Cities
Grid cities and tangled cities ask different things of the person walking them
A street plan is a record of how a city was made, and it decides whether you navigate by coordinates or by…
Samar Bhatia
Senior writer, The Next Postcard
Samar has written about cities, slow routes, rail & road for most of the last decade and is happiest when a piece answers the question completely.
21 articles
Coast
The sea warms weeks behind the air, and that is why swimming improves after summer
Water has an enormous capacity to absorb heat slowly, so coastal seasons run late, and the best month for…
Travel Craft
Packing is a volume problem until an airline turns it into a weight problem
Two separate constraints govern what you can carry, they are enforced by different people at different…
Slow Routes
Going back to the same place is a different activity from travelling
A return visit removes the work of orientation and the pressure to see things, which changes what the trip…
Rail & Road
The layout of a big station tells you how much time you need
Terminus and through stations impose completely different journeys on foot, and knowing which one you are…
Rail & Road
A hire car contract is mostly a question of who carries the damage
Almost every confusing part of renting a vehicle abroad comes from the same place: the contract is…
Travel Craft
What a guidebook is for once the listings have gone stale
Printed guides have lost the practical information race to the internet and kept the thing the internet is…
Cities
A weekly market is a circuit, and the trader is the part that moves
Market days are staggered between neighbouring towns because the same stallholders travel a rota, which…
Slow Routes
A canal is a staircase of water and it moves at the speed of a lock
Artificial waterways were engineered around gradient and water supply rather than around distance, and…
Slow Routes
A pilgrim route works because everybody is travelling the same way
What distinguishes an old pilgrimage road from an ordinary long walk is that it has a direction, a…
Slow Routes
Somebody repaints those waymarks, and it’s usually a volunteer
Waymarking looks like permanent infrastructure and is in fact a maintained system with an owner, a standard…
Slow Routes
Walking out of a city takes most of a morning and explains its edge
The transition from centre to countryside on foot passes through a zone that almost nobody visits…
Travel Craft
A tipping custom is a description of how people are paid
Whether a country tips, and how much, follows from its wage structure and its law rather than from national…
Cities
A university town has two populations and only one of them is there in July
Places where a large institution dominates run on an academic calendar rather than a commercial one, and…
Cities
A working place of worship is public space with conditions attached
Churches, mosques, temples and synagogues are among the few interiors in most cities that anyone may enter…
Cities
A city park is a piece of dated argument about what a city owes its residents
Public green space arrived in waves, each with a different theory of what it was for, and the layout of a…
Cities
A city that limits its visitors has usually run out of quieter options first
Entry charges, timed slots, coach bans and rules on short-term letting are late-stage responses to a…
Slow Routes
A staffed mountain refuge is a supply operation with beds attached
The huts that make a multi-day mountain route possible are logistics enterprises first, and nearly every…
Slow Routes
A journey with a fixed end date should carry its slack at the end
Delay accumulates along a multi-leg route rather than averaging out, so a buffer only protects anything if…
Slow Routes
Freedom to roam and a right of way are two different legal answers
Whether you may walk across open country depends on whether the law grants access to land in general or…
Rail & Road
Whether a network has barriers decides how it checks your ticket
Closed systems verify at the gate and open systems verify on board, and that single architectural choice…