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A Dickens London walk.

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

When you join Richard Jones on one of his Charles Dickens London walks you are joining the man who wrote the book Walking Dickensian London.

One of the addresses that is covered on this walking tour of Dickens London is 58 Lincoln’s Inn Fields which was, from 1834 to 1856, the home of John Forster (1812–76).

Forster was Dickens’s greatest friend and his first significant biographer. Dickens based Mr Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) on Forster, and later used his house for the residence of Mr Tulkinghorn – legal adviser to Sir Leicester Dedlock and evil blackmailer of Lady Dedlock – in Bleak House.

Dickens was at his lawyer-bashing best when he wrote:

‘The crow flies straight across Chancery Lane… into Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Here, in a large house, formerly a house of state, lives Mr Tulkinghorn. It is let off in sets of chambers now, and in these shrunken fragments of its greatness lawyers lie in maggots in nuts.’

On the 2nd December, 1844 Dickens, who had travelled especially from Italy for the occasion, gave a private reading at Forster’s house from his new Christmas story ‘The Chimes’. The select gathering included Forster, Thomas Carlyle, and Daniel Maclise.

‘There was not a dry eye in the house’, wrote Daniel Maclise to Catherine Dickens, who had remained in Italy. ‘Shrieks of laughter – there were indeed – and floods of tears as a relief to them – I do not think that there ever was such a triumphant hour for Charles… ’

Maclise also did a pencil sketch of the occasion (opposite), showing Dickens seated at the desk, the book open in front of him, surrounded by his enraptured audience.

Forster considered it an accurate depiction of the event, although he did comment that there was a touch of caricature of which he considered himself ‘chief victim.’

A second reading two evenings later was equally successful, and thus were sown the seeds of Dickens forays into amateur theatricals and, according to Forster, ‘those readings to larger audiences by which, as much by his books, the world knew him in later life.’

This is just one location that features on Richard’s Dickens London walks but it really is a Dickensian landmark and a true time capsule of Victorian London.

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Walks in Pepys and Dickens London.

Friday, July 17th, 2009

Walks in the eastern section of the City of London uncover some lovely old historic streets, several of which have intriguing tales attached to them.

Many visitors to the Tower of London fail to realise that, just a short walk away is an intriguing street called Seething Lane which we feature on several of our City of London walks.

Seething Lane once stood near to the Cornmarket and it was probably from this proximity that its name - which is derived from Old English words meaning full of chaff - came.

The mansion of Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth 1st’s loyal spy master general once stood on Seething Lane. He was of course the man responsible for finally entrapping Mary, Queen of Scots into playing her hand and revealing her desire to wrest the throne of England from her cousin, Elizabeth 1st. He lived at the mansion until his death in 1590.

In 1656 the Navy Office was built on the site of Walsingham’s mansion and in 1660 Samuel Pepys was made Clerk of the Acts of the Navy and given a house on Seething Lane.

Pepys is an intriguing character and several of our London walks turn to his astute observations on 17th Century London life to really give you the impression of actually being there.

It was whilst living here that Pepys worked night after night on his famous diary - a diary that he kept in coded shorthand, and in three different languages, French, English and Spanish, so that his wife, who spoke both French and English, would not uncover the sordid details of his infidelities!

By 1673 he had climbed to the top of the greasy pole that was the 17th century civil service and had been appointed  Secretary for the Affairs of the navy - an intriguing title given his lustful private life .

He kept the post until 1679 when he was forced to resign as a result of unfounded charges of spying for the French being brought against him.

By 1686, however, he returned to office and was made Secretary of the Admiralty, a post he clung on to until his retirement in 1689.

Towards the top of Seething Lane there stands a tiny church called St Olave’s which we feature on our Dickens London walks.

The church was restored in 1951 following bomb damage in World War Two. This was the church where Samuel Pepys worshiped and where he lies buried under the nave.

Indeed Pepys referred to it as “our very own church.” after bomb damage in 1951.

Charles Dickens  knew the church and mentioned it in an essay entitled The City of the Absent in his Uncommercial Traveller.

One of the most eye-catching things about the church is its gate, over which are several stone skulls with spikes protruding from them.

Dickens described the church as “one of my best beloved churchyards.” Making reference to the skulls he wrote

“I call it St Ghastly grim. It is a small churchyard with a ferocious strong spiked iron gate, like a jail. This gate is ornamented with skulls and cross bones larger than life, wrought in stone; but it likewise came into the mind of St Ghastly grim that to stick iron spikes a-top of the stone skulls, as though they were impaled, would be a pleasant device. Therefore the skulls grin aloft horribly, thrust through and through with iron spears…”

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A Dickens London walk

Sunday, July 12th, 2009

Richard Jones has written numerous books on Walks around London. They include Walking Haunted London, Uncovering Jack the Ripper’s London and Walking Dickensian London.

