Walking and Re-Creation

During the early modern period, to go for a walk was a recreational activity, but it was also to literally re-create oneself. Heating the body up enabled the evacuation of superfluous humours, with profound physiological effects on the Renaissance individual. Elaine McKay argues that according to early modern thought, "recreation refocuses the mind and creates a sense of ease and wellbeing […] people undergo a physical, mental or spiritual renewal which not only incorporates a reconstitution of health, but also offers opportunities to regenerate, or recreate, a sense of themselves as individual and unique personalities" (2008, p61).

As McKay’s research shows walking was both an activity, and also “the regeneration that such an activity would bring” (p64). This insight lies behind the project ‘Walking and Re-Creation’. Our project brings together the worlds of performance and public health, history and the contemporary moment, practice and theory in an experimental partnership, now ready to be taken to the next phase.

This partnership considers walking to be a form of exercise and cultural performance that is socially conditioned, unites health-based, political, and creative perspectives on walking, and wants to ensure the regenerative benefits of walking can be accessible to all Bristolians. The project is grounded in a shared concern across the worlds of public health, performance and activism that walking and outdoor physical activity is a form of ‘ecotherapy’, which can help people to live well in a connected and healthy way, alleviating the stresses of modern life and creating communities.

We wish to continue to address the historical and contemporary inequity of walking investigated during the ‘Ideas Exchange’’: developing ways to counter the prohibitions placed upon walking, using walking itself to resist the erasure of ground-level histories in favour of top-down narratives, and continuing to assess the impact of cultural identity upon walking access, specifically in relation to gender and race. Our research questions are:
1. How can taking a long historical view on pedestrianism inform what it means to live well now, in the twenty-first century?
2. How might we bridge the structural inequalities that have shaped restrictions on physical activity on the basis of person, place, and position, to ensure that the wellbeing of walking is accessible to all?
3. How can experimenting with different forms of walking potentially change our view of society, health, and history?

Ultimately, this is a project that thinks through how progress through space can affect and effect social progress. We will use both critical making and co-produced research to consider what walking then can tell us about walking now, applying historical insight to imagine the future of walking and wellbeing in a post-coronavirus moment.