Rimbaud was to coin the verb robinsonner, meaning to travel mentally,

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.

Patrick Keiller’s films London and Robinson in Space

Paris, the figure of the solitary stroller who both records and comes to symbolize the emergence of the modern city has a name – the flâneur.

Hawksmoor

the films of Patrick Keiller.

remapping of London through an alignment of those churches designed by the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor.

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.

wealth and respectability conceal the existence of poverty and depravity.