London Walking

This city engulfs you, It reaches outwards rather than up, and It's meandering streets hold you in and disorient. Warping spacetime distracts you, with a pace of life that pervades every aspect of your day - you even walk faster here. The London Walk. Full of purpose and energy, or at least projecting it to avoid silent admonition from the crowd, you're truly one of us when you start to notice that people from other places don't seem to walk as quickly. Between the commute, the career, and the culture, It leaves only snatched moments to yourself each day before the cycle starts over.

Our green spaces offer some respite for people who cannot escape. The Mayor's office trumpets London as the world's largest urban forest, with about one tree for each resident. Almost half of It is 'green space' - code for parks, allotments, and back gardens rather than the old growth that once covered the land. A little less than half of this greenery is open to the public and right of access was one of our earliest civil rights victories. These spaces originated as recreational grounds for royalty, and public access is the legacy of hard-fought battles over centuries.

Access had been an ancient English right back when forests were a vital source of food, fuel, and grazing land. And though the myth of Magna Carta is often held up as the establishment of modern liberties, it mostly concerned the 1% of their day, while the accompanying Charter of the Forest re-established rights of access to forests for 'free men'. Today, public access to parks is protected by law and anyone can enjoy these oases (except at night; other terms and conditions apply).

Guides to green walks and hidden gardens are favourites of lifestyle bloggers and a staple of the Instagram generation. This is no longer about surviving, but telling the world that you're embracing life rather than tired of it. A true Londoner. Perhaps telling yourself that you are thriving. Nothing shall diminish the impression that you are taking everything in your stride, nothing shall slow the London Walk.

To suggest that there might be another way felt ungrateful, and almost blasphemous. At least it did before the pandemic. Stepping out of work into the centre of town, there were many more people than I expected to find given the recent lockdown. More disconcerting to me than the shuttered shops, or empty offices, was the lack of purpose and direction in familiar faces.

Rising rents, chasing promotions, finding partners, meeting friends, the latest exhibition, newest culinary fad... the onslaught made it so easy to be overcome with neuroses and keeping up with each other, It's sleight of hand to stop you questioning if you truly wanted any part of this. Now there was finally time and space for introspection, with more and more of us unable to ignore how the game was rigged, especially if you depended upon a ration of public green space.

The pandemic compounds hardships that people already live with. For vulnerable people this means reducing or outright removing services that they depend on, and more often than not, putting them at higher risk. This is especially true for people experiencing homelessness, where rough sleeping and temporary accommodation make it impossible to protect yourself.

Maybe the most striking aspect of our initial response was decisive action to help people who would otherwise be at extremely high risk on the streets. The number of people supported was up to eight times higher than the government's estimates of rough sleeping - more than enough people to take the places of the great and the good at Lord's, and fill the 'home of cricket' beyond the 31,000 capacity.

This raises questions over why we have failed to do more in the past, and what will happen once the scheme ends, as more and more people are forced from their homes by the aftershocks of the pandemic. Homelessness hides in plain sight, and signs of recovery from the pandemic should not be an excuse to forget again.

You too had fleeting glimpses of their faces every day, before you were inside, barely seeing them before the London Walk marched you on. Like the hunched figure always reading the paper on the steps of Charing Cross; the people on the corners of Trafalgar Square who come together every few hours to share tea; the teenager staring into space down by Embankment while sitting on a holdall of what you suspect are their worldly possessions; the injured war veteran in the Underground with a cardboard sign that claims some dignity lest It take that too.

Stepping out of work, it took me a moment to place these faces. Realising that all of these people were homeless was jarring, and more so that I walked these streets every day without seeing so many of them before. But only days later did I find the heart of why I was so unsettled; the realisation that they have never moved with the rest of us. Out of sync, they are pushed to the margins and excluded from everything, including our thoughts.

London's lost children, and our brothers and sisters - Ishmael - It only brought them inside to protect Isaac.