The Lost Art of Walking

4. Nicholson’s London, Your London, Anybody’s London

One wet Sunday afternoon in the autumn of 1804, Thomas De Quincey, age nineteen, and later to become the author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater, was walking along London’s Oxford Street and finding it every bit as bleak and depressing then as many still do to this day. In order to cheer himself up he went into a druggist’s shop (‘The druggist, unconscious minister of celestial pleasure’) and bought himself a tincture of opium. That brightened up his day no end. It was the beginning of De Quincey’s love affair with opium and a continuing part of his love affair with walking the streets of London.

Later he would write:

‘And sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards…I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatic entries, and such sphinx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen. I could almost have believed, at times, that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terrae incognitae, and doubted whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London.’

Of course, opium is generally not a big help when it comes to finding your way home, but he may be speaking metaphorically here. It seems impossible that he was the very first person ever to have set foot in any given location, although it remains perfectly possible that he was walking in a place for which a map hadn’t yet been drawn.

De Quincey’s fantasy of an unknown London is an attractive one, since London is, in every sense I can think of, well-trodden territory: a place of walkers, with a two-thousand-year-long history of pedestrianism. I’ve trodden it as widely and as well as I know how, but like every London walker, I realize that I’m always walking in somebody else’s footsteps. No part of London is genuinely unknown. However obscure or hidden the place, somebody has already discovered it, walked it, staked a claim on it. Your own exploration therefore has to be personalized — you’re doing it for yourself, increasing your own store of particular knowledge, walking your own eccentric version of the city.

The first London walkers had to be the Romans, since before them there was no London (or Londinium), just expanses of marsh and swamp, thinly inhabited by surly, saturnine Iron Age Brits. Maybe the Brits walked, but they didn’t walk in anything called London. The Romans invaded Britain for the first time in A.D. 43, probably used a pontoon bridge to cross what was to become the river Thames, then a few years later built the first permanent bridge across it, thought to have been just east of the present-day London Bridge. People could then walk from one side of the river to the other, if they chose, though then as now quite a few probably chose not to. North and South London continue to be inhabited by very different tribes.

The Romans weren’t meanderers. Their walking was straight and direct, taking the shortest distance between two points. One of the first things English schoolkids learn is that the presence of a long straight road means the Romans were here. You don’t need a highly developed sense of history to enjoy knowing that you’re walking the same route that some legionnaire or proconsul walked nearly two thousand years ago.

Inevitably the growth of London, the change, the decay, plus a certain amount of bombing and urban redevelopment, has tended to obscure the Roman origins of the city, but even in central areas it’s not so hard to walk along what was once a Roman road. De Quincey’s Oxford Street, now a major shopping artery, and by many accounts a crass, soulless, overcommercialized place (but more of that later), was once part of a Roman route connecting Hampshire to Suffolk.

At this very moment somebody is out there walking the streets of London, consciously following in ancient Roman footsteps, trying to make a connection with some imagined Roman imperial past. I say this without much fear of contradiction, because I know that London’s streets contain walkers of every description, each of them pursuing separate destinies, pacing out routes of personal need and desire, some based on history or literature or on more private obsessions. At least one of them must style himself as a Roman London walker.

The mayor’s office tells us that seven million walking journeys are made in London every day, and although the majority of these will no doubt be short and mundane (and I do wonder what percentage involve going to or from the pub), that still leaves plenty of more programmatic walking expeditions. At the most modest level, these walks will be done by tourists. Showing the city to visitors is good business, and doing it on foot is a great way to reduce overheads. You see them all over London, walking tours being conducted by rather theatrical guides, who look like would-be or failed or maybe just unemployed actors, heading a gaggle of lost-looking walkers, showing them Dickens’s London, Sherlock Holmes’s London, Jack the Ripper’s London, or the Beatles’ London. Some more serious walks will have you tracing routes of plague, fire, riot, and terrorism.

In the interests of research — thinking I wasn’t going to enjoy it very much — I went on one of these walking tours, called ‘The Blitz: London at War’. It happens every Thursday afternoon at two-fifteen, rain or shine: meet at exit 2 outside St. Paul’s tube station. The guide, a skinny, intense, blond woman with one of the more determined strides I’d ever seen — rushed, urgent, leaning forward into some fierce wind of her own imagining — led me and twenty or so others on a tight circuit that had St. Paul’s Cathedral at its center. We looked at the shrapnel marks preserved in the cathedral’s masonry, visited a bombed-out church that’s been left in a semi-ruined state as a memorial garden, saw a monument to the Blitz firemen, and as we walked we spotted various incidental pleasures: the preserved ruins of the Roman Temple of Mithras, for instance, as well as an ice cream seller without a street trading license who was being collared by the law.

‘I haven’t got my license with me’, the ice cream seller said shiftily.

