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In walking of all kinds, the body can never mechanically pass seamlessly through rural space informed by disruptive norms and practical techniques.   The interruptions of stomach cramps and hunger, headaches, blisters, ankle strains, limbs that `go to sleep', muscle fatigue, mosquito bites and a host of other bodily sensations may foreground an overwhelming awareness of the body that can dominate consciousness. Moreover, the terrain and climate are apt to impose themselves upon the body, irrespective of discourses about the rural idyll and the romantic countryside. The body must perform certain tasks, which may be painful or pleasurable in their novelty, or challenging in their awkwardness. Walkers must avoid barbed wire, be wary when passing through fields, make sure they do not step in cowpats or mud or in holes, step over logs, leap across streams, negotiate stepping stones and stiles, swat swarms of flies away, avoid brambles, nettles and thistles. These actions dramatically involve bodily actions and reveal physical properties. For instance, climbing over an unstable and swaying fence, the walker may become suddenly aware of the body’s mass and weight. Environment and climate thus impose upon walking strategies and sensations. The tactile qualities of many rural paths produce a mindfulness about one’s balance as well as a practical and aesthetic awareness of textures underfoot and all around. The walking body treads across rocky ground, springy forest floor, marsh and bog, rough tracks, heathery moorland, long grass, mud, root-lined surfaces, pasture, tarmac and autumnal leafy carpets. Biting insects inhabit long grasses, rain drenches clothes, frosty air freezes body parts. Urban studies scholars and urban policy practitioners agree that,  increasingly, the aim of design interventions into urban space is to alter  the experience of that space for its human inhabitants. Urban  environments are more and more often designed in order to be  distinctive, vibrant and beautiful, thus creating – or so the argument  goes – memorable sensory experiences for the people who pass  through them (Allen, 2006; Klingman, 2007; Lonsway, 2009; Thrift,  2004). This paper has engaged with this argument, firstly, by arguing  that urban spaces are indeed experienced with feeling (see also Rose et  al., 2010). Even people visiting rather ordinary town centres – like  those of Bedford and Milton Keynes – can describe a very rich range of  sensory engagements with those places. These encounters are  multisensory. Sight, touch, sound and smell in particular are all part of  how these towns are experienced. And these experiences of place are  vary considerably from one place to another. The smooth marble and  glazing of Milton Keynes's shopping centre, for example, provokes  feelings of light and smoothness; the varied surface textures of  Bedford's buildings encourage people to compare the town to  sandpaper. Our research thus confirms what many others scholars  have also noted: “material culture is neither stable nor fixed, but  inherently transitive, demanding connection and completion by the  perceiver” (Seremetakis, 1994, p. 7). Specific forms of built  environment afford specific forms of sensory experience.  29  However, while human sensory experience can be understood as  being embedded in material environments, and as provoked by specific  aspects of them, urban spaces do not create experiences in a  straightforward manner. The case studies discussed here suggest that a  more complex analysis is required, for two reasons.  First, the sensory experiencing of Bedford and Milton Keynes  was significantly mediated by the specific walking practices that  predominate in those two places. Sensory accounts of the city thus  have to take account not only of the sensing body, but of how the  sensory body is moving through urban space.  Secondly, a certain sort of remembering also mediates the  experiencing of urban built environments. In Bedford and Milton  Keynes, regular users of the town centres were both highly engaged in  and articulate about the sensory qualities of the built environment; yet  they were also "over it" to such a degree that they did not notice their  surroundings. This paradox of attentive sensory engagement  experiences in places simultaneously understood to be at best "nice"  can be understood, we would argue, by paying more attention to the  working of particular kinds of memory. Serematkis (1994) argues that  one of the most important ways that 'the perceiver' creates the  'completion' of a material urban environment is by acts of memory.  And, in counterposition to most of the literature on memory in urban  places, the paradox of sensory experiencing we are addressing here  does not involve collective cultural identity. Rather, our research  participants' experiences of these two places was infused with what  Serematkis calls perceptual memory:  “...perceptual memory as a cultural form, is not to be found in the  psychic apparatus of a monadic, pre-cultural and ahistorical  seer, but is encased and embodied out there in a dispersed  surround of created things, surfaces, depths and densities that  give back refractions of our own sensory biographies.”  (Seremetakis, 1994, p. 129)  Perceptual memory was at work as our participants walked around  Bedford and Milton Keynes, responding to specific created things and  surfaces not only in terms of those things' and objects' material  qualities, but also in relation to the participants' own, remembered,  sensory biographies. To invert Keightley's (2010, p. 58) claim,  remembering is not just "a performance rooted in lived contexts" but is  also "an articulation of individual psychologies". Such remembering is a  continual process, and produced not only explicit sensory engagements  with the two towns, but also the effect of a series of questions for our  participants: how was this place different in the past? How is it  different from other places I've visited? How is it the same as other  places I've been to?  This effect mediates the sensory perception of the urban  environment. Recalling how this place was different in the past means  31  that the research participants were not engaging solely with the urban  environment as it currently exists, but also in relation to how it looked,  smelt, and sounded in the past. Noting how Bedford and Milton Keynes  are different from other places research participants could remember  visiting invokes a series of comparisons and judgements that again  mediates the immediate experiencing of those two towns. And  asserting that Bedford and Milton Keynes are just the same as other  town centres and shopping centres establishes them as 'types' rather  than unique urban environments, once again allowing their immediate  sensory impact to be reflected upon and, in this case, dulled. As  Eizenberg (2010) argues, this ongoing remembering of other places and  of previous visits to the same place both assimilates a person into the  experienced place and constantly makes reference to other places  elsewhere. It thus accounts for the paradoxical sensibility to, as well as  ignoral of, the built environment articulated by our research  participants. All this suggests that the turn away from Bergson and the  insistence on the collective, cultural nature of memory in urban spaces  may be premature, when perhaps what we are seeing in these case  studies is the evidence of 'pure memory' emerging: "the virtual whole of  the continuous prolongation of past experience into the present…  continually limited by mental functions subordinated to the activity of  the body" (Burton, 2008, p. 329).  In conclusion, we agree that work exploring the multisensory  nature of designed urban environments is valuable for understanding  32  some of the key changes occurring to many towns and cities in the early  twenty-first century. However, we would also argue that, given the  importance of distinct modes of mobility and of perceptual memory to  the mediation of that multisensoriality among the research participants  in this project, such work needs to pay much more attention to these  processes in its account of how urban environments are experienced.