| Summary: | “Walking Pictures” is about how tourists walk London. It studies two ways of walking the city: walking tours and film. My thesis demonstrates how each is implicated in the other’s practices. Combining historical research of the development of tourist walking between 1880 and 1939 with cinematic textual analysis of London-set non-fiction and fiction films of this period, I ask: how might the views and experiences of London’s walking tourists be imbricated within the city’s cinematic incarnations? I focus on a period between 1880 and 1939, when large numbers of tourists started arriving in London via new modes of mass transport. The development of walking tours for these tourists in the 1880s and 1890s runs roughly tandem to the early days of cinema. Though films taken aboard moving vehicles proved popular, early films were often taken on the ground, embodying a pedestrian view of the city. My first chapter therefore contextualises the thesis by telling a parallel history of tourists walking London’s streets and spectators experiencing those same streets in the cinema. Subsequent chapters follow thematic routes through the city, walking a literary London, landmark London, and an impoverished London. Each chapter asks a series of questions. What were the origins of these thematic routes? How and why did these routes become codified in the form of walking tours? What did tourists see and experience on these walks? How does cinema not only reflect the experiences of tourists, but enable those unable to walk the city’s actual streets to experience them fantasmatically in the cinema? Together these chapters seek to understand the cinematic city through its walks. Contributing to larger discourses in history, geography, and film studies, “Walking Pictures” addresses how representations of the city shape the way we perceive and move through urban space.
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