Workers stream across Waterloo Bridge in London

For the promoters of slowness – such as myself in the Slow Lane column – the past 12 months have presented both confirmation and conundrum. The world has bowled along happily for decades in the fast lane, with an occasional half-friendly, half-condescending wave towards the slow one. But after the greatest financial crisis since 1929, it has been forced into low gear, if not reverse.

Perhaps we Slowniks were right all along: the good ship Enterprise was steaming at full speed towards the iceberg, trusting faulty predictions and a brazen conviction of invulnerability. When disaster strikes, however, those who say, “I told you so,” do not get thanked.

Three friends, former BBC radio producer Tessa Watt, agency management consultant Deepa Patel and project management consultant Amanda Stone, started planning their 10-day Slow Down London festival just before the capital and other financial centres were gripped by forced deceleration. For Watt, who left the media circus a couple of years ago to become a yoga and meditation teacher, that only accentuates the relevance of the message.

“There had to be a braking of this incredible spiral of consumerism and work. We’re talking about a speed that’s been building up since the Industrial Revolution,” says Watt. “At the same time the people I know who are still in work are tending to be working even harder now, because there are fewer people to do the jobs. And for the people not in employment, it’s undoubtedly very painful but it’s also an opportunity to look at what we want from life so we can appreciate some of the other things we might have missed out while we were rushing around.”

TAKE IT EASY

Where to head for a go-slow

The Slow Down London festival runs for 10 days from April 24 and includes activities and events such as wine tastings, poetry readings and meditation workshops, many of which are free, writes Helen Waller. Highlights include:

Walk: the festival opens with The Big Slow Walk across London Bridge at rush hour.
Friday April 24, 5pm, meeting at the east end of Embankment Gardens.

Lecture: David Rooney, curator of timekeeping at Greenwich’s Royal Observatory, shows who is responsible for keeping time, how the talking clock came about and how time once came to be sold in London.
Friday April 24, 7pm, National Portrait Gallery, free

Workshop: in an effort to revive letter-writing, poet Miriam Nash leads a Snail Mail workshop. She will urge people to use pen and paper instead of sending e-mails or texts. The workshop will draw on famous letters of the past and present.
Saturday April 25, 2pm, The Gallery, Foyles Charing Cross, free.
To reserve a place, e-mail events@foyles.co.uk

Entertainment: comedian Alex Horne, a Perrier Award nominee, joins forces with urban folk singer Annalie for the evening. Horne will read from his new book Birdwatchingwatching and Annalie will perform songs from her debut album The Anomaly Project.
Wednesday April 29, 6.30pm, Ray’s Jazz Café, Foyles Charing Cross Road, free

Food: an all-day feast at the Southbank, which allows visitors to eat at a relaxed pace as well as to buy from the Slow Food London market. There will also be choir ensembles from the Various Voices festival to serenade diners as they eat.
Sunday May 3, noon-6pm, Southbank Centre Square, free

For a full list of events, visit www.slowdownlondon.co.uk

Watt and friends have been able to attract an impressively wide range of partners, from heavyweight cultural institutions such as the South Bank Centre, the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to more off-beat outfits such as the School of Life, a shop in central London offering “good ideas for everyday living”. The resulting programme offers something for most tastes, from “serious, meaty intellectual debate” and sessions to thrash out a new slow philosophy, in areas such as transport and the arts, to more practical opportunities to live the slow life, with poetry, yoga and meditation workshops, slow walks, feasts and even wine tastings (one co-hosted by myself).

But isn’t London, epicentre of the capitalist work ethic and the world’s first megalopolis, the last place for slowness to take hold? This question especially engages Canadian writer and London resident Carl Honoré, author of the international bestsellerIn Praise of Slow and keynote speaker at Slow Down London’s inaugural lecture. A non-stop dynamo – not remotely slow in person – Honoré sees this as “a fascinating paradox. There is a strong feeling that slow is impossible in London. The English have this attachment to the rural idyll, the idea that to find peace you have to leave the city behind, go and cultivate organic vegetables in the Cotswolds. That’s one way to slow down but I would argue that it’s essentially wrong-headed.”

The key to the possibilities of slowness in London, for Honoré, lie in the fact that slowness isn’t necessarily a literal deceleration, and certainly does not depend on the proximity of babbling brooks and fields of daffodils, but is more of a state of mind that can be cultivated anywhere. “Slow is about how you personally approach every moment of the day: do you approach it in a fast spirit – ‘How can I do this as quickly as possible?’ – or in the spirit of, ‘How can I do this as well as possible, how much time and attention does this task require from me?’ That kind of spirit you can practise as well in the middle of London as in the rolling acres of Somerset.”

