I could tell, at weekends in the summer months, that something had changed in the East End area where I live. Gathering around the locks of the Grand Union Canal, which open out here into the Thames at Limehouse, were groups of walkers of a certain age. They were precisely the walkers you would see on National Park trails, or in Woodland Trust areas: dressed practically, with carefully calibrated shoes, back-packs, and armed with colourful walking poles. What I found striking was the idea that these ramblers would want to spend their Saturdays gazing upon reclaimed urban wilderness – redundant docks and wharfs and warehouses bulldozed to make way for ‘riverside lifestyle choices’ – as opposed to meadows and murmuring brooks. Then I thought about it and realised that these apparently new walking trends are not new at all; many ramblers have always been fascinated with cities and their walking possibilities.
In my case, the pacing of the streets has been a question of a gnawing need to know; London-born, I felt it almost a duty to walk as much of the city as I could. To explore not merely the tight, dark streets of Lambeth, Southwark, and Elephant and Castle – and all those other places with almost folkloric reputations of resonance. But also those long terraces of 1930s houses that stretch illimitably, over Harlesden in the west, Ilford in the east. It is only by walking the city that you can detect how different areas change abruptly and dramatically street by street; how different cultures can be found on both sides of one railway line.
Only through long hikes can you appreciate the awesome multiplicity of London identities. How the Turk-Cypriot flavour of Stoke Newington so swiftly gives way to the orthodox Judaism of Stamford Hill, and thence to West African Seven Sisters. Different roads and streets and terraces and markets move past the walker like a diorama; a procession of vivid images – store fronts with displays of fruit in plastic bowls; evangelical churches in abandoned 1960s office buildings, signs proclaiming ‘The Celestial Chapel of the Blazing Chariot’; suddenly smart little parades of shops with knowing cupcake boutiques, and then the rather tattier parades, with their fried chicken shops, to be found on the city’s frazzled fringes: Chadwell Heath, Welling, Feltham.
An urban walk – be it in London, or along the canal paths of Birmingham, or around Manchester and Liverpool and Gateshead – all those coiling white pedestrian bridges and old flour mills transformed into museums – oddly fulfils as much of that rambling pleasure as any game struggle across sucking moorland. The hills and views of the city, by and large, are not dramatic, it is true. But what you lack in wildlife and greenery, you gain in the ceaseless fascinations of architecture, and history, not to mention the human face. On top of this, in these post-industrial times, we might have to rethink the notion of nature and the city; for even though the wildlife is not immediately obvious, it is most certainly there, more thriving and diverse than at pretty much any other time in history. Back from the brink of extinction are sparrows and blue tits; more exotically, hawks are to be found nesting in the sheltered parts of high-rise office buildings. A ramble through any of the old London cemeteries – from Highgate in the north to Nunhead in the south – will reveal an astonishing range of birds and wildflowers. In the 1950s, there were days when people could not see the hands in front of their faces thanks to industrial smog; now, with industry all but gone, London’s woods and rivers and parks are teeming with life. The Camley Street nature reserve at the back of King’s Cross, and backing on to a formerly derelict area of canal and warehouses, now boasts reed warblers, mallards and bats. The walker in this area can very easily envisage the idea of unstoppable nature pushing her way up from beneath the cracks in the paving.
The same is true of the old Midlands sumplands, that stretch of the country between Birmingham and Wolverhampton that not so long ago seemed to be one long rusty scrapyard. Parts of Birmingham’s canal system can change any walker’s preconceptions. For those of us who don’t live there, Birmingham is synonymous with a nightmarishly grim railway station, a ringroad dominated city centre and broken down redbrick relics of the city’s once formidable industrial past. You would imagine that these – plus the hard-to-love tower blocks in the distance – are now what constitutes Birmingham’s soul. The canals, as they so often tend to, neatly upend this preconception. For once you get away from the dual carriageways and the horrible station, and on to those defiantly antique paths which force you to crouch under low bridges, you see a city proud of its history and keen to polish up those dignified old redbrick warehouses and manufactories.
The restoration of the canals both in the Midlands and throughout the country is one of the more breathtaking success stories of the last fifty years. Local enthusiasts and volunteers, equipped with little more than drills, shovels and wild bloody-mindedness, took these abandoned decaying waterways and made them not merely viable, but actually a huge part of England’s tourism industry. Men and women – local and visitors – piled into old sluices and locks, removing shopping trolleys, burnt out cars, and worse. They repaired leaking crumbling stonework, rebuilt lock gates and ensured that the waters were pumped through fresh once more. It was not so long ago that many urban canals were complete no go areas, haunted by drunks and prostitutes. Now there are more longboats piling up and down canal waters than there were 100 years ago. For walkers, entire new ways of exploring not merely the countryside, but the relics of industrial urban areas, have been opened up.