Recently we were approached by a client who wanted to know which were the best Dickens London walks for an avid Dickens fan to do.

Charles Dickens can be encountered all over London. Indeed his books an even be used to plot a series of exciting and fascinating London walks that take you in to the lesser known places of this great City.

But for the ultimate Charles Dickens London walk you should begin at Chancery Lane Underground Station. Close by is Gray’s Inn one of London’s four Inns of Court. As a teenager Charles Dickens came to waork here for the solicitor’s firm of Ellis and Blackmore and the first Square you come in to is as it was in Dickens day.

From here you can make your way across Holborn into Staple Inn, a black and white timebered building that admits you to a peaceful oasis that has hardly changed since Dickens featured it in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Then making your way along Chancery Lane you can turn into Lincoln’s, Inn another of the Inns of Court where Dickens begin his most scathing attack on the English Legal System in Bleak House.

Across Lincoln’s Inn Fields you arrive at the former home of John Forster Dickens great friend and business advisor. It was in an upstairs room of this house that Dickens gave the first reading of his Christmas book The Chimes.

Close nearby is the Old Curiosity Shop in Portugal Street which, although not the one that Dickens wrote about in his book of that name, is nonetheless worth a look at as it is a very picturesque building that dates from 1567.

So within a few short streets you can enjoy a Dickens London walk that takes in numerous locations that are associated with England’s greatest novelist.

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Literary London - walks and houses

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

Our repertoire of great London walks feature several that explore London’s literary heritage.

London boasts an extremely long and rich literary tradition.

Geoffrey Chaucer lived above Aldgate, in the easternmost part of The City until 1386, and playwright Joe Orton lived on Noel Road in Islington until his 1967 murder.

Marguerite Radclyffe Hall, author of the first lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness, lived in Chelsea and is buried in Highgate Cemetery, both of which our featured on our London walks in those areas.

Oscar Wilde, Dylan Thomas, Virginia Woolf, Fanny Burney, George Orwell, D. H. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, George Eliot, Dorothy L. Sayers, William Blake—the list of authors who made London their home goes on and on.

Alas, a little blue plaque is usually all that’s left to mark the past, but there are some exceptions.

The wonderful Georgian town house where lexicographer Samuel Johnson lived and worked, compiling the world’s first English dictionary, is now a shrine called Dr. Johnson’s House, 17 Gough Sq., Fleet Street, EC4.

His original dictionary, on display, includes the definition “Dull: to make dictionaries is dull work.” There’s not much here in the way of furnishings, but the long upstairs room in which he worked has plenty of ambience.

Thomas Carlyle’s House, 24 Cheyne Row, SW3, is an 18th-century Queen Anne on a beautiful Chelsea back street.

The Scottish author/historian/philosopher lived here 47 years, until his death in 1881. His house remains virtually unaltered, to the extent that some of the rooms are without electric light. In this eerie atmosphere you can imagine yourself sitting in one of the writer’s original Victorian chairs or playing the same piano Chopin himself played.

Dickens’s House, 48 Doughty St., WC1, was home to one of London’s most famous novelists for a short but prolific period.

It was here where he worked on  Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, and Oliver Twist. His letters, desk and chair, and first editions are on display, along with some memorabilia of his wife, Catherine.

If you are interested in DIY London walks you might like to purchase a copy of Richard Jones’s guide to Dickens London Walking Dickensian London that offers a choice of 25 walks around the London that Dickens knew and wrote about.

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Why Walks Are The Best Way to See London

Monday, June 29th, 2009

Walks are far and away the best way to see London.

Walks give you the opportunity to see the backstreets and hidden places where you can really get a feel for the city and its wonderful old buildings.

If you try and explore London from the top of a bus you get none of the atmosphere, none of the thrill of seeking out places where time well and truly stands still.

Walks really are the only way to explore London, so next time you are planning to venture out onto the capital’s highways then give the bus a miss and enjoy one of our healthy and green London walks.

Buses belch out fumes and are not at all environmentally friendly. Indeed bus fumes do an awful lot of damage to the very fabric of the old buildings of London.

Walks on the other hand are extremely green. Furthermore they are very healthy. Setting off to explore London at a measured jaunt can be both therapeutic and relaxing.

One of the main problems with exploring London on a bus tour is that you are divorced from your surroundings. Wouldn’t it be better to be inside that historic building that is simply pointed out on a bus tour and which you have gone by before you even get the chance to take it in.

