Night Walking

This is a post I made a few months ago on Saltypirate, thought it would be fun to post it here too.

One thing that makes my job more than tolerable is our access to the internet. Working on a counter in the mid-day can be very quiet and therefore slow and tedious, but with access to the internet you can entertain yourself with not only games and Facebook but also cultural things! One article I found on the Guardian site was a small bit written by Kate Pullinger, an expat Canadian, in response to the recent statement made by the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith that she doesn’t feel secure walking the streets of London (Hackney, to be precise) at night. Now, one of the most enjoyable pass-times that Mark and I have here in London is just that, walking around London at night (even Hackney, which we did less than a week ago), and for the exact same reasons as Pullinger.

I was young and broke and needed to save my money for pints, books and movies: walking was the cheapest way to get around and most nights out ended with a long walk home. The city was huge, and foreign to me, and I needed to map it out in my mind by stalking the twisty streets with their ever changing names: Eversholt Street becomes Upper Woburn Place becomes Tavistock Square becomes Woburn Place becomes Southampton Row becomes Kingsway all inside 15 minutes. It was only through walking that this would ever make sense …

Walking is efficient and it really is the best way to map out a city in one’s mind, especially in a city like this. I take pride in my sense of direction and my tendency to never feel lost, but in London I’m always ass backwards, that is, until I walk around and connect Holborn with Russel Square, then Faringdon with the City and, next thing you know, I’m home! But at night, there isn’t the hustle of street and foot traffic, it’s quiet, save the night-time song birds (!!??), and everything is well lit (and even appropriately to the style of architecture you happen to be looking at). It also helps that when you’re walking home at night you’re usually a little bit drunk, making the 45 minute journey feel a lot less painful.

One of my favorite parts of the editorial, though, is Pullinger’s “epiphany”:

At night it’s as though the city’s history comes alive, bubbling up from where it lies dormant beneath the tarmac: when the crowds are gone, modernity slips away, and the city feels ancient and unruly. How could anyone not love London late at night, or early in the morning?

This is so true! And I don’t know if it’s because of the layer of damp on the cobblestones, or the spotlights that cut St. Paul’s out of the dark, or what. It’s just so nice, enough to distract any thoughts of robbers and bogeymen. Mind you, I wouldn’t go walking around too late after midnight all by myself, at least not along the quiet back roads, all I’m trying to say is that a) walking around London at night is such a great experience that it shouldn’t be considered a death-sport, and b) I really enjoyed Pullinger’s story.