Desire Lines

2025

Desire lines are the informal trails that defy the frameworks imposed by mapmakers, urban planners, and those who seek to determine where and how people move. These user-made routes represent more than shortcuts; they are expressions of agency, creativity, and an instinct to move through space by feel rather than by prescription.

When pedestrians repeatedly take the most direct or convenient route, or move through space for reasons of safety, spiritual yearning, or quiet rebellion, they create these lines by erosion, leaving a visible and sometimes invisible trace of individual or collective need. These paths can reveal how people actually wish to inhabit their environment, often in direct contradiction to the intentions of architects or landscape designers who plotted routes without accounting for how a body moves through space, or what it needs from the ground beneath it.

In built settlements and open countryside alike, tracks cut across grass and steep inclines. In northern winters, footprints map a direct line through snow, tracing the movement of human and non-human alike from one point to another. Desire lines shape space as much as they cross it, and in doing so they establish an unmediated relationship between walker and place.

In the British countryside, public footpaths are regularly obstructed by landowners and private interests, access withheld in the name of security, privacy, or exclusive use. These restrictions run counter to the spirit and tradition of the right to roam, limiting the ability of humans and non-humans to move through, belong to, and inhabit the natural landscape.

Desire lines can also be read as a form of quiet rebellion: a record of intuitive movement and independent choice within environments, natural, urban, and social, that are increasingly subject to control. This series of works treats walking as a research practice and forms part of the ongoing doctoral project Revisiting a Vanishing Land, which engages with the spectral and ever-changing landscape of the Suffolk coast: its footprints and absences, and the memories held within its terrain.