A Canterbury 4WCoP24 walk which took place on Saturday 7th September 2024 at 10-11.30am. We met at the Church and Parish Hall of St Paul’s without the Walls on Church Street Saint Paul’s, Canterbury CT1 1NH.
Down Memory Lane was an urban pilgrimage in Canterbury that remembered our childhood homes. I planned the walk using online maps from Edinburgh, where I currently live, and until I made the rekkie the day before, I had no knowledge of the area. We walked with each other around the city, allowing its street and building names plus images and found objects to stimulate memories of places where we had lived as children.
The route I planned took me back to the town of Sevenoaks in Kent, somewhere I couldn’t get away from quickly enough when I was aged 18, but which I had a certain longing to explore again in this way. The Canterbury walk passed and visited shops, lanes and monuments which allowed me to explore my geographical and emotional heritage – Marks and Spencer (in honour of my best friend, Clare Spencer who lived up the hill), Lime Kiln Road (because our dad built us a tree house in the garden lime tree), and Hollow Lane (for I spent the first 18 years of my life in Seal Hollow Road).
I invited the other people who walked with me to notice names and locations which prompted their own recollections, and they found themselves drawn back with some nostalgia, sharing stories with each other from those long-ago days.
The walk was devised in response to the 4th World Congress of Psychogeography on the theme of Heritage and Hiraeth:
Heritage (attributive): Characterized by or pertaining to the preservation or exploitation of local and national features of historical, cultural, or scenic interest, esp. as tourist attractions.
Hiraeth (Welsh English): deep longing for a person or thing which is absent or lost; yearning; nostalgia; spec. homesickness.
These are the O.E.D. definitions – what are yours?
4WCoP are here and it was a pleasure to share this walk with everyone involved.
Walking without a donkey 