places & walks
i think best when i'm walking. these are the places i go to clear my head or remember why i like being alive.
london
- hyde park, late night - my default when i need to think, walking the path around the serpentine at 11pm when it's just you and the occasional runner. problems feel smaller out there.
- hampstead heath - parliament hill for the skyline and the ponds in summer. this is where london stops being a city and starts being something older.
- the south bank - the walk from tate modern to tower bridge, best at dusk when the lights come on and the thames looks cinematic.
- the barbican conservatory - tropical plants tucked into brutalist concrete, free and quiet and a little strange and good for reading.
- columbia road on sundays - flower market chaos where everyone's in a good mood and i rarely buy anything but i always leave happier.
new york
- central park - the reservoir loop at dawn, watching the city wake up from inside a rectangle of green.
- the high line - an elevated park built on old train tracks, best in the early morning before the tourists arrive.
san francisco
- lands end trail - the coastal path runs from the old sutro baths ruins out to a little cypress labyrinth above the surf and the golden gate keeps appearing through the trees until you forget you're in a city at all.
- tank hill - the overlook locals climb instead of twin peaks, with the same wide view across the bay and none of the tour buses. best in the last of the evening light.
- the 16th avenue tiled steps - a long, hand-laid mosaic staircase that climbs up to grand view park. it's a small sand-dune hilltop with one of the finest skyline views in the city and hardly anyone else on it.
los angeles
- the secret stairs - silver lake and echo park are laced with hundreds of public staircases left over from the old trolley days and you can lose a whole afternoon climbing between gardens and bungalows if you start from the micheltorena steps.
- fern dell, griffith park - a shaded creek path lined with ferns that feels like it was airlifted in from oregon. cool and quiet, while everyone else is sweating their way up to the observatory.
- the bradbury building - a downtown office building you can wander into for free, with a sunlit victorian atrium of wrought iron railings and open cage lifts that you'll recognise the second you walk in from blade runner.
- museum of jurassic technology - a dim and deliberately confusing little museum in culver city where you genuinely can't tell what's real and what's been invented, with a quiet russian tea room up on the roof when you need to recover.
paris
- the marais - getting lost in the side streets among the falafel, the bookshops and the cobblestones. paris at walking pace.
munich
- the flaucher - the gravel islands and shallow channels of the isar where münchners spend whole summer afternoons grilling and swimming, far wilder and emptier than the englischer garten if you walk a little upstream from thalkirchen.
- glockenbachviertel - the most lived-in corner of the city, where people gather on the steps around gärtnerplatz with corner-shop beers on warm evenings and you can wander for hours without any plan at all.
nature escapes
- peak district - mam tor and the great ridge, proper hiking with the wind in your face and sheep everywhere.
- the lake district - i did helvellyn in the rain and couldn't see a thing and it was still worth it.
gliding
- lasham airfield - where i'm learning to fly. the silence when you release from the tow plane, with no engine and just wind, is an unreal feeling.
airports
an unpopular opinion, but i love airports and that in-between feeling of everyone going somewhere. some of my best thinking has happened in departure lounges.