On this day in 1951 Fanny Wilkinson , the first woman to become a professional Landscape gardener died at the age of 96.
On this day in 1951 Fanny Wilkinson , the first woman to become a professional Landscape gardener died at the age of 96. This year marks 170 years since her birth. Follow the link below to read the tribute Sue wrote for Pascal Theatre to one of her favourite Bloomsbury women.
https://www.pascal-theatre.com/biographies/fanny-wilkinson/
There will be a walk in June to mark the event.
John Boughton (Municipal Dreams) has written this interesting and thoughtful review of Behind the Privet Hedge: a newly published biography of Richard Sudell by Michael Gibson.
Our next Ada Salter: Beautifying Bermondsey walk is on 4th August.
Back in February, Oonagh took reporter Sophie Dickinson from The Telegraph for a walk around Fitzrovia and Soho following in the footsteps of novelist Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent.
Click on the link below to read the article
I discovered communist London on a literary walking tour
Conrad’s Secret Agent and the Anarchists was one of six different literary-themed walks we offered for the Footprints of London Literary Festival. If you missed the festival look out for our literary themed walks throughout the year.
Next up is Sue’s new Waterloo in Fiction walk tomorrow evening. There’s still just time to book.
Tracy Chevalier’s Burning Bright brings William Blake’s Lambeth to life, Michael Sadleir’s Forlorn Sunset explore’s the seamier side of Victorian London, 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.
Not so many public walks this month as we have a number of private commissions. We offer all of our walks for private groups and we are very happy to design a bespoke walk for you.
As usual we are supporting London Open Gardens this weekend and Sue’s walk, Fanny Wilkinson’s Green Lungs for London is sold out!
Once again we are delighted to be taking part in the Footprints of London Literary Festival throughout March.
We have walks in Bloomsbury, Fitzrovia, Islington and Waterloo, including two new ones this year: Finsbury in Print: from Black Dwarf to Spare Rib and Waterloo in Fiction as well as some old favourites
Last week Oonagh took a journalist from the Telegraph for a sneak preview of her Conrad’s Secret Agent and Anarchism in Fitzrovia, walk.
You can find details of all our walks here
Happy New Year! This year Capital Walks in London celebrates our tenth anniverary. For the past ten years, Oonagh and Sue have been delighted to take you off the beaten track and to introduce you to some of our hidden hero(ine)s and favourite people and places.
Over that time, we have led walks in Angel, Archway, Barking, Bermondsey, Bloomsbury, Bow, Clerkenwell, Crouch End, Finsbury, Fitzrovia, Hackney, Holloway, Holborn, Newham, Poplar, Somers Town, Stoke Newington and the City.
We have added new walks each year and 2024 will be no exception. We also have a bigger project planned that we are keeping under wraps for the moment.
First of our new walks for 2024, is Oonagh’s Marx, Lenin and Anarchism: Revolutionaries in Fitzrovia on 13th January.
And on 17th February Sue has a new walk in Waterloo, exploring What’s Behind the South Bank.
Moving into March, we have new literary walks in Waterloo and Clerkenwell, so keep an eye out for those and for news of our bigger project!
Thank you to everyone who has walked with us and shared our enthusiasm over the last ten years. We look forward to seeing you again on a walk soon!
This March our walks all have a literary theme. Oonagh takes us around 19th century Fitzrovia in the company of Joseph Conrad and the Anarchists and explores Bloomsbury as depicted in the novels of the second world war. Sue is also in Bloomsbury, following in the footsteps of crime novelist Dorothy L Sayers and exploring how solitary walking influenced the writing of Charlotte Mew, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf.
See here for dates and details
They are all part of the Footprints of London Literary Festival
We are very pleased to offer guided walks again. We have made some changes to minimise the risk of transmitting Covid. You can see the detail here
IN LINE WITH MANY OTHERS OUR RESPONSE TO THE MOST RECENT GOVERNMENT GUIDANCE ON COVID-19/CORONAVIRUS IS TO CANCEL OUR WALKS AND TOURS FOR THE NEXT COUPLE OF MONTHS. STAY SAFE AND WE LOOK FORWARD TO WALKING WITH YOU AGAIN SOON.
Sue & Oonagh
All our walks this March have a women’s theme. There are spies and socialists, politicians and pacifists, suffragists and scientists, medics and mystery writers.
And of course we take you to to some lovely and lesser known London places.
Our new Newsletter is now out and you can see a complete list of forthcoming walks here.
#womenshistorymonth #IWD2020
If the name Dorothy L Sayers simply conjures up an image of Edward Petherbridge or Ian Carmichael portraying a ‘silly ass’ aristocratic sleuth with a monocle, perhaps it is time to think again.
Lord Peter Wimsey’s fast cars and ample wealth may have been created as wish fulfillment in hard times, but Sayers’ reality was much closer to that of her fictional heroine Harriet Vane, an independent woman of limited means trying to make a career as a writer.
D L Sayers’ own life and the London in which she lived and worked shine through several of her novels and short stories. Pym’s agency in Murder Must Advertise is modeled closely on Benson’s where Sayers worked for many years as a successful copywriter, and in Gaudy Night it is Sayers’ own first floor bedsit overlooking Mecklenburg Square that is home for Harriet.
When we first meet Harriet in Strong Poison she is on trial for her life, accused of murder. Is there any parallel with Sayers’ own life? Is this literary revenge on her own faithless lover?
Despite murder Sayers’ writing often has a light touch and ready wit. Miss Climpson’s “cattery” of female investigators disguised as a secretarial agency appears in several stories and is a nice nod to Sherlock Holmes’ Bow Street Irregulars, the street urchins who are his eyes and ears. Miss Murchison’s nail-biting infiltration of the Bedford Row office of a murderous solicitor makes the heart beat faster!
This walk explores places Sayers lived and worked and her personal and professional life unfolds and interweaves with that of her characters. Fact and fiction overlap on the walk as they do in the novels where, for one example, fictional pathologist James Lubbock shares a strikingly similar career with real-life Bernard Spilsbury, each living in the same Bloomsbury Square and each acquiring a knighthood at much the same time. Why not join Sue on this walk through Bloomsbury to find out more?
Click here to book
Capital Walks in London 