An illustrated city walking guide like no other. Whether you’re a city-dweller who wants to explore your home turf, or a keen country walker who likes the idea of trying something different, or a discerning weekend breaker who wants to get under the skin of a city in a day or two, Urban Rambles is the book to inspire you to get out and explore your nearest city on foot. Each of these 20 walks includes: a GPS enabled map configured for your mobile device specially commissioned illustrations of the route and walk data inspiring photographs of the things you will see along the way information on green spaces and architectural gems recommended cafes, pubs and independent shops England's cities have become much more walkable places in the last decade, with huge investments in green spaces, redevelopment of old industrial areas and a complete urban planning re-think in favour of pedestrians. Walking in a city is the healthy lifestyle choice, offering you the chance to exercise and the calming powers of green spaces. Choose from cathedral cities like York and Lincoln, seats of learning like Cambridge and Oxford, trading ports like Bristol and Liverpool, cities designed for pleasure like Brighton and Bath. Choose to visit Victorian industrial cities Manchester, Sheffield and Birmingham, and of course the nation’s capital, where a new 25-mile circular route takes you from urban regeneration through the Olympic Park and past rivers, parks and palaces.

Despite its indifferent reception when it was first published in 1851, Moby Dick is now a central work in the American literary canon. This introduction offers readings of Melville's masterpiece, but it also sets out the key themes, contexts, and critical reception of his entire oeuvre. The first chapters cover Melville's life and the historical and cultural contexts. Melville's individual works each receive full attention in the third chapter, including Typee, Moby Dick, Billy Budd and the short stories. Elsewhere in the chapter different themes in Melville are explained with reference to several works: Melville's writing process, Melville as letter writer, Melville and the past, Melville and modernity, Melville's late writings. The final chapter analyses Melville scholarship from his day to ours. Kevin J. Hayes provides comprehensive information about Melville's life and works in an accessible and engaging book that will be essential for students beginning to read this important author.

'Spatial images', wrote the German cultural theorist, Siegfried Kracauer, 'are the dreams of society. Wherever the hieroglyphics of any spatial image are deciphered, there the basis of social reality presents itself.' But how exactly are these spatial images to be deciphered? Hieroglyphics of Space addresses this question with a series of insightful essays on some of the great metropolitan centres of the world. From political interpretations to gendered analyses, from methods of mapping to filmic representations, and from studies in consumption to economic surveys, the volume offers a range of strategies for reading and experiencing the modern metropolis.

In Shopping for Pleasure, Erika Rappaport reconstructs London's Victorian and Edwardian West End as an entertainment and retail center. In this neighborhood of stately homes, royal palaces, and spacious parks and squares, a dramatic transformation unfolded that ultimately changed the meaning of femininity and the lives of women, shaping their experience of modernity. Rappaport illuminates the various forces of the period that encouraged and discouraged women's enjoyment of public life and particularly shows how shopping came to be seen as the quintessential leisure activity for middle- and upper-class women. Through extensive histories of department stores, women's magazines, clubs, teashops, restaurants, and the theater as interwoven sites of consumption, Shopping for Pleasure uncovers how a new female urban culture emerged before and after the turn of the twentieth century. Moving beyond the question of whether shopping promoted or limited women's freedom, the author draws on diverse sources to explore how business practices, legal decisions, and cultural changes affected women in the market. In particular, she focuses on how and why stores presented themselves as pleasurable, secure places for the urban woman, in some cases defining themselves as instrumental to civic improvement and women's emancipation. Rappaport also considers such influences as merchandizing strategies, credit policies, changes in public transportation, feminism, and the financial balance of power within the home. Shopping for Pleasure is thus both a social and cultural history of the West End, but on a broader scale it reveals the essential interplay between the rise of consumer society, the birth of modern femininity, and the making of contemporary London.

To Virginia Woolf, London was a source of creative inspiration, a setting for many of her works, and a symbol of the culture in which she lived and wrote. In a 1928 diary entry, she observed, "London itself perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play & a story & a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets." The city fascinated Woolf, yet her relationship with it was problematic. In her attempts to resolve her developmental struggles as a woman write in a patriarchal society, Woolf shaped and reshaped the image and meaning of London. Using psychoanalytic, feminist, and social theories, Susan Squier explores the transformed meaning of the city in Woolf's essays, memoirs, and novels as it functions in the creation of a mature feminist vision. Squier shows that Woolf's earlier works depict London as a competitive patriarchal environment that excluded her, but her mature works portray the city as beginning to accept the force of female energy. Squier argues that this transformation was made possible by Woolf's creative ability to appropriate and revise the masculine literary and cultural forms of her society. The act of writing, or "scene making," allowed Woolf to break from her familial and cultural heritage and recreate London in her own literary voice and vision. Virginia Woolf and London is based on analyses of Woolf's memoirs, her little-known early and mature London essays, Night and Day, Mrs. Dalloway, Flush, and The Years. By focusing on Woolf's changing attitudes about the city, Squier is able to define Woolf's evolving belief that women could "reframe" the city-scape and use it to imagine and create a more egalitarian world. Squier's study offers significant new insights into the interplay between self and society as it shapes the work of a woman writer. Originally published in 1985. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

London's Soho district underwent a spectacular transformation between the late Victorian era and the end of the Second World War: its fin-de-siècle buildings and dark streets infamous for sex, crime, political disloyalty, and ethnic diversity became a center of culinary and cultural tourism servicing patrons of nearby shops and theaters. Indulgences for the privileged and the upwardly mobile edged a dangerous, transgressive space imagined to be "outside" the nation. Treating Soho as exceptional, but also representative of London's urban transformation, Judith Walkowitz shows how the area's foreignness, liminality, and porousness were key to the explosion of culture and development of modernity in the first half of the twentieth century. She draws on a vast and unusual range of sources to stitch together a rich patchwork quilt of vivid stories and unforgettable characters, revealing how Soho became a showcase for a new cosmopolitan identity.

Focusing upon gay street life in London and New York, Mark Turner presents this gay urban history of male street cruising.