The Midnight Walk has been and passed, and Fran and I just want to say a Big Thank You to everyone who rambled the streets of London with us. We found it a great experience to guide the walk but also be fellow inhabitants of an eerily unpopulated City of London.
Read below a number of our fellow intrepid midnight walkers thoughts and accounts of the Inhabit Sounds Midnight Walk.
“The latest Inhabit Sounds event was an enchanting dérive for all the intrepid and sleep-deprived city-dwellers involved. Taking place on a day which also featured a gangland shooting in a Hackney park, most of the walkers turned up fully alive to the infinite possibilities and vast extremities of London and the Midnight Walk didn’t depart from the day’s text. Encompassing everything from unassuming backstreet dwellings to the splendour of Christopher Wren’s St Pauls via way of the austerely utopian Barbican Estate and the dead spaces of the City of London. The walk seemed to conclude quite naturally, submerged in the delicious smell of late night Hot Salf Beef Bagels. More of the same please!”
“My typical journey across London starts with inevitability and ends in contempt – for the Underground at best, my fellow man in general at worst. A journey conducted therefore with a spirit of quiet curiosity in the city itself feels as much a citizen’s responsibility as it does a completely engrossing way to spend an evening.”
“It was great to see familiar places in an unfamiliar light, and to learn so much at a time usually devoted to sleeping or drinking away the day’s lessons. I especially enjoyed exploring the Barbican and its ideal of a closed, self-sufficient community, and discovering the Fulcrum sculpture by Liverpool Street station. And I thought our guides were exceptionally well-informed and enthusiastic.
Thanks again!”
“It was a great experience. London at night is really different, almost eery. It is something I’ve never experienced. Usually when you are out that late, you’re with friends, you are having fun and are perhaps a bit drunk – as a result you don’t really focus on the city and what is going on around you. During this walk you get the chance to discover that and to be attentive to little things. I loved hearing little stories/histories about London too, like the locks on millennium bridge, or the stories behind streetnames. The most impressive point was the meat market. Although it was quiet and empty, you could still sense the presence because of the smell hanging around, and the sounds you played on your computer.”
“I thought the midnight walk was really fantastic. You guys really knew your stuff and encouraged us all to think of London in a different way – eg. Paternosters Sq – I had never thought about the design mentality that went into that, the level of detail eg. the benches with anti-skate bolts.
I loved walking through the Barbican. I’ve never walked from one end to the other and had no idea it was as complete as having an onsite chiropodist! Although it makes sense, I also hadn’t thought about its utopian origins and that those walkways were supposed to be part of a much grander vision of London.
It was good the way you knew what you wanted to say but it didn’t feel too rehearsed which made us feel that we can inject our own thoughts.
My only (slight) criticism was that it was too long – although I understand that you wanted to pack in all your favourite haunts. 2.5 hours is a lot for anyone to concentrate, especially by 2am! I reckon that 1.5 hours might be more marketable if you wanted to open this up to the public.”
“A cloudless yet starless night on the late side of May – I can see roughly a dozen people scrabbling about Millennium Bridge. They seem to have lost something. A few are on their knees staring intently into the river or at a spot on the floor. In the hazy glow that surrounds the bridge at midnight they are like ghosts – unreal yet compelling. Their inquisitive and bizarre activity is in stark contrast to the numb crowds that you will find flowing in thousands over this bridge at midday. I am intrigued and finishing off my solitary cigarette I go and join them. I crouch and we stare into the light of the pathway and the darkness beyond. I am told we are looking for love.
The custom of lovers securing their love via a padlock to a bridge and then tossing the keys into the river below to symbolize there everlasting connection can be traced around the world. Budapest, Riga, Moscow, Seoul, Tokyo, Montevideo, Odessa, Paris, Seville, Rome- the list of places and numbers of locks attached to bridges, fences, barricades, buildings are endless.
The love padlock trend has grown into an urban legend – a sprawling romantic avalanche tearing down the occasional fence or two. City authorities across the globe increasingly break out in a cold sweat in their wrestle with determined lovers and their padlocks: the rule of law(s) versus the art of loving.
However tonight- at Millennium Bridge- love is not around. We stop and get up. Turning up the collar of my coat against the wind and staring at my feet I follow the crowd and we flow over the bridge into the gorge of the city.”