Walking Publics/Walking Arts: walking, wellbeing and community during Covid-19

There is a proven evidence base for the benefits of both walking and art on physical health and mental wellbeing. Our project addresses the lacuna between the arts and those working to promote walking well in the wider community. Walking organisations need rapidly to find new ways to support their members during social restrictions, and to diversify membership to support more people to walk well in and beyond a pandemic. COVID-19 poses an unprecedented challenge to cultural organisations with the need to rethink practices due to physical distancing. Responses to lockdown have created the opportunity to understand how creative walking activities have been and could be used to mitigate isolation and anxiety, maintain health and wellbeing, enhance social connectivity, and facilitate cultural empowerment. This project will deliver a significant contribution to the understanding of, and response to, the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts, generate new data about a key activity, and innovate arts resources for rapid implementation to support health, wellbeing, resilience and cultural participation. Collaborating with partner organisations, artists, cultural workers, and residents, the project will capture: a) the walking experiences and creative interventions of people during COVID-19 restrictions. b) the 'lockdown' work of artists using walking activity within conditions of restriction. c) the potential of the arts to sustain, encourage and more equitably support walking during and recovering from a pandemic. Key deliverables include: i) a new data set and report on walking experiences and creative approaches to walking well and safely ii) a curated digital gallery of creative walking models, open-access Walking Toolkits and piloted prototypes iii) a Cultural Walking Summit iv) three peer-reviewed articles v) a new cross-sectoral partnership.