In parks and playing fields, gardens and wasteground, well-worn dusty paths are to be found stretching away in threadbare lines towards their triangulated destinations.

Gaston Bachelard called these 'les chemins du desir':
pathways of desire.
-Paths that were not designed but instead were eroded organically away by individuals deciding where they wanted to go, rather than allowing the state-sponsored street architecture to dictate to them where they should go.

Its interesting to speculate on the way that many of the thoroughfares of London must have begun their lives in Roman times as 'desire lines', subconciously picked as the 'correct route' between destinations;
over time they would have widened to become roads. The psychogeography of the city becomes more immediate when you imagine it like that.

The shortcut across the churchyard from my house to the off-licence has become so much more alluring now I know that it is no longer a shortcut, but a pathway of desire...