The pedicure

And boots, of course, were made for walking. So were the lace-up “walking shoes” the rest of us wore in winter, and the black plimsolls or T-bar sandals we changed to in summer. My own daily walk was a mile each way, which I did sometimes in the company of other children but often alone. Sometimes I ran the whole way. I was once knocked down by a cyclist, and once foully sworn at by a gamekeeper for walking on the wrong side of a hedge. Apart from school itself, nothing worse ever happened to me.

Walking in the 1950s was not a health issue or a carbon-saving, green political gesture. It was an integral part of life, one’s feet as set in their god-given purpose as nose or liver or lungs. We were an ambulatory species, and had been so ever since our beetle-browed ancestors first strode off to hunt and gather. Even after our fathers got their eight-horsepower Fords or Austins, it would never have occurred to them to drive us to school in them, or our mothers to the shops. That would have offended common sense. If your destination was within walking distance, then you walked.

I have been walking ever since. Not in a map-and-compass, Gore-Texed kind of way (though I’ve done my share of that), and not to save the planet, but simply as the most reliable and observant way of getting from one place to another. This is especially true in London, where the cross-streets, squares and alleys are the sane, low-blood-pressure alternative to the lunatic hell of the Underground. Mental health is surprisingly prominent in the relentless, high-pressure sales pitch that the public-health industry now applies to this most animalistic form of transport. Men who walk more than two miles a day apparently face half the risk of dementia as those who walk less than a quarter of a mile. Walkers are also less likely to be depressed or to suffer from insomnia, and can expect to enjoy what psychologists (who perhaps should get out more) like to call “better cognitive function”, by which they mean thinking, remembering and learning. And noticing things.

This is about half right. You certainly notice things, but the things you notice are not always the best medicine for depression. In town and country alike, you bang your nose against the serial idiocies of post-war planning and transport policies; the debasement of architecture; the corrosive imprint of the Common Agricultural Policy; the Disneyfication of the heritage industry; the contempt for history; impassable traffic; designer pubs. You notice, too, that other people’s legs are coming increasingly to resemble their appendixes as organs of mystery. What exactly are they for?

My walking-for-fun is mostly on the north Norfolk coastal footpath, which for most of the year offers a simple contract – for a small expenditure of effort you get big skies, creek and marsh, tranquillity shared with goose, duck and gull in some of the most beautiful coastal scenery in lowland Britain. In the holiday season, however, the “footpath” is lurched over by a slithering, clutch-slipping motorcade of SUVs and family saloons that force walkers into the gorse. Drivers’ expressions harden and freeze as ruts deepen, mud thickens and the suspicion dawns that 4WD may not after all be the complete antidote to the laws of gravity and friction, but still they press on. This is as truly wild as any place in eastern England, so they can’t drive very far, but by hell they’ll take every last inch they can get. Sometimes, gratifyingly, they sink to their axles and need to do some urgent business on their mobile phones.

Unsurprisingly, it’s an age thing. One evening in July, sitting on an upturned boat cast up by the tide, I watched four muddy old women – one of them on sticks – haul themselves out of the marsh and shout derision as a Saabful of expensive-looking twenty-somethings struggled to complete a nine-point turn without tipping into the mire. It’s as if the young people’s limbs were stuck permanently in some larval stage, like tadpoles or axolotls. In the 1950s nobody saw any need to calculate how far people walked – what would have been the point? It would have been like worrying about how much air we breathed, or urine we passed. Now, as problems of obesity slide further and further down the age scale towards the womb, we count our footsteps like drops of healing water.

It is widely asserted (though I have not been able to find the proof) that we walk 25% less than we did 25 years ago. The earliest figure available from the Department for Transport (DfT) is for 1985-6, when the average distance travelled on foot (counting only journeys of 50 yards or more) was 244 miles a year. By 2004 this had slipped to 196 miles, or a little over half a mile a day – 10 minutes’ worth at a moderate 3mph. Average! Which means that for every person walking more than this, another is walking less. The DfT’s national travel survey in 2004 asked people how often they took walks of 20 minutes or more without pausing. For a quarter of the population – the axolotls – the answer was less than once a year or never. The figure is skewed by the very old and the very young, but not by much. Twenty-four per cent of the under-17s fall into the axolotl class, and even the most mobile group, the 30-to-39s, stands (or sits) at 17% – a gut-wobbling example which they are force-feeding their children like spoonfuls of lard. The Health Survey for England in 2001 revealed that 8.5% of six-year-olds and 15% of 15-year-olds were not just overweight but obese – an increase of 3.5% since 1996, and the most visible manifestation of Gordon Brown’s fixation with continuous growth if not of Tony Blair’s leaner, fitter Britain. The role model seems to be John Prescott, with almost no journey now too short for a bit of extra buttock-time. In 2004, 20% of trips of less than a mile were made by car, and a quarter of all car journeys were of less than two miles. Many of these involved carting children to and from school – a trend accelerated by the government’s “choice agenda”, which extends school journeys and instils car dependency before it teaches the alphabet. “A” used to stand for Apple. Now it stands for Asthma, a condition associated with traffic pollution that has doubled its hit rate in less than a decade.