‘Now that does surprise me’, said the arresting copper.

Inevitably there wasn’t much Blitz to see. The German bombings ended well over sixty years ago, and so we had to rely on our guide, her anecdotes, and some photographs she had with her in an album. Her anecdotes weren’t bad at all. One was about two old ladies who were walking down a London street in the middle of an air raid. This wasn’t so unusual — a lot of people simply didn’t bother to head for the shelters. As they walked, a bomb landed near the old ladies, not too close or they’d have been killed instantly, but near enough that they felt the tail end of the blast, which left their bodies unscathed but blew off all their clothes and left them standing in the street, alive, well, and completely naked.

We also heard the story of a young soldier whose job was to deal with an unexploded bomb that had landed close to St. Paul’s Cathedral and vanished into the earth. Dealing with it involved digging down, finding the bomb, then defusing it. Of course the very act of digging might have been enough to make the bomb go off, but the young soldier was evidently a gentle shoveler and he successfully uncovered the bomb, at which point he saw that it was booby-trapped. Trying to dismantle the fuse was the very thing that would detonate it. The British army boffins were familiar with the type but hadn’t yet worked out a method of disarming it. A controlled explosion on-site was recommended, but that would have brought down half the cathedral.

So a crane was brought and the bomb was painstakingly winched out of its hole, put on the back of a truck, and covered with sandbags. It was then very carefully driven the six miles from central London to the Hackney marshes, where it could be safely blown up, but to get there they had to take a main road, evacuating houses and clearing pedestrians as they went.

Suddenly I found myself tearing up at this story of unimaginable courage set against the familiar backdrop of a grubby, everyday city. I suppose courage is to be found everywhere, and especially in cities under attack. Courage seems to be unattached to ideology, though naturally we want it to belong to the one we support. To be walking in a London street where men had taken such terrible risks was both chilling and infinitely moving. I thought I was going to weep.

Thank God I managed to hold it in. Being reduced to tears on a walking tour would really not have shown the Blitz spirit at all. We walked on, not very far and not very fast. It gradually became obvious, and it was not exactly a surprise, that two hours of standing around listening to stories, interspersed with rather short walks, of no more than a couple of hundred yards each, was actually very hard work, much harder than walking continuously for two hours. As the tour ended twenty people were rubbing their backs, complaining about their feet, and saying they needed to sit down. I checked my GPS: in those two hours we’d walked just under a mile.

♦

In the end no serious London walker allows himself to be guided around the city by anything other than his own instincts and internal compass. The real enterprise is to make the city ‘yours’ as opposed to Dickens’s or Sherlock Holmes’s or the Beatles’.

This is perhaps what that fine London walker William Blake (or at least his hero, Los) meant when he said, ‘I must Create a System, or be enslaved by another Man’s’.

To devise your own system of walking in London isn’t easy — it requires resolve and perversity. The true London walker avoids the obvious by pursuing some grand, if quixotic, agenda. He (it usually is a he) walks in search of lines of force, unrecognized symbols, secret bunkers, evidence of conspiracy, seeking the Land of Cockayne or a new Jerusalem. Personally, I blame the author Iain Sinclair for a lot of this.

Iain Sinclair is a poet, novelist, memoirist, and occasional filmmaker, who dwelled in pretty thorough obscurity until 1985 or so when Peter Ackroyd wrote a book called Hawksmoor, a trans-historical detective novel with a plot that involves the discovery of human sacrifices in the crypts of certain seventeenth-century London churches built by an architect not entirely unlike the historical Nicholas Hawksmoor, although in the novel he’s called Nicholas Dyer, and Hawksmoor is the name of a present-day detective.

Ackroyd fessed up — he’d have been a fool not to — that the novel had been partly inspired by Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat, a prose poem that also invokes pilgrim routes, municipal gardening, and the American avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage.

Ackroyd’s book was a commercial success, and although that didn’t convince throngs of people to start reading Sinclair’s work, he did become a contender, a gray eminence, a distant, brooding literary figure, and a sort of guru for London’s hipper literary walkers. His own commercial success came chiefly from writing nonfiction accounts of his walks in and around London, and although the thick, dense allusive prose of these accounts isn’t easy reading, it’s a whole lot easier than the thick, dense, allusive prose of his fiction. My favorite of his books, and the most accessible, Lights Out for the Territory, is subtitled ‘9 Excursions in the Secret History of London’.

