The introduction describes William Blake’s spatial imagination as simultaneously cartographic and anti-cartographic. It makes a case for studying Blake’s work as a contribution to and intervention in the history of cartography, which can illuminate the richness of eighteenth-century cartographic visual culture. Offering a provisional summary of Enlightenment-era cartographic representational practices, the opening section posits that Blake both embraces and critiques aspects of mapping cultures in his day, while also anticipating much more recent developments in the history and theory of spatial representation. Through the prism of such theoretical and critical frameworks, the overlapping spatial models of maps, diagrams, and networks are established as key axes for the book’s readings of works by Blake and his contemporaries. The tropes of “mental travel” and “golden string,” drawn from Blake’s own phraseology, are then described and presented as major through-lines guiding the book’s readings of “Blakean mapping.” These tropes epitomise Blake’s emphasis on embodiment and open-ended, processual lines of movement, making his work radically open to ongoing revision and revisitation. Accordingly, the final section gestures towards the continuation of the spirit of Blakean mapping in recent creative work by London-based artists and writers, which will be the subject of the book’s final chapter.