The introduction offers an analysis of Edward Penny’s painting A City Shower (1764) and Jonathan Swift’s “A Description of a City Shower” (1710), from which it takes its inspiration, in order to establish the key concerns of the chapters that follow. These include the ways in which an ideal of urban life is so often represented as being embattled or under pressure in representations of walking; the anxieties and concerns about social intermixing in London’s public places; the physical and imaginative ordering and structuring of London’s streets; and the circulation, reworking, and persistence of particular tropes and images that is a hallmark of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century accounts of the city. It also situates the book’s focus within other accounts of the city in this period.

City streets, fortification walls, and gates were key elements of Athenian topography that structured urban space throughout the history of the city, directing circulation both under urgent circumstances and in everyday life. With their continuous repairs and modifications, they remained a fixed point and the backbone of the urban fabric.