Honoré does not deny the many things that make London quite speedy or even the attractions of the fast-paced life. “Big cities act like particle accelerators – they attract fast, dynamic people, and then they make them faster. It’s something to do with all these bodies together fighting for space and time and money. A city like London is an extraordinary smorgasbord of things to do and buy and experience, and the natural human instinct is to want to have it all.”

His most arresting thought is that the very richness of human experience available in London holds the key to its potential for slowness. “One thing that cities have that the countryside doesn’t, to the same extent, is human relationships. You can’t make someone fall in love with you faster than they want to. These things have a natural arc to them. There’s something very slowing about relationships.” Honoré speaks glowingly about the relationships he has with people where he lives around the market street of Northcote Road in Battersea, south London. It strikes me as we talk that he is a natural heir to Dr Johnson, that great lover of London who counted the city’s richness in terms of its conviviality and considered a day lost when he did not make a new acquaintance.

From 1758 to 1760, as a distraction from work on his monumental dictionary, while living in his house in Gough Square off Fleet Street, Johnson contributed a weekly essay to the Universal Chronicle under the title The Idler. Of course, the Idler wasn’t really idle, or slow, at all; while constantly berating himself for his sloth, Johnson maintained a literary productivity that would shame most contemporary authors (certainly myself). But the point of the Idler was enjoyment; to allow the discursive mind the time to wander at leisure over varied themes, from criticism and biography to war and cruelty to animals, as the author wandered through the London streets pausing in coffee-houses and taverns.

Perhaps Slow Down London will prove a belated apotheosis of that elusive figure, the London flâneur – the poetic appreciator of the sights and sounds and people of the city that the harassed worker rushes past without noticing. Tom Hodgkinson, another Slow Down London patron, is a modern flâneur. The editor of the The Idler magazine and author of How to be Idle, How to be Free and most recently The Idle Parent , Hodgkinson, who now lives in Devon with his family, makes no bones about his antipathy to speed. “Speed is a problem because what has led to the crunch has been a combination of greediness and impatience – a desire for quick profits now.”

So how can Slow Down London help restore us to our rightful pace? “There are different levels,” Hodgkinson says. “There are things you can do within the existing framework, like cycling in to work instead of being stuck on the Tube reading Metro, or going out to sit in a church at lunchtime instead of staring at your computer screen.”

More than most big cities, London, with its great parks, its majestic tidal river and innumerable other open spaces, swimming ponds and lidos, can surely offer the old Roman notion of rus in urbe, the city in the country.

In 2004, when I wrote my first Slow Lane column, I suggested it was not necessary to go all the way, with the romantic young WB Yeats, to the lake-isle of Innisfree to find the peace that “comes dropping slow”. Yeats wrote the archetypal lyric of hippyish escape while living in the west London borough of Hammersmith and he has done a disservice to generations of urbanites by associating the city exclusively with unappealing grey pavements.

A couple tend an allotment in Hyde Park in 1941

Slow Down London, as I see it, encourages us to raise our heads from contemplation of the paving stones. Just a small change in the angle of our view can bring unexpected delights into focus. London’s ancient fabric is shot through with crevices where slowness can settle. The other day I was walking down Piccadilly, for the umpteenth time in my life, and happened to look up at a row of buildings, near St James’s church, I had never paid attention to. I noticed, and admired the fine facade of the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour, the portrait sculptures of distinguished watercolourists by Onslow Ford and the rather weathered maidens chiselled in stone by a Belgian artist called Verheyden. Not by any means one of London’s greatest architectural or artistic triumphs, but work of quality and dignity that suddenly brought a historical perspective to the raucous busyness of rush hour.

For me the point of slowing down is not the rigorous imposition of a more ponderous beat, but the enhancement of pleasure and enjoyment. This can be about small things, slight adjustments, brief but rich moments. One of the greatest books written about London, and its symphonic, polyrhythmic richness, is Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Here it is not a question of puritanical rejection of the city’s bustle. Clarissa Dalloway loves the “bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs.” But simultaneously she can appreciate the opposite of all that, going on at the precisely the same time a few minutes walk away in the park: “The silence; the mist; the hum; the slow-swimming happy ducks.”

You might just drop in to the National Gallery and spend 10 minutes with your favourite painting, free of charge, unpressurised by the thought of having to cover an entire blockbuster exhibition. Once when I wrote about my regular assignments with Velázquez’s “Rokeby Venus” (1651), a reader responded with an account of a visit he had made to see the painting. He was sitting on the bench in front of her when an old gentleman, also on the bench, leant across and said, “I have been in love with her since 1962.” “I have been in love with her since 1957,” was his reply.

If all this sounds vaguely frivolous, Alastair Sawday, a guide-book publisher, environmentalist and another Slow Down London patron, is convinced that the slow movement is “a powerful response to the madness of the age. Its genius is that it can be enjoyed at every level. This is an idea in deadly earnest and it deserves our deep respect.”

Harry Eyres: Listen to the sound of heartfelt thanks