Congestion Zone

My name is Noelle and I am walking all the streets of central London. Yep. All of them.

The question I am inevitably asked when I tell people that is: Why‽ So, here’s a bit of my story to get you started.

I grew up in a house of walkers. My grandma, who lived with us, walked every morning into her 90′s. My parents and I walked around our neighbourhood together a couple of times a week. Walking has always been my favourite way to explore both new and familiar places. I have a bizarrely spatial mind so walking is how I map out my surroundings and understand how it all fits together.

I was recently sent a quote from Margaret Atwood that describes my sentiments beautifully: Cartography is map-drawing, and the brain is, among other things, a map-making entity…From our earliest days, as soon as we can crawl around on the floor, we are inscribing maps of our surroundings onto the neural pathways in our brains and—reciprocally—inscribing our own tracks, markings, and namings and claimings onto the landscape itself. Snails make trails, and so do beavers, and so do tree-scratching bears and hydrant-marking dogs, and so—quintessentially—do we.

I moved to London for a Master’s programme in August 2010 and quickly fell in love (some may call it obsession) with the city. In an effort to map out my new surroundings and devour as much of London as possible, I purposefully walked new paths as often as I could. I’d take a different street to class, get off at a more remote tube station, cut through new neighbourhoods, whatever I had to do to explore new streets. My poor classmates got sucked into five or six-mile walks when they thought we were just going to the cafe around the corner.

After a couple of months, I decided to put up maps in my room and mark off everywhere I had been so I knew what I had left to explore. When the map started filling in a little, the thought of trying to see every single street was naturally enticing. A few years later, I finally had the time available to make a real project out of it, which is the blog you are now reading. It’s my way of inscribing my own tracks, markings, and namings and claimings onto London itself and hopefully inspiring you to do the same.

I hope to see you out on the streets!