The fox is barely visible. At first it is just a rustle in the tall grass. Twilight has dyed the winter landscape deep blue, and sound works faster than sight. When it does emerge, the fox moves swiftly through the open, a spark running down a length of wire.
Though darkness has nearly closed in over the woods, they still flare with gestures of life. Crows crowd the corridor of old oaks, the trees’ self-appointed guardians and defenders against the rasping magpies. Oyster mushrooms unfurl from the bark of a decaying tree. Small rain fills the air more than it falls, and the smell of the woods changes with it: mulchier and deeper; notes of cinnamon and pencil box.
The world presses in, unbidden and shimmering.
I have walked for hours, and have long since lost track of myself, my legs carrying me over roots and stones according to their own unconscious rhythm. Repetitive movement and time outside have made porous the boundary that normally separates me from the world. I can feel myself seeping outwards, can almost believe that I’m running alongside the fox’s swift feet, up there jostling in the branches with those crows.
I can locate myself, know myself, through this wild. Even if this wild is just 10 minutes from my front door, right in the middle of London.
It’s not an idea that we’re used to, that cities can be wild places. That feels especially true in the U.K., where rural landscapes are admired as the country’s soul, those green and pleasant lands counterposed against the dark satanic mills of industry, of cities. The urban-rural binary, the belief that nature stops where tarmac begins, feels so commonsense and intuitive that few seem to question it.
But for all its concrete, London defies such neat dividing lines. The city is green—vividly, irrepressibly so. It has more than 35,000 acres of public green spaces, equivalent to 40% of its surface area, according to a 2013 report by the City of London Corporation. In 2019, the National Park City Foundation designated London the world’s first National Park City. Today, it is one of the greenest cities of its size in the world, home to some 15,000 species of flora and fauna, 8 million trees, and dozens of protected habitats.
Everywhere, nature breaks unbidden into human life. It climbs railway bridges undeterred. It hijacks roadsides, spitting out fat blackberries every August. It exists where it’s supposed to and also where it isn’t. And it gives back to its residents grandly, if they know where to look. From my years of walking, I have created a mental catalog of London’s fruit trees: cherry and apple, plum and quince, mulberry and medlar and loquat. There are its autumn sloes and rowans, its summer raspberries and rosehips. I’ve taken fig leaves for syrups and oils, have made cordial from elderflowers, have picked bunches of wild garlic for scones and pesto.
It helps that, in recent years, local policy has explicitly prioritized pedestrian access. Walking, as well as cycling and public transit use, has been a cornerstone of Mayor Sadiq Khan’s Transport Strategy since 2018. “London’s streets should be for active travel and social interaction, but too often they are places for cars, not people,” the report notes, as it sets out the ambitious target that, by 2041, 80% of journeys in London be made on foot, by bicycle, or via public transit (it is currently “slightly short” of an interim goal).
But London also expansively protects walking as recreation. The Walk London Network—among the largest walking networks of any city in the world—comprises eight official routes and hundreds of miles of trails. There are long-range circular routes like the 78-mile Capital Ring Walk and 150-mile London Outer Orbital Path (LOOP). Other paths follow the length of the River Thames, link the city’s north and south, delve into residential neighborhoods and connect lesser-known public squares and gardens into miles-long patchworks of greenery. Together, these trails crosshatch the city, representing near-endless opportunities for natural immersion.
“For all its concrete, London defies such neat dividing lines. The city is green—vividly, irrepressibly so. … It has more than 35,000 acres of public green spaces, equivalent to 40% of its surface area. Everywhere, nature breaks unbidden into human life.”
And so anytime someone disdains London as a place of irredeemable smog and pollution, or writes it off as one endless traffic jam—every time I hear that the place I Iive is dirty, gray, depressing, grim—I want to tell them what I know. What I’ve discovered of the city, and of the natural world, by exploring it on foot. How London has become my own great outdoors.
Twelve years ago, when I moved from New York City to London, I began to walk.
First, cautious strolls around the neighborhood. Walks just to have something to do, to shrug off the loneliness of a new transplant. I set off to stitch together London’s disparate villages with my feet, mapping the city’s breadth with my own slow cartography.
Walking was a way to locate myself in a city whose scale dwarfed New York’s. If New York was all verticals and wide, strong marching avenues, London was more cranial sprawl, vast and dusky even in daylight. Over thousands of years, the city had grown slowly outwards, absorbing nearby towns and settlements in the process. Even when later recast as neighborhoods, they still retained their individual character and gravity.
London’s resulting decentralized quality—a sense that it was always holding something back, waiting to reveal an essential part of itself to those dedicated enough to seek it—compelled me. I could almost feel the place humming under its breath, encouraging me onwards.
