British Summer Time: Sunrise Walks

In 2019 I started greeting the time change with a week of sunrise walks. I invited anyone from anywhere in the world to join me: just start 15 minutes before sunrise and walk until fifteen minutes after.

Replace your morning scroll with a morning stroll.

I had moved to Northampton to work as a Research Impact Officer and was feeling relatively isolated. I didn’t know anyone, and I thought the project might help me find a community of walkers in Northampton and continue to develop a community of walkers at a distance. A few co-workers from the University joined me over the course of the week; on weekdays the timing was perfect for a walk to work. I also connected with a global community of walkers through the multiple networks of walking artists (Morris 2020). Many of the people I had walked with before—both in person and at a digital distance—but there were also walkers I was “meeting” for the first time.

By the time the clocks were meant to spring forward, the global situation had changed. The COVID-19 pandemic meant walking together was no longer feasible. Walking artists and groups adjusted their practice: The Loiterers Resistance Movement made their First Sunday drifts digital; Sonia Overall organized a weekly group #distancedrift, which she has carried on since lockdown began. My own hope for a sunrise community in Northampton shifted to a total focus on walking together at a distance.

Somehow the blog I had kept for the first set of walks also seemed no longer feasible. I couldn’t reflect. In the shifting global environment just getting up in the morning to do the walks was enough. I had conversations with walkers through email and social media, and I pointed them to the experience of other walkers, but I did not collate the replies. The website remained static. The extra work of collation and reflection felt like too much. The walk was enough.

What is the balance between the joy of doing and the work of documenting? Does it need this afterlife to be meaningful, or is it enough to just share the sunrise? To do the practice? The fact that it existed at all?

The third season continued in much the same way. I couldn’t focus on pulling together the various threads of the sunrise walkers. The exchange was tentacular. Unfocused. My inbox and social media notifications filled up with sunrise walks from around the world. Each day of the project I watched the sunrise move across the globe, as walkers from Vietnam to Europe to the United States shared their sunrise with me. I felt invigorated by my engagement with their emails, Instagram posts and Twitter feeds. Fundamentally the project is about getting up and walking the sunrise together, which happened; but somehow, I also felt that I was letting down my co-walkers by not making a space to weave it all together.

I have this sense that I shouldn’t be the central conduit for exchange, but what methods will accomplish that? Is the only solution to apply #hashtags through corporate media that automate our threads and networks? How can this serve as détournement rather than recuperation?

I remembered a time before, during my more strident art-making youth, when I was actively against documentation. I was creating ephemeral experiences. The need to document was a distraction! I now better understand how the document can serve as an invitation, a story that asks the reader to tell it in order to understand it (Benjamin 2019). It is not the end point, but a new beginning, a generative act.

As I enter the fourth season of sunrise walks, I find myself in another transitional moment. The challenges of being an immigrant in Britain’s hostile environment (and particularly the associated rising costs), exacerbated by Brexit and the global covid-19 pandemic, led me back to America. The context for my sunrise has changed again.

After the first season of walks in 2019, the political factors of sunrise walking were apparent to me. I considered the privilege of my ability to walk freely:

“the ease with which I could walk down the stairs and cross the street; my confidence moving through the park alone at dawn; the time I have to engage in such an activity [ . . . ] I considered that for some people a walk is never simple, whether due to physical ability, gender appearance, skin colour, immigration status, familial responsibilities, or other factors.” (Morris, 2019)

Our bodies are always governed by politics and walking is never as simple as it seems. The context in which I am walking has changed, but these challenges and restrictions transcend national borders.

Newly returned to the United States, my timing is no longer in sync with the majority of my co-walkers in Europe. Earlier this week Mathilda sent me a sunrise picture in anticipation of the impending time change, and the associated sunrise walks. “I couldn’t wait”, she wrote. I returned my sunrise in kind. Despite our 9-hour time difference, both pictures were snapped around the same ‘time’. My sunrise comes later. Yet it is still the same sunrise.

In America the time changes earlier, and this season I’ll be starting my walks on March 13^th, the day before the time changes in the United States. The walks will continue through 28^th March, the day the time changes in the United Kingdom. A series of sunrises to mark my transition from British Summer Time to Daylight Savings Time. Please consider this post an invitation to join me. I can’t promise to collate, but I am eager to engage. Just go on a thirty-minute walk wherever you are, starting 15 minutes before sunrise.  

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Storyteller’. In Hannah Arendt (ed.) Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.

Blake Morris. “British Summer Time Blog,” October 20, 2019. https://thisisnotaslog.com/British-Summer-Time-Blog, 2019.

Morris, Blake. Walking Networks: The Development of an Artistic Medium. London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2020.

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British Summer Time is a series of sunrise walks to mark the time change. Start 15 minutes before sunrise wherever you are. More details can be found at https://thisisnotaslog.com/British-Summer-Time-Sunrise-Walks #BritishSummerTime #SunriseWalks. Blake Morris is a walking artist and independent scholar. He can be found on twitter (@formerfresnan) or Instagram (@blakewalks).