Through plans, correspondences, and photography my paper aims to extract social and cultural histories of the populations who lived in the Suez Canal cities of Port Said, Ismailia and Suez. As such, the built environment and infrastructural projects that were built from the ground up in the cities, are an archival source for understanding how Europeans and Egyptians lived, moved and enjoyed the urban, specifically in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The built environment and its design led to certain everyday mundane interactions that became part of the cultural fabric of the Suez Canal cities. For example, the development of public space brought different nationalities into action with one another, which at times brought residents in front of the British consular court or police. Additionally, the Suez Canal Company (SCC) and the Egyptian government (both prior to and after British colonial rule) attempted to police and discipline the urban space towards the goal to make it appealing, hygienic, and sanitary. Yet, as elsewhere, theory was not a straightforward path towards, practice and implementation. Studying the development of water, sewage and indoor plumbing infrastructure demonstrates the complicated and uneven expansion of these utilities to the different areas of the cities. Differentiation in bathroom equipment and design, and access to water and sewerage infrastructure, in essence, created a two-tiered hierarchy, which linked to an individual's position, within the SCC and ethnic identity. As such, what we can begin to piece together from the fragments of the archives is a unique social history of the cities and their residents. This methodology allows the historian to retrace the lines of narratives that at times appear faint.