Walking as a powerful magic

One of the threads running through the talk is what happens when creative walking meets genuine human connection. During the pandemic, Morag was part of the #WalkCreate research project, working alongside Dee Heddon, Maggie O’Neill, Clare Qualmann and Harry Wilson to understand how people used walking and creativity to get through lockdown. The findings were tender and surprising. People found solace on their own doorsteps, painted pebbles for strangers to discover, and rediscovered the nature already around them. One participant summed it up beautifully: walking through Covid taught them to love where they live.

Morag is careful, though, not to romanticise any of it. Walking is complicated. It is not always easy, and it is certainly not the same experience for everyone. She resists the tendency to fetishise the countryside, and she reminds us that no epiphany is available to someone who has a hole in their sock, aching feet, or a worry about catching the last bus home.

The streets should belong to everyone

This is where the activism comes in. As a disabled person, Morag points out that she has never once walked through an environment that was built for her. When a sign promises a five minute walk, she asks the obvious question: whose five minutes? Whose body? For her it might be closer to half an hour.

Her talk turns to the everyday infrastructure that makes walking possible in the first place, and how easily it is taken for granted. Public toilets, she argues, are a civil rights issue. So are libraries, benches, safe crossings and the wider care that lets people leave the house at all. When we talk about walking and wellbeing, we cannot quietly expect a nice stroll to replace the NHS.

And then there is the harder truth about who feels welcome in public space. Morag shares a line from a student in her Women Walking Manchester project that, in her words, hit her like a sledgehammer: the city isn’t for women really, you always have to be vigilant, men don’t realise what it’s like not feeling like public space is for you. It is a reminder that the right to walk freely is unevenly distributed, and that racism, transphobia and other exclusions shape who gets to loiter without fear.

The right to loiter

Morag does not leave us in despair. Her answer is practical and hopeful. Get out. Be connected. Pay attention. Act as though the space is yours, because it is. Sometimes resistance is as gentle as sitting somewhere, dwelling, and refusing to be moved on. It is not only a right to move through space but a right to belong in it, a right to connect, a right to loiter. Keeping spaces open and shared, she says, is the opposite of planting a flag.

She closes by reading from her book, The Feminist Art of Walking, a manifesto of sorts that begins and ends with the same declaration. I am a loiterer because I am curious. Because I want to ask awkward questions and make creative mischief. Because there are places I feel scared to go alone. Because once I was lonely and now I am not. Because I walked myself slowly into being part of this city, and it belongs to me, to us all, now.