Click on the walk title to book
October
Local London Guiding Day
As usual we will be supporting Local London Guiding Day on Saturday 10th October.
This is when London’s local guiding associations come together to offer free tours showcasing the very best the capital has to offer.
This year’s theme is Back to the Future – how yesterday’s London changed into the capital of tomorrow.
Change has been London’s only constant. Yesterday’s people have fought for our freedom and rights to live in the modern London of today and monumental events have shaped our city so it had to reinvent itself regularly. Come and hear about these game-changers and see how even today will shape the London of the future because today is tomorrow’s past.
The theme of all walks this year is ‘Back to the Future’, so you’ll hear how ancient traces have shaped London over the centuries and indeed how the past continues to influence future plans.
O0nagh will be in King’s Cross with Camden Guides this year and Sue will be in Hoxton with the newly formed Hackney Guides who are taking part this year for the first time
Saturday October 10
10:00 am–4:00 pm
Details and exact meeting places of all 6 walks here: https://llgd.org.uk
Barking: from Fishing Fleet to Feminist Icons
This circular walk around Barking takes us past landmarks associated with its medieval abbey, its once huge fishing fleet, the noxious industries and civic pride of the 19th and 20th centuries, right up to today’s riverside regeneration.
Along the way we learn where Capt. Cook was married and where a local suffragette entertained Mrs Pankhurst. We find out what links prison reformer Elizabeth Fry to Barking’s stunning Sikh temple and why there is a memorial to the victims of asbestosis.
Date: Sunday October 11th 2pm
Guide: Sue
Suffragette City
London was at the centre of the suffragette protests just before the First World War, when the capital was rocked by arson attempts, hunger strikes and massive demonstrations. The walk will visit the church where Emily Wilding Davison’s funeral cortège began, and the headquarters of the Women’s Social and Political Union, and the site of the Suffragette Hospital where all the staff, including surgeons, were women, dealing with soldiers straight from the trenches. Along the way we will explore vegetarian restaurants and the 1911 Census boycott.
From a recent review: “I know a good deal about the suffragettes but I learned a whole lot more. Very well researched and delivered.”
Date: Saturday October 17 2pm
Guide: Oonagh
Waterloo in Fiction
A literary walk around Waterloo exploring locations that feature in novels from Victorian times to the present day.
This walk explores the Waterloo of historical fiction. Tracy Chevalier’s Burning Bright brings William Blake’s Lambeth to life, Michael Sadleir’s Forlorn Sunset and Renton Nicholson’s Dombey and Daughter explore its seamier side in Victorian times, while for Sam Selvon’s Lonely Londoners of the 1940s, the station is a place of nostalgia. Above all, it is a place of arrival and departure.
Date: Saturday 31st October 11am
Guide: Sue
November
What’s Behind the South Bank?
In an area that offers so much to see and do it’s easy to overlook some of its most intriguing features. This walk from Waterloo to Blackfriars Bridge highlights hidden gems; some tucked away and others hiding in plain sight. We explore new developments alongside remnants of its industrial past; see monuments and mosaics; learn about a former warehouse that became a military hospital, a cooperative housing development that thwarted the developers and finish in an area once famed for hat-making.
Date: Sunday 22nd November 2pm
Guide: Sue
December
The Trollopes of Bloomsbury
Both Anthony Trollope and his mother Fanny were proliflc and successful writers
Anthony, born in Bloomsbury is best known for the Barchester Chronicles and Paliser novels where Catherdral towns and country houses often overshadow the place of Bloomsbury. But this area which “cannot be called fashionable” and is “not much overlooked by nobility” offers lodgings and temptation to young clerks like Johnny Eade and affordable accomodation for impoverished women like Lady Anna.
We follow the links between Anthony Trollope’s own life as a civil servant at the Post Office, his fiction with its Bloomsbury locations and the influence of Fanny Trollope’s writing on her son’s work.
Date: Sunday 6th December 2pm
Guide: Sue
