How to avoid crashing into strangers without slowing down

When not visiting clients, I tend to work in IBM's office in Central London. The office is very near to one of London's busiest commuter stations so I find myself travelling in the opposite direction to most other commuters: I am using the London underground network to reach Waterloo station when most other workers are trying to leave Waterloo and vice versa.

This makes for a more relaxing journey (fewer people to compete with for space on the trains I use, etc, etc). But it does cause one problem when walking: there is almost always a wall of people hurtling towards me.

This problem is particularly acute near my home in Canary Wharf. There are lots of very modern office blocks in a regimented pattern, with blind corners.

This means that when I approach a blind corner I have to slow down to avoid the risk of bumping into the crowd coming the other way. This makes my life somewhat difficult as I don't "do" slow walking.

n the diagrams below, the blue blocks are buildings, I am the green path and the oncoming crowd is in black.

The first diagram below shows the problem: blind corner and oncoming crowd.

The second diagram shows my solution. As I approach a blind corner, I change direction and walk across the potentially oncoming crowd. If no crowd materialises, I am not really worse off. But if there is a crowd, I am walking perpendicularly to it and so have several precious milliseconds to find a gap between people to dart into.

This increases the distance I walk but means I have no need to slow down. Excellent!