This article considers literary and visual representations of London from the late 1820s to the early 1840s and examines how, over the course of this period, the streets are increasingly figured as a space of busy activity. The topographical works produced by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd and James Elmes, Metropolitan Improvements (1828) and London and Its Environs in the Nineteenth Century (1829), overwhelmingly present the city as the site of finished architectural works; occasionally, however, the latter text shifts its focus away from individual buildings to examine busy intersections, offering an account of the city's ‘unceasing bustle and traffic’ as one of its defining features. By 1842, in his Original Views of London as it is, Thomas Shotter Boys presents the streets as a dynamic environment, undergoing repair and transformation and frequently crowded with people and vehicles. This essay examines this shift by thinking about Shepherd and Shotter Boys alongside works by Charles Dickens, George Scharf, and John Tallis that, in different ways, seek to capture a sense of the city as moving and changing. The increasing currency of this emphasis on transformation rather than completeness and fixity would make possible a focus on the urban poor, who would regularly feature in accounts of the city in the decades that follow.