Camden Guides Newsletter of Walks and Events – August 2024

Welcome to the August newsletter from Camden Guides, and we have a selection of intriguing and fascinating walks taking place over the coming months, starting with:

Secrets of St. Giles: a walk through London’s infamous past

Join Elena to discover the fascinating history of St. Giles.

We will delve into the darker chapters of London’s past as we uncover the secrets of this infamous neighbourhood. We will wander through the alleys where tales of poverty and crime once echoed (Dickens will get a mention or two, of course…) and discover the remnants of centuries-old buildings that bear witness to St Giles’ tumultuous history.

As we wind our way from the ancient church built on the site of a leper colony to the site of the infamous rookeries and gallows, now replaced by some of the most striking modern architecture in London, we’ll talk music, pubs, executions and developers’ greed. There is something for everyone on this walk!

This walk takes place on Tuesday the 20th of August at 11:00 and can be booked by clicking here.

London’s Sex Industry and the Stage in the Long 18th Century

Charles II lifted the Puritan ban on theatre-going, and by 1700 London was sex-capital of Europe. This walk starts with the stage at a time when all actresses were assumed to be prostitutes and theatres a place for clients to find them. We pass through areas where street-walkers and bawdy houses were closely linked with playhouses, and we hear about high-class masquerades where actress-courtesans like Sophia Baddeley might appear. There are the bawds who kept houses, the women who worked in them, like Sally Salisbury, and Harris’s List, where they might advertise. We hear about homosexual Molly Houses as well as Jelly Houses, Coffee Houses, Bagnios and Masquerades. Links between corrupt government officials and criminals formed the plot of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera in 1728, with its cast of thief-takers, highwaymen, pickpockets and sex workers like Jenny Diver who met in flash houses where they spoke a secret language. The unscrupulous Society for the Reform of Manners tried to close down vice, but things began to change when Social Reformers said women selling sex were victims needing rescue. The walk starts in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and passes through Covent Garden and surrounding streets like Drury Lane, where ordinary folks lived who sold sex – orange-girls like Nell Gwyn, flower girls and patrons of dance halls. The underworld called this red-light area where you might meet thief Jack Sheppard’s partner Edgworth Bess the Hundreds of Drury.

This walk takes place on Sunday the 6th of October at 13:00 and can be booked by clicking here.

Historic Workingclass Migrations to London: Irish, Italian, African, Jewish

Working-class migrants, often maligned as ‘economic migrants’, do business, make families, invent objects, bring pleasures, help each other, fight and die together. One old area of central London shows strong and sympathetic traces of the migrations of poorer folk from the late-18th to 20th centuries from near and far, including from within England itself. The walk begins in the Fleet Ditch and works its way uphill through early Italian and Irish settlements in Saffron Hill into areas of more mixing, taking note of Blacks from Africa via the West Indies and ending with Jewish migrations from numerous locations that made Hatton Garden’s Diamond Street.

On weekends you can see traces of old migrations as well as new – it’s clearly still an area favoured for opening new small businesses.

This walk takes place on Saturday the 19th of October at 13:00 and can be booked by clicking here.

Disgraceful Women of Old St John’s Wood

This walk begins 200 years ago in St John’s Wood, where family arrangements routinely diverged from Victorian rules of respectability. What did it mean to be a Kept Woman? Was it only disreputable or an act of shameful immorality? Some mistresses were movers and shakers, like Harriet Howard who financed the return of Louis Napoleon to the French throne. Novelist George Eliot lived placidly for many years with someone else’s husband, not far from a brothel where sex workers were known as laundresses. A bigamous Agapemonite minister lived with multiple rich unmarried female followers. All this took place in a suburb built with high walls and thick trees to ensure privacy and discretion.

We walk south into Lisson Grove, considered a Victorian slum, where journalist WT Stead staged a scandal he called The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, when he bought Eliza Armstrong from her mother to prove it could be done.

How much did social class determine whether society was appalled by alternative sexual arrangements? Were unmarried women with lovers heroines or victims? Come on this walk to consider scandals of 200 years ago that might sound familiar today, and at the same time join up two neighbourhoods you never thought about together before.

This walk takes place on Saturday the 9th of November at 13:00 and can be booked by clicking here.

We hope there is something of interest in the above walks. Our next newsletter will be on the first Saturday of September. New walks will continue to be added to our online calendar, which can be found by clicking here.

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