Notes on Walking: Athens, London & Ottawa

By Ashley Alexandra:

There are two million cafes in Athens and each one is perfect.

In the summer, the city smells like hot garbage. But at 2am, sitting on our balcony, I could smell the bread baking from Takis’ Bakery just below. There isn’t a better smell in Athens. Except maybe for the scent of night-blooming jasmine along the Acropolis. It’s so sweet it nearly suffocates you.

It’s illegal to charge more than 50 cents for a bottle of water. It’s simply too hot to mark up such an essential item. Athens is hilly and exhausting. The sidewalks are fleeting. They drop off without a moment’s notice and all of sudden, you’re in the street facing off against bad drivers, the worst drivers, who are trying to kill you for daring to enter their designated space. How does anyone operate a wheelchair, or a broken foot or a pram in this city? They must stay home.

It’s hazardous, but rewarding to walk in Athens. Athens is all vistas and tableaus. No one in their right mind would tire of seeing the Parthenon suddenly appear, floating in the distance, when they turn a corner. So too, the crumbling storefronts that look like they haven’t been shopped in since 1974. Or the old men on a corner kafeneio sipping coffee and gossiping. I never tire of these things.

There are flowers everywhere in Athens. They grow wildly. Jasmine, Bougainvillea, Wisteria. Spiderwort, Lantana, Poppies. Flowers that would cost you $60 for a couple of blooms in a clay pot back home. There are Cypress trees and Monstera. Palms and Giant Aloes dotted all along the hills. Mega Aloe. Megalo.

I never wore sandals at night, for fear of cockroaches scurrying over my feet. Late night Athens is so very alive. You don’t see much public drunkenness in Athens, but everybody is gathering and drinking and yelling. Families come out at 11pm; children can finally use the playground equipment without getting burnt by the metal.

Athens is pink and fractal. You can walk to the ocean in an hour. Once I watched it snow on the Acropolis. It’s the best place in the world.

***

London is an international space station. It’s moody and orderly.

I hated London. I made playlists about wanting to leave and walked around angrily. There are so many private gardens and gated communities in London. Who do these Hampstead snobs think they are?

The public parks in London, though, will change your life. The best Christmas I’ve ever had was spent drinking a coffee while walking in Hampstead Heath. Reading the names of the various species of roses in Regents Park is a walking meditation. I’ve heard there are even dinosaurs south of the river but I never made it there. I have seen the parakeets, though. And the deer. But it's the foxes, nocturnal and elusive, that delight me the most.

Nobody looks at you in London. There is no unwanted eye contact. This is a city of anonymity - something I didn’t know that I desperately needed until I got it. The homes in London, curtains ajar, practically beg you to sneak a peek as you walk by - another simple, anonymous joy.

London is brise-soleils and bench dedications. Always remember to read the plaque. If you’re lucky, it’ll punch you in the gut.

London is a vortex. It’s 800 small villages that have nothing to do with each other and the architecture shifts accordingly. I walked from my home in Finsbury Park to my office in Bloomsbury. From overcrowded sidewalks to quiet gardens. On Holloway road, I walked past Turkish grannies rolling gozleme in the kebab shop windows. On Gower street, I walked past enough blue plaques for a year’s worth of history lessons, which all boil down to this: everyone who’s anyone has lived in London. London didn’t even have a Mayor until the year 2000. There is no centre. It does not hold.

London is a brutalist utopia. The Barbican. Alexandra Estate. Trellick Tower. Balfron. Brunswick Centre. Royal Festival Hall. These are places built for walking. The architects just didn’t plan on cars getting in the way. London is a refuge for the perambulating, misunderstood modernist.

It feels good to walk in London. It’s so easy to walk in London. It’s better to walk than take the Night Bus, certainly on a Saturday night. Just watch out for moped thieves. Don’t stand checking your phone at an intersection. Actually, just keep walking if there are no cars. Watch the traffic, not the traffic lights.

Bury me in Abney Park cemetery. Or in Highgate, next to Karl Marx and his maid. Or maybe just a bench dedication along the Parkland Walk.

***

Ottawa is just a concept. It could be Dallas or Calgary or Buffalo. Where is our vernacular? Why can’t I see it?

It’s difficult to walk around the city that you grew up in with fresh eyes. I walk past memories. Dull and stupid memories. There’s where I had my root canal (Carling ave). There’s where I skipped school and bought my first records (Lincoln Fields Mall). There’s where I almost got married (Hintonburg). Ottawa is an unwelcome memory palace.

If you walk one hour in any direction in Ottawa, you will inevitably hit unwalkable, ugly sprawl. It’s unwalkable because it’s ugly. It’s devoid of density. Every city has soulless suburbs, but Ottawa is drowning in them.

I don’t have to watch my phone or my bag in Ottawa. I can walk along the canal at 2am. The cars are still dangerous, but at least you can fight back here; I slam on their hoods when they try to cut me off.

There is a thick layer of ice along the sidewalks for five months of the year here. The city government doesn’t care about pedestrians. Helsinki has heated sidewalks. Ottawa has a transit system whose train tracks freeze in the winter.

Ottawa is fragmented and complacent. Everyone looks at you as you pass by. What are they staring at?

