The Best Running Routes in Eltham, Greenwich & Blackheath

Shooters Hill is one of the highest points in South East London, and it's become something of a rite of passage for local runners looking to build hill strength. The climb from Well Hall Road up toward the Shrewsbury Lane / Eaglesfield Park area offers a sustained, honest gradient — good for repeats of 60–90 seconds with a jog back down for recovery.

Pairing hill sessions like this with dedicated leg strength work makes a real difference to how well you handle the climb — see our guide to the four lifts every runner should do.

Just adjacent to Shooters Hill, Oxleas Meadow and the ancient woodland of Oxleas Wood offer a genuinely different running surface — proper trail underfoot with rolling terrain rather than a single sustained climb. It's a good option for an easy or recovery run where you want softer ground on tired legs, or for adding some off-road variety into a training week without leaving the area.

Greenwich Park is arguably the best-known running spot in the area, and for good reason. The park combines a genuine climb up to the Royal Observatory with flatter loops lower down, so it works for almost any session type:

• Long, easy runs looping the perimeter paths
• Tempo efforts on the flatter lower sections
• Hill repeats on the climb up toward the Observatory, with sweeping views over the Thames and Canary Wharf as a reward at the top

It's a popular spot, so expect company on weekend mornings, particularly around the more scenic viewpoints.

Blackheath itself is a large expanse of open common, ideal for flat, honest tempo running or intervals where you want consistent, unbroken terrain without traffic crossings. Being elevated and open, it can be considerably windier than routes lower down — useful, unglamorous training for race-day conditions, but worth factoring into your pacing expectations.

Eltham Park South and Eltham Park North offer straightforward, well-maintained loops that suit easy runs, recovery jogs, or simply squeezing in mileage without needing to drive anywhere. The paths are flat and predictable, making them a good choice when the priority is just getting easy miles in comfortably.

Avery Hill Park is a slightly less crowded alternative to Eltham Park, with a mix of open grassland and some gentle undulation. It works well as a mid-length steady run, and connects reasonably well with surrounding streets if you want to extend a loop into a longer session.

Sutcliffe Park's flat, enclosed layout (it's a former sports ground redeveloped as a nature reserve and flood-relief park) makes it a genuinely useful venue for interval sessions where consistent, flat terrain matters — think 400m or 1km repeats without worrying about hills skewing your splits.

A little further out, Beckenham Place Park offers considerably more space to roam, including woodland, open parkland and a lake, making it well suited to longer runs where you want scenery variety over an hour-plus effort without repeating the same short loop multiple times.

A simple way to use these routes across a training week:

• Easy runs: Eltham Park or Avery Hill Park
• Intervals/tempo: Sutcliffe Park or the flatter sections of Blackheath
• Hill sessions: Shooters Hill, or the climb in Greenwich Park
• Long runs: Greenwich Park loops extended into Blackheath, or Beckenham Place Park
• Easy trail variety: Oxleas Wood and Oxleas Meadow

Whichever routes you use, the terrain here — plenty of hills, open exposed ground and mixed surfaces — rewards runners who back their mileage up with proper strength work. If you want help building a programme around your local training terrain, our running coaching is built specifically for runners training across this part of South East London — book a free call to talk it through.