What Vans Can’t Teach

Have you ever wondered how many kilometres you’ve walked in your lifetime? As dog walkers, the kind who don’t use vans, we cover serious ground every single day. Tens of kilometres, week in, week out, since 2007. Same streets, same corners, same routes. There’s a famous ad where a man walks to the same shop every day until he eventually wears a tunnel through the pavement. We think about that ad a lot. One day the streets of Notting Hill will simply cave in beneath us.

But here’s the thing, and this is what we want to write about today: the dogs don’t experience it as the same route at all. Every day the city offers something new. Something a dog riding in a van will never get.

Walking to the park, picking up packmates along the way, isn’t just fun (though it is very much fun). It’s real socialisation. Not just with other dogs. With everything. The city itself.

The city is loud, and that’s the point

Think about a puppy arriving in London for the first time. First weeks with their mother, then isolation during vaccinations, and socialisation is already limited before it even begins. And then suddenly: buses. Scaffolding. Cyclists. Builders. Someone with an umbrella. A pigeon that does something unexpected.

You can start before the full vaccination course is done, carry your puppy through it all if you have to. (We are not recommending this for Saint Bernards or Great Danes. You’re on your own there.)

The slow, steady exposure to everything the city throws at you is one of the most important things you can do for a young dog. We meet so many nervous dogs whose problems trace back to simply not having seen enough of the world early on. Passing someone with an umbrella shouldn’t be a crisis. For some dogs, it is.

Bella

Bella was a white German Shepherd we walked years ago, and she came to us as a puppy with a very specific list of things she found deeply unreasonable. Buses were at the top. Large groups of dogs were a close second.

Kensington Gardens has no shortage of dog walkers, so the second problem gradually sorted itself out through sheer daily exposure. The buses required a different approach. Walking through the neighbourhood each day, we’d slow our pace near bus stops, letting Bella watch as a bus pulled in, hissed dramatically (London buses do love a good hiss), and moved on. The dogs around her couldn’t have cared less. And slowly, neither could she.

It didn’t take long. She’d started young, and young dogs are still writing their story. By the time she was properly settled into the pack, Bella had become one of the most sociable dogs we’d walked. Confident, relaxed, full of friends.

Kona

Kona was a different case entirely. Seven years old, moving from rural America to London with her owners. If Bella was a puppy discovering the city, Kona was an adult who’d been dropped into it without warning.

She was scared. Withdrawn. Honestly, a little sad. She didn’t want to be touched, not even by us, in those first weeks. We gave her the only things that actually work in situations like that: time, patience, warmth and space. No rushing. No pressure.

What helped most was the routine. The same streets, the same sounds, the same faces, every single day. Gradually, a stranger passing on the pavement stopped feeling like a threat. A bus became background noise. The city, which had felt overwhelming, became familiar.

Kona never became the dog who trusted everyone. She didn’t need to. What she became was calm, genuinely and quietly calm. Watching that happen, slowly and then all at once, is honestly one of the best parts of this job.

It took her longer than it took Bella. Older dogs rewrite more carefully. But she got there.

Streets, not sessions

Bella needed gentle exposure while she was still young enough to take it all in stride. Kona needed patience, repetition and a lot of respect for her pace. Different starting points, different timelines, but the same thing made the difference for both of them: walking through the city every day, surrounded by dogs who weren’t scared.

That’s city socialisation. Not a class. Not a specialist session. Just the streets, the buses, the cyclists, the construction noise, the scaffolding, the occasional pigeon situation, walked through day after day until the world stops feeling dangerous.

It’s one of the reasons we’ve never used a van. The journey is the point.