Author: FionaC

Liz pauses us as we emerge onto the terrace above the canal. All around is a social throng of teens, twenty-, thirty- and fortysomethings. They line the floors of the Mailbox, drinking, dining, flirting, peacocking and people-watching. After months of restrictions, the UK’s third lockdown is easing and it’s a beautiful sunny Saturday evening in central Birmingham. The mood is celebratory. The olds are mostly vaccinated, the young at least partly so, and everything feels just a little bit more hopeful for the future. Humanity is in its brightest colours.

This is either going to be the most triumphant or the most uncomfortable part of our attempt to ‘crone the city’. 

==

Croning the City 

Who are these women? Are they important in some way? Why are they carrying stuffed toys? Why are they walking in a line? Why is a photographer snapping them? Where did the middle one get that dress? What is the story here?

Three crones walk in silent, single file. 

The crones walk through city infrastructure that can feel forbidding to all women – underpasses, canal towpaths and tunnels. 

The crones walk where women of their age wouldn’t ordinarily be present – past strip-club streets to the party zone on a Saturday night. 

The crones walk where they are most visible – across sweeping bridges and staircases, through a train station, a high-end mall, past tables of people-watchers. 

The crones are dressed in bright colours. Two carry props of toy animals. They walk in a resolute but unhurried fashion. 

A photographer trails them, running ahead, to the side, crouching into position to frame the women against the city. 

The crones are glanced at, stared at and the subject of both whispered comments and open exclamations… They are also frequently not noticed at all. 

The crones appear briefly on a hot Saturday night in the city and just as quickly fade away, leaving only small, temporary traces in the lives of others. 

==

Can we do a watched walk?

“I was thinking about [how women walk] and wondered if we could do a watched walk? How could we encourage the most people to have a memory of us walking through a city?” 

– Liz

Six weeks before the Crone Walk, I posted a photo from my second all-female Dazzle Walk – a walk designed to make us digitally invisible to the city’s prevalent surveillance cameras. The murder of Sarah Everard was causing widespread outrage and factoring into post-Dazzle Walk discussions about how women walk. How did being invisible in the city make us feel. Safe? Threatened? Subversive? If cameras didn’t protect us, what would? More female pedestrians? Walking with others? 

I invited female friends to join me on a series of walks together in the city, perhaps alternating on the themes of visibility/invisibility. Those who volunteered were 40 and 50-year-olds, the age when women tend to become invisible and less valued within a society that favours youth and patriarchy. Age, gender and visibility quickly became a factor in this next walk. 

Having spent a year thinking about walking invisibly – on Dazzle Walks, Dark Moon Walks and Night Hikes – walking with the sole purpose of being seen seemed an interesting counterpoint. What might the opposite of an invisibility walk look like? How could we as deprioritised older women become visible again? 

==

At New Street Station, the photographer (Matt Murtagh) is documenting the walk at our request. He takes some pre-walk photos as a warmup and we present ourselves one by one for the camera. 

Our self-generated poses mimic those of fashion models, cougars and various other female stances selling desirability. As a middle-aged woman who is none of those things, they nevertheless rise up in my mind. I want to look attractive – this is how I perceive that to happen. It’s what we see everywhere in advertising and women’s media – women bent into weird accentuating shapes. These images are culturally embedded and inescapable. And so at home, we drop a hip, or stick out a foot, or position our bodies in some way that is deemed to be more attractive than simply standing still. It’s what we know. 

We submit to our close-ups but it feels awkward, perhaps because it foregrounds our struggle with the desire to look good for the camera. We trust Matt and yet we are fighting a culture that says we must look younger, thinner, happier, prettier, sexier. I feel tension between this and my crone-aged self. I want to be authentic yet here I am posing and breathing in the middle-aged spread. 

==

On ageing in a patriarchy

“… I feel at my most confident now … I am more myself … more powerful now that society has decided I’m less useful … No one says thanks or recognises us … At the mercy of my hormones … I’m angrier now the oestrogen has gone … We are all knackered … I’m worried about losing my desire/desirability … I’m happy to be less visible …”

– Snippets from pre-walk discussions

The experience of ageing is different for men and women. For women, the menopause draws a distinct line based on our reproductive organs shutting down. With it comes a hormonal rollercoaster with 30-40 recognised symptoms that may go on for a decade. At 53, I’m two years in and there is no ignoring the pile up of symptoms, which can be mild or debilitating from one day to the next. 

