THE A TO Z OF EXPLORING

We may know how to navigate it but how well do we know the streets and roads that make up the places in which we live? Jack Cornish challenged himself to walk every road in London – and discovered a whole new way of seeing his home city

Ten years ago, I vowed that I would walk every street in London. The idea developed when I was living in Brixton in south London and, once or twice a week, I’d walk the four miles or so to my office in Holborn, right in the city centre. It only took a couple of months to become rather bored of the same walk along the same streets, so I started to mix it up – taking short diversions, striding down undiscovered side streets – just to vary the routine. Gradually my routes began to spread further and further, and I started to wonder: in my 25 years of living in the capital, how many of its streets have I walked? And so my mission began: to walk every road, avenue, mews, row, alleyway and square of the city.

In regular life, we all tend to stick to a pretty small ‘area of influence’ – where we live, where we work and where our friends live, with the occasional trip out, to visit a museum or park perhaps. This attempt to walk all the streets breaks that – it creates a reason to go somewhere new. And, in the process, on nearly every walk I have stumbled across the unexpected – a small row of thatched cottages in the

modern suburbs of Brent, the magnificent cupped pink blossom of a magnolia tree thriving in many a front garden, a tranquil Japanese garden tucked behind what was once Television Centre within the constant rumble of the Westway road.

Exploring a new area, or “ticking-off” a street has now become part of how I live in the city. I formed habits of getting off the bus at a different stop, deliberately arriving ten minutes early to meet friends and then walking round the block; or setting off on a free Saturday to explore a completely new part of town. Having lived in London nearly all my life, I realised there are parts of the city I have never thought about, let alone visited. If you live in Lewisham in the south east, it is easy never to visit Ealing out in the west.

For the novelist Geoff Nicholson, urban walking “has to be personalised; you’re doing it for yourself, increasing your own store of particular knowledge, walking your own eccentric version of the city.” My eccentric version of London is slowly building up. Like many of our towns and cities, it is pretty unplanned and its streets have a tendency to gloriously turn in on themselves (although you notice a more planned grid creep in when you get out to suburbs). Sometimes, having walked around for hours, I find myself within a short sprint of where I started.

But gradually, places start to link up and I can see how the bones of the sprawling city fit together. The cultures, style and history of the city unfold before you. A good day’s walking is starting off somewhere completely new and walking back to a more familiar area. When walking, you notice how subtly the character of one area bleeds into another. The type of housing changes (60s tower blocks replaced by regimented streets of interwar semis, perhaps interrupted with 1980s executive infill) and shops change (artisanal delis morph into chicken shops and then into Polish supermarkets or Indian sweetshops). The thousand villages of London are all there to be discovered – each one linking into the next.

As I started to share my explorations on social media, I realised my compulsion to complete my city on foot is not unique. Hundreds have embarked on similar projects. Liam Wyatt, an Australian expat, walked the whole of Bologna; Duncan Clarke is running all 735 miles of Leicester’s pavements, Jean Sullivan who walked every block of the 4.5 sq. mile community of Oak Park, Illinois; or Alan Waddell who took up walking the suburbs of Sydney aged 89 ( he covered more than 3,000 miles and 280 suburbs before his death at 94). All people embroiled in the same project of trying to complete ‘their place’.

My mission to complete London is potentially futile. I’ve never had the courage to look up the exact distance of all the streets, but I keep on in the hope I might complete it, enjoying the journey as I do so. But even if you don’t have the ‘completionist’ mindset like myself, Alan or Jean, there is still so much to be found in your home town – especially when you see the space yet to be explored. Just think of the many shared stories of local discoveries made during daily exercise in lockdown. Grab a map of your town or city and spend ten minutes exploring it. I have an old A-Z that I take great satisfaction in colouring in at the end of a day’s walking (my personal record of the city). See which parts of town you have never visited or which streets you have never walked down (these may be just five minutes from your front door). Go out, wander and start your own eccentric version of your town or city.

“THE CULTURES, STYLE AND HISTORY OF A CITY UNFURL BEFORE YOU”