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March 2026
Finsbury in Print
Explore Finsbury: home of radical magazines; setting of and inspiration for novels by Dickens, Gissing and Arnold Bennett .
Finsbury’s narrow streets and courts provide the setting for many novels. We pass by novelist Arnold Bennetts’s Riceyman Steps, through George Gissing’s Nether World, see where Dickens’ Oliver Twist first met Mr Brownlow and meet the inspiration for Miss Haversham.
2nd March – 11am
Guide Sue
Dodging the Blitz: Bloomsbury Second World War Novels
Discover the novels which draw on Bloomsbury’s experience of the Blitz
Graham Greene’s End of the Affair and the Ministry of Fear are directly taken from his wartime experiences and love affairs in Bloomsbury as an air raid warden. Elizabeth Bowen and Muriel Spark are other writers who transposed war time events into their literary output. Pat Barker and Sarah Waters have used the period and location brilliantly in recent novels to emphasise the female experience of war. This walk highlights important events which formed the basis of these novels, and looks at some of the main landmarks of the Blitz in Bloomsbury.
Discover the novels which draw on Bloomsbury’s experience of the Blitz
5th March – 2pm
Guide: Oonagh
Finsbury in Print
Explore Finsbury: home of radical magazines; setting of and inspiration for novels by Dickens, Gissing and Arnold Bennett .
Finsbury’s narrow streets and courts provide the setting for many novels. We pass by novelist Arnold Bennetts’s Riceyman Steps, through George Gissing’s Nether World, see where Dickens’ Oliver Twist first met Mr Brownlow and meet the inspiration for Miss Haversham.
8th March 2pm
Guide: Sue
Conrad’s Secret Agent and Anarchism in Fitzrovia
Explore the anarchist circles in London through the eye of Joseph Conrad in his Secret Agent, based on true events
Conrad’s The Secret Agent cast a critical eye over London at the end of the nineteenth century when the capital was home to a series of revolutionary anarchist groups. They had come to police attention following royal pressure after the assassination of the Tsar of Russia. The Secret Agent, Verloc, in Conrad’s novel is a double agent, blackmailed to commit an outrage which ends in family tragedy. The death of Stevie, Verloc’s son in law, is closely based on a real anarchist explosion near the Greenwich Observatory in 1894.
9th March – 11am
Guide: Oonagh
Cold Comfort Farm in Highgate
Discover the life of Stella Gibbons, who published over 20 novels as well as Cold Comfort Farm, her first novel.
Discover the life of Stella Gibbons, who published over 20 novels as well as Cold Comfort Farm, her first novel, which achieved widespread success. She lived on the Holly Lodge Estate, Highgate, which had been built on land once owned by Angela Burdett-Coutt. John Betjmann and J.B. Priestley lived nearby, both of whom wrote about single professional women making their own way, often in flats like those on Holly Lodge Estate.
12th March – 11am
Guide: Oonagh
The Trollopes of Bloomsbury
Both Anthony Trollope and his mother Fanny were proliflc and successful writers. Discover their real life and fictional links to Bloomsbury.
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.
23rd March – 11am
Guide: Sue
The Trollopes of Bloomsbury
Both Anthony Trollope and his mother Fanny were proliflc and successful writers. Discover their real life and fictional links to Bloomsbury.
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.
29th March – 2pm
Guide: Sue
Capital Walks in London 