Last weekend I played the part of a walking author, leading a guided walk around Richmond for Books on the Rise bookshop.
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| Photo: Caroline Gannon |
I was a little worried about this since I know next to nothing about Richmond and despite a couple of reccies (one of them op cit) I hadn’t come up with a grand idea, but then, as inspiration often comes out of desperation, I suddenly thought and announced to the ten or so people who’d turned up for the walk, that since I was so ignorant of local conditions, they should guide me. They seemed to fall for it, at least nobody demanded their money back (not that I was getting any of their money).
I wasn’t entirely inert. This was going to be my walk rather than theirs, and one of the things I do as a walker, is look at a map and if I find a street with an unusual or engaging name, I go there. And so my/our walk started in a street called The Vineyard, which led eventually to a street named Mount Ararat Road.
Off we went. There was no actual vineyard visible in the Vineyard, though there was The Vineyard Community Centre, and there were vines growing up several of the houses, and there was no sign of the flood in Mount Ararat Road, though there was a dentist’s surgery called the Ark,
and in the front gardens there were a surprising number of olive trees.
We wandered for 90 minutes or so, not quite aimlessly, and eventually we ended up in Paradise Road at the house where Virginia and Leonard Woolf set up the Hogarth Press, with a blue plaque framed by a lot of wisteria. There was wisteria everywhere in Richmond.
Of course we saw things we hadn’t expected to see; a phone box that had a dial tone and so may even have been functional,
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| Photo: Jen Pedler |
an almost armillary sphere,
the occasional liminal space,
and the biggest rosemary hedge I think I’ve ever seen.
I think the walk worked, to the extent that a couple of the walkers did say to me, ‘Oh, I walk around here all the time but you’ve made me see things I’ve never seen before.’ That, obviously pleased me, though in my modesty I’d say I hadn’t made anybody do anything, but I’d created the conditions that allowed people see for themselves. Hey, it’s what I do.
