A Picnic With Thoreau

Who hasn’t dreamt of running away from it all? When the daily grind starts to wear you down, the idea of swapping city life for a simple hut is extremely appealing.

In 1840s, writer Henry David Thoreau swapped his busy schedule in Concord, Massachusetts, for a wooden hut he built himself in Walden Pond. He wrote: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”.

More recently, Neil Ansell swapped his life as an award winning television journalist with the BBC and a long standing writer for the broadsheets in London for a remote hillside cottage in Wales, without water, electricity, gas or people. His book, Deep Country, is an account of the five years he spent in the hills, how he lived and what he lived for, of how he learned to become self-sufficient in every sense of the word.

Join us for a picnic in the most remote hidden wilderness that London can offer, Camley Street Gardens, to discuss ideas around self-discovery, purpose, the natural world and the advantages of staying still.