Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 34 42–60 2009 ISSN 0020 -2754 © 2008 The Author. Journal compilation © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Visualising everyday geographies: practices of vision through travel-time David Bissell Responding to recent debates in human geography on the need to explore more complex renderings of everyday visuality, this paper explores some of the fluid relationships between everyday visuality, materiality and mobility through practices of contemporary railway travel in Britain. Based on extensive empirical research, this paper explores three different but related visual practices experienced during the course of a railway journey. First, it looks at how sublime forms of vision emerge to produce a variety of passive embodied effects. Second, it looks at how more attentive visual practices are implicated in the temporal organisation of the journey and have the capacity to activate changes to routine. Third, it looks at how the physical materiality of the carriage interior serves to mediate the visual field in particular ways and gives rise to a series of freedoms and constraints. Whilst the visual consumption of landscapes viewed through a window is often taken to be an axiomatic part of the travelling experience, this paper demonstrates the importance of apprehending how a multiplicity of visual practices affect how perceptions of time, space and location unfold over the course of a journey. key words visuality mobility everyday geographies travel-time materiality Britain School of Environment and Technology, University of Brighton, Brighton BN2 4GJ email: d.j.bissell@brighton.ac.uk revised manuscript received 5 August 2008 Introduction Since the advent of railway travel in nineteenth- century Britain, geographical literature on railway travel has been inextricably bound up with visual sensibilities. Travel by train facilitated new ways of experiencing landscape that many have argued gave rise to particularly modern ways of seeing (Kirby 1997; Schivelbusch 1980; Stilgoe 1983). The train is often invoked as one of the principal technologies that contributed to these changing modes of perception. Moving through landscapes by train at speeds previously unimaginable reconfigured the relationship between people and landscape (Danius 2002). Through this time–space compression and the annihilation of space, people could travel further distances in ever shorter times, thus changing passengers’ routine perceptions of time and space (Stein 2001). The significant increases in speed engendered through these technologies gave rise to a novel way of experiencing landscape through new modes of visual perception. Passengers perceived the landscape as it was filtered through the machinic ensemble of the train (Schivelbusch 1980). The train window accentuated the processual and mobile qualities of landscape perception, where the depths and folds of landscapes were animated by the motion of the train. These new panoramic forms of experiencing landscape were not limited to changing modes of perception emergent from increased speed, but this ‘public mobilisation’ (Urry 2007, 91) also increased the diversity of landscapes that people could visually experience (Freeman 1999). Indeed visual sensibilities have always been bound up with travel and the experience of journeying. Echoing the significance of the visual within geography (Gregory 1994; Daniels 1993; Rose 2000 2003a), from the viewing of specific sights on the eighteenth-century Grand Tour (Van den Abbeele 1991), to the sightseeing practices implicated in more contemporary tourist practices (Crang 1997; Urry 2002), the visual has been a central – and perhaps even axiomatic – way of comprehending the experience of travel.