Sadly, I failed to persuade my own old village primary school to reveal how its pupils now made their daily journeys, but others have been trying an idea that came out of Hertfordshire in 1998 – the “walking bus”. The mechanics of this were explained in a paper given to the 2003 European Transport Conference by the Centre for Transport Studies at University College London (UCL): “A walking bus is a group of children who walk to school along a set route, collecting other children along the way at ‘bus stops’, escorted by several adult volunteers, one of whom is at the front (the ‘driver’) and one is at the back (the ‘conductor’).”

If good intentions guaranteed success, then walking buses would have filled the pavements as surely as parents’ cars had clogged the highways. But novelty packaging couldn’t disguise the fact that children and their minders were being asked to forgo the ease and speed of wheeled transport in favour of shoe leather. And Satan has a bigger advertising budget. Car manufacturers do not shy away from targeting the school gate with TV commercials equating children’s pride (never mind their parents’) with the size and newness of the vehicle that delivers them. Keeping ahead of the Joneses is a far more seductive proposition than keeping up with a pedestrian virtual bus driver in a fluorescent bib. From a peak of 68 in 2002, the number of walking buses in Hertfordshire fell to 26 in only a year. Many schools never even started them, deterred usually by inadequate parental support, fears about road safety or, as UCL tactfully put it, “lack of the head teacher’s time to start the process”. “A” is also for Apathy.

One of the weirdest aspects of axolotlism is the extraordinary growth in conspicuously rugged, high-performance shoes. You would think from the advertisements and window displays that we were a nation of marathon runners, deckhands and lumberjacks for whom a 10-mile hike in a downpour was just what we needed to pique our appetites. Even the derided sandal suddenly went all pecs-and-six-pack when Clarks introduced their much-imitated ATL (All-Terrain Leisure) model in 1994. Nobody will say precisely what the life expectancy of a pair of these is – there are too many variables in usage and wear – but Bob Hardy, Clarks’ foot-fitting manager, agrees that 5,000 miles would be a reasonable expectation.

Cleated shoes have become like the SUVs whose tread patterns they so accurately reflect. Bestsellers all feature “active air” high-tech soles made of hard-wearing compounds honeycombed variously with tubes, channels and air sacs to cushion the wearer’s feet. Back in the hunter-gatherer days, as in Africa still, the naked human foot was naturally cushioned by the yielding earth on which it trod. In the unyielding age of concrete and tarmac, which arrived too soon for evolution to match it with hooves, the cushioning has to come from our shoes. Like the gas-guzzler in the garage, they are capable of going far beyond anywhere their owners will ever take them, and are valued chiefly for their image as breezy, salary-earning suburban cousins to Doc Martens, bristling with unfulfilled promise. (I could cross the Andes in these if I wanted to.) It is a matter of no regret to manufacturers – or, more likely, importers – that more of their shoes will be parked on the feet of axolotls than will ever stride out for 20 minutes without a pause.

Even axolotls, however, in shuffling back and forth between desk and water cooler, couch and kitchen, may accumulate an unsuspected number of foot-miles. Bob Hardy tells me the average creepy-crawly Briton puts one foot in front of the other 10,000 times a day, and shop assistants may exceed 18,000. This adds up, he calculates, to a startling annual total of 4,000 kilometres, or 2,500 miles –the equivalent of walking from Land’s End to John o’Groats and back, and then back again to John o’Groats. In a lifetime, it’s four times round the equator. Such intermittent, short-range stuff doesn’t count as exercise any more than shifting a paperclip counts as weightlifting, but it’s a cherishable statistic nonetheless.

