Central to verse satire since its Roman inception, walking, particularly in city space, is an integral element also to Elizabethan satirical poetry. Rather than assume a strict pattern of imitation from Roman to Elizabethan, however, this paper argues that the device of the city walk in satirists such as Donne, Guilpin and Marston responds to pattern of urbanisation in the late 16^th century as well as new forms of representing city space in visual and conceptual terms. To these poets, the city becomes a space that is both traversable and mappable, and rather than simply describe urban territory, satirical writing also – in Michel de Certau’s words – ‘manipulates spatial organization’.