In London, walking through the streets of the city, as opposed to taking transport of one kind or another across it, has for centuries functioned as a self-consciously anti-plutocratic activity.

In the 18th century, when capitalism was in the ascendant and the British metropolis was becoming a centre of consumption, poets leading precarious lives on the margins of society insisted on walking partly because they could not afford to travel by coach and partly because it enabled them, in some literal sense, to embody their resentment of the ruling class. Going on foot, for these residents of Grub Street, was an assertion of solidarity with the poor and the disenfranchised.

It is this attitude that informs one of the finest poems ever to have been written about London, John Gay’s Trivia (1716). It is a militant affirmation of travelling on foot as a political, or proto-political, activity. There, the poet compares the righteous walker, whose modest walking-stick is constantly put to use because it directs his “cautious Tread aright”, to the idle aristocrats who, “loll[ing] at Ease” in “gilded Chariots”, carry their “Amber tipt” canes merely for the sake of fashionable appearance. Gay attacks the “griping Broker” who sits in an ostentatious chariot “and laughs at Honesty, and trudging Wits”.