Column: Stuart Maconie
You can drive around a city to try and explore it, sure. But then you can try and eat a yogurt with a boat oar too.
Pound pavements, reap rewards.
THE BEST WAY to get to know a city is on foot. We all know that. And this fine magazine may be called Country Walking but forgive me staying urban this month. We can’t always get out of town, especially during this last strange year and a half, but we do need to move. The writer Maira Kalman said, “I don't want to trudge up insane mountains or through war-torn lands. Just a nice stroll through the hill and dale. But now I walk everywhere in the city. Any city. You see everything you need to see in a lifetime. Every emotion. Every condition. Every fashion. Every glory.”
For reasons I’ll share with you a little later this year, this week has seen me walking in the footsteps of the great J B Priestley as he did in his beloved English Journey book of 1934; specifically, in his footsteps around the great maritime city of Southampton. I don’t, or didn’t, know Southampton at all. I know that they moved their ground from compact and attractive The Dell to disused gas works St Mary’s in the early noughties. I know that like Wigan, they have won the FA Cup but once in a shock giant killing upset. I know they are fierce rivals with neighbouring Portsmouth. But what does this tell you, apart from how shockingly narrow my frame of reference is? I needed to get to know it, and, as I began by saying, the best way to get a know a city is on foot.
In his book, Priestley is attractively vague about directions, routes, place names and the like, which may be because he is chauffeured around in a Daimler rather than pounding the street on shanks pony. But it might have been an even better book if he had. Public transport however admirable, and chauffeured Daimlers however pleasurable, can never give the feel that putting one foot in front of another does. It gives the city a human dimension, it puts it at head height, at the perspective of a real live walking human being, rather than a piece of cargo.
The councils and marketing departments and brand consultants have happily come to realise this. Once upon a time, I might have had to collar a local or spend hours poring over maps in the local library to find out where to go and what to see in a new city. Now it’s a couple of clicks of my phone. I mixed and matched between three of the many trails you can download or buy from various apps to make my tour of Southampton. The QE Mile, The Titanic Trail and the old City Walls. Mobile phones we know can be exasperating but here is something to love them for. They will prompt you, steer you, even talk to you as you make your way around. I learned that Jane Austen hung out here, that thousands of children from the devastated Basque city of Guernica made their way here by boat and were welcomed by the people, that no street in the city was unaffected by the Titanic disaster, and, more trivially but more happily, that they do a fantastic curry at the Bayleaf kitchen and a great pint in the Red Lion next door, the oldest pub in the city where conspirators to depose Henry V were tried back in 1415.
Its trade is the sea and yet it is somehow not of the sea. Parts of its old town are like York, and it’s new like, say, Coventry or London or Manchester. Apart from a few squares of the Old Town it is never as raffish or piratical as Bristol. It feels solid and prosperous still just as it mainly did in Priestley’s day. Despite being almost in the rough cold grasp of the Atlantic, it seems to have mainly weathered or been sheltered from the storms. But you would never know all this unless you left your Daimler or tube or Megabus. Next time life and work keep you away from the hills or to a new city, walk its streets, pound its pavements, drink its beer. We’ve been kept indoors and apart for a long time. And as the great US comic Steven Wright observed “Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.”