Bleeding London

NAMES

Once it would have been easy enough for Stuart to blame his parents. They were the ones who had given him his name; a painfully absurd name that he hated. The name Stuart was innocuous enough, and so in most contexts was his surname. It was inherited in his father’s case, acquired through marriage in his mother’s; and he would have conceded that there was nothing inherently absurd about having the surname London. The last time he’d looked in the London telephone directory there were twenty-five or thirty others in the same boat. There were famous Londons, Jack for instance, and Julie. And he would also have admitted that if one had to be called after an English place-name London was clearly preferable to a great many others: Worksop, Diss, Looe, Foulness.

But surely his parents should have had enough common sense not to join the name of a capital city with the name of a period in history. They should not, they should so obviously not, have given him the name Stuart London. He despised it. It was a chapter in a history textbook, the tide of an exam paper, the name of a historical map, scarcely a person’s name at all.

What had depressed him even more was that for a long time his parents hadn’t even realized what they’d done. They were not stupid or simple people, but they were not students of history either. The Tudors and Stuarts were unknown quantities to them. So for that matter were the Romans, the Georgians, the Victorians. It was only when little Stuart, a short-trousered schoolboy, came home from class, confused, laughed at, mocked to the point of tears, that his parents had some inkling of what they had done. They saw, too late, how their son’s name might be considered laughable.

His father tried to make light of his son’s misery and said how much worse things might have been if he’d called him Norman London, but this didn’t help at all. Besides, his father pointed out, it wasn’t one of those totally ludicrous names that every Tom, Dick and Harry would find hilarious. It wasn’t Eva Brick or Eileen Dover. No, people had to have a certain subtlety of mind and a certain level of sophistication to find his name a joke. His father implied that this would make things better. Stuart knew it only made things worse.

Alas, he was now no longer a schoolboy, and was therefore no longer able to blame his parents for anything. He was a forty-year-old man, who, in serious consultation with his wife, had decided not to have children. But if he’d had children he’d have called them something plain and simple, Bill, Alice, something like that. They wouldn’t have had to go through what he’d been through.

Stuart had suffered long and hard but he had never quite had the confidence or the desperation to change his name. He’d considered it many times, had even considered some serious alternatives, but had not taken the final step. And then one day it was far too late. He found himself in a position, in a profession where his name might even be construed as beneficial; albeit a position and profession for which he no longer had much respect or tolerance.

He hadn’t intended to find himself here. In so far as he had ever possessed any ambitions at all they were about becoming an architectural scholar or a historian, or possibly some sort of curator, something like that. But none of that had worked out. Instead, after several interrupted courses of study, after a number of career changes and crises, he had found himself as a part of the tourist industry, as managing director (he still found the title laughable) of a company called, with what these days seemed to him a ravaging lack of originality, The London Walker. London by name, London by nature. And he wondered if in some sense his name had preordained this fate for him.

You would pick up The London Walker catalogue if you considered yourself to be the more discriminating, more cultured kind of tourist, the type who wanted to get off the tour bus and walk the streets of London in the company of a knowledgeable and articulate guide. The catalogue had a quotation from Samuel Johnson in it, not the obvious one, but instead, “By seeing London I have seen as much of life as the world can show.” If you liked what you read you might well find yourself signing up for one or more of the following guided tours: the Bloomsbury Walk, the Boswell Walk, the Christopher Wren Walk, the London Crime Walk, the Holmes and Watson Walk, the Art Gallery Walk, the Docklands Walk, and so on and so forth, ad nauseam in Stuart’s opinion.

Stuart, even though he had never wanted to be a business man, knew that any kind of business was a series of only partially solvable problems, a series of headaches that didn’t wholly respond to treatment. There was no business that had ever ‘run itself, but for the time being at least The London Walker ran without any input from him. That was because he had a wife, and she ran the business for him, for herself too, and she ran it better than he could. It would have been nice to think he could have sat back and grown fat and rich on the profits. In fact he sat back and felt utterly useless and depressed.