Wouldn’t you rather be able to explore  a building, to see what other treasures its facade might be hiding.

London Walking Tours are a great way to do this. You can see the buildings, feel the buildings, experience the buildings. You can get in to the backstreets and hidden away places that are just as they were when Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare knew them.

So when you are planning to venture out onto the streets of London, give the bus a miss and opt for the green, healthier way of exploring the capital and join us on one of our London walks.

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Dickens Walks of London

Saturday, June 27th, 2009

We have many Dickens London walks that cover numerous areas and districts of the capital. Each of these Walking Tours of London includes biographical details about Dickens life and touches upon one of the most traumatic periods of his childhood. A period that would effect him both emotionally and creatively for the rest of his life.

Indeed, as we explain on the various London walks we conduct around Dickens London, he would return to this period of his life time and again in his fiction.

John Dickens, Charles Dickens father, was a Clerk in the Naval Pay. He was a man who could never control his spending.

In 1816 John Dickens was transferred to Chatham, near Rochester in Kent, and Charles began the happiest period of his childhood. He received an education from a young Baptist school teacher named William Giles.

But the happy years came to an abrupt end in 1821 when John was transferred back to London.

His father’s spending continued and, to try and help the ailing famly finances Charles was found work at Warrens Blacking Warehouse, whose manager was James Lamert the stepson of his mother’s sister.

To compound the misery he began working there on his twelfth birthday 7th February 1812 Charles. The factory was accoring to his later description “a crazy tumbledown house, abutting on the river and overrun with rats.”

Aged just twelve the sudden loss of his childhood proved a huge trauma for the sensitive boy who had been convinced that he was destined to become a gentleman.

Instead he now found himself sticking lids and labels on to bottles of boot blacking surrounded by men and boys from the class he would later refer to as “Shabby Genteel” for a weekly wage of six shillings.

Many years later Charles recalled:-

“My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man and wander desolately back to that time.”

Two weeks after Charles started work John Dickens was arrested for debt and imprisoned in the Marshal Debtors Prison in Southwark.

Charles was found lodgings, first in Camden Town, then later in Lant Street, Borough, which was close to the prison.

Each morning he would visit his father and mother and the rest of the family at Marshalsea, then go to work after which he would go back to the prison before making his way back to his lodgings in Lant Street.Left to his own devices and he began exploring London.

Walks around Covent Garden and Seven Dials introduced him to the seedier side of 19th century London amnd his wanderings would later provide him with inspiration in his books.

The blacking factory inspired him in another way. He was befriended by an older boy named Bob Fagin whose name he would ater use in Oliver Twist.

The strange thing is that his father was in receipt of payments of over £6 a week from the Naval Pay Office and yet made no attempt to clear his debts. Indeed, Dickens parents confessed that they felt more comfortable and unmolested by their creditors than they had done for a long time. It appears that they didn’t want to be released.

But then in April 1824 his father’s mother died, leaving him £450 and after three months in prison John Dickens was released.

Dickens still went daily to the blacking factory, which had transferred to Chandos Street, just off Strand.

Here he now worked in the window in full view of the public. One day his father visited and had a furious row with James Lamert and Charles was sacked.

Mrs Dickens did her best to get Lamert to take the boy back and patched things up.

She said he should go back to work but his father was adamant he should have an education and he was sent to Wellington Academy on Hampstead Road.

Dickens never forgave his mother for wanting him to return and later wrote:

“I never afterwards forgot” he wrote later “I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.

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Walks in Dickens London

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

When you join Richard Jones for one of his Dickens London walks, you are joining someone who really knows the subject and who has the ability to bring the Streets of Dickens London vividly to life.Richard is the author of the classic Dickensian guide Walking Dickensian London.

Walks through all parts of London are featured in this book and it really is an eyeopener to the streets, places and people that Dickens would have known.

One of Richard’s more intriguing Dickens London Walking Tours is the area that covers Trafalgar Square. This gives Richard the opportunity to introduce a little biography on Charles Dickens and also to quote one of Dickens’s great comic passages.

In 1834 Dickens was working as a Parliamentary reporter for the Morning Chronicle, whose offices were at 332 Strand. As well as reporting on the various debates in Parliament he also began writing a series of essays or sketches about London Life.

His favourite book as a child had been Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, and he had even nicknamed youngest brother, Augustus, Moses after Moses Primrose, the vicars son in the book.

