[Guardian] I’m exaggerating, but only slightly. Understanding how cities are put together is vital, given more than half of us live in them.
It probably says something about me that, while I retain no memory of the first time I successfully walked the 15 miles from central London to my childhood home in Essex, I remember my first failure in excruciating detail. It was late October, the week before I started my first proper job and, not then being in the habit of gainful employment, I got up late and accidentally didn’t set out until the afternoon. Then I stopped for a lengthy coffee at Mile End, a district whose very name should have been a useful clue that I’d barely got started. I eventually gave up, freezing and damp, in Ilford, a suburb that borders Romford, which, I reasoned, meant I’d nearly made it. I hadn’t.
I didn’t know it then, but that walk was an early symptom of a mania that was to gradually swallow up my free time. I’ve since done that route so often that I’ve grown bored with it ‐ there’s only so much joy to be had from a long march through Chadwell Heath ‐ but I’ve branched out, walking the Thames and the Lea rivers, various tube lines and completing the assorted routes recommended by Transport for London. Once I’d exhausted those, I took to getting trains out to far-flung stations and then simply walking back. I’ve done the same in other cities, too, walking aimlessly around the streets of Montreal and Manchester, Chicago and Coventry. I even tried walking in Doha, though I fear I may be the only person in the whole of human history to have attempted it, and I regretted it exactly as swiftly as you’d think I would. 
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