Immersive "walking around" videos are garnering millions upon millions of view on YouTube—no surprise, with travel prohibitively complicated, we're all craving a sense of pre-Covid normalcy and a return to social interaction and public life
After months of semi-lockdown and unpredictable, increasingly complicated barriers to travel, the creeping anxiety that so many of us—previously freewheeling weekend warriors who'd happily hop a longhaul flight at the drop of a hat—have been edging is finally taking its toll. No surprise that we're all looking for outlets and salves to cure our collective wanderlust—see all the handy hiking guides, culinary staycations, self-improvement courses and imaginative mental stimulation platforms Tatler has curated to amuse you, you're welcome.
Sometimes, though, all our frayed nerves and bored brains crave is a sense of return to pre-Covid public life, casual social interaction, streetscapes and regional citybreaks—a familiar-unfamiliar departure from the daily home-work-home grind. Enter "walking around videos," a burgeoning YouTube trend that's flown under the radar for years but has quietly garnered millions upon millions of views, especially in recent months.
"Walking around videos" are exactly what they sound like they are—typically long-ish, 45- to 90-minute no-talking, real street-sound long walks through an ordinary neighbourhood in a city or town. They're oddly soothing—lowkey vignettes that are reminiscent of pre-pandemic normalcy—and some of our favourite walking videos, listed below, features destinations we can't wait to visit again, once this whole thing— * gestures around wildly * — blows over.