You will probably know lots of bits of the St Giles’ area: Tottenham Court Rd tube, Centrepoint, Shaftesbury Ave, Seven Dials…but you probably don’t know how the area came to be as it is. A fascinating story of ancient roadways meeting, a medieval leper colony, a failed posh residential district, a notorious Victorian slum and […]
St James’s (the area south of Piccadilly and West of Haymarket) is one of the most unspoiled and attractive parts of London. It also contains the senior royal residence (St James’s Palace) and the oldest Royal Park. This walk aims not just to have a very enjoyable wander around the handsome square and beautiful streets […]
The Beatles are often referred to as a Liverpool band. Of course they started there, but as soon as they started recording they moved to London and from February 1963 did all of their recording, living and loving there. As Ringo says in Anthology “If you are in our business, you go to London- that’s […]
The “big” Tudor monarchs loom large in the popular imagination: especially Henry (all those wives!) and Elizabeth. Frequent and memorable depictions from Holbein to Mantel have ensure that. The story of London under the Tudors is less well-known but fascinating. Massive population influx, huge growth in manufacturing and retail, explosion of popular literacy and printing, […]
Hundreds of years of fascinating history have occurred within the Square Mile: but you need to know where to look to find the traces and understand the story. The City was uninhabited after the Romans, devastated by the Great Fire and the Blitz and heavily rebuilt by the Victorians, so this can be challenging: this […]
For nearly 2000 years people have lived and worked in the City, constantly focusing on “doing deals” and making money. This walk aims to bring to life how Londoners have conducted their “dealing” over two millennia, focusing on the most pivotal Roman, Medieval, Early Modern and more recent examples of “doing deals”. Brexit and Covid […]
Many of the most interesting sites in the City are somewhat tucked away and often quite small. While the City does not have big parks like those further west (its history means the space was mainly used for trading or churches!) it does have c.250 open and green spaces: many created by the destruction of […]
You are probably familiar with some stories of Roman London: Boudicca as heroic figure of proud British resistance, some fragments of wall here and there, the Temple of Mithras being discovered somewhere. But this walks aims to dig a little deeper and explore why the Romans came, why they founded London and how it developed […]
You probably remember being taught about The Great Fire at school … Pudding Lane, a bakery, St Paul’s. But this walk aims to bring to life how the disaster unfolded, how people reacted, how the authorities responded: and as we recover from our current national calamity, to explore some striking parallels about how leaders react […]
