ABSTRACT
In contemporary urban and architectural discourse, we are increasingly obsessed by figures which traverse space: the flâneur, the spy, the detective, the prostitute, the rambler, the cyprian. These are all spatial metaphors, representing urban explorations, passages of revelation, journeys of discovery – ‘spatial stories’.2 Through the personal and the political, the theoretical and the historical, we all tell spatial stories, we exchange narratives of architecture in, and of, the city.3 Inspired by a desire to ‘know’ the past as a woman, to understand the gendering of architectural space in nineteenth-century London, this chapter tells one such story, a spatial story of the ramble.
