Strangers to the City: Travel and Tourism in Eighteenth-Century London

This talk will situate London within a European culture of travel and tourism, thinking about how guidebooks presented London to travellers and how visitors described their experience of the city. Throughout the eighteenth century, critics of the appearance of London frequently expressed concerns about London’s lack of magnificence as compared to its European counterparts, wondering whether a grander cityscape might attract foreign tourists – and their money – to London.

Nevertheless, visitors from Europe marvelled at a city whose size and status as a global commercial hub seemed to render it sui generis. This paper will examine how various forms of writing invoked the tourist in London and how familiarity with The Spectator shaped visitors’ accounts of the city, providing fresh insight into how London was imagined, perceived, and described in this period.