It is no part of my personal case for walking that it’s good for my health, though if I were disposed to hypochondria its magico-medicinal qualities would be right up there with homeopathic enemas and royal jelly. It’s not all just woolly psychological stuff, either. According to the Ramblers’ Association, the proven benefits include: reducing the risk of heart disease and stroke; lowering blood pressure; reducing high cholesterol; increasing bone density and helping prevent osteoporosis; reducing the risk of cancer of the colon and of non-insulin-dependent diabetes; reducing body fat and helping to control weight; relieving osteoarthritis; improving flexibility and co-ordination, and so reducing the risk of falls. The British Heart Foundation offers a similar message; so do the Medical Protection Society, the British Association for Cardiac Rehabilitation and every other body qualified to have an opinion, all backed up with libraryfuls of scientific reports. Australian researchers last month reported that obese people combining daily doses of fish oil with regular walking – 45 minutes, three times a week – lost an average of 4.5lb in three months. Take up thy bed and walk.

It’s not a new idea. In an impassioned, somewhat overwrought essay on Walking, which he published as part of a collection in 1913, the historian G M Trevelyan declared that he had two doctors – “my left leg and my right” – which he would call to carry him off for the day whenever “that combination of mind and body which I call my soul” was “choked up with bad thoughts or useless worries”. He went on: “I have often known the righteous forsaken and his seed begging their bread, but I never knew a man go for an honest day’s walk… and not have his reward in the repossession of his own soul.”

Wordsworth apparently thought the same. Thomas de Quincey calculated “upon good data, that with these identical legs Wordsworth must have traversed a distance of 175,000 or 180,000 English miles, a mode of exertion that to him stood in the stead of alcohol and all stimulants whatsoever to the animal spirits; to which, indeed, he was indebted for a life of unclouded happiness, and we for much of what is most excellent in his writings”.

I hope all this is true, though I have to say that the location of my soul is still a mystery and the benefit to my waistline is not obvious. There are almost as many calories in a glass of white wine as you’d burn off in a 20-minute mile. If you’re serious about exercise you’ll have to work a bit harder. Push it up to a brisk 60 minutes at 4mph, for example, and you’ll see off a couple of pints of beer, which might make a pretty good case for a power walk home from the Coach and Horses. But that is not the point. I don’t walk because it is good for me but rather because – like eating and drinking too much, going to the cinema, reading in bed, listening to music and all the other indulgences that make up a discriminatingly hedonistic life – I like it.

The pleasures of landscape are obvious. Trevelyan twittered on for page after page about his explorations of Tuscany, the coasts of Devon and Cornwall, the Welsh borders, mixing the obvious – “[The walker] must be careful not to leave gates open, not to break fences, not to walk through hay or crops, and not to be rude to farmers” – with sub-Wordsworthian romance – “No one knows how sun and water can make a steep bank of moss smell all ambrosia till he has dug foot, fingers and face into it in earnest” – and early contenders for Pseuds’ Corner – “You must learn to haul yourself up a rock before you can visit those fern-clad inmost secret places where the Spirit of the Gully dwells.” De Quincey’s comparison with alcohol might not have been so wide of the mark, after all, though Trevelyan’s stimulant of choice was tea.

“But grant to me, ye Muses, for heart’s ease, at four o’ clock or five, wasp-waisted with hunger and faint with long four miles an hour, to enter the open door of a lane-side inn, and ask the jolly hostess if she can give me three boiled eggs with my tea – and let her answer ‘yes’.” Those were the days all right. Trevelyan quotes an idiotic sentence by an earlier distinguished historian, Thomas Babington Macaulay, from his History of England: “Could the England of 1685 be, by some magical process, set before our eyes, we should know one landscape in a hundred, or one building in ten thousand.”

This was not true when Macaulay wrote it in the mid-19th century. It was not true when Trevelyan repeated it in 1913. It was not even true when Messerschmitt met Spitfire over Kent in 1940. Or even, quite, when I took to walking as a teenager on Dartmoor in the 1960s. The old men I met in the pubs were rural craftsmen – shepherds, horsemen, farriers – who could have joined hands with their predecessors across as many centuries as men had farmed the land, and found not a stranger among them. The England they had shaped was still sufficiently intact to be recognisable as at least the grandchild of its ancient self – hedges and lanes, ponds and woods, barns and byres and trees.

It really has gone now, a victim of politics, erased by the Common Agricultural Policy, which, like a blind man in a casino, blew our inheritance on production subsidies. Walkers can no longer wander as Trevelyan did, with an almost patronising innocence like explorers meeting the natives. Urban Britain, with its street lights and kerbstones, has twisted its fingers into every fibre of rural England’s pelt. Even the protected landscapes – national parks, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty – are a bottled essence uncorked for the urban spender, incapable of surprise. Yet though some of the character (and the characters) may have gone, and though the most popular bits have been scoured away by pressure of feet, they still have their beauty, and parts of them even now rebuke Macaulay. They are government’s gift to the walker and we owe it to our polyurethane-moulded active-air soles, if not to our mortal souls, to take them for all they are worth.

