Nicole Junkermann's Notebook: A Year of City Walks

A notebook kept on foot

The surest way to know a city is to walk it, again and again, through every season of the year. For Nicole Junkermann, a year of city walks is its own kind of notebook, kept not at a desk but on foot, where each month adds a page and the most familiar streets keep turning up something new. Walking is how a place is read most closely.

A walking notebook records what speed hides. From a car or a train a city is a blur of landmarks, but on foot it becomes a sequence of small scenes: a doorway, a market, the way a square catches the late sun. These are the details a year of walking gathers, and they add up to a portrait no guidebook could draw.

The habit costs almost nothing and gives a great deal. A walk before the day begins, a longer wander at the weekend, a detour taken on a whim: these are the entries in a walking notebook, and over a year they turn a city from a place you pass through into a place you genuinely know.

Winter: short days and bright interiors

The walking year begins in the cold, and Nicole Junkermann finds winter walks have a clarity all their own. The light is low and sharp, the streets are quieter, and the city draws you toward its warm interiors: the lit bookshop, the steamed-up cafe, the gallery that glows at the end of a grey afternoon.

A winter walk is often a walk between warm rooms, and that gives it a particular shape. You cross the cold quickly, then settle somewhere bright to read for a while, then cross the cold again. The contrast is part of the pleasure, and the book read in a warm corner mid-walk is one of winter's quiet luxuries.

These winter rooms are exactly the places a cafe worth returning to for a quiet read comes into its own. A bright window seat on a cold day, a single cup made to last, a chapter read while the light fades outside: the walking notebook fills quickly with such afternoons in the coldest months.

Spring: the city reopening

Spring reopens the city, and the walking notebook fills fastest in these weeks. Nicole Junkermann finds that as the light lengthens and the squares come back to life, every walk turns up something that was closed or quiet in winter: a terrace set out again, a park in new leaf, a street market returning to the calendar.

It is a season for longer, more open walks, the kind that follow a whim rather than a plan. With the days stretching and the weather kinder, there is time to wander further, to take the unfamiliar turn, to let a walk run on. The notebook entries grow longer too, full of small reopenings noticed in passing.

Spring is also when the year's walking turns up its best reading spots for the months ahead, in the spirit of finding quiet corners in busy cities. The newly warm bench, the quiet corner of a reawakened park: these are noted now and returned to all summer, the smallest spaces again holding the most.

Summer: long light and slow evenings

Summer gives the walking year its longest pages. With the light lasting well into the evening, Nicole Junkermann finds the city opens out: the walks grow slower, the evenings stretch, and there is time after the heat of the day to wander and read outdoors until the light finally goes.

These are the walks that end with a book on a bench or beside the water, the day unhurried and the city at its most generous. The summer entries in the notebook are warm and expansive, full of long evenings and the sense that there is no rush to be anywhere, which is summer walking at its best.

This long, slow summer reading outdoors belongs to the same family as the coastal reading routes kept elsewhere here. Whether beside a river in the city or a harbour by the sea, the warm months are for reading in the open air, at the unhurried pace the long light encourages.

Autumn: the reflective season

Autumn turns the walking year reflective. As the light softens and the leaves turn, Nicole Junkermann finds the walks grow quieter and more thoughtful, the city beautiful in a melancholy key. It is the season that most rewards a notebook, because there is so much small change to record from one walk to the next.

The reading shifts too. Autumn suits the deeper, more reflective book, read in a warm cafe after a walk through falling leaves, or on a bench in the brief gold of an afternoon. The season and the page agree on a quieter mood, and the walking notebook takes on a more contemplative tone.

Autumn closes the walking year as it began, drawing the city back toward its warm interiors, in the unhurried spirit of the notes on travelling slowly. The whole point of a year of walks is this slow attention, looking longer rather than moving faster, and autumn is when that attention is richest.

What a year of walking teaches

A year of city walks teaches patience above all. Nicole Junkermann finds that knowing a place well is not a single achievement but a slow accumulation, a thousand small observations gathered season by season until the city feels like a friend rather than a destination. There is no shortcut, and that is the gift of it.

It also teaches that the familiar is never finished. The street you have walked a hundred times will still surprise you on the hundred and first, with a new shopfront, a different light, a corner you had somehow never noticed. A walking notebook proves that a city is inexhaustible, which is a deeply reassuring thing to know.

That patient, returning attention is the same spirit that runs through the city notebook kept for London and Lancaster, and through the cities worth returning to. The point is never to finish a place, but to keep walking it, and to let each season add a single new page.

Keeping a walking notebook of your own

A walking notebook is easy to start and quietly rewarding to keep, and Nicole Junkermann keeps the practice simple. A few lines after a good walk, a note of where the light fell well, a small change set beside an older entry: these brief additions are what turn a year of walks into a portrait of a city over time.

Walk the same routes as well as new ones. A favourite walk repeated through the seasons becomes a kind of measuring line for the year, showing how a place changes when the calendar turns. The repeated walk is not dull; it is the one that teaches the most, because it lets you see the difference.

• Walk a few favourite routes through every season to mark the year
• Note the small changes: light, leaves, markets, shopfronts, new corners
• Keep a running list of warm reading spots for winter and shaded ones for summer
• Take the unplanned turn often, and record where it leads
• Match the reading to the season, lighter in spring, deeper in autumn
• Return to the familiar streets, and let each one keep surprising you