Tag: 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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Plodcast
When I go for a walk, it’s often to the soundtrack of a podcast. I realise having headphones on splits my attention between where I am and where the podcast takes me, and I miss out on the sounds of the environment I’m in and send signals to others not to approach. This is not…
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Writers On Walks
BBC Radio 3 has collected a series of its program The Essay into the audio book Writers on Walks. 22 contributors, “an array of novelists, poets, journalists and biographers chart the varied and inspiring walks they have taken around Britain and elsewhere”, gathered into categories like Dawnwalks & Night Walks, Springwalks & Winterwalks, and Strange…
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The Road Is How
In The Road Is How, Trevor Herriot writes about how while still recovering from an accident, he made a three day walk from his home in Regina to a cabin his family has at Cherry Lake. Trevor is a wonderful writer and attentive observer of the natural world; Daniel Baird in The Walrus called him…
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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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Pedestrian Pride
The Pedestrian Pride Project is based in Columbus, Missouri, USA, a city with a population around 130,000. “Founded by community advocate and walking commuter McKenzie Ortiz, Pedestrian Pride is rooted in the belief that the stories of those who walk and roll daily should be at the forefront of urban advocacy. ” Most of the…
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Robert Macfarlane
Robert Macfarlane has walked in places I never will and his books about his journeys – most of which take place on foot – have been some of my favourites over the past decade or so; he’s a wonderful writer. Macfarlane described his third book The Old Ways (2012) as being about, “the relationship between…
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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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Walking out of Eden
Out of Eden Walk, Paul Salopek’s ongoing 38,000 kilometer trek traces the journeys our ancestors made as they walked out of Africa. You can follow the walk on Instagram, read the journey’s dispatches here, and listen to them on Soundcloud. In October 2025, he reached North America and spoke to the CBC’s Matt Galloway on…
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How walking changes the way we see the world
CBC Radio Saskatchewan’s Blue Sky devoted an episode to walking: “Ken Wilson spent days walking the car-centric bypass highway around Regina. He wrote about his experience in a new book Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road. Joely BigEagle-Kequahtooway of the Buffalo People Arts Institute did a ceremonial walk dragging…
Project Pedestrian 