Efendi masculinity emerged in the first half of the twentieth century through distinctive social practices, one of which was urban mobility. Most of efendi families lived in what we may call the “middle city” of Cairo. This area stretched from 'Ataba in the north to Sayyida Zaynab in the south, and included the area formerly known as Darb al-Gamamiz, as well as Lazoghli, Hilmiyya al-Gedida, Birkat al-Fil and others. Some of these areas were old but rapidly changing, others grew on virgin land through the drying of the Khalig al-Masri canal and neighbouring swamps, or through the sale of private land (dairas) for urban development. The Middle City was socially heterogenous. It included upwardly mobile efendi families alongside traditional merchant and artisan families, migrant students, the urban poor, but also middle and lower-middle class foreign minorities. Different kinds of urban mobilities connected this Middle City with the upscale Downtown and other areas. This is where many salespersons and service workers staffing Downtown businesses lived. Most of lower and middle level clerks who staffed government offices in al-Dawawin lived in Darb al-Gamamiz and Sayyida Zaynab. The first part of my paper discusses the emergence of this Middle City as the physical location of a nascent national middle class culture. The second part of my paper looks at one particular type of urban mobility that connected these new middle class spaces with the heart of the colonial metropolis: notably, leisure. Young efendi men and boys frequented the upscale avenues of Downtown. Such visits often entailed cinema-going or visits to theatres, but more often consisted of simply strolling, hanging around, and window shopping. These leisure outings were always done in small groups of peers, and can be thought of as particular urban rituals of efendi youths—yet their non-cosmopolitan class position included them only ambiguously into the category of “flaneurs.” This paper is based on over a dozen autobiographies, here subjected to a collective spatial reading describing classed, gendered and generational patterns of urban mobility; novels; and anonymous private diaries. Last but certainly not least, I will use photographic albums created by young efendi men and boys in this period, which not only “illustrate” the spatial patterns (centred on Downtown) observed in autobiographies, but rather make visible the way in which these particular ways of consuming the city worked to produce an efendi masculinity that was inseparable from its spatial dimension.