The traditional maiden, mother, crone archetype provides a neo-pagan view of the different life stages of women. I’ll be honest, it isn’t an area I’m familiar with, unless the archetype can also mean tomboy–careerwoman-other. I viewed ‘crone’ with as much suspicion as all the other labels and cultural stereotypes that afflict women throughout their lives – as yet another put-down. 

Crone feels like the most loaded word of the archetype. Images of witchy Baba Yaga, fairy godmothers and old hags in rags immediately spring to mind. But crone archetypes also symbolise ‘wise women’, finally able to take a step back from the concerns of maidenhood and motherhood and enjoy a potentially very different, transformative ‘third act’. My own mother is an example here, transformed from shy Irish maiden to immigrant mother-of-three to founder of the Acorns Children’s Hospice shops (From Little Acorns…).

With age can come wisdom and growth. This is a theme of our pre-walk chats. The crones discuss how much more confident we are in many ways now that we are older. Our knowledge and experience makes us more powerful in our work, more confident in our sexuality, and more articulate in our voice and expressions. 

Yet in a youth-oriented patriarchy, we are also now more likely to be overlooked, less likely to be listened to, passed over for work or jobs, and seen as less desirable or less valuable somehow due to age. The unspoken biological question surfaces: what do we have to contribute to society now that our reproductive work is done? 

==

People are giving us plenty of side-eye as we pass them on the pavements near New St Station. We are not walking ‘normally’. We are in single file and slow but purposeful. At the Hill St crossroads, we stand juxtaposed next to three maidens, waiting for the green light. All of us are dressed up but our older bodies are more lived in, our middles way less defined, our outfits less figure-hugging. We are the same but 30 years in the future. I try to think of somewhere our generations interact without the power relationships of age: parent and child, teacher and student, line manager and employee. Nothing comes to mind. 

We reach The Mailbox. A huge former Royal Mail sorting office, now a destination for high end goods and services. There is a sense of us rising up. We emerge from a concrete underpass up a sweeping stone staircase, then escalators, then lifts. The situation also feels heightened – we are about to enter the entertainment district. 

A couple of expensively-dressed young women look up briefly from their drinks. I feel assessed. I don’t think we look old so much as out of place. Not thwarting expectations of ageing so much as thwarting expectations of what we should be doing in that space. “What are we doing here if not shopping?” asks Liz in her route prompts.

==

How do you perform ageing?

“He said: ‘Ah you know a woman’s middle-aged when she’s wearing leopard.’ The casual sexism and ageism of that comment has stayed with me for 12 years”  

– Jenny

“… [Ageing] is a multiple, ambiguous and contradictory process which provides us – continuously and simultaneously – with images of our past, present, lost, embodied and imagined selves”

– Helene Moglen, Aging and Trans-aging, Bodies in the Making

The Crone Walk had a sense of occasion, a ‘happening’. Pre-walk, it felt as if we were preparing for any night on the town. We discussed dress codes for greater visibility but instead of little black dresses and heels, the talk was of robes that made us look like cult leaders, or functional boiler suits, or “something with a leopard-esque print” that plays into the everyday sexism and ageism of cougar/MILF/GILF sexual stereotypes. 

We talked of challenging these stereotypes but also of lost or alternate or potential selves. Dressing up for the walk could be part of the process of ‘becoming’ this other self. 

Accessories included comfortable walking shoes and props such as stuffed toys (hinting at eccentric cat lady and megalomaniac villain stereotypes, roles we were over-associated with or that were associated with men).

The female ritual of ‘getting ready’ felt familiar to our younger selves. The fun, the anticipation, the mirror checks – perfectly lampooned in Rachel Bloom’s The Sexy Getting Ready Song from the TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend – but more loaded with meaning. We were getting ready to perform ageing; we were dressing up for the city and for how we wanted to write our older selves into its landscapes. 

Our prompts for an age-based walk were partly borrowed from Manchester’s Loiterers Resistance Movement:

How do you feel as you walk through the different spaces? (comfortable/uncomfortable, accepted/imposter, safe/scared, included/excluded, anonymous/watched?) 

