And here’s a thing. I got an email from Don Pollins, “near Washington
DC.” He’d just read the part of my book The Lost Art of Walking where I spend a
day walking back and forth from one end of London’s Oxford Street to the other.
Given the wonders of Google Street View he was able to follow in my footsteps (“virtually”
and of course now some years after the event), and he came up with this
wonderfully telling image.
I wasn’t exactly sure what kind
of store Walk was, but it turns out, not all that surprisingly, to be (or
rather to have been) a shoe store. Obviously
that branch above has gone out of business, and poking around on Yelp I see it
got some pretty poor reviews, mostly based on the crappiness of the staff. It’d be nice to think that was the reason it
closed. And it may be that the whole
chain has gone out of business. I’m not
sure. It’s really, really hard to Google
a store that’s simply called Walk. Maybe
that’s why they went out of business.
But I know there was at least one
other branch on Oxford Street because when I did the walk that I write about in
the book, I took this picture, clearly a different store from the one on Street
View:
The digital info attached to the
image tells me it was taken at 6.41am on July 18th, 2006, which sounds
about right, though I’m never sure how accurate that info is. And here’s another picture I took that day:
It was taken at 9.53 am, apparently, in Frith Street, just off Oxford Street. I took it because I saw the number 666, but I
don’t suppose the bar was actively involved in Satanism. It was called 6 Degrees, and somebody in the
bar clearly had a number of large “6 degrees” stickers and put three of them in a row
on the glass doors. Perhaps they were
mocking Satan - always a high-risk activity.
6 Degrees, I discover, has now closed down too.
