I started organising Radical Walks in the Summer of 2021 as a way of meeting friends again after lock-down. As they say, one thing then led to another. Since then I have organised walks in Dover, Ramsgate, Folkestone and across London. Recent walks have involved the London Festival of Architecture and the Bishopsgate Institute. 

I am fascinated by how memories and histories are intertwined with time and space. And yet we often have little or no control over how the built environment changes and how once familiar places become unrecognisable. 

There are many excellent historical records, masses of books and a rich treasure of newspaper articles. But there are also many histories which are never recorded and only held in the minds of those who were there. History, if it is anything, must be about what really happened. History becomes alive if the connections can be made between people and the time they lived, how they lived and their experiences. We can learn to fill the gaps with historical imagination.

The walks I organise generally cover the period from the 1880s onwards. This is when mass production starts; and with that, consumerism, department stores, new technologies such as telephones and aeroplanes, the development of mass political parties, trade unions, suffragettes and more. As well as the social and political histories the walks dip into the arts, fashions, architecture and literature. With all these different colours to use, some fascinating pictures can be painted. 

My other interests are the medieval period and I am slowly working my way round the cathedrals of England and northern France. But this is a huge temptation which must be kept under control as much as it can. It is intriguing to have the Middle Ages as a counterpoint to what we have today. In some ways, urban environments operated more effectively 500 years ago than they do now. They question then is; why?

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