Walking the streets of London: using Zadie Smith's ‘NW’ to explore teenage, metropolitan ways of seeing and writing

Abstract

This teaching and learning investigation draws on two adjacent chapters of Zadie Smith's novel (2012). The first chapter delineates one character's journey through north‐west London as plotted by the directions feature of Google Maps, while the next chapter focalises this perspective at street level. Ten classes across three year groups conducted a reading and a writing task based on. This task, which linked students’ writing to their own walking in London, was influenced by Harold Rosen's writing pedagogy, which privileges environmental experience as being central to developing student writing. The 190 mappings and street‐level descriptions of walking through London provide a rich portrait of teenage, metropolitan ways of seeing. The findings indicate an intrinsic link between place and memory for many students, while showing that writing about the metropolis invites literary experimentation influenced by recent changes in technology and communication. The investigation offers insight into a teaching strategy that can develop students’ reading and writing skills.