Slow travel
Slow travel is the idea that by taking the route less travelled, by avoiding aeroplanes and main roads, and by making it up as you go along, you might have a better experience. It’s similar to slow food, which promotes buying local produce, trying new varieties and making the most of what you have to reduce food waste and improve sustainability in food.
In the slow food movement, the main benefit is that you get to leave the supermarket monoculture of tasteless carrots, watery potatoes and whatever-it-is that Lidl calls cheddar to rejoice in new flavours. Parsnips you look forward to, rather than despise. Slow travel takes a similar slant.
This sounds good.
Ever since I read John Hillaby’s Journey through Britain about 10 years ago, I’ve always wanted to travel slowly. In the book, he recounts his walk from Land’s End to John O’Groats through late ’60s Britain. The wanderlust doesn’t stop there: Nick Ray is paddling around Scotland in a canoe for a year, The Man in Seat 61 tempts me with rail journeys across the world, and Go Jauntly continues to pump out lovely little walks. Slow travel has been here for a while, but it feels closer now.
Slow Travel UK, a website encouraging folks to give slow travel a try, started in September 2020, the year of the pandemic. After months of lockdown and with infection rates starting to rise again, taking a break somewhere everyone else isn’t would have felt safer. Around the same time, Welcome to My Garden started in Belgium, an Airbnb-style platform where people can offer their gardens out to self-propelled travellers looking for somewhere to camp the night.
These join a wave of other online movements and tools aimed at slow travellers: Slow Ways, Don’t Lose Your Way from the Ramblers Society, Komoot, and Saturday Walkers’ Club.
What you have is all the tools needed to quit the rat-race, get outside more and take one day at a time. The complete Kerouac-fuelled, vagrancy-by-design experience.
Which for many people living in the UK at the moment probably feels like a great idea. Any way to escape from the self-perpetuating, ever-growing, Romanesco broccoli of economic and political despair is a tantalising way out. Being able to traipse around the country, along quiet paths between towns and cities, sleeping in people’s gardens, would be a nice distraction.
But then I’m reminded how, for many people in this country, homelessness isn’t an alternative but a necessity. Recent estimates show that rural homelessness is on the rise, and I’d wager that the polycrisis is having the same effect in urban areas.
It’s weird how all the tools to choose vagrancy exist alongside the conditions forcing people out onto the streets and lay-bys. There is hope though. The response to Homes for Ukraine showed the population’s capacity to care for people suddenly uprooted by circumstance, and maybe that’ll play out this winter too.
If you can spare it, donate £30 to your local homelessness charity (or one of the national ones). They’re going to need it.