However, Augustus Couldn’t pronounce Moses so he repeated it as “Boses”.Delighted by this childish mispronunciation the family shortened this to Boz, which was the name Dickens adopted for his essays and they appeared as Sketches by Boz.

the Sketches Dickens to the attention of the publishers Chapman and Hall who in 1835 had been approached by the artist Robert Seymour to publish a series of his cartoons showing the mishaps of a group of sporting gentlemen whom he had named the Nimrod Club.

Mr Hall objected because, as he pointed out, although he had been raised in country he had no interest in sport. He suggested instead that the book be novel-like and that it be about a wide range of English scenes. He also suggested that the plates (drawings) should arise naturally out of the text.

Mr Hall approached Charles Dickens about writing the text and Dickens, who had recently been in Bath remembered a name he had seen there – Moses Pickwick - a coach proprietor. He thought this a perfect name and thus Pickwick Papers was born.

In his first sketch of Mr Pickwick Robert Seymour depicted him as a tall thin man. Again Mr Hall objected and suggested he make him more portly. Seymour did and thus the appearance of Pickwick that we all know today came in to being.

The publication suffered a major setback when, between the first and second numbers Seymour committed suicide in his garden shed at his house in Islington.

Chapman and Hall advertised for a new artist and among those who applied but was rejected was a young man by the name of William Makepeace Thackeray.

In the end the commission went to the artist Hablot Browne who adopted the Pseudonym Phiz to match Dickens’s Boz and remained his principle illustrator for the next 23 years.

The Pickwick Papers became a huge success and well and truly set the young writer on the road to literary fame and fortune.

We start our West End Dickens London walks at Charing Cross because it is where the Pickwickians began their adventures.

There is a building called Golden Cross House opposite Charing Cross Station which remembers the Golden Cross Inn, which was first mentioned in 1643. The one Dickens wrote of and knew was built in 1811 and was pulled down in 1827 to make way for Trafalgar Square.

Its location, as we explain on our Dickens London walk was more or less where Nelsons Column stands today.

Dickens has left us a picture of it in one of the Sketches By Boz entitled Early Coaches. Later it would be the place where David Copperfield spent his first night in London when newly arrived from Canterbury.

One of its main features was the danger to public safety from the low arch that led from the coach yard onto Strand. People travelling on top of a coach had to crouch to avoid banging their heads on this arch.

As the Pickwickians leave the yard en route to Rochester aboard the famous Coach The Commodore, Mr Jingle, reminds them of the arch in a memorable fashion:

Heads – Heads – take care of your heads – terrible place – dangerous work – other day – five children – mother – tall lady, eating sandwiches – forgot the arch – crash – knock – children look round – mother’s head off – sandwich in her hand – no mouth to put it in – head of a family off – shocking – shocking.

So when you are looking for Dickens London walks to take don’t stick to the familiar area around Holborn, consider a walking tour in an area that is not readily associated with Dickens.

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Haunted London walks

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

Haunted London walks are a great way to get to see the City by night. They offer a combination of history, mystery and distinct spookiness.

For example, on our Alleyways and Shadows Haunted London walk we explore a warren of old alleyways at the heart of the old city that have hardly changed since the days when Charles Dickens knew them. It was in these old sections of bygone London that he set the opening for his most ghostly of ghostly tales A Christmas Carol, and on our walk we take you past the location of Scrooge’s counting house.

It’s one of those locations that those who join us on our ghostly London walks really do gasp in amazement when they are confronted by these wonderful survivors from times gone by.

Elsewhere, on our Ghosts, Ghouls and Graveyards London walk we take people into the Churchyard of the oldest parish church in London St Bartholomew the Great which dates back to the year 1123.

Many people who see this church, even if coming to it for the first time, get the impression that they have been there before. I’d love to say that this is some past life paranormal experience, but the truth is people have seen it before, even if they haven’t visited it before. The church is something og a movie star and has been featured in, amongst other films Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, Shakespeare in Love and Four Weddings and a Funeral.

London has a great deal to offer those who choose to explore its streets, alleyways and courtyards once night has fallen. Indeed, when you walk through the historic sites at night, you virtually have them to yourself. The offices have closed up, the daytime populace have gone home and the memories of bygone ages begin to stir.

Our Haunted London walks have been paced out to ensure that you get the right blend of history and mystery, and your guide will introduce you to another side of London.

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A Docklands London walk

Monday, June 1st, 2009

One of London’s more intriguing areas is the district of Old Docklands. We explore this fascinating area on several of our Riverside London walks, and people who participate really do go away with an understanding of a totally different part of London.

Walks that take in the area of docklands include our popular Pirates and Pressgangs Tour; There is also the London of Dickens East End Walk that brings to life what the area was like in the 19th century.

