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Posts Tagged ‘Chelsea’

Exploring Wren’s London on Our Walks

Monday, September 14th, 2009

In our earlier blog we looked at how many of the streets we see on our London walks were the work of one of London’s most prolific architects, Sir Christopher Wren.

Wren’s opportunity to transform the London skyline came about in September 1666 when the Great Fire of London destroyed virtually all the medieval City.

With the embers of the fire still smouldering, Sir Christopher Wren approached King Charles 11 and presented him with a comprehensive plan to rebuild the City on a grid-pattern that would consist of spacious streets, squares and elegant piazzas.

In truth, since the plan ignored the property rights of all those who had lost buildings in the Great Fire of London it had little chance of ever becoming a reality.

What it did do, however, was persuade the king that this enthusiastic young man was just the person to supervise those parts of the necessary rebuilding that could be undertaken by the Crown and the public authorities.

Wren was, therefore, made one of the three Royal Commissioners for the rebuilding and was employed almost continuously from then until his retirement in 1718.

You can see evidence of his genius on so many of our London walks. From the mighty splendour of St Paul’s Cathedral, to the graceful simplicity of his lesser known churches such as St Anne and St Agnes in Gresham Street.

According to the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, commenting on Wren’s achievement in 1932, ” There is no finer monument to his genius than the character that he gave London…”

Indeed, as Wren himself observed “architecture aims at eternity” and his vision is still apparent to us today as we make our way around the streets of the City on our London walks.

He designed 51 City Churches, four Royal palaces, Royal Hospitals at Chelsea and Greenwich, not to mention numerous minor commissions both within and without London.

When he died in 1723 at the ripe old age of 91 he had transformed London and was, fittingly buried in the crypt of his greatest achievement, St. Paul’s Cathedral beneath a simple black slab that urges “If you require a monument look about you..”

Those who join us on our City of London walks will see that it is not just a reference to St Paul’s Cathedral but to his graceful church towers that still dot the London skyline.

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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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It’s A London Thing - Walks and Tours

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

Walks are one of the best ways to see London. Bus tours don’t provide the opportunity to take a peek behind the scenes, to peel pack the layers of history and really look at London’s past.

If you wanted to put together your own London walks your best way to do so is to focus on an area (Google maps is great for this) and locate buildings that seem interesting. A church, an old pub, anything really that you can focus on.

Having got the focus for your walk of London, the next thing to do is have a look at smaller streets that run between larger streets. In places like Belgravia and Chelsea these are invariably very attractive mews, lined by properties that are now much sought after but which in the 18th and 19th centuries were the homes and stables for the coach men who serviced the large houses that surround them.

To step into these places is to be pitched back in time and you can often discover something that really makes it your tour of discovery.

In the City of London walks can take in a terrifice variety of old alleyways and historic passages where you can just feel the history seeping from its walls.

To walk through these old alleyways is a joy and, again, you can plot your own London walks in the City using Google maps to located buildings that seem interesting and between which you can plot routes that soon become time travelling vooyages of discovery.

If you don’t want to do it yourself then why not join one of our regular London walks?

Every night we offer a Jack the Ripper Tour and on Fridays and Saturdays we do our ever popular London Ghost Walks.

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