Walking Publics / Walking Arts
walking, wellbeing and community during COVID-19
Walking Publics/Walking Arts was a COVID-19 Rapid Response project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council exploring the potential of the arts to sustain, encourage and more equitably support walking during and recovering from a pandemic. Running from 2021 to 2022, the project completed a large public survey exploring people’s experiences of walking during the pandemic and within this, whether and how they used creative walking tactics (for example, creating or following a painted stone trail or looking for rainbows in windows). It also explored how artists used walking as a creative resource during COVID-19, whether adapting existing walking work or turning to walking for the first time.
Our key research questions were: 1) How did adults across the UK experience walking during the COVID-19 pandemic and how had their walking activity changed? 2) How and with what impact had creative approaches been used by them to support walking activity? 3) How had artists use walking as a method of arts practice and what could be learned from them and shared more widely to support more people to engage with and enjoy walking beyond the pandemic?