Stuart was not a native of London. He had been born in Colchester in the mid-fifties, but London had always seemed a magical place to him. His father had war stories from when he was a fire watcher in London and, before she was married, his mother had been a great fan of West End musicals and she still talked about them as part of her golden past. When he was a child there had been family excursions, days out in London, an aunt in Finsbury Park who was occasionally visited, but these jaunts were never enough for Stuart. From the earliest age he’d known that he wanted to move to London, live there, be a student there. He’d driven himself to pass O-level Latin so he could study English at UCL, even if his interest in English literature hadn’t survived his first term there.

As a student in London, the city had drawn him in like a benign spider’s web. He’d sit in the student bar with a copy of Time Out and see what films were showing, what bands were playing, and it would always be the most distant cinemas, the most far-flung venues that attracted him. Whereas other students were attached to the West End by an inelastic tether, he found himself free to bounce around the most inaccessible and provincial parts of the city.

The majority of these trips had to be solitary. It was generally impossible for him to persuade any of his student friends to come with him to what they called the outer limits, but he was not deterred. Sometimes he would have girlfriends and if they liked him enough they would be prepared to indulge his whims, his urge for the margins. But none of his girlfriends ever lasted very long. His longest relationship was with a girl whose parents lived in Spitalfields, and he sometimes thought the relationship only survived at all because he responded to some archaic poetry in that place-name. Being able to say he was going out with a girl from Spitalfields had, in his own mind if nowhere else, a certain glamour to it. He was profoundly disappointed when in due course he discovered that the ‘spital’ part of the name was a contraction of the word hospital and not some archaic spelling of spittle, as in saliva.

But when he had no girlfriend, and when he travelled the city alone, he never felt lonely. The city supported him, engaged him and kept him company, and he was very grateful to it.

His student years passed rapidly, and although he wasn’t a bad student, he was only interested in what he was interested in. Having abandoned English he dallied with history, then with history of art, with philosophy and anthropology. He got a degree, but only just. He wouldn’t have minded becoming an academic, but his learning was too patchy, and it was impossible to imagine what he would have researched. Instead he found himself doing a series of ‘real’ jobs; working first on a travel magazine, then for a small advertising agency, then as a technical writer for a computer firm. While all his friends seemed to conceive of themselves as over-qualified and unemployable, he found himself constantly facing a working future that promised promotion, security, responsibility, challenge.

Several years went by in this way, then one day he woke up, knew he was in absolutely the wrong place, the wrong job, the wrong industry, and decided he’d better run. He walked out of his job, moved into a much cheaper flat, lived on his meagre savings and wondered what the hell he was going to do next.

He knew that he still liked London, that he liked exploring it, walking through it. He knew he wasn’t too bad at talking to groups of people, and surprisingly he found that he quite liked foreigners. He wondered how these interests might be turned into a means of making a living.

With a recklessness and a nerve that he later found amazing, he set up a series of walking tours of London: the Architectural Walk, the Mob Walk, the Sculpture Walk. He was their only begetter. He led the tours, devised the routes, tore the tickets, made the phonecalls. He had some leaflets printed and strewed them around hotels and tourist information centres, got himself mentioned in the listings magazines, and he was only slightly surprised to find that he soon had a thriving little business, which he called Stuart’s Tours.

As anticipated, a lot of his work was with groups of American tourists. They were his best audience. His insights, his quirki-ness, his jokes, didn’t go down so well with non-English speakers, especially not the Japanese. But his youth and enthusiasm went a long way. Tourists were charmed by his manner and impressed by the depth of knowledge in one apparently so young, although at the age of twenty-six he didn’t feel young at all.

He quickly honed his skills. Those who took the tours said he was a natural communicator, that he should write a book, have his own TV show. Modestly, and accurately, he said they were wrong. Nevertheless, he could see that he was enough of a communicator to be able to make a living this way. Some seasons of the year were better than others, some years were better than others, but he soldiered on for three summers and winters, and he didn’t go broke.

He was always concerned to give value for money and he never treated his tourists with anything other than respect, but as time passed he was aware that he was losing some of his original charm. He wasn’t becoming cynical exactly, but he was getting weary.

