The council wasn’t hiring a municipal walker, but she took the job anyway

As Lian Bell walked up the leafy North Circular Road on Tuesday afternoon, past O’Devaney Gardens, the repetitive bleep of a reversing construction vehicle filled the air.

Part of the road was cordoned off.

“Oh, this is interesting,” she said. “I wonder what’s going on?”

Two workers in yellow high-vis Road Safety Authority jackets gave her a friendly greeting. Maybe, because she too was wearing high-vis.

But while their uniforms clearly indicated that they worked with a state body, hers raised more questions on closer inspection.

Bell’s high-vis vest looked like council issue. Except, in place of the city’s logo of three castles were in fact three feet, with the words “Municipal Walker” below them.

Sometimes, she’ll get a warm nod from a council worker who assumes she’s a colleague, she says – and every so often, somebody will flag her down to ask her what, exactly, is a “municipal walker”.

Usually, she’ll say right off that she’s not actually a council worker, she says. “I’m interested in what walking does for a city, and the ways it’s good for the city, and I’m interested in the art of it.”

It’s a job she invented for herself, she says, and once a month since September 2022, she has done a full circuit of the North and South Circular Roads, observing these 14km through the seasons.

What exactly it means to be the self-proclaimed Municipal Walker of Dublin is something Bell is still dwelling on, she says, laughing. 

“It’s funny. I so rarely actually talk about this,” she says. “I’m still trying to get my head around it, partly because I do all of these walks on my own.”

Walking for the good of the city

The last few days had been heavy with rain and chilly winds. 

But today was 16°C. The sky was blue and crisp. An ideal day to embark on what would be the walk that marked three years of serving as the Municipal Walker, Bell says. “That said, I’ve done it when I was sick or when there wasn’t a dry day.”

While Bell is a full-time artist and this is, in a sense, an art project, she is also hesitant to categorise it as one.

She didn’t start out thinking this was going to be an art project at all, she says while approaching the outskirts of Phibsborough. “It was more, coming out of Covid, feeling sort of worried about the city.”

There was a feeling of palpable anxiety and anger on the streets, she said. “And I didn’t know how to influence or improve it. Or whether I had any responsibility here.”

She had been researching the idea of labyrinths, she says. “Unlike a maze, it’s one long winding path and I loved that they were used as protections or charms.”

Fishermen in northern Europe would use them before they would go out to sea, she says. “They would walk in them for protection. Or to ask for good weather.”

As she started walking, she wondered if the ritual of performing this same walk each month fulfilled a similar purpose, she says. “Is this what I was doing? Is it possible to improve, or walk for the good of the city?”

How to get a job in the public sector

Bell grew up in Rathmines, she says, walking through the piles of leaves that had gathered on the inside of the footpath.

As a kid, in the 1980s, she remembered her mother regularly pointing out a man on the street who would walk around carrying a bucket and a rag, she says. “He was quite big. He always wore a paddy cap. Tartan. The Irish flag’s colours.”

His name was Derek Howe, she says. “My mother told me the story where he created his own job, essentially.”

Apparently, Howe had noticed that all the old parking meters needed cleaning and so he did, she says. “He kept doing it and eventually the council paid him for his work.”

The sentiment from the story that she liked was how he took responsibility for a part of the city, she said. “And, what if the thing was maybe not as obvious, or practical?”

While trying to determine what her role could be, someone suggested she ought to photograph the city as it is changing, she says. “I ended up taking a lot of these crude snaps at certain points.”

It’s something she does now, not because she likes it, she says. “It feels like bureaucracy. Like it’s actually not really a part of the walk. But I feel like I kinda have to do it.”

If the council was to hire her though, she wouldn’t want arts funding, she says. “I’ve thought about it a lot. But if I were to do that, I’d rather be in the Road Maintenance Service.”

A city is its people

Two young men in dark shirts with the words “Church of Jesus Christ” above the right breast stopped Bell as she walked silently by Aldborough House.

“Excuse me,” said the taller of the two Mormons. “Would you like to join us in church on Sunday?”

Bell gave a polite shake of her head, and continued on her way, stopping momentarily to take a photo of a piece of footpath.

A city is the people walking in it, Bell says as she reaches Spencer Dock, passing the head of Luke Kelly. “Or being in it.”

Near the river, she notices an unusually large number of people leaving the Convention Centre.

“This is the busiest I’ve ever seen it,” she said.

She stopped at the crossing just beside the drawbridge, amid a sea of people still exiting the centre, many clutching folders, smiling, and wearing suits and dresses.

Turning to a couple right behind her, she said: “Can I ask you, was that a citizenship ceremony?”

“Yep,” said the man.

“Oh, congratulations,” she said. “Oh brilliant!”

Delighted, she carried on her way, stopping on the Beckett Bridge to take a photograph of the Liffey as its dark green water flows out to the port.

An important aspect of this is observing and absorbing the city, she says. “A lot of us stick headphones on, or we extract ourselves by being in a car.”

Being the Municipal Walker is to navigate the city without using any of those objects that separate her from it, she says. “The question is then: where is the edge of me? Where does the edge of my body end and the city begin.”

Walk like nobody is watching

Bell took a seat on one of the green steel benches that looked out across the basin to the graving docks, the flats in Ringsend and the stacks.

She took out a flask of coffee and ate a jam brown-bread sandwich while a gull eyed her up, snapping its beak at her feet and some starlings surveyed the grass in a concrete planter behind her.

Although this was her thirty-sixth time doing the walk, she hadn’t ever really announced it to anybody until recently, she said. “I put a little bit up on my website six weeks ago. So it hasn’t been out in the world really.”

It’s nice to think somebody will read about this and learn it’s been happening every month for three years now, she says. “They’ll go ‘huh’, that’s mad, and they’ll never ever see me, or come across my path.”

“But maybe, if it’s something interesting, it’ll just be in the back of their head,” she says. “I love the quietness of it. It’s doing what it does whether or not anybody sees it.”

Bell stood up, packed away her flask and an empty blue ziploc bag, and got ready to march the length of the South Circular Road.