The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Our motto is be gay and free
Make Love and Joy your choicest treasures
Look on our book of glee
And Ramble over scenes of Pleasure. 22
A Spatial Story of Exchange
Rambles had been published from the seventeenth century onward,
23 but the years following the Napoleonic Wars saw the publication a
large number of best-selling books and prints featuring the rambler, or fashionable
and sporting man about town. These semifictional urban narratives
told of the initiation of various country gentlemen to the adventures of city
life in London under the guidance of a streetwise urban relative. 24 Monthly
periodicals, with “rambler” in the title, drew on earlier literature offering
lists, locations, and descriptions of prostitutes, 25 in order to cater for male
readers in pursuit of sex pleasure. 26
The rambler represented a new kind of urban masculinity—male,
young, heterosexual, and upper-class. Also described as a corinthian, bruiser,
or dandy, the rambler was a man of fashion and sport, of leisure and pleasure,
who spent his income on gambling, drinking, and whoring: “A young unmarried
Englishman, with a large fortune, spends but a small share of it on
his common expenses; the greatest part is destined to his pleasures, that is
to say, to the ladies.” 27
The rambler traverses the city, looking in its open and its interior
spaces for adventure and entertainment; in so doing, he creates a kind of
conceptual and physical map of what the city is. In constant motion, in pursuit
of pleasure, leisure, and consumption, the rambler is a specific form of
urban representation—he represents the city as multiple sites of desire. “We
have already taken a promiscuous ramble from the West towards the East,
and it has afforded some amusement; but our stock is abundant, and many
objects of curiosity are still in view.” 28
BAZAARS: PLEASURE HOUSES OF COMMODITY
CONSUMPTION
The rambler’s relation to the city, one of curiosity and desire, also describes
the attitude toward the new luxury shopping venues built during the same
period. These include exchanges, bazaars, and arcades in the area west of Regent
Street. 29 The new bazaars were like both Walter Benjamin’s arcades, “a
city, indeed a world in miniature,” and the world exhibitions, “places of pilgrimage
to the fetish Commodity.” 30 Physically, the English bazaar was a
building of more than one story, which contained shopping stalls rented out
to retailers of different trades, as well as picture galleries, indoor gardens,