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Trainspotter, mon semblable, mon frere.

To walk every London street? So supposedly did Phyllis Pearsall who compiled the first London A-Z and who walked, it is said, every street in the capital. (This would mean, if each of the 24,000 thoroughfares were but an eighth of a mile long, a total of 3,000 miles; judge for yourself. My aim as I set out that first morning was to walk every main thoroughfare in London; the definition of main? Well it had to be something, so simply all thoroughfares marked yellow on the London A-Z; an area some ten miles west to east; ten north to south; every main road, in fact, within a five mile radius of Westminster. So my walks covered an area of 100 square miles; and covered some three hundred miles.

Feeling slightly self-conscious of my odd endeavour (resentful even, of the necessary limitations I had had to impose on myself) I set out one day at eight a.m. on a January Saturday and walked from Clapham, through Camberwell and New Cross, concluding at Bermondsey. About five miles. Back home I marked in my route on a large A-Z map, with pink highlighter.

Three years later one stretch of one street remained; and I had kept quite a respectable one: Great Portland Street. To do this in style I rode in a taxi to the top of my very last unwalked street, and then solemnly (and yet feeling a little
foolish as I had three years before when I took my first step) walked south until hitting the Christmas shopping crowds of Oxford street. I went home, unrolled my maps, now tattered, and highlighted the remaining three inches. My task was complete.

I felt I was operating on three levels as l walked. First there was the street itself and its disparate features. Secondly the syntax of the streets, the logic (or, this being London, the lack of it) of what succeeds what, what leads to what.
Thirdly the overall and largely retrospective picture achieved by tracing my route over maps; seeing large scale axes, coherences not apparent on site; it was once I had got home that the entirety of London came together both cartographically and mentally.

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