Walking Men, an introduction
Everyday we stride over these Walking Men painted on the ground, they tell us where to walk, guiding our way. Though under our feet and easily overlooked in the roadscape clutter, every one is unique. Most are hand-painted, varying wildly in design, and execution.
Official design
To understand what's going on, a good place to start is the Department for Transport templates for the UK. This is what the Pedestrian Symbol is meant to look like:
The official designs, with links to larger size versions below:
Department for Transport Pedestrian Symbol S 2 - PDF
Department for Transport Pedestrian & Child Symbol S 3 - PDF
However it’s quite obvious that those doing the painting haven’t seen the diagram, forgotten what it looks like, or are reluctant artists. To be fair to them, the relatively complex design, with tapering arms and legs, and difficult details like the feet was obviously never designed to be replicated with the clunky painting tools at their disposal. So each example is a fresh surprise, and special. You can feel the confidence of one person’s work, with bold swooping lines of arms and legs, but elsewhere note the initial tentative spray-paint lines, like a preparatory pencil drawing, before thick hesitant paint is applied.
Does it matter if they're not all uniform? Our ability to recognise the human form is so strong that few seem to notice a wayward eccentric interpretation. They are all undeniably just a figure painted on the ground.
The design with poetic license on the streets in the UK
What we see is a product of deregulation with sub-contractors sub-contracting, and ultimately a lack of control. This is the work of a human, a personality, and is a triumph non-conformity, especially exciting since it is a very visible product of an industry where adherence to absolute standards is meant to be paramount. I am not critical of this, I celebrate the fact that this personal expression has flourished in an urban landscape usually decorated in a controlled manner by governments and corporations. Unlike graffiti, this subtle self-expression is a by-product of government initiatives to help us to walk and cycle more in an urban environment overrun by cars.
My first Walking Men, on the Camp Road walking and cycle route, St Albans 2004
I have been building this collection since 2004. I ‘saw’ the first examples because they were a strange distortion, as exhilarating as any tortured figure in an Expressionist painting.
These painted Walking Men on the ground haven’t been around for long, perhaps no more than 10-15 years, and are a curious product of our safety conscious age. They shouldn’t really exist at all, certainly in the UK. Originally the Department for Transport defined a cycle symbol to be painted on the ground to show where cyclists should go, but never explicitly created a design to show where people should walk. The assumption was people know where to walk, you don’t need symbols on pavements. Later cautious highways engineers decided it would be safer to remove any ambiguity - and define both where to walk and where to cycle. This is why they don’t exist universally, and are typically absent from the more 'sophisticated' highways authority's patch - Central London for instance, where they only start to appear as you move into the outer boroughs.
An unusually artistic bicycle - off Tottenham Court Road, London
Typically wherever there are Walking Men, not far away there will be Bikes, generally they are painted more carefully and accurately to the official design. I assume this is because a bike is inherently more difficult to draw, requiring more care to get it right - there are exceptions, as in this example above.
Historical resonance
Walking Men on the ground are much more than just another roadsign, for me they take their place in the landscape like a 21st century version of an ancient man cut into white chalk like the Wilmington Long Man in Sussex or the Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset.
Wilmington Long Man and Cerne Abbas Giant (right)
John Piprani emailed me to point out some similarity between this contemprary highways work, and neolithic / iron age petroglyphs - rock art from the Val Camonica, Northern Italy.
Val Camonica (top row) Walking Men from Poole, Newcastle, Welwyn (bottom row)
Eadweard Muybridge's famous sequence of photographs taken in the 1880's
Pavement shadow photographs by Esther Wragg
Emotional response
They are of course a representation of ourselves, and we have an emotional reaction to the human image. Though individually relatively small, never larger than 'life-size', collectively this is Art on a grand, national scale. There are thousands of them out there - all around us.
Falling men, in Harlow & Northolt
As I walk round one for the first time; from above, from a side angle, I start to see a vulnerable man, perhaps a falling man frozen in time, or even a still, dead man. I was a photographing a string of Walking Men through a squalid underpass in West London when I realised I was surrounded by the tributes and messages to a man who had recently been killed at the spot - the Walking Men symbols on the ground became a poignant part of his memorial, you could say a permamnent echo of the police chalk outline around the murdered body on the ground.
Flowers and messages where a man died
Ostensibly the photographs are of one thing - the main subject, but of course they capture a lot more in the background - alleyways, underpasses, verges, hedges and railings, housing estates, industrial units, out-of-town shopping centres, car parks. The secondary subject, records in passing, a glimpse of where and how we live.
Stephen Wragg
June 2011