Tag: Urban Walking
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Dickens’s night walks
In my late teens and early twenties I read a lot of Charles Dickens. In Peter Ackroyd’s (unabridged) biography Dickens (1990), I learned more about the man behind the writing. An aspect of his life that really fascinated me was the long nocturnal walks Dickens would take to try and deal with insomnia and the…
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Iain Sinclair’s London
Iain Sinclair has spent decades roaming the British capital on foot and excavating the city’s psychogeography in books such as London Orbital, where he follows the route of the M25 motorway, and London Overground, where he walks alongside the city’s Overground rail network. Sinclair has said that 2017’s The Last London is his final book…
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Phone zombies, drifters, speed bumps
Lauren Elkin, whose book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City is profiled on the Resources page, contributed a radio essay to the BBC on the types of pedestrians one encounters on urban sidewalks: “Elkin reckons that the way people walk, their gait, is a signifier. It also tells us something about ourselves as we watch people…
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Ken Wilson – Pedestrian
It was such a pleasure to talk with Ken (aka Dr. Ken Wilson). I’ve known Ken for a couple decades and I have seen how walking has become a vital and creative component of his life. He’s been very generous in sharing the sources of his walking knowledge, and introduced me to a range of…
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Johnny Strides
Johnny Strides is the handle of John Hicks, who’s been posting videos of his walks – mostly in Toronto but elsewhere as well – since before the COVID pandemic. His YouTube channel has thousands of videos and he’s adding more on a daily basis. In an interview with Spacing Magazine in 2024 he said “I…
Project Pedestrian 