Throughout much of the eighteenth century, respectable English society thought little of walking for pleasure. Only âfootpadsââpaupers, beggars, vagabonds, and the poor more generallyâwent by foot. Anyone who could afford to do so rode, whether by carriage or simply on horseback. From the later eighteenth century, however, this attitude began to change, especially after improvements to the road system and the decline of highway robbery. The new middle class brought into being by the urbanâeconomic transformations of these years came to connect walking with recreational activity. Walking became a sporting spectacle. In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, and indeed in other countries at this time, athletic pedestrianism was enormously popular. Competitions were organized, challenges were made and a great deal of money was gambled; successful exponents of the sport became celebrities on the basis of their ability to cover vast distances with remarkable speed and energy. In 1815, for example, John Stokes of Bristol walked 1,000 miles in just 20 days at Saltford in Somerset.1
Yet this new association between walking and recreation was not confined to competitive pedestrianism: more important than this was the broadening and deepening of its relationship with more sedate pleasures. The aristocratic practice of strolling through parks and gardens while enjoying the landscape, the benefits of exercise and the sensual pleasures of (a carefully-managed) nature had long been an established feature of elite culture. Over the course of the eighteenth century members of the nobility began to allow middle-class elites access to their private gardens, many of which, such as Phoenix Park in Dublin, Retiro Park in Madrid, Lazienski Park in Warsaw, the Tiergarten in Berlin and Gorky Park in Moscow, became public parks later in the century. The first publicly funded parks, the Derby Arboretum in London and Peopleâs Park (now Chotek Gardens) in Prague, opened in 1839 and 1841 respectively. By the end of the century a Sunday stroll through the park had become a standard middle-class, urban leisure activity across the continent.2 The emergence of the public museum followed a similar trajectory. What began as galleries owned by royalty and members of the nobility, at times visited by select middle-class elites, eventually became public institutions, the most noteworthy instance being the opening of the royal gallery within the Louvre to the public during the revolutionary year of 1793. Indeed, a new and particular walking practice that combined observation with ambulation extended to fairs, exhibitions and amusement parks, practice that often mixed leisure with pedagogy, science, order and socialization.3
While the new middle classes strolled for enjoyment in ways that echoed the practices inherited from their social betters, they also walked far beyond the garden and the museum, in more rural and even wilderness contexts.4 In Britain their doing so was bound up with other preoccupations and activities. For some, walking was inseparable from a painterly or poetic appreciation of the sublime and the picturesque. Inspired by publications such as Thomas Westâs Guide to the Lakes and William Gilpinâs enormously influential series of âObservations on Picturesque Beautyâ, middle-class tourists of taste ventured forth to places that afforded visually rewarding viewpoints, or âstationsâ, from which the charms of the Lake District, the Wye Valley or Dovedale could be discovered and admired.5 For others, such as the indefatigable clergymanâscholar Richard Warner, who made a 469-mile âpedestrian tourâ of Wales in August 1797, walking was a counterpart to their scholarly investigation of antiquities.6 Antiquarian preoccupations were often closely associated with an interest in the natural world, and this too involved pedestrian activity.
Indeed, by the beginning of the Victorian period, a veritable army of both amateur and professional naturalists was trudging across the British countryside admiring, collecting and cataloguing natureâs bounty, many covering 30 or more miles a day, with some even going to such lengths as sleeping out on remote Scottish hillsides in order to search for specimens.7 Informed by publications such as Charles Lyellâs Principles of Geology (1830â3), others embraced a new-found interest in geological formations, often exposed thanks to railway constructionâand this too meant a great deal of walking (as a young geologist, John Stevens Henslow (1796â1861) was capable of walking 40 miles in a single day, carrying his hammer and specimens wherever he went).8 And still more simply wandered less purposively, seeking repose and solace among moors, mountains, beaches, ruins and villages, and other places that breathed of an older, less urbanized way of life. By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, on-foot appreciation of landscape and the natural world had become an established element of middle-class cultural experienceâit had entered the mainstream.
