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Afterwards, I went hunting for these overlooked places with more intention. I followed alleys simply because they existed, and I read the small plaques I’d always ignored. In doing so, I discovered an online group that documented local “micro-histories”: a former cinema now split into offices, a river that had been forced underground, a street renamed after a nurse rather than a general. I joined their weekend walks, partly for company and partly because their curiosity matched the new one growing in me.

Oddly enough, it was the city’s new electric scooter scheme that really taught me to slow down. I signed up on a whim and spent a weekend gliding along the riverside, weaving between tourists and office workers as if I’d found a secret lane through the crowds. For the first time, I could cover several neighbourhoods without breaking a sweat, and the sense of efficiency returned with a vengeance. I even started timing myself again, comparing routes and boasting to friends about shaving minutes off my commute, as though the whole point of being out in the open was to move faster than everyone else.

On the first walk I attended, the leader—an architect with a battered notebook—asked us to stand still for two minutes and list what we could smell. It sounded ridiculous; nevertheless, the exercise worked. Someone noted damp stone, another mentioned frying onions from a window above us, and I caught the metallic tang of rain on scaffolding. Then the architect explained that planning documents rarely record such things, even though they are part of why people fight to keep certain streets as they are.

Then the details began to organise themselves into a pattern. I started recognising shopfronts I’d never properly seen: the faded sign of a cobbler, the hand-painted menu outside a café, the tiny bell that announced each customer at a corner florist. Moreover, I realised how much sound carried when you weren’t sealed in a carriage—snatches of conversation, the clink of cups, the impatient rhythm of a pedestrian crossing. These fragments didn’t just decorate the walk; they stitched it together.

At the beginning, these walks were embarrassingly practical. I planned them like errands, counting minutes and choosing streets with fewer crossings. However, within a week I noticed that the city behaved differently at pavement level. The same route that looked straightforward from a train window was full of hesitations: a bakery queue that spilled outside, a delivery van blocking the cycle lane, a sudden gust that turned a corner into a wind tunnel. All of that friction, oddly, made the journey feel more real.

Later, when my knee had recovered and the underground tempted me again, I found I couldn’t return to my old shortcuts without feeling I was skipping pages. I still took trains, of course, but I began to punctuate them with short walks, choosing exits that forced me onto the surface. Consequently, my sense of direction became less about efficiency and more about meaning: this corner where Marta read aloud, that passage into the garden, those workshops with their stubborn light. The city, I realised, was not one map but many overlapping ones.

One afternoon, it was those sounds that made me stop. Outside a community noticeboard, a woman was reading a poster aloud to a child, slowly, as if the words needed time to settle. When she noticed me waiting, she smiled and said, almost apologetically, that her son liked to “hear the city”. Her name was Marta, and she pointed out something I’d walked past for years: a narrow passage between two buildings that led to a public garden I didn’t know existed.