French radical Guy Debord, who coined the word psycho­geo­graphy in the Fif­ties, de­scribed it as the “eff­ects of the geo­graph­ical envir­on­ment, con­sciously organ­ised or not, on the emot­ions and behav­iour.” He added that there was a “pleas­ing vague­ness” about what the adject­ive psycho­geo­graph­ical might be app­lied to, and it has been stuck on every­thing from Stone­henge to Jack the Ripper. For the most part, Merlin Cover­ley uses it to mean city writ­ing, and the cent­ral thread of this book is a guide through the hist­ory of writ­erly walk­ing in London and Paris.


Cover­ley’s chosen start­ing points are Defoe and Blake, and he pro­ceeds to give an over­view of the now canon­ical links from De Quincey’s wand­er­ings in the city, through Poe’s “man of the crowd” and Bau­de­laire’s “flân­eur”, and on into the surr­eal­ists and the situ­ation­ists.