Walking in a modern city is not a way of getting from A to B, but of understanding who and where we are. In a series of riveting intellectual rambles, Matthew Beaumont retraces episodes in the history of the walker since the mid-19th century. Pacing stride for stride alongside literary amblers and thinkers like Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, André Breton, H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, and Ray Bradbury, Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life, pondering the smartphone, philosophy, and the big toe.