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This chapter draws on empirical data from women’s stories as we start on the ‘journey’ of experiences of sexual harassment. This chapter focusses on the ‘before’, as I present women’s accounts of everyday life moving around London and participating in the rhythmic ensemble of the city. It demonstrates how the city remains a gendered environment that induces both fear and freedom and contextualises the (physical and mental) landscape in which incidents of sexual harassment occur. I will draw on theoretical approaches relating to the emergence of urban modernity in order to contextualise how the social, spatial and temporal conditions in the historical metropolis led to the advent of new sociabilities and modes of being in public life that still influence interactions today. Acknowledging that this remains gendered, I call on the literary character of the flâneur to critically analyse women’s past and present mobilities in the city. I simultaneously incorporate Lefebvre’s concept of rhythm to illustrate how the anticipation and expectation of sexual harassment impact women’s mobilities so intimately that it constitutes their normative urban rhythms. By exploring women’s wider lives in the context of movement and mobilities in the city, this chapter demonstrates the gendered nature of everyday life in the urban environment, including how the anticipation and perceived risk of sexual harassment are experienced and negotiated as an omnipresent possibility.