Mid-eighteenth-century London was a city of grand buildings. Several buildings, including St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Royal Exchange, and numerous city churches, had been rebuilt in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1666; others, such as the Custom House (completed 1725), the Lord Mayor’s Mansion (completed 1753), and St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (completed 1769), were more recent projects. These buildings were transformative for London’s urban spaces, but they were also transformative for the idea of the city. Representations of individual London buildings were critical to representations of the city as a whole and, by extension, to civic identity. Although images of London buildings had been functioning in this way for decades, in the mid-eighteenth century a new form of image emerged: the magazine illustration. Many eighteenth-century magazines occasionally depicted notable buildings in London, both historic and contemporary, in elevations, plans, or fold-out views, but one of the richest examples of architectural magazine imagery is a series that appeared in the Royal Magazine in the early 1760s. The scale of this series was unusual, and the style of its images was distinctive. This essay will examine the Royal’s series of illustrations as critical imagery in a virtual tour of London’s notable buildings, a tour that made the city’s architecture available in a highly accessible form to people throughout Britain and in British colonies overseas. London was a tourist destination, and thus its most prominent buildings had long-established roles as sites of spectatorship, but the magazine offered a new form of virtual tourism.