The business was a one-man show and that made for a solitary if simple working life. But he had never been very good at the paperwork or admin and he was pleased when the business became busy enough to justify advertising for an assistant. He needed to import some organizational skills but he also needed company.

The ad must have been badly worded. He only received one reply, from an ambitious, friendly, outgoing, thoroughly business-like young woman called Anita. She had recently returned from a round-the-world trip and said she wanted to be involved in the tourist industry. She also said that she wanted to start at the bottom and work her way up. Stuart was unaware that he was at the bottom, had no idea what the way up might be, and was even more baffled when she talked in the interview about the enormous potential she saw in his business.

In the absence of competition he employed her, but she would probably have beaten most other candidates. She was obviously going to be good at the job, but what really clinched it was her name. She was called Anita Walker, a name he found as absurd as his own. It was a frivolous reason for employing someone but he never had reason to regret it. Anita could handle the accounts, could handle people, could conduct a walking tour if necessary, could do just about anything she set her mind to. Within six months she had made herself indispensable and within a year she had married the boss, not that Stuart had ever felt like her boss. She became Anita London. “A neater London.” Well, few people ever picked up on that, but her name lived on in the company’s new tide. They combined their names to become The London Walker.

Right from the beginning she told him that a business must expand or die. He didn’t particularly want it to do either, but he settled for expansion. Anita’s idea was simple enough. Instead of having one man devising and conducting all the tours, she saw that they could find any number of cheap, capable people to do the work of guiding: students, resting actors, retired academics, bored but intelligent housewives. They could be trained quickly and easily and sent on their way to do the job, creating much more work, more turnover, much bigger profits. She also suggested that some of Stuart’s tours were, how could she put it, a little recherche. Why not go for a broader market? Why not the Shakespeare Walk? The Royal Walk? The Rock ‘n’ Roll Walk? Stuart briefly objected that this was not what he’d had in mind when he started the business, but, in the face of Anita’s developing business plans and cash-flow forecasts, this was no objection at all. At the time it seemed like a risk and a diversion but he couldn’t deny that it worked.

The company progressed. There was a new office, a pool of employees, bigger and better business plans, loans, a lot of meetings with bank managers and freeholders. There were times when it all looked very precarious indeed but at the end of each year the accountants, who never appeared to have had any confidence whatsoever in the enterprise, declared that The London Walker was doing surprisingly well.

Meetings with bank managers and accountants were still not Stuart’s forte, however. At first he continued to lead walks. But Anita had been right. His knowledge of London was detailed and profound, his love of it real, yet as the years went by he had an increasing distaste for the obvious. He genuinely wanted to reveal London to the people who came on the tours but he was bored with its more obvious features. He wanted to show its eccentricities and unknown quarters. Rather than take them to the Tower of London he’d have preferred to take them to the abandoned Severndroog Castle near Oxleas Wood. For Stuart it increasingly wasn’t enough to tell a few old anecdotes and point out a few sights and locations. He felt that truth was more profound in the obscure corners than in the grand sweeps. And on a good day he would find these corners, even while ostensibly showing punters the more orthodox aspects of London. His tours became increasingly abstract, free form, improvised, often turning into a sort of mystery tour. A crowd that had signed up for a canal walk might be treated instead to a tour of sites connected with leprosy. There were a few complaints, some dissatisfied walkers who demanded their money back.

He organized a walking tour called Stuart London’s London — The City That Nobody Knows. Of course, he saw there was an absurd contradiction in the tide of the tour. If it was a London that literally nobody knew then clearly he wouldn’t have known it either. But the real problem was nothing so philosophical as that. Quite simply, nobody ever signed up for the tour. Weeks passed and the other tours did good business. People wanted to see the Beatles’ London, and Virginia Woolf’s London, Pepys’ London and Hogarth’s London, but nobody wanted to know the London they didn’t know. They wanted to know better the London they already knew. Stuart was profoundly depressed.