Sinclair’s project, pretty thoroughly realized, was to connect his personal experiences of walking around the more feral parts of the city (in general the parts where the tour guides don’t take you, although Sinclair is a Jack the Ripper maven) with various overlapping historical traditions: the literary, the bohemian, the criminal, the mystical, the alchemical, not so much the sexual. He brings together the worlds of various Londoners, some living, many dead, many of them walkers, some permanent residents, some who just passed through: Daniel Defoe, William Blake, the Kray twins, Derek Raymond, William Burroughs, Alan Moore, Rachel Whiteread, to name very few. He’s also spectacularly good at revealing and connecting historical characters you wish you knew more about:

‘Thomas Canry Caulker, son of Canrah Bah Caulker, King of Bompey in West Africa — William Hone, bookseller, prosecuted for blasphemy…Samuel Sharpe, banker and Egyptologist…John Swan, originator of the steamship’s screw propeller and the self-acting chain messenger’.

The text has frequent exciting references to ‘secret mythologies’, ‘psychic landscapes’, and ‘mystical geographies’.

All this makes Sinclair a psychogeographer, though frankly, these days, who isn’t? In its modern form psychogeography (of which, more later) often seems to be a way for clever young men to mooch around cities doing nothing much, claiming that they’re flaneurs who are doing something really, you know, significant, and often taking Iain Sinclair as their role model. To be fair to Sinclair he seems amused by all this, and at the very least skeptical about the craze he’s started. He refers to psychogeography as a franchise, which seems to get it about right — it neatly turns the psychogeographer into the McFlaneur.

For anyone to compete with Sinclair on his own terms would be folly. He knows more than you do. He has read more widely, more deeply, more obscurely than you. He’s also walked more and walked farther, more often, more observantly, more obsessively. And so, not being an absolute fool, I decided it would be a good idea to have Iain Sinclair (metaphorically at least) walk on the footpath with me rather than stand beside it observing my failings. I thought I’d better talk to him. I made contact. He said walk on over, so I did. For a literary gray eminence he was remarkably welcoming.

Sinclair, as his writings regularly tell us, has lived for decades in Hackney, in the all too appropriately named Albion Drive. I’d walked past his house years earlier on one of my own walking excursions, and noted that it seemed a good deal less the dark shamanic lair than you might have expected from reading Sinclair’s books.

The only other thing I remembered from that walk was seeing a graffito at the end of the street. Painted in blue on a pale yellow brick wall were the words No lips. I took a photograph of it, and over the years I’ve regularly looked at it and wondered what, if anything, those words meant.

Photographing graffiti is a suitably Sinclairian thing to do. One of the essays in Lights Out for the Territory has him walking from Hackney to Greenwich Hill and back to Chingford Mount, recording all the graffiti he sees on the way. ‘These botched runes’, he writes:

‘burnt into the script in the heat of creation, offer an alternative reading — a subterranean, preconscious text capable of divination and prophecy. A sorcerer’s grimoire that would function as a curse or a blessing.’

When I went back to Hackney this time, on my way to see Sinclair, I walked around trying to find the No lips graffito again, but either it had been removed or I was looking in the wrong place. So I looked for other clues instead. Sinclair the writer is so preternaturally aware of his surroundings and their real, imagined, or clandestine histories and meanings that just going to see him is enough to put you on your sensory mettle. Not far from Albion Drive, for instance, was a street called Vixen Mews; surely that was a name that bespoke a dark past and a labyrinthine narrative. Later Iain Sinclair would tell me he had no idea where the name came from, though he was intrigued by it, too, and I admit I was relieved to find that his knowledge of London wasn’t utterly encyclopedic.

On the other hand, when I mentioned that the previous day I’d been wandering around London and had found myself walking through the Nonconformist graveyard known as Bunhill Fields (where quite a few people go at lunchtime to eat their sandwiches, I discovered), his eyes lit up like Roman candles.

‘Oh yeah’, he said, ‘the epicenter. Blake, Defoe, and Bunyan’. (All three of them have memorials there, though current scholarship thinks none of them is buried there.) ‘My theory is that all lines of energy or intelligence move out from that particular cluster. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is actually the ultimate English walking book, where the physical journey that he does then becomes fabulated into this Christian mythology, but all the places are actually mappable. And then Daniel Defoe, because he traveled around the whole of England as an intelligencer and spy and double man. And then Blake with his cosmic and imaginary journeys, with specific wonderful transits of London that are in the Jerusalem poem where he starts on Highgate Hill, through the narrows of the riverside, and he actually lists all these places. So I think any sense of a journey must begin on that spot, in this wonderful cross between the three of them’. In Lights Out, he writes:

‘Bunhill Fields. Everything I believe in, everything London can do to you, starts there.’

Sinclair’s appearance is professorial, alert, a touch gaunt, unamused, with a very correct posture that might make you believe he’d had a spell in the army, which as far as I know he hasn’t. There was none of the soft fleshiness that deskbound writers are heir to. Maybe it came from all the walking. His voice, however, was soft, gentle, of a higher pitch than you’d expect to hear coming from that severe face. He was friendly but reserved, and obviously accustomed to being interviewed, even though I insisted I wanted this to be a conversation rather than a Q and A.

