“Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night,” wrote the poet Rupert Brooke.
If Nightwalking is a matter of “going astray” in the streets of the metropolis after dark, then nightwalkers repres.
Matthew Beaumont recounts an alternative history of London by focusing on those of its denizens who surface on the streets when the sun’s down.
Before the age of electricity, the nighttime city was a very different place to the one we know today—home to the lost, the vagrant and the noctambulant. “Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night,” wrote the poet Rupert Brooke