Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Paperback
ISBN: 9781844675586
May 2006
Reviews
-
“A history of walking that is about time and space and consciousness of the world as much as about putting one foot in front of the other.”
-
“A writer of startling freshness and precision.”
-
“[A] magisterial history of walking.”
Blog
-
Verso's guide to political walking
Inspired by Patrick Keiller's The Robinson Institute, currently on show at the Tate Britain, we present Verso's guide to political walking. We also draw influence from Will Self's Guardian article in which he pronounces that "walking is political" and suggests that the "contemporary flâneur" can be one "who seeks equality of access, freedom of movement and the dissolution of corporate and state control."
1. Wanderlust - Rebecca Solnit
The first general history of walking, Rebecca Solnit's book finds a profound relationship between walking and thinking, walking and culture, and argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in an ever more automobile-dependent and accelerated world.
2. Savage Messiah - Laura Oldfield Ford
Savage Messiah collects Laura Oldfield Ford's black and white, cut 'n' paste, punk fanzines that document her drift through London's margins. Illustrated with haunting line drawings of forgotten people and places, Oldfield Ford records the beauty and anger at the city's edges.
-
“Psychotic spatial awareness”: Will Self on Rebecca Solnit and political walking.
Writing in the Guardian, Will Self argues that walking is political. He points out that while a century ago 90% of Londoner's journeys were made on foot, according to current projections "walking will have died out altogether as a means of transport by the middle of this century." Attempting to demonstrate how alienated we have become from our physical environment, Self imagines what might happen to city dwellers in Britain if our transport systems disappeared overnight and we were forced to rely on our feet to get us around,
Put bluntly: deprived of mechanised means of locomotion - the car, the bus, the train - and without the aid of technology, the majority of urbanites, who constitute the vast majority of Britons, neither know where they are, nor are capable of getting somewhere else under their own power.
-
“The Butterfly and the Boiling Point”: Rebecca Solnit on the spark and sustenance of global change in 2011
In the midst of simultaneous eruptions of resistance and escalating global turmoil, one can't help but wonder why, after years of repression, these particular people have found the strength and the will to organize and rebel? In a beautifully written article, Rebecca Solnit recently examined global events the context of social boiling points and the necessary conditions for revolution. Solnit, an acclaimed author, historian and activist, begins her piece with a poetic survey of recent uprisings:
Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. Its coming is always a surprise, but its nature should not be.
Revolution is a phase, a mood, like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity. Some of these things pass. The women of Cairo do not move as freely in public as they did during those few precious weeks when the old rules were suspended and everything was different. But the old Egypt is gone and Egyptians' sense of themselves-and our sense of them-is forever changed.