But I have been lured by Trevelyan into bucolic digression. This is not the kind of walking I meant when I began. We should follow him now along a very different path: “Every man must once at least in life have the great vision of Earth as Hell. Then, while his soul within him is molten lava that will take some lifelong shape of good or bad when it cools, let him set out and walk, whatever the weather, wherever he is, be it in the depths of London, and let him walk grimly, well if it is by night, to avoid the vulgar sights and faces of men, appearing to him, in his then daemonic mood, as base beyond all endurance. Let him walk until his flesh curse his spirit for driving it on, and his spirit spend its rage on his flesh in forcing it still piteously to sway the legs. Then the fire within him will not turn into soot and choke him, as it chokes those who linger at home with their grief, motionless, between four mean, lifeless walls.” Yo, Trevelyan! Not all that’s worth exploring is photogenic – a truth that applies as much in towns and cities as it does in the landscape.

The pleasures of walking in town are not just parks and architectural set pieces but the ordinary humdrum stuff, the urban equivalents of cottage and farmyard that are or were the fabric of ordinary lives. A favourite route in southeast London includes a perfect example of a late-Victorian planned estate – pinnacle of the spec builder’s art – and a classic street of 1930s semis whose owners have strained every creative sinew to customise their homes with an anarchic, sod-the-purists riot of stuck-on detail (glazed conservatories, faux-stone cladding, wrought iron, Tudorbethan windows, gnomes) that is as joyful as it is architecturally sacrilegious. Stuff like this gives just as much pleasure as a cathedral close or a Regency arcade. I stroll into cemeteries, docks, courtyards, markets, stations, churches and chapels, even shops (in high streets, look up at the first or second storeys to see what the architect really intended). At the cost (in central London) of allowing an extra half-hour’s journey time, you get all this instead of sardines in the Tube. You are in command of your own speed and direction, in your own time and space, just as the doctor ordered. Psychologists like to talk about “locus of control” and “cognitive mapping” – lofty terms for not letting other people muck you about, and developing a sense of place. Experiments on children have led to the unsurprising conclusion that those who walk to school have a much more highly developed awareness of their environment than their sensorily deprived classmates dropped by car.

That very sense of place, the whole idea of community, is everywhere under threat. Human contacts increasingly are not human at all, but electronic jiggery-pokery – even voices are made redundant by text and e-mail. In a village, the loss of pub and post office strips away yet another reason to walk and meet people. In many new urban developments it’s not even thought about. At Milton Keynes I asked a planner why houses were being aligned in such a way that neighbours could never meet without pre-arrangement. He responded with elaborate patience, as if I had suddenly noticed the introduction of double glazing or plastic drainpipes. Nobody lived any more like aborigines in “geographical communities”: the community of the 21st century was one-touch, broadband and “virtual”.

Trevelyan’s “daemonic mood”, being the product of justified anger, is one of the more perverse of walking’s pleasures. There is anger at the generations of planners and politicians since the 1930s who have swallowed all the various nonsenses of “machines for living” and “streets in the sky” at the cost of human scale; who have plucked the hearts out of towns with irredeemably ugly, repetitious and boring red-brick shopping centres which have themselves been sacrificed to out-of-town megastores. Anger at highways departments whose only idea of traffic management is appeasement – wider, straighter roads, concrete kerbstones, a visually deafening noise of signs and lines and humps and chicanes that sweeps flesh and blood aside like litter. Anger at the mess on the doorstep left by the departing Prescott, ridiculed for sexual incontinence but unrebuked for the rape of the southeast and the dehumanising thuggery of his vainglorious “Pathfinder” demolition schemes in the north. Such crimes are not victimless: they make victims of us all. Satnav systems with their robot voices now reinforce the impression of each street and junction as a stage on a journey to somewhere else, like hits in a computer game. This is the ultimate tragedy against which walkers unite. We are a campaign for real places; for real community and belonging; for slowness and pleasure in a world of speed and utility.

It’s exactly what George Trevelyan was getting at when he recommended the walker to relax after tea with a few well-chosen pages of Carlyle, Shakespeare or Dr Johnson. “Then, putting the volume in your pocket, go out, and godlike, watch the geese.”