‘London’, he said, ‘is the ultimate walking city, although it’s a kind of battle — it has that mysterious labyrinthine quality that keeps it interesting. It’s never the same twice, and you duck in and out of alleyways and there’s so much business going on, and very soon you can negotiate into green spaces, rivers. It keeps it interesting’.

This is what I had come to hear. I was still on my sensory derangement kick. In fact I was still popping opiates for my recovering broken arm, but I wanted to talk about more recreational forms of medication. I’ve only once done any walking while under the influence of LSD and it wasn’t much fun. I was walking in a crowded street, not in London but in Cambridge, and I believed I could read the minds of the people walking toward me. They were all nightmarish minds that I’d have preferred not to have been able to read. I said I couldn’t imagine walking around London on acid.

‘Very wise’, Sinclair said, ‘because underneath there’s a monstrous aspect to it’.

The people I know who support the idea of walking around on LSD say what’s so great about it is the way you see all the minutiae and fine detail that a drug-free mind simply skims over.

‘But’, said Sinclair, ‘you can train yourself to log and sense those details anyway. Over the years you can come to recognize aspects and details, down to the smallest particulars, and incorporate them into a larger sense of the whole. That’s really what walks are about. As well as hoovering up information, it’s a way of actually shifting a state of consciousness, and you get into things you didn’t know about, or you begin to find out about, and that’s the interesting part. Otherwise, it’s just reportage’.

I sensed that he thought few things in the world were quite as pernicious and worthless as reportage.

In his books Sinclair is seldom a solitary walker. He has a loose posse of fellow obsessives, mostly male, who share a taste for walking, thinking, recording, talking; especially talking, he said.

‘It’s the only time you’ve got to have a long conversation, even though it contains a lot of silence. You stop to have breakfast in a greasy spoon, then later in the day you drop into a pub, and you can have different kinds of conversation from the kind you have as you’re rambling along, when you’re not quite together, or you come together and then you’ll do a stretch where one person goes ahead, then you meet up and he notices something, you notice something, over the course of the whole day, and there it is, it’s very, very civilized, a perfect philosophical dialogue’.

I wondered if he had a series of set walks.

‘Yes, because we’ve been in this house since 1969, so there are many set-piece walks that I do. I’ve got different walks for different questions or problems or ideas that I’m dealing with, a whole chain of maybe fifty different walks that you do for different things.

‘One would be that short-story walk. If it was a more confused situation, if I was worrying away at something, I’d go down to the river — it would be one of two ways. If it was a seriously difficult thing that needed to be really thought out, I’d go down the canal to Limehouse, get on the river, then I could go down the river as far as the problem needed, and loop back. If it was something more straightforward, I’d go straight down Bethnal Green, through Brick Lane down to Wapping, and hit the river there, and that would be enough to resolve this one thing, and if it was something I was looking for still, I’d go up to Waltham Abbey or the New Forest or Tilbury or something serious’.

So, I suggested, the size and nature of the problem determined the size and nature of the walk.

‘But it needn’t necessarily be a problem’, he said. ‘It might just be recharging the batteries in a particular way, or I have an instinct that there’s something interesting there and I take off in that territory’.

Given that he’s written so explicitly about where he lives and walks, and since he continues to live and walk in the same place, I wondered whether he was ever recognized by fellow walkers.

‘For a period I kept bumping into people somewhere around Shoreditch’, he said, ‘who were actually walking about with books of mine, doing various projects from the books, but I haven’t of late seen any’.

And did he reveal himself to them?

‘A couple challenged me, and one I saw just reading the book and I talked to him and pointed something out that he was looking for, and a couple of times on the canal, too, I saw a guy on a bike who was cycling through one of the books and ticking things off. He practically ran into me. But I think there are huge numbers of people walking, not with my books, but walking and doing their own endlessly strange projects across London’.

I mentioned that I’d been rereading D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, and was amazed by the huge distances the hero Paul Morel would walk in order to go and see his girlfriend Miriam. Sinclair’s eyes lit up again. ‘Yes indeed’, he said.

The fictional Miriam is closely based on Lawrence’s own girlfriend, Jessie Chambers. Morel’s mother says:

‘She must be wonderfully fascinating, that you can’t get away from her, but must go trailing eight miles at this time of night.’

And she’s right, of course. Miriam is wonderfully fascinating. The evenings together — Paul and Miriam’s, D.H. and Jessie’s — were intense and passionate, and one of their passions was for literature. In Jessie Chambers’s memoirs she mentions the books they discussed. Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons was one of them, its title perhaps an inspiration for Lawrence’s own novel.