What can you see? Who is seeing you? Who is missing? 

==

Liz pauses us on the packed terrace above the canal. She later admits she has disliked walking all her life until lockdown equated it with freedom. Here, she is a majestic walk guide, a female crone cult leader in a billowing robe of many colours, stroking her beloved toy cat, and surveying new kingdoms to conquer. Jenny aligns herself next to Liz; she looks serene and confident in the most vivid green dress. I follow in a dinosaur-camouflage boilersuit, with a toy lion stuffed in my belt. I’m wearing a bikini underneath because it’s hot and as a reference to GraceGraceGrace – three gen-age artists who partly inspired this work.

Before us, people are everywhere, enjoying their first freedom in months amid a summer heatwave. Matt runs ahead and crouches down to snap us. This draws attention. The act of photography literally makes us visible – people see him and then look at us. I feel self-conscious but also part of the scene. We may be costumed crones but everyone else is dressed up for high visibility, too. “I love your lion!” shouts a young woman to me as we pass the people-watchers. 

On a high metal walkway over the canal junction to Gas St Basin, Liz pauses again. Two women dining at a restaurant beneath are staring up. To give them a better view, we lean on the railings. They look at us, we look at them. They whisper conspiratorially. It doesn’t really matter what they are saying. We are here, we are seen, we are discussed. I’m enjoying this. I almost wave at our whispering younger sisters to let them know we are benevolent but that might break the spell so I resist.

As we approach the canal tunnel to Broad Street and Brindleyplace, a woman now exclaims at Jenny. “OMG I love your dress, I love that green, I could never carry it off!” Seen.

We end the walk at the Ikon art gallery, chosen by Liz as “somewhere all of us will feel safe thanks to our interests and somewhere where it’s entirely acceptable to be dressed unconventionally”. We’ve made it. We are elated. We can’t wait to talk about how it went. 

==

Snapshots

How did it feel? Who did you see? Who is seeing you? Who was missing?

“Like we were gliding through the city, the slow pace, the single file, the deliberate nature of the walk. No one got in our way until the tunnel. It flowed, we flowed.”

“Felt invisible at times – people were busy in their own worlds but it was nice. We could look around and enjoy the city. Our purpose wasn’t rushed.” 

“The silence was important.”

“There was an urge to smile.”

“Felt quite processionary.”

“Felt benevolent towards my younger self.”

“The standouts were homeless people – wearing black or grey clothes and sitting still.”

“The over-65s, children and normally dressed people were missing from the scene.”

“We blended in – we were in context of everyone else and everyone was dressed up. What would it be like if we went out on a Tuesday or on a morning commute?”

“Did we get into different characters in our minds?” “Not so much. I think it was enough to dress up with intent – as heightened versions of ourselves.”

“I felt a peace from our walk I really did not anticipate.” 

“It was a lot of fun! I think there’s something very interesting in an event existing to be photographed and how meaning is created through that process.”

“It felt authentic. That embodied experience once it shifted from sweaty awkwardness to being a part of something was so grounding and liberating.”

==

The power of a walk

“I have long been fascinated by how people understand themselves using landscape, by the topographies of self we carry within us and by the maps we make with which to navigate these interior terrains”

– Robert MacFarlane, The Old Ways

“To be a crone is about inner development, not outer appearance”

– Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD and author of ‘Goddesses in Everywoman’

Afterwards it occurs to me that we were mostly seen and acknowledged by women. This fits with losing the male gaze, which was firmly on the maidens of Brindleyplace, but also reflects a lack of older female role models in society. If we could speak to that lack by being more present, it sends a signal that female life doesn’t end when your ovaries switch off.

Our aim was a ‘watched walk’ – to be seen in the city and to claim some space for older women where we had little or no presence. It was a journey that was by degrees self-conscious, eloquent, colourful, conspicuous, fun, celebratory, defiant and bonding. The experience of ‘croning the city’ was more vivid for the participants than the watchers.

Walking as a crone enabled us to think about our own interior worlds of wants and anxieties around gender and ageing. It gave us space to explore where we are at with ageing, what being menopausal means, and how we might see ourselves now and in future. 