The number of middle-class walking practicesâeach freighted with their own purposes and meaningsâonly multiplied as the nineteenth century unfolded in Britain, Europe and regions under Europeâs influence. The emergence of workday schedules gave rise to leisure activities aimed at enhancing the time free of labour. Respectable members of society strolled through gardens and parks, just as the nobility had done, but this time in public gardens and public parks. The Royal Blackheath Golf Club, the first of its kind established outside Scotland, was evidently fully functional by 1766, if not some time before; by the end of the nineteenth century there were 49 golf clubs in London alone (89 by 1909).9 Michel-Gabriel Paccard and Jacques Balmat managed to reach the Alpsâ highest peak, Mont Blanc, in 1786, which in turn spurred others to scramble up the mountains of that great chain, and indeed mountains throughout Europe.10 The first modern guidebooks, published by John Murray and Karl Baedeker in the 1830s, took their middle-class readers on planned walks at prescribed sites, such as the âvery interesting excursionâ to be had up a hill near MĂŒrren, which was recommended in the ninth edition of Murrayâs handbook to Switzerland as quite manageable, having âbeen frequently accomplished by ladiesâ.11
The burgeoning city opened up even more possibilities for walking. Pavements raised above street level began to appear in Europeâs metropolises from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.12 Improved street lighting allowed for relatively safe walks at night.13 By the late nineteenth century the taboo on women walking the streets had been broken, as witnessed most prominently in the appearance of female shoppers on their way to newly built department stores.14 More than ever before, city-dwellers walked the streets for pleasureâto socialize, seek out sex, and visually consume urban scenes and spectacles described in sensationalist, often lurid, tones by a new popular press. One newspaper, for example, estimated that 10,000 people visited the Paris mortuary in April 1895 to view two young girls who had drowned in the Seine, symptomatic of a larger practice of walking to view dead bodies on public display.15
Such public spectacles often brought together a diverse array of urban inhabitants. Commuting often did the same. Many city dwellers, whether out of necessity or choice, continued the long-standing practice of walking to work, despite the rise of the omnibus, tram and underground railway. As a young lawyer in London in the 1860s, James Bryceâs daily routine involved a two-mile walk from his apartment in the West End, âstreaming down Oxford Streetâ to his Chambers at Lincolnâs Inn, andâat the end of the dayâthe same walk in reverse back home again.16 Throngs of moving crowds, denser during peak commuting times, became a defining aspect of the urban landscape, as well as of the urban experience. As evening descended, Edgar Allen Poe wrote from a London cafĂ© in 1845, âa tumultuous sea of human headsâ filled the pavements as âtides of human population rushed past the doorâ. Soon, however, his eyes âdescended to details, and regarded with minute interest the innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenanceâ that revealed noblemen, merchants, attorneys, tradesmen, stock-jobbers, âa tribe of clerksâ, pick-pockets, gamblers, and âJew-pedlersâ.17 âBerlin was storming homeward from its workâ, one commentator noted in 1914. âSolid masses crowded the pavements, a stream of trams and crowded motor-buses clamoured along the street. The Stadtbahn, or city railway, thundered across its arches overhead. The Untergrund [Underground] engulfed rivers of humanity in the side streets. Shop-girls, clerks, petty bureau-officials, tradespeople, typistsâfresh eager faces, restless and nervous bodies.â18
Conversely, walking and practices of exclusion often went hand in hand. In times of political upheavalâ1848, 1866, 1899 and 1918ârioters marched throughout Bohemia and Moravia destroying Jewish-owned taverns, restaurants and homes, exclusionary violence that, among other things, kept fearful Jewish residents off the streets. In London, âmale pestsâ harassed female shoppers throughout the West End, suggestive of a larger, male-dominated discomfort with the appearance of women in public spaces. Throughout Europe local police used ordinances prohibiting alcohol and unruly behaviour to exclude the working classes from public parks; often, however, subtle ga...