“There’s a lot more to walking than walking“ was the title of a presentation that Danish Architect and Urban Visionary, Jan Gehl used to give at conferences. One of his key points was how much of walking was about dawdling, dwelling and observing all the activities going on around you. Who was chatting to whom, wondering what that group of women were doing gathering over there, and who is that sitting on the bench overlooking the canal? Well it is Irish poet Patrick Kavenagh sitting on a bench overlooking the Grand Canal in Dublin – which we guess is as a good a place to find a commemorative statue to a poet who wrote the poem: “Lines written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin”
However, we are not sure whether Jan would see these types of statues as positive additions to public spaces. We have very rarely ever found them occupied by living people, and they tend to only attract people posing for a holiday snap (as you can tell from the images here). This is probably as much to do with the choice of where the seated statues were placed, as it is for the embarrassment one feels sitting beside a bronze statue.
Glenn Gould in Toronto
Mid November 2019, when we were sifting through The Museum of Walking image archives in search of something we had obviously wrongly catalogued, we happened across this young man studiously reading and ignoring Glenn Gould, the Canadian musician commemorated downtown in Toronto. We sought the help of our Twitter followers, several of whom have in their time, asked their friends to pose for that holiday snap. If you should happen to have any further details to reveal about this modern day phenomenon please do Get in Touch.
Photo credits: @Cornish_Jack , @johnstreetdales , @Ticlme , @brikennedy
All about walking blog posting is unpredictable – if it’s raining biblical downpours then a blog post is more likely to appear, in most other weather conditions we are out walking and not blogging on a keyboard…..