Taking a stance against encroaching invisibility let us respond to it both individually and as a group. It let us play with cultural stereotypes but also feel the feminine power of coming together after a year of not having such gatherings. And it was fun. The dressing up. The conversation. The chance to get know some funny, smart and intelligent women better.

One surprising factor in the Crone Walk was the photographer. It quickly became clear that the act of photography was not just about documenting the walk but was integral to the work. It facilitated us being seen time and time again. 

The photos, when they came, were almost superfluous. Matt’s final selection of 100 photos offered a perfect broad scope of shots from all angles and across all the environments we walked through. But they only provided a singular view – that of the photographer. ‘Croning the City’ was a more intense experience than the photographs could ever show. Walkspace mentor and artist Pete Ashton raised the point that we should be careful not to confuse the art and the documentation. To avoid the photos being seen as the work, the crones decided to publish only one image from the walk (since extended to five images.)

Another surprise… I had thought the Crone Walk would need a leader to make it happen but leadership was also superfluous. In that way that women excel at when they come together, the walk immediately became a collaboration with decisions made by all. It felt good to be part of a group where everyone had an equal voice.

For the record, the collaboration consisted of:

• several pre-walk discussions of what we wanted to do and why, walk practicalities and ‘what is art?’
• an immediate formal post-walk discussion 
• an informal post-walk dinner sharing more general experiences around growing older 
• a week later, an artist briefing and a group crit of the photos.

There is so often much benefit in how women come together; and in how we walk together too. Walking in a group provided us with a safe space to act. It gave us a sense of solidarity with the changes we are facing as a result of the menopause and a sense of solidarity with others who may also struggle to be heard or seen in society. Through the idea and act of crone walking together, we were able to explore female ageing and take some positive action over it.

==

What next?

‘Croning the City’ turned out to be more than I had hoped for. I hope it won’t be the only crone walk. Perhaps next time we will appear in a different context from a Saturday night out in the city. Perhaps a morning commute or a protest march or walking in other places where crones need to be seen or where our maiden/mother/allies exist. 

We could adopt entirely new crone characters or re-invent ourselves for the camera, taking cues from Cindy Sherman’s photographic work. Or maybe it will develop in a completely different way. Into a womanifesto. Or a game. Or a script for a play perhaps. 

It doesn’t really matter. Ultimately, the crone age is all about potential and change. Crones go through the change. We have the ability to become agents of change.

Bring on The Change.

Bring on the Crone Age.

Bring on the Cronage.

==

Photographs: Matt Murtagh, 2021

A silent walk through an observed city

Every journey starts with a single step. In 2016 mine was finally getting around to sorting out my crappy online passwords. I took a short cybersecurity course and decided to pay it forward by offering help sessions in a local café. This grew into The Interrogang – a monthly reading group for data issues. In 2017 I became an ‘Ingenius’ at The Glass Room London, an interactive exhibition into data privacy visited by 20,000 people. I wanted to bring this home to Birmingham so I started a newsletter called Observed City which ran for a year. Together with Open Rights Group Birmingham, we set up a mini version of the Glass Room exhibition at my local library.

Now this series of steps has moved from activism to art in the form of a walk commission by The Dazzle Club – a research collaboration which explores surveillance in public space. For the Birmingham Dazzle Walk, I proposed using age-related camouflage as counter-surveillance measures to walk silently and invisibly across the city.

In the style of a surveillance report, here is the walk log.

++

Birmingham city centre, 18 March 2021

6.15pm the Electric Cinema, Station St

I meet my walk guest – the neurodivergent, experimental artist and writer, Kruse – to lead her through a city that was once the UK’s CCTV capital, with an estimated 100,000 CCTV security cameras in 2020. I am only allowed one walk invitation due to lockdown restrictions. The city is empty. I find this perturbing, threatening; Kruse finds it bliss.

In my bag is make-up to help erase the shadows and features that demark my face. Kruse applies a white foundation. We look like blank ghosts. As women over 50, we are already invisible in society. We enhance that with low-contrast clothing – a beige mac, a light hat, jumper, skirt and gloves. 

We take a single photo of our beigeness, blending against the station wall, and turn off our phones so we won’t be digitally tracked by the data emitted from our devices. 

We are now silent.

We start to walk.