There have also been social changes; all broadly in the walker’s favour. In the 1970s and 1980s, London ramblers knew better than to venture along the Regent’s Canal from Dalston to Hackney; some of the path ran alongside some of the capital’s most troubled areas. Stolen cars burning by the side of the towpath were not uncommon. Local children would amuse themselves by tipping breezeblocks off the small canal bridges. In addition to a familiar repertory company of harmless old boozers claiming ownership of the waterside benches was a new generation of less predictable drug addicts. Now, at the weekends, there is virtually walkers’ gridlock on this towpath; a cacophony of angry ting-tings from frustrated middle class cyclists attempting to get round the pedestrians. The walkers stop to admire the early-nineteenth-century bridges, stare at the now-compulsory waterside warehouse-flat conversions, and break for cappuccinos in waterside cafés that were once old textile factories. There are drawbacks. Up until the late 1990s there were still the ghosts of old industry here, the echoing sense of the canal itself being used. But the path today looks a little like one of those estate agent computer simulations, with smiling, middle class people enjoying urban regeneration. If one wants to feel secure, one must sacrifice a little authenticity.
For urban walkers, the notion of trespass is subtly (and amusingly) reversed. Obviously we walkers know that we cannot traipse through back gardens or front gardens or indeed anywhere that involves any kind of fence. Nor would anyone want to. Naturally. The areas where urban walkers sometimes feel most chary about intruding on are labyrinthine old council estates from the 1960s and 70s. And not because of fear of crime, but simply because of the sense that they are somehow not allowed.
There is a good example of this to be found in Poplar, east London. It is called the Lansbury Estate in honour of the pioneering Labour politician George Lansbury. As these 1960s estates go, it is neither repellent nor attractive – just a very large quantity of utilitarian square houses, and tower blocks that are not especially towering. For the walker – and there are both individuals and groups now seeking out such locations – the place is quite literally a maze. A cut across a small patch of greenery would appear to lead to a path between a tower block and a terrace; but it does not. You turn a corner, and you are in a high-walled dead end, filled with bins. Similarly, down a few more of these twisting paths, you cross a car park, heading for a road you can see beyond. But there is a fence in the way and you are forced to retrace all those steps. During all of this, you feel as though you are trespassing. There is no reason why you should. There are no signs forbidding casual pedestrianism. But this is none the less the abiding impression, and it is very much to do with the way that urban territory is marked out. It is the subliminal message of graffiti, but also buried deep within this use of space. Paths can only have been blocked off to discourage casual use. May that dead end be a lesson to you. If you do not live here, you have no business being here.
A little further east along the river, you will find curious hard-core urban walkers exploring the vast, dense maze that is the Thamesmead estate. Thamesmead – a cruelly lovely name for a place that has become the byword for all things unloved about council estates – is built on marshland. At its northern edge laps the silent River Thames. Through its closes and cul-de-sacs flow little channels of water, made to look like canals. All around are vast fortresses of pale grey concrete, stained in places with overflow pipe water, and punctuated with little windows. To the south lie other obstacles to the walker’s path, including the southern outfall sewage pipe and the baleful bulk of Belmarsh prison.
None of this is pretty; more importantly, none of this is remotely welcoming to the casual explorer, on foot. Thamesmead has been designed for cars and buses; very often pavements simply disappear, and the reluctant pedestrian is forced down into dark underpasses. Statistically, the chances of being mugged are not especially higher here than a lot of other places. But the lack of a sense of a community on an old marsh cut off from the rest of the city gives the place a rather lawless feel. So there are dedicated walkers who come to experience this, plus also to gaze upon an architectural experiment that is now widely reviled.
Also popular in London – and slightly more easygoing in terms of atmosphere – are the old ‘railway walks’, paths on old trackbeds that used to run through the suburbs. Especially pleasing is the Finsbury Park to Highgate ‘Parkland Walk’, which follows a steady upward incline, and gives the walker occasional glimpses of the backs of houses that they would have been seen from a train window as recently as 1970. Not far from the Highgate path is the Highgate Woods to Alexandra Palace reclaimed railway line – even more rewarding, as this grants one views right the way down to the distant Square Mile, and across east towards Stratford and the Olympic site. An even more remarkable story of renewal can be found down at that very site – though this has less to do with the Olympics than anyone might think. For much of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the River Lea – which runs steadfastly down from Hertfordshire, through north-east London and the East End down to the Thames – was one of the most poisoned rivers in Britain. Along its banks, dirty industry – from the ordnance factories of Enfield, to the noxious glue factories of the Bow Backs – would spew reeking waste into those narrow, brackish waters. The area that is now partly occupied by the Olympic Park – Fish Island – was, by the 1950s, a hellhole of pollution, and the waters were dead.
