Lovely Runner | Haengnidan-gil, Suwon — The Street UNESCO Accidentally Preserved

Haengnidan-gil is roughly 600 metres of Hwaseomun-ro, running from the Hwaseomun gate to Hwahongmun, and the drama uses effectively all of it — first date, walking home, the shots where two people are just going somewhere together.

The reason this street looks the way it does is regulatory. Suwon Hwaseong was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1997, and the height and development restrictions that came with it froze Haenggung-dong while the rest of Suwon built upwards. For years that read as stagnation. Then people started reopening the old low buildings as cafés, workshops, concept stores and photo booths, and the constraint turned into the entire appeal.

What that gets you now: a low, walkable, slightly European-feeling street where nothing is taller than a couple of storeys, gachapon machines next to craft studios, cherry blossom in April, and a lot of people taking outfit photographs.

It is also where Kajaguruma sits — the Extraordinary Attorney Woo gimbap shop — a few minutes away, so if you have a memory on this Blox from that drama, this is the same neighbourhood.

Local commentators have started raising the obvious worry: that Haenggung-dong hollows out, that rents rise and the residents and the small workshops that made it worth filming get pushed out. Spend money in the small places rather than the chains.

Walk the whole 600 metres slowly, gate to gate. The drama did not pick a landmark here. It picked a street that people had already made worth walking.

Cover photo: Suwon Hwaseong walls, by Adil, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Fortress view, not the street.