It was Anita who eventually told him he should stop pounding the streets and take a more consultative role, maybe have a less hands-on approach. What she meant, simply, was that he should stop conducting these obscure tours that nobody wanted or enjoyed. He was quietly devastated but he agreed to take a four-week break and see how things went. Ostensibly he would use the time to brush up on his already encyclopaedic knowledge, but in reality he sat around the office watching how efficiently the business worked without any help from him. Young, fresh-faced guides who didn’t know too much actually gave the punters far more of what they wanted than he did. It was a terrible revelation but one he couldn’t ignore.

He agreed to stop leading tours. He stayed in the office and desperately tried to think of a role for himself. He sometimes interviewed potential members of staff but his instinct for spotting potential was fallible. He sometimes trained new guides, but he knew so much about his subject that often he found it impossible to distill information of the right sort and in the right quantities to be useful to new recruits.

For a while he conceived of his consultative role as thinking up new and original ideas for tours, but this was not an area where novelty or ingenuity were particularly welcomed. The Henry VIII Walk and the Jack the Ripper Walk were always likely to do better business than Stuart’s fancier inventions such as the Thomas Middleton Walk, the Post-Modernist Walk, the Anarchists’ Walk. In fact it was a guide in her first week with the company who came up with the idea of the London Lesbian Walk, which for a while was one of the most popular tours.

So Stuart began to withdraw even further. He was no longer sure what his job was, but whatever it was, a lot of people seemed to be able to do it better than he could. He had lost something, a spark, an enthusiasm; a common touch. He felt becalmed. He started to work from home, a situation that rapidly turned into sitting around the house not working at all. He knew that madness lay that way. He was not suited to inactivity. If he wasn’t needed by The London Walker then he wasn’t the sort of person who could simply put in an appearance and pretend he was working when he wasn’t.

There were some ways of disguising his uselessness. There were people ‘he could have meetings with in the name of business, working lunches that could become boozy and prolonged, extended to absorb half the day. But Stuart always felt ashamed to be returning home or to the office half-cut at four o’clock, and by five a fierce alcoholic melancholy would have set in. It felt terrible. There was no way he would be able to pursue a career as a professional London drinker.

More harmlessly he sometimes slipped away to see a movie. That felt only mildly shameful, but the pleasure it brought was outweighed by the guilt he felt, knowing that his wife and his employees were out there working while he wasn’t.

He toyed, very briefly, with the idea of becoming a womanizer, of spending his afternoons having affairs, and he succeeded in going to bed with one of the young female guides. But no, it was more than just going to bed. It had very nearly been a full-blown affair. It had been nice enough in its way, intense and exciting and all that, but it really wasn’t nice enough to risk your marriage and therefore your business and livelihood for, and it certainly wasn’t nice enough to want to make a habit of. Once it was over he hadn’t had the energy or the inclination ever to do it again, but the memory of it stayed with him, both sweet and threatening.

The only kind of clean, simple, honest pleasure that satisfied him was using London in the name of research. Any increase in his knowledge of London must surely be of benefit to the business, or so he told himself. He would spend afternoons in the Museum of London, the V and A, the British Museum. There was nothing academic or systematic about these visits. In fact he would sometimes see other people apparently doing much the same as him, and for them it was obviously nothing more than killing time, sheltering from the cold or rain. But time needed no killing for Stuart. While ever he was engaged with London it passed very swiftly and happily.

On other occasions Stuart needed nothing so organized as a museum. He got pleasure simply from walking the streets of London. Certainly some streets offered more than others. Some were full of interesting sights or people, others were places he knew well or liked a lot. Sometimes he experienced the pleasures of familiarity, sometimes those of novelty, but it was always a pleasure.

He didn’t give much thought to what precisely he was doing, but if he’d been compelled to think it through he would undoubtedly have said this phase was a temporary one, a period of transition before he worked out his new role within the firm. But gradually, and it hardly took a genius to work it out, he saw that no such role would ever materialize. He was, in the most ordinary sense, redundant. The London Walker was no longer going to be part of his life, of his self-definition. He would have to find some different reason for being. He thought of trying to get a new job, of starting a fresh career, but he felt far too jaded and old for that. He needed something that connected with his own deep interests, something that was simply more him. He needed a Big Idea, and sure enough, eventually, it came.

