Breton: ‘For myself, I admit such steps are everything. Where do they lead, that is the real question.’ . . . Nadja: ‘Lost steps? But there’s no such thing!’ 1 ou stand at the crime fiction section of the public library. A woman is with you, her voice soft and intent. I want you to walk with me, there are some things I need to show you. At her beckoning you pass the librarians at the main desk, through the turnstile, and up the stairway to the art and music library. There you wait at a table while she searches for a book to show you, one with a pho- tograph of the room the way it used to be when old museum cases lined the walls. It is unavailable so she directs you instead towards a volume on the table about René Magritte that features the painting The menaced assassin. Someone has apparently left a note between the pages: ‘Someone’s following you.’ The tone changes. There’s less time than I thought. You follow her directions back down the stairs, more urgent this time, turning out of the library and into the noise of London’s Whitechapel High Street. Try to follow the sound of my footsteps, she says, so that we can stay together. Ecumene 2001 8 (1) 0967-4608(01)EU205OA © 2001 Arnold GHOSTLY FOOTSTEPS: VOICES, MEMORIES AND WALKS IN THE CITY David Pinder This paper is concerned with urban walking and the work of contemporary artists and writers who take to the streets in order to explore, excavate and map hidden spaces and paths in the city. The focus is on an audio-walk by the Canadian artist Janet Cardiff entitled The missing voice (case study B), which is set in east London. Connections are also drawn with other recent projects in the same area by Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair. The paper discusses how these artists raise important issues about the cultural geographies of the city relating to subjectivity, representation and memory. Cardiff’s audio-walk in particular works with connections between the self and the city, between the conscious and unconscious, and between multiple selves and urban footsteps. In so doing, she directs attention to the sig- nificance of dreams and ghostly matters for thinking about the real and imagined spaces of the city. Y