6.30pm Birmingham Media Eye 1, Grand Central / New St Station

The walk begins in twilight under one of three huge ‘Media Eyes’ staring out from Grand Central shopping centre above Birmingham’s main New Street train station. Each eye targets and scans humans for demographic and emotions-based data in order to serve ads. These Orwellian Big Brother eye-shaped screens look down on public space, profiling us for its own commercial profit. The largest screen is 28.80m wide x 5.28m high. Somehow they have passed the city’s planning process. My references for these are not benign or benevolent: they represent dystopia, control and a removal of freedoms. 

How is it ok that they face out from the shopping centre into public space? How is it ok to profile the public for profit without public consent? 

6.30pm New St Station

We walk through the station, which drips dome-shaped cameras from the ceiling. They blend in surreptitiously, looking like lights that aren’t on. Last summer I took a photo of them – it seemed a fair exchange as they took images of me. An official challenged me and said she’d have to report me. Apparently I needed a permit to take their photos but they don’t need a permit to take footage of me. I explained what I was doing to two police officers, who were unconcerned. This is where being a white woman over 50 offers privilege. 

6.35pm Birmingham Media Eye 2, Stephenson St

We emerge under the largest ‘eye’, which is off or just not displaying ads. A soft-lit emptiness lets us see behind the black screen. There is a single green light – it is on. We watch the watchers for a short time then we remove our masks and head into the city’s main shopping streets.

6.40pm New St to Corporation St

It is eerily quiet except for the occasional screaming of the trams and some gulls far overhead. A man further ahead claps a beat to fill the silence. The auditory soundtrack of an empty city is intense. We blend into the walls and pavements but in the darker areas feel exposed and vulnerable in our beigeness.

I lead but we walk side by side. This is the ‘grey man’ theory of invisibility – don’t act unusually, blend in with the crowd. The ability to remain unseen can be a powerful protection, particularly to women walking at night. The case of Sarah Everard has raised the hackles of every woman. I am glad to be walking with Kruse in the empty streets. The last time I came to town in November I was followed briefly – on a Saturday at 5.30pm in Brindleyplace, a highly surveilled and patrolled area. Cameras do not protect and they are not always a deterrent.

6.45pm Great Western Arcade

At night the cameras are less visible but they are still there in trees, on buildings, integrated into street furniture, behind digital billboard screens, on strategic street corners. It’s harder to spot the cameras as the walk progresses but I am becoming attuned. 

In the Great Western Arcade, the tech is there at the start and end of the 545m-long Victorian walkway. It is deserted. I can hear our soft heels tapping on the tiles and our ghostly images reflect in the closed shop windows. 

6.50pm Colmore Circus Queensway to Priory Queensway

The Gaumont Cinema used to be here. I saw The Sound of Music there as a child, six times, and remember standing in the long queues. It was full of life and people. Now it is empty office blocks and paved walkways. I spy a Victorian-style lamppost but with domes where there should be lights. Like us, are the cameras trying to remain unseen? 

Town used to be a place to come to escape and enjoy the pleasures on offer. Now we are watched and recorded and followed everywhere we go. How does this change how we act and how we feel about coming here? Does it feel safer or oppressive? What has been lost? What has been gained?

In our youth, my generation had the freedom to walk without relentless surveillance and tracking, and this freedom has been lost – a loss normalised and embraced first with CCTV and now with digitalisation and smart city initiatives. There is no choice in this. 

Town used to be about people, now it is all about technology. Is it in service of its citizens or other interests?

6.55pm Corporation St

It is almost fully dark now. As night falls, invisibility brings power in remaining unseen but also powerlessness in having to hide from potential predators. Being a woman, the night often feels shut off, but this walk feels good as we reclaim the space. Often I clock eyes with people when I walk because I am hypervigilant and always on alert. But now we weave unseen like ectoplasm through groups of people at bus stops and outside takeaways who don’t seem to register us at all.

7pm Birmingham Control Centre, Lancaster Circus

The turning point of the walk is the Birmingham Control Centre, one of the leading CCTV control centres in Europe with commercial clients across the city and also direct links to West Midlands Police. 

Its Google profile images are straight out of a Hollywood movie. Four watchers (men?) monitor several hundred screens and the scene is bathed in electric blue. Another stylised purple has a single man walking (stalking?), casting an ominous shadow with his footsteps. A third in red has someone typing in a code to enable (disable?) an alarm. In reality, 1 Lancaster Circus is brutalist Birmingham 1970s concrete. On every corner, top and bottom, a camera points. 

