On the pleasure of the unscripted walk, the side street that opens into something unexpected, and the city as a practice of attention
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat — Cyndi Himmelstiere on the art of walking Shoreditch.
The best street in Shoreditch is not the one the internet recommends. It is not Brick Lane, which is excellent, or Redchurch Street, which is also excellent, or Calvert Avenue, which I am particularly fond of. It is the one you find by accident, turning left when you meant to go right, following the sound of something or the smell of something or simply not paying attention to where you are going in the particular productive way that produces the best urban discoveries. Shoreditch, for all that has changed in it, remains very good at producing this kind of accident, which is the characteristic of a neighbourhood that has not been entirely planned.
The Walk as Practice
I walk without a destination several times a week, which I recommend to anyone who wants to understand the city they live in better than a commute allows. The commute is a line between two points; the walk is an area. The commute produces familiarity with a route; the walk produces familiarity with a neighbourhood, which means noticing what has changed and what has stayed the same, the new mural and the closed shop and the plant someone has put in a window that makes the whole street slightly better. This is the information that life in a neighbourhood runs on, and the walk is how you collect it.
What I Have Found
The things I have found by walking without direction: a courtyard behind a Georgian terrace that opens into a garden that exists for people who live nearby, with a bench and a tree and a quality of quiet that the surrounding streets do not prepare you for. A shop that sells only one kind of thing, which I will not name because it is the kind of discovery that is diminished by description and improved by arrival. A mural I had somehow missed for three years on a building I had walked past a hundred times, which tells you either that the mural was added recently or that I was not looking, and both are possible. The city changes. You also change. The walk reveals the difference.
The Neighbourhood You Actually Live In
I have lived in Shoreditch long enough to have seen it change significantly, and I notice that the changes I mind most are not the big ones — the buildings, the demographics, the price of coffee — but the small ones: the shop that had a specific character and then did not, the particular light on a corner at a particular time of year that seems slightly different now that the building on the left has been repainted. These small changes accumulate into the feeling that the neighbourhood is slowly becoming a different version of itself, which it is, as it always has been. The walk is what keeps you current with the version you are actually in, rather than the one you have in your memory.
Why You Should Go Now
The argument for the unscripted walk is also an argument against waiting. The neighbourhood you are walking in will be different in a year, and different again in five, and the street you find by accident today may not be findable in the same way later — it may be changed, or it may be findable but not surprising, because someone else will have written about it and the surprise will be gone. The city rewards the person who goes now, pays attention now, notices now. The best street in Shoreditch is waiting for you. It does not know it is the best street. It is just a street. Go find it before someone else names it.
For more from Cyndi Himmelstiere on Shoreditch and East London, visit Cyndi Himmelstiere. Walking London at Time Out London.
I want to be precise about what I mean by finding a street. I do not mean locating it on a map, which anyone can do. I mean arriving at a street for the first time with the particular feeling that something is here that repays attention, that the street has a character it has developed over time through the accumulation of the decisions of the people who live and work on it, and that this character is available to you if you are willing to slow down and look at it properly. This feeling is reliable in Shoreditch more often than in most parts of London, because the neighbourhood still contains enough variety and enough that is unexpected to produce genuine surprises in a person who is paying attention.
The unscripted walk is also an argument for getting lost, which London actively resists in the age of the smartphone. Getting lost is now a choice rather than an accident, which means that very few people do it, which means that the experience of discovering something you were not looking for has become rare enough to feel significant when it happens. Turn the phone off, or put it in your pocket, and walk in a direction you have not walked before. The city has been here a very long time. It has things to show you that it has not shown you yet.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
