The Secret Places XiX & XX

The penultimate two chapters of The Secret Places (Elkin Mathews & Marrot London 1929) - a chronicle of the 'pilgrimages' of the author, Reginald Francis Foster (1896-1975), and his friend 'Longshanks' idly rambling in Sussex, Kent and Surrey. See our posting of the first chapters for more on Foster and this book, including a contemporary review in
The Tablet.

XIX

OLD CRACKPOT

All day we had laboured southwards into the Kentish Weald, our clothing plastered in front with the sleet that drove upon us and our boots squelching at every step. In many miles we had not spoken. Longshanks sucked dismally at an inverted pipe which had long since grown cold.
In the end of such journeyings is a deeper content than of those made in fair weather. When the light failed over the eastward hills and the shifting wind brought a greater cold, we came upon a barn, and entered it as men who come to their last rest. As we heaved the door into place the day died over Sussex.

The Secret Places V & VI

Two more chapters of The Secret Places (Elkin Mathews & Marrot London 1929) - a chronicle of the 'pilgrimages' of the author, Reginald Francis Foster (1896-1975), and his friend 'Longshanks' in Sussex, Kent and Surrey. See our posting of the first chapters for more on Foster and this book..

V

ADVENTURERS' INN

They refused us bread and cheese at the flaunting hotel (though I knew they had both), but told us that we might have luncheon. We left, therefore, and cast the dust of the place from off our feet, vowing never to return thither. For when a man wants bread and cheese with his ale there is nothing that is a fitting substitute.
We had to tramp five miles before we satisfied our need, and after that distance bread and cheese were not enough. But the inn, we found, provided nought else to eat, So were we punished for lack of charity towards those who scorn to provide simple fare.
A diary of vagabondage is necessarily a tale of inns, for one must eat and drink, and uncooked turnips and nuts and berries are indigestible fare.

Walking in London (1912)

From Walking Essays by A.H. Sedgwick.

(Edward Arnold 1912)

Many of the observations in this book hold true today e.g. 'there are so many people in London that they do not notice each other. If the Londoner paid the slightest attention to his neighbour he would go mad in a fortnight..' Also the idea that there are walking 'lines' in London vaguely prefigures the tramps 'ley lines' conjured up in Iain Sinclair's 1975 work Lud Heat (and re-trod by Peter Ackroyd in Hawksmoor). Sedgwick talks of an 'innate craving for big lines' and a direct path  from Central London to the King's Road- 'the line by which the citizens of London went to Chelsea to eat buns...'

London walking is a quite distinct and peculiar thing, utterly unlike any other town-walking. It is a unique branch of walking in general and solitary walking in particular : for all the circumstances which make town-walking solitary apply ten-thousandfold in London. But if you accept this condition, and walk London alone, you will find a very curious thing, namely that in this biggest and most monstrous of all towns you approach most nearly to pure rusticity. The strictly physical conditions, dirt, noise, smell, constriction of outlook, multiplicity of people, are as bad or worse in London than other towns ; but in certain other points, by no means unimportant to a walker, the end of the series is like the beginning, the infinite is like the infinitesimal. What was possible on the South Downs, difficult in Cheltenham, and unthinkable in Liverpool, becomes possible again in London. 

It all springs from one simple fact : there are so many people in London that they do not notice each other. If the Londoner paid the slightest attention to his neighbour he would go mad in a fortnight. It is physically impossible for him to notice every one he sees ; consequently, he gets into the habit of simply overlooking them, and as their esse is percipi, they become, for practical purposes, not there. A Londoner walking along a crowded street is really alone in the wilderness : the men are simply as trees walking.