Zena and I met a young man from the Czech Republic who was offered a job and accommodation in Manchester. Arriving in the city, he found that the pay - minimum wage - minus the rent left him without enough money to eat and to take the long journey by tram to work. So he walked there and back each day.
Which reminded me of the 1979 book "Walking is Transport" by Mayer Hillman and Anne Whalley. Which I was thinking about when I saw this blog about "Tactical Urbanism" in Raleigh, North Carolina.
And the efforts of Anthony Garcia and Mike Lydon to encourage walking using unofficial way-finding signs. They want to build "a culture of walking".
From: Tactical Urbanism: Short-Term Action for Long-Term Change by Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia, published in March 2015.
(Click on the photo to enlarge)
Tags for Forum Posts: Anthony Garcia, Mike Lydon, Tactical Urbanism, Walking is Transport, walking
I think that walking with some kind of purpose is easier than just walking. Trudy and I (along with a few other friends) have been walking the Thames Path in stages. We started at the Thames barrier and have walked upstream in chunks of about 9 miles. Apart from being interesting, varied and good for us it is also an exercise in planning because we have to choose sensible start and finish points that can easily be reached by public transport. The imperative need to schedule stops at suitable watering holes means the planner of each stage has some research to do. Here is photo of riverside art on the foreshore near Greenwich:
and here, by contrast, is what one might see further upstream:
The Thames is a photographer's dream and at times the amount of good material can slow us down so much that even our paltry 9 miles seems hard to complete.
Another trick is to add some walking to a journey you were going to take anyway - for example, walk across Finsbury Park to get to Finsbury Park tube, or walk along the parkland walk to Highgate tube station.
Walking is also a very good way of seeing interesting corners of central London - e.g. walking from Kings Cross to Russell Square, Holborn or beyond.
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