Psychogeography

The Practice of Everyday Life. Taking New York as his subject, de Certeau provides a useful distinction between the street-level gaze of the walker and the panoptical perspective of the voyeur,

dramatise the city as a place of dark imaginings.

Hawksmoor

Hegelian terminology

the tradition of writer as walker

London is overlaid by the fictional and poetic reworking of successive figures, creating patterns of continuity and resonance that can be detected by those attuned to the city’s eternal and unchanging rhythms.

‘The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.’2

writers such as Defoe, de Quincey, Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Machen, paints a uniformly dark picture of the city as the site of crime, poverty and death.

The successful navigation of such a city is dependent upon the composition of a mental map, which can be transposed upon its physical layout,