“From the very beginning, I found myself entranced by the breadth and depth of the city,” writes Ana Kinsella in her 2022 book “Look Here: On the Pleasures of Observing the City,” which chronicles her own beginner’s journey through London. “Here was a thing so layered and complex that it had grown gnarled, and it was up to me to put myself inside of it. I knew that to move through it would be to move through time itself ... As my knowledge of the city grew – which neighbourhoods had trees full of parakeets, where the good and peaceful pubs were – memory constructed something organic in my mind that I could call upon at a moment’s notice: a map of my very own.”
Even as I came to know London better, I kept up the habit. It was years before I realized that what I was doing was something greater than locomotion, had little to do with what I thought of as “exercise.” Exercise was a word that belonged to the gym, to treadmills and grunting men hoisting barbells, to the awkwardness of changing rooms and floor mats tangy with secretion. Exercise was quantified in suffering, conducted in public as a form of repentance.
This practice of urban walking was a counterpoint to all I’d ingested of American diet culture. It was movement as rejoicing, movement that had taken on the contours of solace and meditation. It was a private pleasure, but also a challenge of endurance. My walks grew long enough to leave a pulse rippling across my legs and my fingers puffy, my body smelling of fresh air and animal exertion.
As I walked, I situated myself in the wider world. Not only in the world of human doings, of the streets that fizzed with life and commotion, but in the natural world that flanked them. With the help of a plant-identifying app, I explored the city like a botanist. I found an unlikely coastal redwood off a private street, the soft fibers of its bark as recognizable as its imperial presence. Then fig trees, which filled the street with their musky, sappy smell and squashed fruit. Mugwort and gorse, hemlock and hawthorn, cow parsley and wormwood.
Over time, my awareness deepened. I walked the same routes so often that I began to observe how the plants and animals that inhabited those environments changed throughout the year. In parallel, I marked shifts within myself: a more expansive frame of mind, a feeling of sensory immersion so cool and deep that it approached a kind of transcendence. In situating myself in the rhythms of the natural world, that world came rushing back up to meet me. I no longer felt so alien and apart, a body meant just for laboring in small rooms in front of small screens. Something had dislodged and come free.
“Whatever else happened during that first strange year in London, the time spent walking the city’s streets alone did something to me. It changed me,” Kinsella writes. “Some people move to a new city and get a dramatic haircut, alter their personality, choose different kinds of lovers. I just went out walking.”
Of course, I’m not the first to experience the urban walk as something revelatory. People have walked cities for centuries, if not millennia, not only for necessity but also for pleasure. The discipline was first defined in 19th-century Paris as flânerie: aimlessly strolling and observing the city, untroubled by commitment and open to unplanned encounter. Notably described and practiced by writers like Charles Baudelaire and Marcel Proust, and later by 20th-century philosopher and essayist Walter Benjamin, flânerie arose against the backdrop of a rapidly modernizing Paris that was newly accessible to pedestrians.
“I walked the same routes so often that I began to observe how the plants and animals that inhabited those environments changed throughout the year. In parallel, I marked shifts within myself: a more expansive frame of mind, a feeling of sensory immersion so cool and deep that it approached a kind of transcendence.”
“In my ignorance, I think I thought I invented flânerie,” writes Lauren Elkin in “Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London,” published in 2016. “Coming from suburban America, where people drive from one place to another, walking for no particular reason was a bit of an eccentric thing to do. I could walk for hours in Paris and never ‘get’ anywhere, looking at the way the city was put together …”
London has long cultivated its own flâneurs. Few have taken as much pleasure and inspiration from walking the city as did Virginia Woolf, who described the practice at length in her diaries, and made it the basis of novels like “Mrs. Dalloway.” In her 1930 essay, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” Woolf chronicles one of her nighttime sojourns in a wintry London. Ostensibly, her purpose is buying a new lead pencil, but really it is immersing herself in the ever-changing atmosphere of the city, drinking in its spectacle and sensation, and luxuriating in her solitude.
“How beautiful a London street is then,” Woolf writes, “with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness, and on one side of it perhaps some tree-sprinkled, grass-grown space where night is folding herself to sleep naturally and, as one passes the iron railing, one hears those little cracklings and stirrings of leaf and twig which seem to suppose the silence of fields all round them, an owl hooting, and far away the rattle of a train in the valley.”
Throughout the essay, Woolf’s attention roves from golden-lit windows and secondhand bookshops to the bustle of the Strand, one of Central London’s major thoroughfares. But she returns to the natural environment of the city, and its own propensity for magic. “On a winter’s night like this, when nature has been at pains to polish and preen herself, [the eye] brings back the prettiest trophies, breaks off little lumps of emerald and coral as if the whole earth were made of precious stone.”
More often, however, chroniclers of urban walking fail to understand cities as natural spaces, and unwittingly uphold the urban-rural binary. Naturalism, Elkin writes in “Flâneuse,” is “not a way of interacting with the world that particularly interests me. I like the built environment, I like cities. Not their limits, not the places where they become not-cities. Cities themselves.”