For an entire month last winter, nazis and white supremacists took over the downtown streets and occupied the space directly below my apartment. I threw ice at them from my balcony and gave them the finger as I walked by. I told my boyfriend that I hated it here and booked a trip to London.

***

Ashley Alexandra was born and raised in Ottawa, Canada. She has lived, worked and walked in the UK and Greece. She is a militant pedestrian and a strong advocate of participatory democracy.

Berlin: A spring diary

By Paul Scraton:

On a midweek morning, in these strange and anxious days, I go for a walk. Sometimes it feels like all I can do. I cannot concentrate on the words I would like to read and write. My eyes ache for something other than the gentle glow of a backlit screen. The sun is shining and our pavements are wide. In Berlin it is springtime, our balcony full of the sound of bees delivered to a neighbour by mail order. I head out into the city.

My walk takes me south from where I live in Gesundbrunnen, crossing the route of the Berlin Wall into Mitte before following a familiar route through Rosenthaler Platz to Hackescher Markt and Museum Island. The first stretch feels reasonably normal (whatever that means right now), with kids on scooters, joggers and dog-walkers, and apartment dwellers escaping the inside for sunshine on a bench. Apart from the playgrounds being locked up, it feels like it always does.

Closer to the city centre, it is all a little more eerie. The hotels around Rosenthaler Platz are darkened. The pavements are empty. It is a reminder not only of current events, but in a strange way of the changes that took place over the past two decades in these neighbourhoods, ones that perhaps we did not notice while they were happening. Without the tourists, the hotel and hostel guests and the AirBnBers, the population is diminished. As I walk, I wonder how it would have looked on these streets had these contact restrictions and ban on tourist stays in the city happened twenty years before. 

In a recent essay for Literary Hub, the walker-writer Lauren Elkin explored the idea of what we remember when we walk the city, reflecting on the idea that “[w]e city-dwellers are recording devices, forever observing the micro-adjustments time works on our neighborhoods, noting what used to be where, making predictions about what will last and what won’t.” 

This is always true, I think – although sometimes we don’t notice as much as we should as the city changes around us – but as I walk through a Berlin that was stalled about a month ago and only just starting to move again, the question of what will last has become more urgent than ever before. Will these hotels ever reopen? The restaurants and bars, where chairs were lifted onto tables all those weeks ago and have not been down since? The clubs, where only ghosts dance, behind their heavy, locked doors?

And we think of the stories from the hospitals and care homes, we read the testimonies of the key workers and we see the numbers going up and up and we think not only of what will last but what we’ll have lost.  

We walk the city to remember. 

On Rosenthaler Straße I pass the place where we used to go drinking in the basement of a junkyard and the bar on the corner that never seemed to close. One is an adventure playground now, a place where my daughter spent afternoons during primary school. The other belongs to a hotel that was built on what was still an empty space when I first moved to Berlin. I walk down this street all the time, but usually I am going to or coming from somewhere, to meet my daughter from school or my partner after work. I don’t remember much then. But today I do.  

At Hackescher Markt I bump into a friend. We don’t hug and stand a distance apart as we talk about how everything is, at work and home. We ask about our respective partners, families and what our daughters make of it all. It feels like we are the only two people on this street, a place where normally crowds bottleneck at one of the few locations where Berlin actually feels like a proper city. We say goodbye without the normal gestures of farewell. We don’t say that we should try and meet up soon. That we should hang out sometime. It all feels awkward. Strange. 

Down by the river I watch as the sun catches tiny waves caused by the wind and realise that it is not only people who are mostly missing from the scene, but also the river boats. There are no cruises out on the water, no sightseeing to be done even though the weather is fine. The city by the river has a different sound now. Birds and distant traffic. The laughter of a little girl on her bicycle. What’s missing are the engines of the boats and the commentary in different languages that crackles through loudspeakers before drifting off on the breeze that blows in between the grand old museum buildings at the water’s edge.

My route home takes me close to where my partner and I first lived together and the playground by the tram tracks, as empty as on a freezing winter’s day. I walk along the route of the Berlin Wall, the no-man’s land emptier than I have ever seen it, apart from maybe the last time I was here during the anniversary celebrations, when it was blocked off to allow the safe arrival of politicians and other dignitaries, who did their own short stroll to remember, from the black car to the chapel.

There are not many here to remember today. Those people who are out and about are all moving. No-one lingers, to read the memorial boards or look at the photographs. At the corner of Bernauer Straße the bakery is open, and I pause on the pavement to let a young woman in a face mask, cup of coffee in each hand, cross in front of me. When we walk we make predictions of the future. Of what will last. No-one can say how long our city will be like this. What version of Berlin will emerge on the other side. We do not know how much loss and sadness we will have to deal with along the way. 

A few blocks from home, a small group of workmen are putting the finishing touches to a new bar that is currently not allowed to open. But still they paint the window frames and inside tables are being laid out and the first drinks have been added to the shelves behind the bar. The day that it opens will be some party, but we don’t know when that might possibly be. The only thing is certain, I think as I turn the last corner, is that the city that welcomes it will not be the same as it was before. 

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).