Standing on Virginia Woolf's Doorstep

Abstract

Walks also exist in written form. In local bookshops historical itineraries appear on the 'local interest' shelves alongside memoirs, oral history booklets and collections of sepia-tinted photographs. My own interest in the genre stems both from a passion for local history and for London, and from political commitment. It began when in 1978 I was asked by the legal support group, Rights of Women, to plan and annotate the route for a money-raising historical walk in London. My research was on women's lives and the experience of childhood amongst the late nineteenthcentury London poor, and I had always tried to develop a sense of 'where' as well as 'when' and 'how'. So I agreed, thinking (erroneously) that I could rustle something up quite quickly. This might indeed have been possible had I simply pulled together references to the famous women of past - those whose wealth, birth, beauty, talent or connections gave them, exceptionally, a place in the historical record. But I was reluctant to endorse conventional history of that kind, with its focus on power, its obliteration of how and at whose expense that power was acquired and maintained, and its neglect or distortion of the social and political complexities of the past. I was also eager to share as wide a range of material as possible. These concerns all required me to mine my extensive research notes, and many books, for local references and addresses. I thus misjudged how long the work would take me. When I had finally put something together and a date was set, I checked the route by bicycle. On the day, it turned out that I had also underestimated how long the walk would take. After ten miles of London streets, there were some very footsore feminists, though with sponsorship by the mile each person walked it was good for ROW's funds. From then on I kept a look-out for similar projects, preferably about women. I came across a few in the United States, produced sometimes by local historical societies, sometimes (like the Black History Trail in Boston) by groups trying to redress the historiographical balance. My English