For walk builders

Building a walk

Anyone can draw a walk in the builder and save it to their own phone — that part is free and needs nothing from us. Getting one published — a permanent page, on the map, walkable by strangers — takes a little more.

New here? The short version: you pick something in your town to stand in for the Sun, and every planet's distance follows from how big that thing really is. Walk to them and they show up at true scale through the card's camera view. Nothing below is complicated — it's mostly about choosing good places.

What makes a walk worth walking

The maths is automatic; the choosing is the whole job. A walk where the planets land on a parking bollard, a locked courtyard and the middle of a dual carriageway is technically correct and nobody enjoys it. A walk where Mercury is a post office, Mars is a fire station and Neptune is down at the water is the same maths and a completely different afternoon.

So if you came here from the map toy: that page is deliberately the stripped-back version. It drops the planets in a straight line from wherever you point, because its job is to show you the scale in ten seconds. It is not trying to design a good walk, and it can't — that part needs someone who knows the place. Sit down with the builder when you've got a few minutes and pick the stops on purpose.

How publishing works

1. Draw it in the builder. Pick a Sun, size it, place your stops.
2. Submit it with a contact address. This takes a minute and commits you to nothing.
3. We email you. Every "official" walk gets a personal review — we'll talk it through and help fill in anything missing.
4. You send photos of the stops, as a reply to that email.
5. It goes live with your credit on it.

We're a small operation, so expect a few days.

Photos

We ask for one clear photo of each stop, plus the Sun. It doesn't need to be a work of art, just something recognizable: enough of the surroundings that someone arriving can look up and know they're in the right spot. That's exactly what the photo is used for — it appears on the stop's page as the thing a walker checks themselves against, because GPS only gets them within a few dozen feet.

Photos are also how we know a route is real. We can't walk every city ourselves, so asking you to walk your own route first is what tells us the directions, the locations and the day as a whole are worth someone else's time.

What makes a good Sun

Everything else is scaled from this one object, so it has to be findable.

• A sphere, globe, dome or round sculpture.
• Publicly accessible, without paying or booking.
• Recognizable enough that a stranger can stand in front of it and be sure.
• Not going anywhere. A touring installation makes a beautiful Sun and a dead walk in six months.

What makes a good stop

• On the arc. The builder shows you where each planet would actually fall.
• Publicly accessible and safe to stand at for a few minutes, taking a photo.
• Somewhere worth being. Given a choice between a correct spot on an empty verge and one a hundred feet away outside a good café, take the café.
• Reachable. Outer planets get genuinely far out — check there's a sensible way to get there and mention it.

What we turn down

• Stops on private property, or that need a ticket.
• Stops nobody can actually reach.
• Routes that were clearly never walked. This is usually obvious, and it's why we ask for photos.

Where we can publish, today

Right now we can only publish walks in the United States. Publishing a walk elsewhere, even a free one, brings legal obligations we haven't set up for yet, particularly in the EU and UK. Reach out and let us know anyway — if there's enough interest in an area, we can work out the legal side and make it happen.