Iain Sinclair got up, left the room, and came back a minute or two later with a small blue hardback copy of Fathers and Sons. He opened it up and held it out to me. There on the flyleaf was the signature ‘Jessie Chambers’. This was Jessie Chambers’s own copy of Fathers and Sons. This book had belonged to the woman for whom Lawrence was prepared to do so much walking. Sinclair had been given the book by a dealer as a thank-you for carrying a box of books.

It had occurred to me that Iain Sinclair might invite me to go with him on one of his fifty or so routes. I thought it might make for good, if again well-trodden, material. He didn’t, but I did do one short walk with Iain Sinclair. It wasn’t arduous, and as far as I can tell it was devoid of secret histories and alternate mythologies, although you can never be sure about these things. Our walk together was about twenty feet in length, the distance from his front door to his front gate, from his house along his garden path to the street. Being a good host, he saw me all the way out, escorted me off the premises. This, unarguably, was a walk through Iain Sinclair’s London.

♦

I was left wondering which particular endlessly strange walking project of my own I should be doing in London. I tried to envisage a map that showed every step I’d ever taken in the city — from my first visit with my parents when I was eleven years old, then all the visits I’d made when I was a student, thinking myself pretty cool to have friends, even a girlfriend, in London.

Then, as soon as I got out of college, I went to live in London, and began a period of twenty years or so living in one grim, unsatisfactory place after another, all over the map: Notting Hill, Shepherd’s Bush, Stamford Hill, Hendon, Baker Street, Greenwich, Bloomsbury, West Hampstead, Earls Court, West Ham. Eventually, and for the longest time, I lived in a small flat in Maida Vale that I wanted to move out of the day I moved in, and managed it just over twelve years later. I contemplated doing a pilgrimage walk around all these places where I’d lived, but it would have taken forever, and why would I want to depress myself?

Like Iain Sinclair, I had a certain number of set London walks, and I liked to think that over the years these had got more eccentric and sophisticated, more full of the connoisseurship of walking and London. Some of them were straightforward enough, various walks along and across and under the Thames, various walks that enabled me to watch the endless, cyclical destruction and reconstruction of London. Some were more consciously obscure: a walk to the six-hundred-year-old Whitechapel Bell Foundry — a stroll along Lombard Street to see where Alexander Pope, Aubrey Beardsley, T.S. Eliot, and Charles Dickens’s first love, Maria Beadnell, had all lived at one time or another; an expedition to see the King’s Place Nunneries — exclusive, expensive, eighteenth-century brothels, the best of them run by a woman from Guinea known as Black Harriott.

Sometimes I just took a shot in the dark. An afternoon spent on the green, cheerless expanse that is Wanstead Flats wasn’t one of the great walks, but it took me to a place I’d never been before, and will most likely never go again: the Hornimann Museum — the home of stuffed critters and primitive musical instruments — was wonderful, and I promised myself I’d definitely go back, but so far I never have.

I had a brief obsession with a book on architecture, written by Charles Jencks, called Post-Modern Triumphs in London. I spent quite a few Sunday afternoons walking around looking at new buildings that were all faux this and high-tech that, and saying to my walking pals, ‘Well yes, it is postmodern, but is it a triumph?’

I discovered that a high percentage of the buildings I liked were designed by a company called CZWG. These included The Circle, a curved block, finished in purple-and-blue-glazed bricks — Cascades, an apartment building on the Isle of Dogs, twenty stories high, one side of it stepped, providing a stack of ‘penthouses’ — the Janet Street-Porter House in Smithfield, a conglomeration of odd-shaped windows, balconies, metal grids, and four colors of brick. Janet Street-Porter, incidentally, remains a famous English walker, and was for a while vice president of the Ramblers’ Association.

The G in CZWG belongs to Piers Gough, a tall, skinny, angular Beardsleyesque character with quite a public profile in England as a champion of postmodern architecture. Newspapers and magazines describe him as ‘flamboyant’ and note that he’s an advisor to Frank Gehry.

I met Piers Gough at a party in London. By then I had become interested in people who had difficulty walking, but I had no idea that Gough fit into this category. None of the cuttings I’d read about him ever mentioned that he’s seriously disabled.

At the party I saw that he had terrible trouble getting around. In order to cross the room he had to make a series of lurches using tables, sofas, sometimes the walls, to support and propel himself. His legs pointed inward asymmetrically, and his feet, which splayed outward, were encased in special black leather shoes that were oddly stylish and almost semi-circular in plan.

We happened to be leaving at the same time, and he offered me a lift: his legs worked well enough to allow him to drive an automatic car. As we walked the couple of hundred yards to his Saab, I saw that he walked more easily in the street than he had indoors. The lurches I’d seen were his attempts to launch himself: once he was in motion he could keep going. He also used a walking stick, one specially made for him from transparent Perspex. With the long black raincoat he was wearing, he cut an elegantly ruined figure.

