effort!
Among the returning favourites were the Art & Music Walk and the Victorian History Walk, both of which continue to be popular. This year also saw the introduction of the Architectural Gems Walk, which proved to be the most popular new addition. Other highlights included a pub walk exploring Forest Hill, Bell Green, Sydenham and Kirkdale, and the more adventurous Nature Reserves Challenge Walk, which gave participants rare access to six local nature reserves in a single day.
As part of the festival weekend, the Forest Hill Society Environment Committee also gave away over 200 edible plants to local residents and families. There was no shortage of eager young gardeners choosing to grow (and hopefully eat!) their own tomatoes, mint, rosemary, sage, courgettes, chard and more — whether on balconies, windowsills or in back gardens.
For more details on each of the walks, you can find guides on the Forest Hill Society website.
If this sounds like your kind of weekend, we’d love you to join us. Membership of the Forest Hill Society is just £5 a year — and the more members we have, the stronger our voice becomes in local matters and the more we can do as a community.
Thank you to everyone who took part, helped out, shared stories, grew plants and made this year’s festival such a success. Here’s to even more steps and smiles next year.