ABSTRACT

Activities as mundane as ‘walking’ can be linked to ordinary movement in urban spaces, to social institutions, and to interconnections with social inequalities and power, including questions such as access and resources. The burgeoning of ‘popular’ literature about walking – overlapping with a renewal of ‘nature writing’ – is connected to an attempt to relate the experience of being within ‘nature’, while at the same time being philosophically informed and reflecting ecological and social concerns. Gardens are constructed to be ‘appreciated’ at ‘walking pace’, to stimulate and satisfy sensual pleasures and meet the need for ‘recreation’. Walking in the wider garden or landscape itself can also be like going through a maze or labyrinth – if there is a complex of interlocking pathways that seem to have similar features. The ‘garden’ in its domestic, and other guises is a site that is bounded, segregated, and stratified socially in a number of ways, for example, in terms of gender, age, income.