Once it had arrived there was an inevitability about it, something undeniable. He was sitting in the coffee bar of the Museum of Transport in Covent Garden thinking how much he disliked buses and tubes when the idea finally struck, and the moment it was there he couldn’t see why it had been so long coming. It felt so completely and perfectly right. What he had to do was utterly clear. He was going to walk down every street in London.

♦

The reasons why a man might choose to walk down every street in London seemed many and obvious to Stuart. It could for example be explained simply in terms of curiosity, in a man’s urge to see new things, to investigate those parts of the city that were off all the tourist maps, that were known only to locals and the more intrepid explorers.

He would, inevitably, go to places he’d never been before, that was at least partly the point, but he would also find himself in places he didn’t especially want to go. He didn’t think there were any areas in London where it was simply too risky to walk, but he knew he would be going to districts that he had until now consciously avoided — and probably for good reasons — but that was the nature of the beast. Perhaps then his walking would be an act of reclamation, a way of taming the city, a way of saying that London was open and accessible to everyone, that it held no secrets, no unknowable horrors.

Obsession also fitted the case. A man who walked down every street in London could be considered a superior, more abstract sort of trainspotter, with the obsessive’s desire for completion, for having the whole set. He would walk past every school, every gaol, every theatre, every hospital, every pub, every solicitor’s office, every used-car lot, every folly, every MI5 safe house, every brothel and crack den, every plumbers’ merchant, every delicatessen, every law court, every sports stadium, every everything. He would have been there, seen there, done that. And even if he missed certain things, markets that were only held one day a week, parades that were only held one day a year, great buildings that were hidden behind scaffolding, nightclubs that were known only to members, well, at least, he’d have walked past them, been in the streets where they took place.

And maybe this could be explained as part of a simpler desire just to show off, to say look at me, look what I’ve done, what I’ve achieved, aren’t I a fascinating if eccentric character? That made perfect sense.

Yet he didn’t want to make London his. This would not be anybody’s particular version of London, not Dickens’, not Pepys’, not Betjeman’s, and certainly not his own. Since every street was to be walked down, every street would have equal value and importance. He wouldn’t spend extra time in those streets that were attractive or steeped in history, neither would he dismiss streets that appeared to be featureless or uninteresting. He sensed something profoundly egalitarian in all this, a belief in a sort of democracy, a belief that all places, all things had merit and were to be equally cherished and respected. And perhaps there was a spiritual, maybe Buddhist element in that, a belief that all places were one, but he didn’t want to run too far with that idea or there’d have been no point in setting off at all.

And yet, convincing though these reasons were, he was not quite convinced by them. His real motives seemed other, and far less reasonable or explicable. In the end he didn’t know why he was going to walk down every street in London. In truth he felt compelled by a force he didn’t understand. It wasn’t logical and he wasn’t sure he really had a choice. It was just something he had to do. The city was mysteriously leading him on, drawing him in; it was a mystery that he relished. Perhaps it had to do with love or sex or self-knowledge, one of the ‘big issues’, but although he was only intermittently eager to understand his own motives, he did genuinely believe that if he walked long enough and far enough he might eventually work out why he was walking at all.

For the moment it was easier to think about practicalities. Stuart tried to lay down some rules of engagement for himself. His desire to walk down every street in London required him to make some definitions. First there was a need to define exactly what he meant by London. He decided that his London would be synonymous with the London boroughs, although he was aware that this increased the size of his task. The boroughs included outrageously distant areas like Croydon, Bromley, Ruislip. Once these places would have been in, respectively, Surrey, Kent and Middlesex, and even now they remained outside the London postal districts. But what was London if not its boroughs? If you didn’t define London in the broadest possible way, you might as well restrict yourself to walking, say, round the square mile of the City.

Then he had to decide what he meant by ‘street’. His dictionary defined it as ‘a paved road (esp. Roman): a road lined with houses, broader than a lane.’ He was immediately suspicious of a definition of street that found it necessary to use the word road, but he obviously intended to walk down roads too. He also intended to walk down roads that weren’t necessarily lined with houses. For that matter he intended to walk down lanes too. Alleyways and courtyards, mews and closes, avenues and walks were certainly on his map, as were embankments, bridges and towpaths.

