Traces of a Walking City

London still holds physical traces of its pedestrian past if you know where to look. Fragments of early Portland stone paving survive at King’s Bench, Lincoln’s Inn, around the Queen Anne statue at St Paul’s, and in the northwest corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields near Newcastle House. Over in Queen Anne’s Gate, a statue of Queen Anne marks the spot where a wall was once built to block through traffic, what we might now call an early low traffic neighbourhood. Those elegant 18th century houses were home to residents determined to stop the rat runners of their day.

London’s Great Walkers

The city has produced some phenomenal walkers. Samuel Pepys regularly walked several miles from his home in the east of the city to his Admiralty office in Whitehall. Lancelot Andrews, before becoming Bishop of Winchester, would walk all the way back from Cambridge as a student.

But the real spectacle came in 1618, when two extraordinary men each walked from London to Scotland. Ben Jonson, by then a well-known playwright but getting rather corpulent in his forties, set off along the east coast, following a route we can trace on the Historic Ways map, up through Huntingdon, Stamford, Grantham, Newark and on to York. He was greeted by civic dignitaries and local aristocrats along the way, and when he arrived in Edinburgh, crowds thronged the streets.

That same year, John Taylor, known as the Water Poet, took a different route up the west coast on what he called the Penniless Pilgrimage, insisting on paying for nothing and depending entirely on the goodwill of those he met. His route took him up Holloway Road, through Highgate (where some 17th and 18th century houses still survive on the high street), on to Barnet, St Albans and eventually through Coventry and Preston into Scotland.

Pilgrimage Routes Lost and Found

The conversation also turned to pilgrimage, a theme that has come alive during this year’s London Walking Festival. The most famous literary pilgrimage, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, followed a route along what is now the A2, through Gravesend, Sittingbourne and Rochester to Canterbury. What’s fascinating is that Chaucer reveals the social status of his characters through the quality of their horses, from the clerk’s shabby nag to the wealthy riders’ specially bred palfreys, designed for a comfortable ride.

But the most important pilgrimage site of the late Middle Ages wasn’t Canterbury. It was Walsingham in Norfolk, visited by kings and commoners alike. When it was pulled down during the Dissolution, the pilgrimage route all but disappeared. Using the Historic Ways map, David traced the route from London up through Waltham Cross, branching off at Puckeridge through Barkway to Newmarket, then to Brandon, and on through Pickenham to Walsingham. Much of this route is now lost, making it a fascinating prospect for anyone wanting to recreate a medieval pilgrimage.

400,000 Daily Walkers

At its peak in the mid-Victorian era, around 400,000 people walked into the City of London every day and back again, not counting those who arrived by train or steamboat. As a percentage of the population, that figure is remarkable. We can picture this through literature: Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s clerk in A Christmas Carol, walked three miles daily from Camden to the City, much as Dickens himself had done as a young man walking to the Blacking Factory near Hungerford Bridge.

Monasteries and the Wealth of Medieval London

Recording at St Bartholomew the Great gave us a vivid reminder of medieval London’s extraordinary wealth. Within just the small area of Smithfield and Clerkenwell stood three very wealthy monasteries: St Bartholomew’s, St John’s Clerkenwell (whose gatehouse and crypt still survive as the headquarters of the Order of St John), and the Charterhouse. No monasteries in the whole of Wales matched their income, and very few north of the Humber came close.

Explore It Yourself

If this has sparked your curiosity, David recommends the Central London Footways map, which includes a QR code linking to a guided walk through London’s walking history. There’s also a Footways film about the history of walking, and the Smithfield and Clerkenwell map, which David considers perhaps Footways’ best design, with a timeline showing the area’s history. All of these maps are available at St Bartholomew the Great Church.