In some ways, it is increasingly encouraged, even mildly fashionable. Meanwhile, writers such as Iain Sinclair have made the value of nosing around Britain's brick labyrinths into something close to an orthodoxy. Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, trampling asphalted earth in alert reverie . . . Alignments of telephone kiosks, maps made from moss on the slopes of Victorian sepulchres . Traffic in cities is getting heavier and more impatient.
Deliveries are more frequent and more urgent.
And developers, for all their talk of pedestrians, are still colonising pavements with their hoardings, blocking off river walks with their fortresses of apartments and attaching car parks to everything they can get away with. The air the urban walker breathes is exhaust and brickdust. The ground beneath his or her feet is uneven and ill-maintained. And then there's the dogshit, the trespassing cyclists . . . Or you could stay out of the rain, and read these books.