On the other hand, there were some paved roads where he didn’t intend to walk at all; along stretches of London motorway, for example, through underpasses and road tunnels, along flyovers. Public parks presented another problem. After a lot of thought he decided he would walk around the boundaries of every London park and common, but only go into them where there was what might be construed as a genuine road. So he would walk along Rotten Row in Hyde Park but he wouldn’t be compelled to walk along every path that cut across Hamp-stead Heath or London Fields or Wimbledon Common.

In the same way, he felt he wouldn’t need to cover the roads that went through retail or business parks or through industrial estates or which were service roads for factories or warehouses. If roads claimed to be private he was quite prepared to respect their privacy. And, in a rather different way, he would apply much the same rule when it came to council estates; a walkway between two tower blocks could remain untrodden, but a genuine road where cars or milkfloats or dustbin lorries could pass would have to be walked down.

There was to be nothing macho or Herculean or competitive about his project. He had nothing to prove, and there would be no time limit. He wouldn’t have to cover vast distances in a single day. There would obviously be a certain amount of endurance, patience and determination involved, but it wasn’t to be anything so crude as a simple test of stamina or staying power.

He decided he would undertake his walk in sections of ten miles per day. That felt like a suitably modest figure. At a brisk pace he would be able to cover that distance in no more than two and a half hours, which would represent a relatively minor intrusion on his day. But perhaps he’d be walking more slowly than that. He wanted to give himself the time and freedom to observe and appreciate his surroundings. He would allow himself to rest if and when he wanted to, and he’d certainly be able to stop for a coffee or even a beer. And if someone tried to engage him in conversation, then he wanted to have time for that too.

A fitter man might have found ten miles a wholly trivial distance, but for him at his age, with his low level of fitness, ten miles a day seemed on the limit of what was easily achievable, especially since it had to be done day after day. He might have managed to cover twenty-five or thirty miles in a single session but he’d have been crippled the next day. He didn’t want to be crippled, yet he did want to feel the basic physical effort of covering the ground on foot. He wanted to feel the solidity of the pavement. He wanted the slog and the weariness of it.

He had to make sure this didn’t just turn into gentle strolling and sightseeing, into a series of days out. To that end he decided that he would not be allowed to enter any gallery or museum or tourist attraction. He would be allowed to go into shops only if he had something specific to buy that he needed for his walk: a drink, shoe laces if his current set broke, Elastoplast for his feet perhaps, but he couldn’t enter any shop simply to browse. If it rained or snowed he was entitled to take shelter, but not for more than half an hour; after that he’d have to continue walking, whatever the elements. If he was passing the house of a friend he would not be allowed to call in and break the journey. If he happened to run into somebody he knew and they suggested some social venture, he would have to decline.

He considered taking a camera with him to photograph the things that caught his eye, to create a visual record and an aide-memoire, but he decided against it. He feared that the presence of a camera would turn his walking into a photographic expedition, into a quest for the picturesque. Besides, taking photographs would make him conspicuous, and there were all sorts of places where a man with a camera would be unwelcome.

If he had been homeless and rootless, a street person, it might have been very different, purer in a sense. He could have started walking, continued for as long and as tar as he saw fit and then he could have stopped and spent the night wherever he happened to be, then started again the next morning. That way there’d be no crossing the city to get back to base. Not everywhere would be equally hospitable. Doorways in Hamp-stead or Kensington or Chelsea were not welcoming to the homeless, and on some estates a man sleeping in a doorway might have found himself in all sorts of trouble, but as a methodology this homeless version had a lot going for it. Or perhaps, less dramatically, he could have taken to the streets in a camper van and completed daily circular walks from where it was parked, returned to spend the night, then moved on to a new starting place in the morning, gradually covering the whole city.