I said I was writing a book about walking, and would he mind if I asked him a few questions. He graciously said he didn’t mind. He’d been on a building site, he told me, and had fallen, not very far, about ten feet, but it had been enough to break his spine. That had been thirty years ago, when he was thirty. He’d been living with the disability for half his life. His wasn’t a typical spinal injury, he said. In some ways he’d been lucky. Most people with a broken spine are completely paralyzed below the point of the break, but he wasn’t; otherwise, he wouldn’t have been able to walk at all.

I asked whether the condition was stable, whether it was getting worse, whether it could be improved somehow. He said it was only getting worse in the way that everything gets worse with age. And he had to do exercises to prevent deterioration. He went to the gym and went swimming.

What about walking, I asked. I had the notion that this might be a man who could walk only with great difficulty but who needed to continue to walk in order to improve his condition.

My notion was quickly destroyed. Cough had done enough walking in his life, he said. When he was growing up, his father had taught at a school in the middle of the English countryside. There were no buses, and the train station was three miles away. The frequent six-mile round-trip to and from the station had spoiled his taste for walking long before he had his accident.

But worse than that, he said, walking was actually bad for his condition. The more walking he did now, the less walking he would be able to do in the future. It was as though he had only a certain number of miles in him: every one he used up meant there was one mile less to use. He would eventually walk himself to a standstill.

♦

I returned to imagining that cosmic map of Nicholsonian walks in London. There’d be thin spidery traces all over the city, some just a single line indicating a route I’d taken only once. There’d be some slight thickening around the places where I’d gone a few times to visit friends — the better the friends, the greater the thickening — and even more thickening in the places where I’d lived: the longer I lived there, the denser the markings. The decade spent in Maida Vale would result in the map being positively clotted and embossed along the route from the tube station to my front door. After that I suspected Oxford Street was the place I’d walked the most — the street that so many people hated.

I know plenty of Londoners who will go out of their way to avoid setting foot on Oxford Street. I’d taken to asking people what they thought was the worst London street for walking, and many said Oxford Street. It’s not that it’s notoriously dangerous or ugly or mean, it’s just that it’s full of people that a lot of Londoners don’t want to mix with: tourists, out-of-towners, spivs, pickpockets, kids cutting school, mad shoppers. The real objection is that it’s too popular, too full of ordinary miscellaneous humanity. It’s unpopular with one set of people precisely because it’s so popular with another.

Oxford Street is a thoroughfare running more or less east-west. The big department stores are on the north side, the sunny side of the street — De Quincey’s druggist was on the sunless south side. It’s the street where William Blake walked on his way to and from his house on Poland Street. It was the subject of a movie by Malcolm McLaren, and the site of one of the Sex Pistols gigs, at the Hundred Club. It’s also a street where I once saw Bob Geldof walking along weighed down with his Christmas shopping.

It became Oxford Street only after 1713. Until then it was variously known as the Road from Uxbridge, the King’s Highway, the Acton Road, Tyburn Way — the Tyburn being a river that still runs not so very deep beneath the street surface. In 1941 a German bomb made a crater that briefly exposed it.

Tyburn was also the place of public executions, at the very western end of Oxford Street, nearly but not quite where Marble Arch now stands. Hangings were regular, communal, celebratory activities. Prisoners were brought on horse-drawn cart from Newgate Prison a few miles away in the City of London, and eventually along the length of the street while large crowds followed on foot. To walk along Oxford Street is to walk the route of fifty thousand convicted criminals who were executed at Tyburn and those who liked to watch.

Tom Waits mentions the Tyburn Jig, the ‘dance’ of the flailing legs of the hanged who won’t be walking anywhere ever again. In fact a small paper could be written on Tom Waits and walking. In the song ‘Whistle Down the Wind’ he refers to something called the ‘Marley Bone Coach’ — that’s how it’s spelled on his website. Now, Marylebone is a district of London, no distance from Oxford Street, and I don’t doubt there was once, probably still is, a coach that goes there, but the phrase ‘taking the marrow bone coach’ is, or was, slang for walking, i.e., using the marrow bones in the legs. I’d like to think Waits is aware of this. In another song he warns that when you walk in the garden you’d better watch your back.

Most of my walking on Oxford Street was not done entirely by choice. I’d worked two jobs on the street and two more close by. Consequently, when I went out for a walk at Iunchtime I found myself on Oxford Street. My bank was there. I bought food there. I bought clothes, books, records, spectacles. The truth was, despite everything, I rather enjoyed walking there, and yet I could see there was something troubling and paradoxical in having done so much walking in a place that was held in such contempt by so many. I felt that Oxford Street needed to be redeemed. I thought it might be a good place to do my particular strange walking project.