Successive recessions, added to a dawning environmental consciousness, began to change things. The ordnance factories closed down, heavier industry rusted, decayed and was blown away. The path along the River Lea – a patchwork of potholes, broken glass and extravagant weeds – became the haunt of derelicts and keen urban runners. It was also noticed that in the absence of industry, the water now flowed cleanly enough to encourage species to return. Now, in place of the country walk, we have dedicated groups of ramblers tracing that River Lea path, from the eighteenth century Three Mills, at Bow, up to Waltham Forest, and along the way noting such extraordinary curiosities as cormorants, kingfishers and exquisite dragonflies, as well as the clear waters playing host to pike and an array of other fish. Rus in Urbe: the virtues of the country, and the rejuvenating effect of seeing the varieties of nature, are brought instead to the old Walthamstow Marshes. There are special walking tours led by natural history experts trailing up and down the River Lea now. They explore the meads near Waltham Abbey; they cheerfully march along in the shadow of the looming waste disposal incineration centre on the North Circular Road; and they eagerly hike about in search of exotic plants on the Tottenham marshes beside the old power station.
Not all attempts at urban regeneration have been so benign or pedestrian-friendly, though: it is only about seventy years ago that Sir Patrick Abercrombie – in thrall to the idea of building a new city in the aftermath of the Blitz – advocated constructing vast motorways right through the centre of London. Mercifully he was stopped; apart from the sinuous grey concrete snake of the Westway gliding over west London rooftops, and the uncompromisingly bruising A12 bulldozering its way through the terraces of the east, the capital always broadly favoured the walker. Other cities throughout England and Scotland were not so fortunate.
Newcastle is shot through with dirty grey dual carriageways. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, it was clearly decided that the pedestrian was a second-class citizen, and that nothing must impede the motorist. Similar nightmare roads were pushed through Glasgow. Other towns, such as Derby and Chesterfield, had concrete necklaces of ringroads fitted. The net result of all these tinkerings – the one-way systems, the vast roundabouts, the flyovers – was an urban landscape filled with dark underpasses, long subterranean passages that the walker would have no choice but to traverse. Now the walker is at last prevailing. In towns and cities up and down the country, subways are being blocked off and filled in, and decent systems of traffic lights are being installed on the surface. Town planners appear to be acknowledging that it is not fair to terrorise pedestrians. This is just as well, for the only way that one can really keep checking the pulse of a city is by walking its streets, noting new developments and the quiet demolition of others. Only the walker – never the driver – will see how dramatically the urban landscape of England has changed over the last fifty years.
Some cities have been reinvented and rebuilt to a degree that would make anyone from the 1940s gape with incomprehension. Sheffield, once a smoggy city of steel burning industry, now glistens with white high-rise towers, silvery water features and carefully landscaped steps. The forbidding concrete estate on the hill above the station is itself receiving a Day-Glo refit. Down in the west, Cardiff has been thoroughly overhauled; once again, we find white high-rises and silvery water features and landscaped steps. Only the walker can fully appreciate just how alienating complete modernity can be. How weird it is to return to a town that you thought you knew, and find that all the familiar landmarks are now either jostling against vast new architectural projects or have been overwhelmed by them. From the giant dimpled luxury superstore in Birmingham to the gaunt, metallic, glittering corporate towers that now jab at the clouds in Leeds, pulling the eye away from the old municipal glories beneath, the pace of change in the British urban landscape over the last fifteen years or so has been extraordinary. In time, once all these fresh landmarks have lost their novelty, the cities will subsume them once more. For now, walkers must acquaint themselves anew with roads and high streets that they thought they knew. This is a simple matter of reorientation. On a happier note, it also gives the rambler fresh views and prospects to assimilate. So in many ways, this is a golden age for the urban walker; whole new territories are opened up on the edges of city centres, with the development of ‘quays’ and the renovation of disused docks and industrial canals. Where once the banks of the River Clyde were used for the epic labour of boatbuilding, there are now nicely paved riverside walks, punctuated with the occasional old crane, left there for ornamental purposes. The ‘Clyde Walk’ has been a long time in preparation. First mooted in the early 1970s, it was a good thirty years before any sorts of results in terms of path creation materialised. Meanwhile, some 60 miles to the east on the River Tay at Dundee, the once forbidding river edges are now – finally – thrown open to eager walkers, who can enjoy both the furious Tay estuary, and the view of the epic, curving railway bridge across it, as well as pure blasts of invigorating North Sea air.
