Bored of his usual route, Nigel Beecroft ran every street in Birmingham instead

In a garden in Handsworth, in north-west Birmingham, there are six ice cream vans. Nigel Beecroft knows this because he has run past it, as he has run past every other garden in the city.

Beecroft, 60, an associate director who lives in Harborne, on the south-west side, started about two years before he finished. He had grown bored of his daily route, the Express & Star reported, and wanted a challenge that few people had tried. So he began running the streets he did not know, mornings and evenings, and marking each one off.

On Friday 17 October 2025 he ran the last of them. The paper’s count was 7,998 streets and some 2,500 miles (4,000 km). He marked it with a pint at his local.

“It started as a bit of a quirky idea but I just got more and more into it.” — Nigel Beecroft, to the Express & Star

Cul-de-sacs count

The rules of an every-street project are simple. A dead end still has to be run to the end and back. Beecroft said a lot of Birmingham is cul-de-sacs, and that he got some odd looks in them.

He planned each run on an app before leaving the house and recorded it on Strava, the fitness-tracking app, so that the map filled in as he went. He kept a diary too. Motorways and dual carriageways (divided highways) were left out unless a path ran beside them. Traffic, he told the paper, was the main difficulty.

He wore out four pairs of trainers and fell eight times, wet leaves being one cause. He ran through the city’s bin strike, hurdling rubbish bags. Elsewhere he found a house painted with an astronomical mural.

“I’m sure there aren’t many people who have seen every single street in Birmingham.” — Nigel Beecroft, to the Express & Star

He used the run to raise money for the Mace Foundation, which supports people who have been in care. He is not finished, either: the paper reported that he is about 30 per cent of the way through Lille, in northern France.

Why this matters

In a study published in Nature Neuroscience in 2020, researchers followed 132 people in New York and Miami by phone GPS for three to four months, and texted them at random times to ask how they felt. On days when people moved through a wider variety of places, they reported more positive emotions. The US National Institutes of Health, which helped fund the work, summarised it with two cautions: the participants were aged 18 to 31, and the link may run both ways, since a good mood may also send people exploring.

The exercise part is better established. The NHS (the UK health service) recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate activity a week, such as brisk walking, or 75 minutes of vigorous activity, such as running, plus strengthening exercises on two days.

Start with your own postcode

You do not need a city, and you do not need to run.

• Pick a boundary you can finish. The streets within half a mile of home, your postcode district (ZIP code), a village. Choose something that takes weeks, not years.
• Walk it if you like. A street walked is a street done. CityStrides, a website built for this pastime, has counted walks and hikes alongside runs since 2015.
• Plan before you go. Look at the map, choose tonight’s streets, then leave. A paper map and a highlighter work as well as an app.
• Use ordinary street sense. Go in daylight to begin with, tell someone your route in places you do not know, and skip any road without a pavement (sidewalk).
• Check first if you need to. The NHS advises seeing your GP (family doctor) before starting if you have not exercised for some time or have a medical condition.

If you want a gentle way to build up the walking first, our walking plan for beginners sets one out week by week. And for what happens when the same idea is applied to a continent, read about Karl Bushby’s walk home from Chile.