Iain Sinclair at the London Walking Festival Conference

Recorded at the University of Westminster on 15 May 2026, introduced by Dr Tom Cohen. A Do London Differently production.

Iain Sinclair arrived the way he always travels. On foot. That morning he set out from his front door in Hackney, followed a Footways route across the city, and treated the keynote itself as a pit stop before walking home by some longer, odder way. For more than fifty years he has read London by walking it, and in this hour he turned one morning's route into a portrait of the whole city: its ghosts, its wildlife, its surveillance, and its small daily miracles.

Highlights

The map as an old friend. Sinclair's method is simple and strange. Read a map at home like a book or an artwork, picture the journey, then put it away and set off without it. Carry the route in your head, divert freely, and come home to argue with the map like an old friend. Do that, he says, and the city renews itself.

The ghosts come out. Walk the same streets long enough and the dead walk with you. Passing a block of once neglected flats, Sinclair found himself back in conversation with the poet Barry MacSweeney, minutes after bumping into the poet and publisher Tom Chivers in the tea room. The map, by choosing one route, brought a decades old exchange flooding back.

A howl, a donkey and Van Gogh. By the canal he passed a schoolboy walking alone and making an unearthly howling noise. It looped him into his newest project, a series of walks in the footfall of Vincent van Gogh, ending at Auvers-sur-Oise and the Wheatfield with Crows. There, above a bench, a real donkey made the same noise, and led to the story of Theo's gravely ill baby, also named Vincent, saved and thriving on donkey milk. A howl of despair answered by a howl of survival.

Divert, and you'll find treasure. Thrown off the canal by a barrier at New North Road with no explanation, Sinclair offered the practical heart of the talk. Take the information that is available, then divert. The diversion delivered Arlington Square, a green oasis, and the reminder that London is not one park but a series of them, revealed only by walking. Set against that is the constant privatising and fencing off of space. You move between the dystopian and the utopian, and the movement makes you new.

Loud ghosts on Duncan Terrace. The literary dead crowd the route. The street where Joe Orton was murdered. Peter Ackroyd, once dragged home over his own doorstep. Kathy Acker, who told Sinclair she blamed the Regent's Canal for everything after drinking from a bottle she had dropped into it.

How a walker was made. From Brixton and film school in 1962, walking in obedient straight lines along the Northern line, to the 1966 return and the first proper London walk: Freud's ashes at Golders Green, Marx at Highgate, Rimbaud's house on Royal College Street. Later, a line of energy drawn from Bunhill Fields, where Blake, Bunyan and Defoe lie together, across the river to Greenwich, with St Anne's Limehouse framed dead centre. From then on, walking and writing were the same act.

Lights Out for the Territory. The book that made his name, published in 1997, found its shape by turning everything into walks. He closed by reading its credo from the first chapter: walking as the best way to explore the city, drifting purposefully, and above all noticing everything the rest of us stride past.

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