In this chapter I draw some of the theory already outlined into dialogue with two urban travel accounts to London dating from the latter half of the nineteenth century: Jules Janin's Le Mois de mai à Londres et l'exposition de 1851 / London in the Month of May and the Exhibition of 1851(1851) and Jules Vallès's, La Rue à Londres / The London Street (1876). As can already be discerned from their titles, both works are concerned with different architectures and spatial arrangements of the city, and indeed both texts exhibit a consciousness of space as a material configuration of modernity. However, the key question here is to examine the distinctions being made by the authors with respect to their differing appropriations of this nascent modern world. As Lefebvre tells us, the modern world consists in a ‘problematic’ of space that is dual in its aspect, requiring an account both of capitalism and modern social space if we are to understand more precisely the ‘tendencies of modernity’ (Lefebvre [1974] 1991, 123). Without pretending to attempt to analyse this problematic, I want to take Lefebvre's duality to analyse the texts at hand. In this way, I explore Janin's (1804–1874) engagement with the Crystal Palace as an encounter with a new representation of space in the Lefebvrian sense explored in chapter 1, an architecture that can be seen to signal the beginning of a certain idea of ‘global space’ (Lefebvre [1974] 1991, 125) in its erection of a space of ostensible transparency – a building assembled entirely from glass and iron girders, the Crystal Palace constructed a void that was to be filled by the gathering together of national objects in a global topography of spectacle. In a second movement, I examine Janin's modus operandi for interpreting what Paul Scheerbart might call this ‘glass palace’ ([1914] 1971, 14), and how the author's spatial practice is shaped by a political vision of France in the aftermath of the 1848 June Days.