You'll believe a house can walk if you can get to the Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire by the end of November. Between then and now, the delightful Walking House, a 3.5 metre diameter hexagon of black steel tube, 3.5 metres long, will be going through its paces. What it does, as its name suggests is to walk, if only very slowly, at just 0.1mph in fact. Have a look above on YouTube to see it in action.  Six electrically powered lunar module-like legs with bright yellow pads, or feet, enable the house to go walkabout. Designed by the Copenhagen artists' collective N55, Walking House is an essentially romantic idea lovingly realised using new, environmentally friendly technology. The inspiration for the design was the Romany travellers' traditional way of life, roaming the country, and across borders, by caravan, but brought up to date: Walking House has no need for horses and reins or diesel engines, gearboxes and wheels to make it go. While standing still, it generates power through solar cells and small windmills and when fully charged it gets up and walks.  The NASA-style prototype has been designed for four people, although the members of N55's Walking House team – Ion Sorvin, Oivind Alexander Slaatto and Sam Kronick – are keen to point out that its structure can be extended, while if stacked together, a group of Walking Houses could form temporary villages. The prototype features polycarbonate windows, built-in furniture, including sleeping platforms, a composting lavatory and a wood-burning stove.  The idea is not entirely new, as the British Pop architectural collective, Archigram, designed a Walking City, largely attributed to the late Ron Herron, in 1964 and there have been any number of walking pods and other inhabitable structures in sci-fi novels, comic strips and films over the past century. Realised in the form of drawings and animation, Herron's Walking City was a hugely enjoyable proposal, an entire city that could get up, walk to wherever in the world its citizens would like to go, and plug itself into the local landscape for energy and supplies. The city could take itself on holiday, and Herron's beautifully realised drawings showed this giant automaton taking itself on trips to various exotic locations.  The thinking behind Walking House is compelling: why can't we live more like Travellers have? Why do we need to stick to one place? There are many answers to these questions, of course, but questions of culture, work, how and where we educate our children aside, the all too real answer is property. Or land. In most of the world, humans have parcelled up and privatised land and its ownership is seen as an almost God-given right. And, this is why Travellers themselves have found the modern world an increasingly hostile place. Wherever they go, the customs and rules of land ownership say "you're not welcome here".  So, while Walking House is a special project, it might be hard for potential future owners to find anywhere to walk their house to, except a caravan site. And can you imagine Walking Houses cluttering up roads on Bank Holidays as they plod along at the speed of a singularly dozy tortoise in the wake of caravans towed by cars? They wouldn't be very popular.  The nomadic way of life, although much romanticised, has largely died out worldwide. This might be sad, yet Walking House shows that the idea is far from dead, and that the notion of ambling through the world in the equivalent of a gaily painted Gypsy caravan might just be brought happily bang up to date.
The Walking House recalls ancient nomadic habits, but is it a practical answer to lower carbon living, asks Jonathan Glancey