Wanderlust: A History of Walking

"Beth: The book is a history of walking, and it covers all types of walking, from a solitary reverie, to political walking, protest, spiritual walking, pilgrimage. It talks about walking in the mind, about walking being a space of passageway which mirrors the process of thinking, of pondering and wandering. She talks about walking as “a form of spatial theatre, but also spiritual theatre,” particularly in relation to pilgrimages, this reiteration of a walk or a movement through space as a reliving of something that’s happened, so that you can relive an experience from your own space and time. Beth: There are lots of different spaces you can walk in, not just epic 82-day pilgrimages. She describes this idea that landscape contains information and that by walking through it, rather than by looking down on it from the aerial view, you can relive a story or reiterate an action from the past. It’s about landscape being a language and having a story to tell as you move through it, so that the act of moving through a place produces experience, rather than that the experience is in a place that you go to. She says that “to trace even an imaginary route is to trace the spirit or thought of what passed there before.” I think that relates strongly to our book. We were walking an imaginary route, we were imagining as we were walking, and we were mapping this myth. It was similar to the aboriginal song-lines, that mapping of a landscape as a way to remember and to call up stories. When we were walking around a site, we’d start to read it and interpret it and imagine what had happened there, trying to figure out whether it was really bomb damage, or whether it was a piece of demolition, or gentrification, and trying to interpret what we could see, reading the bricks and stones, and fences, and pavements. It’s a book about the experience of walking as a way to interpret landscape, rather than mapping or ownership. She talks about walking as a classless activity. Most people can walk, or move through spaces. Those things become contentious with privatisation, but they also become politicised with protest. So her book is all about the many uses of walking, and how it relates to the mind."