I came to a decision. I would make six transits of Oxford Street, there and back, from Tottenham Court Road tube station at the east end of the street to Marble Arch at the west, and back again. I would spread them out over the course of the day. I would see how the street and my walking changed.

The Oxford Street Shopping Association claims the street is a mile and a half long (though I suspect this is an optimistically high figure), so each round-trip would theoretically be three miles, for a total of eighteen. A few unexpected detours and diversions, plus the short distances between the start and finish of the walks, would surely make it add up to twenty miles. That seemed satisfyingly like hard work.

Why six transits? Partly because I was trying to work up a pun about ‘sic transit Gloria’, but mostly because I was doing the walk on the sixth day of the sixth month of 2006. There were reports in the papers about this date having some relation to the number of the beast, 666, but I couldn’t see that. No reasonable way of writing the date could be made to give you that bestial number. In any case, one of the notions being bandied about was that this would be the day the Anti-Christ was born, which in itself didn’t seem to threaten much, at least for the time being. Even the Anti-Christ surely wouldn’t hit his stride on the very day he was born.

During the course of the day I duly walked the length of Oxford Street six times in each direction and did my eighteen to twenty miles. I set off for the first walk at six in the morning, in bright sunlight, and I completed my last walk a little before midnight.

I walked the street when it was all but empty and when it was so packed that I could scarcely walk at all. Chiefly I saw other people: first the workers, then the shoppers, and finally the carousers and drunks and lovebirds.

At times there was something festive about it all. The weather was as good as English weather ever gets. The people on the street looked as though they were enjoying themselves. Many looked like tourists, and many of them seemed lost. A lot of maps were being consulted, and lots of photographs were being taken. I saw one man scanning the street with binoculars. A woman in full, engulfing Arab dress was wielding a video camera. The crowd was diverse in terms of race, age, and class. They wouldn’t all be going to the same shops or buying the same things or spending the same amount of money, but they were all there to buy something, whether designer clothes or cheap T-shirts with a map of the London underground on them. They were united, made homogenous by the great equalizer of trade, and they all looked essentially happy about it.

I was hassled occasionally, once by a young man in a red T-shirt, smiling far too broadly, who stepped in front of me and demanded, ‘Do you have love in your heart?’ I couldn’t stop myself guffawing at the question. ‘I think you know I haven’t’, I said. That made him lose a lot of his charm. ‘This is a very serious issue’, he said very seriously, which I didn’t dispute. He was raising funds for a children’s charity, a worthy cause as far as I know, and no doubt there is some research proving that asking dumb questions of people who are walking down Oxford Street is a good way to suck in money, but I was the wrong demographic.

‘Does this ever work?’ I asked as I walked away.

‘Yes’, the young man called after me earnestly. ‘Yes, it does’.

Later, outside Marble Arch tube station two young Muslim men were standing behind a stall decked out with leaflets and hand-labeled DVDs. One asked me, ‘Now, what’s your understanding of Islam?’ He had the winning smile and the steady, open gaze favored by the more appealing sort of zealot, and I said I didn’t really have any understanding of it at all. He asked me if I had a DVD player, and offered me a DVD. I said I’d rather have something written. ‘Ah’, he said, ‘you want the original’.

I ended up with two publications, one called ‘Jesus, peace be upon him, a concise Islamic Belief’, and a booklet titled ‘Muhammad’s Prophethood: an analytical view’, by Jamal A. Badawi, professor of business management at St. Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada. Badawi is very insistent that Muhammad was not an epileptic, nor did he suffer from ‘the falling down disease that was known to his contemporaries’.

A minute after I’d left the Islamic boys, I encountered a Christian preacher, an American from his accent, shouting through a megaphone, asking whether I, or anyone else, wanted to know about heaven. He certainly hadn’t perfected the winning smile and the steady gaze. I, and everyone else, looked away and walked on.

Halfway through the afternoon I noticed a fragmentation, people displaying tribal affiliations: retro punks, a pair of Japanese women in kimonos, some Hare Krishna celebrants, and a group of four particularly nasty-looking young skinheads. Not quite skinheads, actually — they’d left odd patches of velvety hair here and there on their skulls and had them razored into hard-edged geometrical patterns. This wasn’t the style of authentic English skinheads I was familiar with, and when I heard the boys’ German accents I was relieved. It seemed to explain something. And even if the prospect of German skinheads was ultimately no more reassuring than that of English skinheads, I felt some consolation in knowing they were no part of any tribe I remotely belonged to.

During the busiest part of the day I wasn’t so much looking at people as looking out for them, trying to avoid being bumped into, knocked aside, trampled underfoot. This, of course, applied to everyone else, too, and resulted in some general bad temper. People around me were getting annoyed because walking was becoming so difficult. It was becoming so difficult because of all the other people who were there, also walking, also having difficulties, also becoming annoyed.