Whereas a walk out in the wild can connect one with an ancient past, a walk in the core of a city will impress more recent eras upon you. There are those who make for the City of London on quiet Sunday mornings; the Square Mile has a road and passageway layout that has survived since medieval times, if not before. In the silence of that morning air, anyone moving through this jumbled warren, darting down from Moorgate to Aldgate, through tiny passageways and hidden courtyards, by way of Guildhall – a mash-up of medieval pomp and late 1950s gaucheness – or any one of the innumerable churches that survived the Blitz, will be confronted with history. Ironically, thanks to the Blitz, the City is now reconnected with its Roman forebears; for the Luftwaffe bombs exposed many sections of the old, long buried Roman wall. Today, walkers can look down on these sections from pavements above.
For the last few years, there has been a cult enthusiasm among younger urban walkers for ‘psychogeography’ – which very loosely seems to mean divining the old spirit of each street, or each district, and seeing the invisible lines of historical – or even occult – energy that connect them. Rather than being an exclusively modern phenomenon, these psychogeographers – like those who enjoy the bleakness of the Thames Estuary – are actually romantics, in the old-fashioned poetic sense. To these walkers, boarded-up disused hospitals, or derelict small factories, old railway arches, or power stations, are pretty much the urban equivalent of the ruins of Tintern Abbey. They use the term ‘entropy’ but what this really means is the picturesque quality of abandonment or obsolescence. Groups such as Urban 75 – a jolly sounding bunch who, like Leslie Stephens’s Sunday Tramps, occasionally escape London’s bonds into the Home Counties, and then post cheerful accounts of these rambles on the Internet – are the embodiment of what seems to be a growing walking enthusiasm. They embrace the dustier, more neglected corners of the city. For the last two centuries, our footsteps have been directed out of town; now, increasingly, they are being directed into it. Some urban landscapes are now deemed every bit as beautiful as Hambledon Hill.
It is only comparatively recently that Londoners en masse have been tempted out into the country at all. There is a distinguished tradition of cockneys especially preferring to remain securely within the sound of Bow Bells. In the late nineteenth century, there were music hall songs about this antipathy to the countryside. In one ditty, a drunk man climbs aboard a late-night tram and wakes to find himself, horror struck, at the end of the line among the fields beyond Upminster. Men and women who would think nothing of walking miles across the city either to work or to visit families and friends would not countenance similar jaunts across fields. There are some rambling groups today – in the East End especially – that seem to specialise in staying within London’s borders, and exploring instead the ever changing, shifting city. Some urban walkers, for instance, are sometimes drawn to ‘regenerated’ sites simply because local history has been thoroughly eradicated, and something entirely new has materialised, bringing with it new paths and roads. One such ramblers’ magnet that has dispensed with heritage – other than a few cranes and the occasional eighteenth-century warehouse transformed into millionaire bankers’ apartments – is the financial district of Canary Wharf, which is perched on top of London’s extinct economic engine, the great docks.
Water remains; but now it dazzles in the reflected light of vast skyscrapers, each dedicated to those esoteric financial arts. The other point of fascination for walkers is their own status upon this vast estate, which stretches fully a good mile wide. At the edge of the Isle of Dogs, on the access roads leading in to Canary Wharf, there are vast yellow signs. They proclaim that this is strictly private property. That there is no automatic right of way. That there are certainly no bridleways or designated footpaths. In other words, you are there only as long as the management of Canary Wharf deem you suitable. When this ‘Manhattan on Thames’ started to rise in the late 1980s, there were a few eagle-eyed observers who wondered about the legality of taking such a vast tract of land, upon which ran public roads, and in effect privatising it to the extent that even the pavements were under the jurisdiction of faceless financiers, as opposed to Parliament. Walkers might want to ponder that now as they march by the sides of these reclaimed docks. One word of caution to anyone who likes to go walking with a dog: you might be permitted, just, in the open air. But try entering any one of the dinky Canary Wharf ‘parks’ or indeed any enclosed area, such as the Docklands Light Railway, and you will find yourself instantly surrounded by faux policemen, wearing faux police outfits – security guards dragged up to look like real constabulary. Dogs are not permitted. In that sense, there are parts of the city that are every bit as hostile to the walker as the old Farmer Giles bidding people to get off his land. Where rural walkers have slowly made incursions into restricted territory, urban walkers still meet with surprising obstacles. One now wonders how Tom Stephenson – one of the most influential figures in the walking movement – might have tackled such flagrant intransigence.