Described as the sensation that 'you or everything around you is spinning', vertigo is a very common symptom that may affect up to 40% of adults at some point in their lives. As this description suggests, the experience of vertigo is fundamentally spatial, rewriting one's relationship with the environment around. It is thus perhaps understandable that vertigo has also been a rich and enduring metaphor used to depict disorientation, unbelonging and existential crises across a range of literary, visual and cultural texts - from the films of Alfred Hitchcock and Jordan Peele, to the art of Salvador Dali and Bridget Riley, to the literature of Elizabeth Bishop and JM Ledgard. While the attractiveness of vertigo-as-metaphor is obvious, it is also the case that it ends up reinforcing the sense of balance as hegemonic. Vertigo then ends up being both an experience that realigns one's sense of physical space, and also a trope around which multiple metaphorical narratives can be constructed. Coming out of a project on the cultural history of vertigo, this paper will combine accounts of lived experiences of vertigo, history of medicine, and examples from literature, visual art and cinema, to explore the relationship between vertigo and space.