We cross underneath the Aston Expressway and look up, watching them knowing they are watching us. Then we turn and stand with our backs to it, instead overlooking the subways that subjugate pedestrians to walk below the city.

I imagine myself appearing on their screens, visible but indefinable. I feel subversive, a citizen spy in a beige mac. A female Bourne. Maybe a Hollywood response is how data privacy becomes a more sexy topic to engage with rather than one that is always at the bottom of the to-do list.

Akiko Busch, in ‘How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency’, says: “Invisibility can be corporeal or ethereal. It can be chosen or conferred. it can be power or powerlessness. It can be desired or despised. It can be ambiguous and full of intrigue, or straightforward and even banal.”

This walk also walks this line.

7.05pm Aston University campus

We enter the campus, another highly surveilled area. It is well lit. They are well versed in privacy and offer degrees in cybersecurity. I once came to a cybersecurity conference here. There are countless cameras. 

We follow behind three young female black students who are dressed head to toe in black. They are our mirror opposite and seemingly in perfect disguise against the night. But they are more at risk of biases in facial recognition algorithms than any other demographic. Facial recognition systems consistently show the poorest accuracy in subjects who are female, black and 18-30 years old. I want to invite them to walk with me.

As an older women I am becoming increasingly invisible as my value to society declines. I am also discovering age-related biases that manifest digitally and ultimately exclude. Last year, my UK passport application failed the automated check saying ‘we can’t find the outline of your head’. My slowly whitening hair against the white photobooth background had confused the system – not for the first time. At the data privacy exhibition The Glass Room London in 2017, Adam Harvey’s facial recognition exhibit MegaPixels often failed to register my face at all – or, if it did, it produced matches that were only 60% accurate. 

A middle-aged white women misidentified in a white space is not a big deal, but…

7.10pm Wattilisk, Birmingham Crown Court, Newton St/Dalton St

This gift of age-related camouflage – greying hair, pale features and low-contrast clothing – offers a natural ability for non-detection against my home city’s well-known prevalence of cameras.

If cameras struggle to find either the outline of a head or facial recognition markers from my blonde facial features then perhaps I am free. I am a human female ‘Wattilisk’ – a city sculpture that abstracts the head of city engineer James Watt until it is becomes unrecognisable as an individual. Or, working in the opposite direction, I can decide to become visible and identifiable once more. 

The Wattilisk embodies the simultaneously empowering and disempowering nature of invisibility. As a symbolic totem pole of facial recognition, it also offers an interesting discussion point.

7.15pm Dale End

Dale End is a road valley that dips between the law courts and the main high street shops. It is less well lit  and one of Birmingham’s crime spots. It is also the busiest section so far with small groups gathering outside McDonald’s and cycle couriers collecting takeway food. Here is life and a glimpse of the city as it was. For middle-aged women needing to pee, it is also the only place we find that offers a comfort break. 

As we enter the high street, the digital advertising infrastructure increases in volume – two tiny cameras on either side of each.

7.20pm Birmingham Media Eye 3, front of New St Station.

The walk ends at the third and final Media Eye. It posts government Covid-19 messages about ‘Hands, Face, Space’ then advertises a mattress then goes black. The system is broken. Perhaps we can build back better. Insert your own LOL, according to your opinion on this.

The station plaza has street lamps and tree sculptures with a dozen or so dome-cameras hanging from them. I stand underneath and blend.

Kruse is incredulous: “There are so many cameras.”

…but hardly any people for them to watch. 

It is night and it is lockdown but I am filled with the strongest vision that this is our future – a city devoid of citizens – because who wants to go somewhere to be profiled, predicted and exploited? All that remains are orange or turquoise-branded delivery cyclists dropping food supplies at speed to the outskirts where there are fewer cameras endlessly watching and to where Birmingham’s citizens have retreated.

I turn my phone back on and on multiple apps my ID pops up.

I am back in the digital matrix.

I am logged. 

Fiona Cullinan is a writer, editor and a co-founder of Walkspace, with an art practice exploring themes of infrastructure, privacy, diaries, memory, feminism and ageing. Further writing can be found at: fionacullinan.com.

