Walking in Virginia Woolf’s footsteps

Abstract

The past two decades have seen the rise of the walking tour as a tourist practice that stands in uneasy and contradictory relation to commodity culture. Focusing on the guided tour to Virginia Woolf’s London, this article examines what happens when we literally go back to Bloomsbury, walking the literary text as we write the urban one. Placing it in a tradition of walking as a cultural, critical and aesthetic practice, this article explores the literary walk as a mapping of the city, a reading of the streets that is also a performance of the text and that, as an embodied experiencing of urban space, is the corollary of the present obsession with heritage and cultural memory.