But, of course, he wouldn’t be doing it like that. He had a home to go to, a wife, a job of sorts and, as tar as possible, he didn’t want that life interfered with. Each day, using either his car or public transport he would need to travel to a spot from which to begin his walking, and at the end he’d either return home or go to work. He wouldn’t be able to walk at weekends, either. He’d just do it on weekdays as though it were a job. Then there’d be family holidays, Christmas, days when he or Anita might be ill and at home. There might even be days when he was required to do something for The London Walker, though of all possible disruptions this seemed least likely.

He had no intention of telling Anita what he was doing. She would not have disapproved exactly, not even thought he was mad, but she was an all too practical woman and she would simply have pointed out the immense difficulties he was going to face, the sheer size of the enterprise.

He was well aware of the vastness of what he was proposing, but at first it was hard to find the exact parameters of that vastness. He spent a lot of time trying to find out just how many miles of road there were in London, but he failed until he consulted an HMSO document called London Facts and Figures. There it all was in black and white, in both miles and kilometres. It told him there were 8,318 miles of road in London, 37 of them motorway, 1,080 of them trunk and principal roads, and the rest were ‘other’. If he walked ten miles a day, fifty miles per week, 2,500 miles per year, he would have covered London in less than three and a half years. That was a daunting task but certainly not an impossible one.

Then he realized that the 8,318-mile figure assumed he would never have to walk the same street twice and that was clearly not to be. For one thing there were culs-de-sac and dead ends. In order to walk along them at all he’d obviously have to walk along them in both directions. But even without such obvious difficulties the asymmetry of London streets was such that covering an area with a single, continuous walk that never covered the same ground twice was next to impossible. Take the simple case of a set of parallel streets running east to west that connected with streets running north to south at either end, a shape that looked like a ladder. There were such configurations all over London. He looked at his map and immediately found examples in Wimbledon, Battersea and Catford. Say you began walking along the east⁄west streets; there was no way to get around such a pattern without either missing sections of the north⁄south streets, or without repeating certain stretches. Given the nature of his enterprise, only the latter was acceptable, which meant he would cover a lot more than the simple mileage of London streets, and the ladder configuration was one of the simplest. As the pattern of streets got more complex, it became even harder to cover efficiently.

Then, like all cities, London was in flux. Even the most recent maps couldn’t keep up. New building created new roads. By the time he’d completed 8,318 miles of walking there would be a new set of streets that hadn’t been in existence when he’d started. He would have to mop these up at the end.

He bought a map, an A — Z, but he chose the colour version because it was printed on smooth, unabsorbent paper. He wanted no blodges, no seepage. He also bought a black marker pen, for he intended to draw a thick black line along all the streets he had walked so that the whole map would eventually become black and obliterated, no street names visible, London reduced to an abstract linear design. The map would become increasingly less useful and one day it would be completely useless and meaningless. That would be a very special day, the day when it was all over, but he knew it would be a long time coming.

The task loomed bigger and bigger, but in a strange way it didn’t matter how big it was, because whatever its exact dimensions it was certainly finite. The task, like London itself, had limits. It was achievable. It was only a matter of time and persistence. There was a goal, an end in sight. For a long time starting seemed like much more of a problem than finishing.

He knew he had to begin somewhere and he knew that in one sense any place was as good as another, but he scanned the index of his A — Z looking for a street name that sounded appropriate. His eyes fell on a line that read North Pole Road. Next day he went there and started his walk.

♦

He had no idea what to expect in North Pole Road. He knew there would not be frozen wastes, igloos, polar bears, and yet he couldn’t imagine what a street with this name would be like. It was situated in west London, not far from Netting Hill, not far from White City, very close to Wormwood Scrubs.

He looked at his A — Z, and then at a tube map and he decided he would have to drive there. He parked in a leafy street called St Quintin Avenue. On the corner were three young teenage girls and they had a baby with them. He assumed it belonged to one of them but he couldn’t really tell. They held the baby up as though he were an aeroplane and made him fly through the air at head height, then every now and then one of the girls would pretend to headbutt him. It looked like a form of torture but it was obviously done with affection and the baby didn’t object.