The Birmingham Dazzle Walk also appears on The Dazzle Club Instagram.

There is something about walking at night. The experience of it is so different from walking in the daytime. There is pleasant disorientation even in familiar terrain. The known becomes unknown and new. The darkness, and the cold of winter, keep others away bringing a stillness and communion with things that are bigger than the us – the moon, the stars, the far distant horizons.

The ability to blend in with the night is a lure: to become enveloped by the darkness and the security of not being seen. To become the people who lurk in the shadows. There is empowerment in being a woman who walks at night, in rewriting the script of fear that runs alongside the female experience of the city. There is a reclaiming of the night and a mating of two strange bedfellows: exhilaration and peacefulness.

Human night vision slowly unfolds as the minutes pass, honing all the other senses; the process of becoming a nocturnal animal is a powerful one. There is walking at night and then there is walking by the light of a clear full moon. Now is a chance to turn off artificial light from torches – which can draw unwanted attention – and really see beyond a small halo of vision.

There is hiking on the hills at the edge of the city, usually busy with people but empty now except for a few silhouetted horned cattle. There is crunching through a carpet of fresh snow, reflecting the moonlight and lighting the way.

There is doing all this with other women. The conversations and experiences are different somehow. A snowman with carefully moulded male genitals brings a fun opportunity to smash the patriarchy – or at least crack a few jokes about it. It is a bonding experience.

It’s important to stop and listen, too. Too much talking and the experience is lessened. Stop and a meltwater path can be heard softly bubbling down the hill. The squelch of deep mud. The scrunch of snow. The M5’s distant hum. The fizz of an electricity pylon.

I long for a silent walk but I also don’t want to walk alone at night. Besides walking together and sharing the experience is important. How do you find others to walk with? A few weeks ago I met Laura Babb for the first time. We went for a walk around our home neighbourhood of Stirchley and discussed doing a night walk. Last week we merged our female friends who walk into a Whatsapp group called ‘Wild Women Walking’ and it feels like something exponentially bigger and connective has been born from that first walk. We may not know each other yet but we are all fish of the same stripe. There will be more walks. Because, for sunrises and night walks, winter is our time.

More night walk reports:

• Full moon walk report
• Full moon walk photos
• Dark moon walking 2
• Dark moon walk photos

Back in January, our local Stirchley Co-op supermarket closed forever; a Coop had been on that particular site for 106 years and in the Stirchley, Birmingham, area for 145 years.

Several Walkspace members planned a processional last walk up and down the aisles to say goodbye properly, and also see what lay behind the layers of goods to the emerging skeleton of the store. The closing of this Co-op was no small deal to the local community and about 100 other people wanted to join them.

Fast forward to July, and this week, delayed by a global pandemic and subsequent lockdown, a Morrison’s opened on the site.

It was finally time to write up that doomed walk, lay Stirchley’s greatest ever retail character to rest and tell the story of what happened on the Co-op’s last day.

The full walk report is a photo essay memorial. It lives here as part of a series of local walks called ‘Perambulate With Me’. Here’s an excerpt:

On 25^th January 2020, the Stirchley Co-op sadly closed forever. The urge to see it one last time was strong. It was a strange feeling, after all it was just a shop. And yet… this was the supermarket I had grown up with in the 1970s-80s and returned to in the 2000s-10s. 

The Stirchley Co-op’s last day was a Saturday and there wasn’t much shopping to be done anymore. The shelves had been slowly emptying over the previous weeks and whole sections of the store were now being closed off… Locals were tweeting about the ‘apocalyptic scenes’ as if the end were nigh. Given what was to come, it was prescient.

Fellow Stirchley resident and psychogeographer Andy Howlett and I decided to walk the Co-op.

To: “mournfully walk up and down the empty isles, browsing instead the infrastructure that remains”.

To embrace: “The stark angles of empty metal shelving! The receding vistas of shopper-free aisles! The rhythm of its layout and walkways! The final beeps of the disappearing tills! The barren promotional structures offering no deals!”

To say a last goodbye.

Read the rest here…

More Stirchley-based deep walk explorations are coming soon, which take our community-sourced lockdown ‘Map of Noticed Things’ as the raw material. See the map and read about the project here: Mapping Stirchley.