London walks in Docklands.
Our Old Docklands Pub Walk is another great favourite, featuring as it does some of London’s oldest and most atmospheric riverside pubs.

Places such as the Prospect of Whitby and the Town of Ramsgate, each one of them a true time capsule of bygone London.

Included on these London are characters as diverse as Captain Bligh of Mutiny on the Bounty fame; the artist Turner; Jack the Ripper and, as mentioned previously, Charles Dickens who set the plots of several of his novels amongst the creaking riverside wharves of Docklands.

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May Day

Friday, May 1st, 2009

It’s May Day and you’d be surprised how many of our London walks and tours touch up on this day of ancient celebration. Our Mayfair London walk, for example, takes walkers through an area the very name of which comes from this ancient festival. On one of our Charles Dickens London walks which wends its way along Strand and through Covent Garden we pass the church of St Mary-Le-Stand may-pole-dancing4inside which Charles Dickens parents were married.

The church is situated on the spot where the old May-pole was once located. It was here that the May Day festivities were carried on until, in 1517, the London apprentices rioted during the celebrations and the powers that were had the Maypole taken down. Although it was re-erected following Charles 11’s restoration in 1660 it never achieved its former prominence and it was finally taken down in 1713 when the church of St Mary was built on its site. Although another one was erected nearby this only lasted five years and was moved elsewhere in 1717.

One thing that we like to do on our London walks is look at the history behind the many intriguing English customs,  and today people all over the country will be celebrating the May-day and some of them will even dance round the maypole.

The custom of dancing round the maypole is an old one.  Washington Irving writing in his Bracebridge Hall remembered it fondly.

“I shall never forget the delight I felt on first seeing maypole.
“It was on the banks of the Dee, dose by the picturesque old bridge that stretches across’ the river from the quaint little city of Chester.
“I -had already been carried, back into the former days by the antiquities of that venerable place, the examination of which is equal to turning over the pages of a black-letter volume, or gazing on the pictures in Froissart. The maypole on the margin of  that poetic stream completed the illusion.
“The mere sight of this maypole gave a glow to my feelings, and spread a charm over the country for ‘the rest of the day.”

There were of course several other maypoles dotted around the streets of London, the sites of which are now covered on several of our London walks.

The church of St. Andrew Undershaft, St. Mary Axe, opposite the Lloyds Building, was so named because it was dominated on those occasions by the shaft of the huge maypole that was erected there annually.

This was one of the most famous maypoles of pre-Puritan days. Chaucer refers to it when talking of a braggart :

Right well aloft, and high ye beare your head,
As ye would beare the great shaft of Cornhill.

John Stow, the historian, records that it was higher than the church steeple. When not in use this maypole was suspended upon iron hooks on the walls of neighbouring houses. ‘-

In the reign of Edward VI, a sermon was preached abhoring the May Day observances around St. Pauls’ Cross, which stood by St Paul’s Cathedral.

The occupants of the houses on which the St Andrew’s Undershaft maypole was hung, took down the shaft, and sawed it in pieces -

“Every man taking for his share as much as had lain over his door and stall, the length of his house, and they of the alley divided amongst them so much as had lain over their alley gate.”

Although the maypole has long since gone the church of St Andrew Undershaft still survives and today itst-andrew is towered over by the soaring bulk of the Swiss-Re building - or the Gherkin as it is best known in London - much as it was by the maypole in days gone by.

Another famous pole stood in Basing Lane, near St.- Paul’s Cathedral, covered on our City of London walks.

According to John Stow it was forty feet long and “fifteen inches about.”
Local tradition maintained that it had been the jousting staff of Gerard the Giant.

As mentioned earlier the maypole on Strand, having been dismantled, was re-erected in the wake of Charles 11’s return to the throne in 1660. It was one hundred, and thirty-four feet high and was borne in triumph to the space outside Somerset House with the beating of drums and the waving of flags.

The revelers made it the symbol of the return of a Golden Age. The Duke of York, afterwards James. II, had the pole erected by seamen and decorated with three gilt crowns. It was not moved until 1717, when it was bought by Sir Isaac Newton, taken to Wanstead, Essex, and used as a support to a giant telescope.

These stories and snippets of historical fact typify the sort of informed commentary you can look forward to are featured when you join us for any one of our London walks.

They also illustrate what a fascinating and captivating city London is. Every corner turned can yield up a little nugget of history or a site of special interest. Every alley explored has a story to tell or a little bit of historical gossip for our guides to impart.

So a happy May Day to all our readers and we hope that we will be able to welcome you soon on one of our Historical London walks around a city that has spent 2,000 years preparing for you to explore it.

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