In her 2000 book, “Wanderlust: A History of Walking,” a study of walking from antiquity to the modern day, Rebecca Solnit also reinforces this divide. “Rural walking has found a moral imperative in the love of nature that has allowed it to defend and open up the countryside,” she writes. “Urban walking has always been a shadier business, easily turning into soliciting, cruising, promenading, shopping, rioting, protesting, skulking, loitering, and other activities that, however enjoyable, hardly have the high moral tone of nature appreciation.”
For Solnit, the city is a place whose “biological spectrum has been nearly reduced to the human and a few scavenger species.” Unlike the rural gatherer, who “may pause to note a tree whose acorns will be bountiful in six months,” the urban walker is a natural opportunist, more alert to the potential of “a grocery open late or a place to get shoes resoled.”
What then of the London walker, the city walker, who does both? While Solnit and Elkin seek to defend urban walking against those who can only imagine it as dissolute and hard-edged, they risk reaffirming the idea of the city as pure artifice, as an environment that is only uplifted when it is recast as a stage for people-watching. Certainly, not all cities are as defiantly green as London. But even in many of the biggest metropolises, nature finds a way in—and it’s worth paying attention to.
It may be the people in the street who create a city’s energy and culture, but it is ungovernable nature that breaks down the margins. It arises through cracks in the sidewalks, climbs lampposts and invades highways, recalcitrant to human design. In the process, it situates cities within the wider world. It tells those of us who live in urban environments about the ecosystems and lingering wildernesses that we inhabit. It can even remind us of our own latent and primordial wildness, and begin to repair our severed relationships with the natural world.
Twelve years of walking in London has permanently altered me. My great outdoors may not be high Alps or glacial lakes, but they are still full of ever-changing life and color. Walking them has taught me more about the place I live, the flow of its seasons, and the beings I share it with than any other experiences in my life.
That’s been true during moments of joyful discovery as well as crisis. Two years ago—during a period of record-breaking heat, when uncharacteristic grass fires sprang up around London—I felt the menace of that smoke. It dyed the air an uncanny sepia, seemed to cover every leaf in its deadly dust. Elsewhere, I noticed the signs of something wrong—like the hard nuggets of early blackberries, turned from green to deep purple a month too soon by the heat.
“In situating myself in the rhythms of the natural world, that world came rushing back up to meet me. I no longer felt so alien and apart, a body meant just for laboring in small rooms in front of small screens. Something had dislodged and come free.”
As disquieting as they are, I am grateful for the immediacy of these moments, which plunge me into a truth I might otherwise still comfortably ignore. Likewise, I know that my time in London’s green spaces is radical in another direction. Each aimless and unplanned walk feels like a riposte to the ever-accelerating pace of productivity culture, an escape from the screens that stalk my waking hours. When I walk, I can free my attention from what has been designed to capture it and open myself to unexpected, resonant encounters. A fox running through the twilight. The smell of high-summer jasmine from half a block away. Migratory swifts, coasting high on warm currents. It restores me—my attention span, my creativity, my brain’s naturally rambling pace of thought—to myself.
“The random, the unscreened, allows you to find what you don’t know you are looking for, and you don’t know a place until it surprises you,” writes Solnit. “Walking is one way of maintaining a bulwark against the erosion of the mind, the body, the landscape, and the city, and every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.”
That’s not to say that walking in London is a universally accessible panacea. As Elkin describes, cities are “made up of invisible boundaries, intangible customs gates that demarcate who goes where.” Kinsella echoes this sentiment: “I bring to my looking all of my own identities and biases, my accumulated experience as an able-bodied and inconspicuous white woman, living in cities that were built for people like me.”
For all of the local government’s efforts toward encouraging walking on a broad scale, London remains segregated, with numerous barriers along lines of wealth, race, and class that prevent its residents from experiencing its natural environments equally. It’s encouraging, then, to see organizations like Wild in the City and Black Girls Hike striving to correct those inequities, and providing greater access to London’s wilds.
It is late morning, and I decide to walk to Highgate Wood, one of my favorite green spaces in London. Spanning 70 acres, the ancient woodland preserves a patch of the Forest of Middlesex, which once covered much of the region and was mentioned in the Domesday Book (a 1086 survey of England and Wales commissioned by William the Conqueror). Today, the forest is home to a wide variety of bird, bat, tree, and fungus species, and is considered an internationally important area for wildlife.
When I visit, it is late spring, and the woods are jubilant with life. New, taffy-green leaves burst forth. I look up and notice one of London’s ring-necked parakeets poking out from a high cavity in a tree, guarding its nest. Later, as I pause on a bench near a clearing, a robin settles right next to me, gazing up at me curiously.
These momentary observations and encounters are small, but together they add up to something more—a deeper knowing and connection. I think of how youthful and boisterous the woods feel now compared to the waning days of autumn, or in winter, when snowdrops and mushrooms bloom silent through the mud. What a privilege it is to know them in this way, to have built up such a rapport over the years.
“When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back,” Solnit writes. “Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.”
Words and Photos by Claire Bullen
