May is National Walking Month in the UK. To mark the month, Pod Academy’s Jo Barratt went on a nightwalk with Dr Matthew Beaumont, senior lecturer at University College London and co-director of the Urban Laboratory who is writing a book, Nightwalking – A History for Verso, to find out something about the history of cities and walking after the sun has gone down. Gabriel Stebbing of band, Night Works also joined them.
Night time in the city is an enticing, beguiling and sometimes a frightening place; a liminal artificial world between true night and the daytime in which most of us spend the majority of our time. It is more often than not the case that we experience this world on foot, which is something that has been extensively romanticised from Baudelaire’s flaneur, the driftng urban explorer, to the pop music written about walking home from nightclubs.
The very concept of a populated nocturnal realm is reliant on one invention that we all probably take for granted…..
