Scholars looking to produce a “history from below” narrative of late nineteenth-century Egypt have interrogated court, police and other institutional records. The research has begun to cast a light on what non-elites, the poor, women and other marginalized groups went through daily. Yet, there is a glaring lacuna when we approach the scale of the built environment and how individuals used space. This study applies a unique methodology by using consular court records from the British consulate in Port Sa‘id in tandem with Suez Canal Company (SCC) archival material on street inspections, hygiene and health and general policing in the Suez Canal cities. As others have shown the consular court records offer a new view of the subaltern and their interaction within the urban environment, which move the scale of analysis from empire to the street. Individual interactions with the consular court came about primarily because of a criminal complaint that led to the involvement of police and then subsequently consular officials, because either the defendant or both were a subject of the British empire. These documents demonstrate the various ways in which residents interacted with one another on the street. The mention of specific public spaces or streets allows the urban historian to locate these cases on the urban landscape. For instance, a street fight between an Egyptian and a Maltese resident at a prominent promenade offers us a sample into how the physical environment was used. Furthermore, the repetition of popular locations supplies the historian insight to which areas were popular with residents, tourists and passersby, as well as locations which received the gaze of the police authorities. Additionally, the documents from the SCC detail the policing of the urban to curb the shopkeepers, café owners and fruit-sellers from further impinging on the streetscapes of the city. This was an intentional attempt to restrict, control and order the physical appearance of the roadways. The disciplinary vantage point of maps etch clean lines and make sterile urban environments, yet both sets of documents, consular court and SCC archival material, offer exciting new ways to complicate our understanding, and moves us towards a more nuanced, urban history.