I walked in David Bowie’s footsteps to get a sniff of the real. But I found something I didn’t expect

David Bowie’s death had a profound impact on me. I needed to celebrate his life. But how, exactly? I’d lost a companion and guide from those teenage years. Bowie, the brother I never had, the figure brave enough to follow his dreams, whatever the price. What was I going to do about it?

Above all, I felt a compulsion to get out there and make Bowie my own. The eventual solution was random, a matter of impulse, certainly not logic. But then things fell into place and an initial gesture of homage turned into an ongoing call to action. The answer? It was simple. Walk. 

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I’d watched coverage of vigils at Bowie shrines around the world. Weeping fans, messages, mounds of flowers. The closest of these to me were in Beckenham, Brixton and around Soho. So a series of low-key mini-pilgrimages began. Heddon Street, site of the …Ziggy… cover photo shoot, where Bowie, the intrepid voyager had posed, ready for action, was first up. I had no idea then that, from January 2016 onwards, I’d still be doing it nine years later. 

Walking to find Bowie. 

The places I explored started to form a semi-mythical status in my imagination. They became Bowieland. Stretching from Bickley to Berlin, Eel Pie Island to Southend. Recovery from open heart surgery in 2013 gave the expeditions another dimension. Not only was I walking to find Bowie, but also to prolong my own existence on this planet. My physio’s order in the first days after my operation kept ringing in my ears: “Let’s walk.” Walk to recover, walk to stay alive. These became the first steps in the recovery of my lost hero. 

I became obsessed, a Fitbit addict charting ‘vigorous’ walking, cardiovascular health. Walking ‘with a purpose’: in my case, Bowie. It wasn’t an exact science. Quest? Maybe. Odyssey? Not quite. Oddity? More like it. Not knowing where I was going or how I was going to get there. That seemed to be the key. 

New Bowie patterns and markers emerged. The windows Bowie had stared out from in Oakley Street, Chelsea… That gig he’d played in the caves at Chislehurst … Whitehall recreation ground in Bickley where he’d kicked into autumn leaves… 

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It fitted in another sense too. My peripatetic trampings, I came to see, echoed Bowie’s own creative spirit. A self-confessed lodger, a nomad, acting out the role of the explorer. From Tolworth to outer space, from Pett Level to New Mexico. 

Somehow Bowie had made it from the back bedroom of his parents’ house in Plaistow Grove in Sundridge, to conquer the world. 

Bowie’s ashes were scattered, location unknown. There was no official shrine, no official route of pilgrimage. But the places that made him were still out there. I wanted to experience them first-hand. Not as part of a group tour, mediated by a guide’s narrative. I realise now, in the process, I was also charting my own life, meeting previous selves, trying to understand more fully where I’d come from, and where I might be heading in life. 

Bowieland is the product of these journeys. Repeated excursions led to a simple need to find out more. The walking itself made me value living for the moment, in my ‘Bowie zone’, not trying to meet a target or claim a result. 

It was uneven territory. I love Bowie’s humour, his pratfalls and self-deprecation, as well as the glorious triumphs. He gave the world Golden Years, but he also left us The Laughing Gnome. Bowie just shrugged his shoulders, moved on, learning as he went, sampling everything and anything. 

The incidental walk-on parts in this book include Bowie scholars to film producers. But you don’t have to be a Bowie obsessive to enjoy it. You’ll meet someone in the same class as him at Burnt Ash Primary School. The lodger in his flat in Manchester Street who opened up a wardrobe to find a pair of silver sprayed boots… Everyone, seemingly, has a Bowie story. Mention his name, and doors are unlocked. 

And I didn’t just find Bowie out there. I discovered the traces of other footsteps assimilated by him. From
TS Eliot and Vincent van Gogh to Little Richard and Jane Austen. It was the places themselves that spoke
most tellingly.

You can navigate Bowie’s afterlife from a mobile or a screen. Anyone can do that. Play, or bring to mind, the opening of Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life or the surge of sound at the start of Heroes. That’s how the walks still feel to me. To walk in Bowie’s footsteps is to get a sniff of the real. Put on your trainers or walking boots. Now it’s your turn.

Bowieland by Peter Carpenter, is out now (Monoray, £22).You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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