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Start claiming territory in your neighbourhood
Begin with the streets you already walk. Colour them in, close a few blocks, then expand one street at a time.
How a dog walking pack locked down a Brighton seafront
If you walk the stretch between Hove Lawns and the lagoon, you're walking on somebody else's ground. Specifically, you're walking on ground held by eleven dogs who have been coordinating for four months and have no intention of giving it up.
They didn't set out to do this.
It started as a rota
The group already existed: a WhatsApp thread for the people who are reliably on the seafront before eight. Someone joined Patch, then someone else, and within a fortnight most of the thread was on it. They formed a pack mostly because the app asked if they wanted to.
The rota came later, and it came from a practical problem. Two of them realised they were walking the same half-mile every morning while nobody covered the western end at all. So they split it.
That's the whole strategy. Eleven people, a rough map, and an agreement about who covers what.
Why it works so well
A pack shares territory, so nobody's competing internally. Every walk any of them takes counts towards the same ground. Coverage beats effort. Eleven ordinary twenty-minute walks in different places will out-claim one person doing an ambitious two-hour route, every time.
They also benefit from geography. A seafront is a long thin thing with limited access points. Hold the access points and the rest follows.
What happens to everyone else
Reasonably, other walkers noticed. What's interesting is what they did about it.
Nobody quit. A few started walking earlier. Two other packs formed in response, one of which now holds most of the residential streets behind the front and is, by all accounts, thoroughly pleased with itself. One person has made it a personal mission to take a single specific patch outside a café and has now taken it four separate times.
The seafront pack finds this very funny and has started calling it his café.
The part that surprised us
We built packs expecting them to be used by friends who already walk together. What's actually happened is that packs are making people walk together who previously just nodded at each other.
Three of the eleven had never spoken before Patch. They'd been passing each other at the same time every morning for over a year.