You couldn’t have called it chaos exactly, since there was no slide toward entropy, no heading toward a state of lesser organization. In fact, there was a great deal of steely purpose about many of the walkers, and there wasn’t anything random about it. Everyone looked determined, like they were on a mission, like they had to get somewhere fast. They wished they were already there, and yet they were thwarted and frustrated by their fellow pedestrians.

As the day ended and the stores closed, garbage bags filled with commercial waste had been built into slack pyramids at intervals along Oxford Street. Each pyramid had its own scavenging homeless person. The bags were semi-transparent, which made it easier to see the contents and determine which bags needed to be ripped open.

The London rush hour came and went. It was a thing I was well familiar with from my days working on and off Oxford Street: a frantic, but not quite genuine, desire to get away, to go home, to draw a line across the day. But this was regularly undercut by a reluctance to engage with the rush at all — and so people chose not to go home but to find a pub or bar instead, to hang out with people from work and complain about work and delay the inevitable. At eight o’ clock there were plenty of people on the street who’d spent a couple of hours in the pub and were now going home a bit drunk, a bit late, dashing along, working up excuses for when they got there, chasing after buses and missing them, cursing as though this was the worst thing that had ever happened to them in their whole lives.

I set out for my last transit at a little before eleven o’clock at night. Oxford Street was still well populated with people coming out of pubs, restaurants, burger bars — some finally heading home and walking to bus stops and tube stations or trying to flag down taxis. Others were looking for somewhere to carry on partying.

A few people were the worse for drink, but most seemed better for it, mellowed and easygoing, strolling, enjoying the warm night air, a lot of couples holding hands, one or two kissing in shop doorways. A lone, lanky, big-eyed bookish girl was coming out of a Borders bookstore just as it was closing, the kind of girl who gives hope, and then disappointment, to lone bookish boys everywhere. Two excited Italian gay boys had their digital cameras out and were photographing the window displays in some of the clothes shops — they looked deliriously happy.

It could have made you feel melancholy if you were that way inclined — walking alone and seeing all these people with significant others — and usually that’s very much the way I am inclined, but the fact that I had a reason to be walking alone, that I was involved in my own endlessly strange project, made all the difference in the world. It made it all right. I was a walker, I was a writer — I had a double purpose, and no need, now at least, to feel lonely in my solitary walking.

The irony of all this, not lost on me even then, was that I had done the transits, completed my self-imposed mission, walked the journey of twenty or so miles, and I was right back where I’d started. Essentially I had got nowhere.

Had I made Oxford Street my own? Had I redeemed or reclaimed anything? Well, yes and no. Oxford Street remains unpossessed and unclaimed, but that means it’s still available. It’s yours for the taking. It’s promiscuous. It’s anybody’s. In the course of the day I’d walked with and in the footsteps of a multitude of people, but I knew that I must be one of the very few who had ever walked twenty miles back and forth on Oxford Street in a single day. The perversity of this pleased me no end.

♦

At the time when I made my Oxford Street transits, and indeed when I first wrote the above, I was unaware that Virginia Woolf had written an article called ‘Oxford Street Tide’. It was one of six essays she wrote for Good Housekeeping magazine in 1931: they’re collected in a very thin volume called The London Scene.

Now, Virginia Woolf is not exactly an open book to me. In the past I’ve forced myself to read her novels, including Mrs. Dalloway, which some regard as a great London walking novel, though not me. Mrs. Dalloway is so little of a walker that the very idea of having to walk to the florist is an incredible excitement that sets her off thinking, ‘What a lark! What a plunge!’ You’d slap her, wouldn’t you? The critic John Sutherland is similarly unimpressed and, devastatingly, calculates that to get round her circuit in the allotted time she must have taken a taxi.

In ‘Oxford Street Tide’, Woolf knows she shouldn’t like Oxford Street — it’s so cheap and gaudy and full of plebs, awash with people ‘tripping, mincing, in black coats, in satin dresses’, so downright vulgar. But then suddenly, to her great credit, she realizes she can’t sneer at it completely. She notices something appealing in the energy and vulgarity of the place. She detects something Shakespearean about it and that makes it all right.

Then, on a street corner, she writes:

‘Tortoises repose on litters of grass. The slowest and most contemplative of creatures display their mild activities on a foot or two of pavement…One infers that the desire of man for the tortoise, like the desire of the moth for the star, is a constant element in human nature.’

Well, I think I saw a few elements of human nature in the course of my six Oxford Street transits, but I had not inferred that the desire for a tortoise was one of them. I’m pretty certain I wouldn’t want to spend too much time in Virginia Woolf’s Oxford Street, but for the sake of seeing the tortoises, I wish I could walk down it just once. They, as much as a tincture of opium, might be a cure for melancholy.