What is everyone talking about this week: Walk more slowly, will you?

April, besides gags on day one, can mean only one thing: it’s time to ditch the duster. An extra hour of sunlight has crept into the evening and, with it, a new kind of mise-en-scène has begun to take shape.

Have you noticed how everyone has started to walk more slowly? To stand a little taller? To observe things with more intention? If winter is the dandy’s calling card — parties galore — then spring is undeniably the season of the flâneur, in the country now as much as in the city.

The flâneur is, first and foremost, a shopper. His history, explained writer Muriel Zagha on her podcast Garlic & Pearls, is deftly entwined with that of the 18th-century shopping arcade, which emerged in pre-Napoleonic Paris to accommodate a burgeoning middle class keen to shop in more salubrious environs than the era’s putrefying streets. It is a retail structure that we appear to be re-embracing. Since the Quadrant Arcade won the New London Award for architecture in 2019, many others have been in the works, including at Newson’s Yard on Pimlico Road (housed within London’s oldest timber yard), Dolphin Square nearby Tate Britain (one of Britain’s largest residential tower blocks) and in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, where a new arcade will be unveiled this summer.

A glacial pace — seeing and being seen — is integral to the notion of the flâneur. ‘It’s very French,’ Ms Zagha says. Britons, co-host Suzanne Raine opines, are much faster walkers; something that’s contiguous with our Protestant work ethic. Perhaps, then, the country is where the flâneur finds his purest articulation: a place where things happen more slowly and beauty is more abundant.

As much as urban retail districts experience a surge in footfall during spring, as workers leave the office early to shop or grab a pint (April 15, statistically, is the driest day of the year), it is the country that truly reaps the rewards of our vernal adventures. Visits to the National Trust are on the rise, particularly among 18 to 25 year olds, and a growing number now choose to spend the whole weekend in the country, rather than take only a day trip. Our flourishing farm shops, besides offering a significant upgrade to supermarkets, have become a favourite setting for the rural saunterer, as they invite us to linger on this or that flower or ponder whether to try this or that olive oil.

Indulgent? Perhaps. But is this not what spring is all about? Our name for the season that flows forth from the March equinox comes from the Old English springan: to leap or to arise. Indulgence, meanwhile, comes from the Latin indulgere: to yield. Grow new crops, buy new clothes: ’tis the season to see the world anew.

Garlic & Pearls is available on all podcast platforms.

This feature originally appeared in the April 1, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.