Stuart made the short walk to North Pole Road. He was glad he hadn’t hoped for too much. It turned out to be an ordinary local high street, with a railway bridge at one end, and a small public garden at the other that served as a traffic island. The street consisted of two parades of shops facing each other: Roger’s Bakery, Mick’s Fish Bar, Jackie’s Flowers, Marion’s Hairdressing, Varishna’s Newsagent, Charig’s Wine Shop. There was a butcher, a greengrocer, a bookmaker’s, a few takeaway food places, a pub called the New North Pole. Everything felt small-scale and decent and unexceptional. It was representative of a certain sort of London, not rich, not poor, not pretty, not ugly, not hostile, not hospitable. He was pleased to have started with somewhere so mundane yet so typical. But try as he might he couldn’t find much to keep him there, so he walked towards Wormwood Scrubs, a place he had never been to before. It was the name both of the gaol and of an area of open land with playing fields. He walked along Ducane Road, past a school and a hospital until he came to the prison.

In some ways it was much as expected, with forbidding brick walls and towers and barbed wire, but its location was not at all as he’d have pictured it. He somehow felt that prisons would be located in the middle of nowhere, away from people and civilization. Wormwood Scrubs, however, was situated on a main road, on a bus route, near shops and a housing estate and a railway line. The prisoners could probably look out of their cells and see the buses and trains going by. It felt all wrong. The sheer proximity of daily life would be part of the punishment. The high walls meant there was little for him to see, but at one corner of the prison site there was what looked like a house (although surely the gaol didn’t contain workers’ cottages?) and there was a walled garden with a huge rose bush climbing up over the brickwork and escaping.

He had to go back more or less the way he’d come and as he passed the school he watched some fairly talented schoolboys doing catching practice on the playing field. It was then he realized that this first foray was in danger of turning into an aimless ramble. He pressed on determinedly. It took a long time to walk all the way up Scrubs Lane, past the industrial estates, across the bridges that took him over railway lines and canals, and at last he came to the Harrow Road. He wondered why some roads merited a definite article (the Old Kent Road, the King’s Road, the Edgware Road), while others of apparently equal status and nature (Oxford Street, Essex Road) did not.

He followed the Harrow Road on its long, eastward course. It was wide and windy and it rattled with traffic. He saw a tyre centre whose frontage had a mural depicting members of staff. He thought about setting foot in Kensal Green Cemetery but he resisted. Further along, nearer town, he left the Harrow Road, and took a footbridge over a canal and headed towards the Trellick Tower. He thought of Hugh Casson, frightened by Erno Goldfinger, scared by ‘the degree of certainty compressed into a small room’.

He found his way to Ladbroke Grove, passed under the Westway where he saw two drunks standing on top of a prefabricated toilet doing some kind of dance. There was also a hairdresser nearby called Have It Off. Then back through the leafier part of Hotting Hill, or perhaps it should have been called North Kensington, he wasn’t sure, and he returned to where his car was parked.

He sat in the driver’s seat feeling both footsore and pleased with himself. He knew his walking could have been more purposeful but he’d done a reasonable ten miles. Not bad for a beginner. He opened his A — Z, took out a marker pen and drew black lines through all the streets he’d walked along that day. When he was finished he tossed the A — Z on to the passenger seat and drove home.

He knew he should have felt good, yet as he drove he had a profound sense of emptiness and dissatisfaction, and it wasn’t simply because he’d occasionally lacked purpose in his walking. Rather he suspected that something fundamental was wrong with his method. Somehow he couldn’t imagine completing another thousand days like this. Simply scoring out streets after he’d walked along them wasn’t going to be enough. It marked his passage but it didn’t record his presence. Even as he sat there with the day’s walk fresh in his mind, he knew it was already starting to fade away. He could no longer quite picture the prison towers, and he’d forgotten the name of the hairdresser in Ladbroke Grove. Before long the whole day might just as well never have happened. There was nothing to say he’d been there. His experience was disappearing and he knew he had to find a way to reclaim and retain it.

The solution was obvious enough. In order for his experience to feel real and meaningful it wasn’t going to be enough just to do the walking. And if he didn’t have a captive audience of tourists to whom he could describe what he saw, he realized he was going to have to write about it.