Welcome to the Camden Guides newsletter of walks and events for February, and within this month’s edition we have a comprehensive range of walks over the coming months to explore many different aspects of the Borough of Camden, starting with:
St. George’s Gardens: a hidden cemetery in the heart of Bloomsbury

Join Elena on a tour of a secret urban cemetery.
Step into the historic and atmospheric St. George’s Gardens in Bloomsbury, the first Anglican burial ground to be created away from a church in London. Thanks to the efforts of Victorian philanthropists it was transformed into an “outdoor sitting room for the poor” in the 1880s and has been a public garden ever since. Today this secluded and peaceful garden, away from the hustle and bustle of Bloomsbury, is still a treasure trove of fascinating tales.
We’ll explore the final resting place of ten Jacobite soldiers who met a gruesome end and of a famous anti-slavery campaigner. We’ll discover the tragic tale of a victim of a Victorian-era miscarriage of justice and the shadowy world of anatomy schools – apparently, the first official case of bodysnatching was recorded here.
Although Virginia Woolf will get a mention, this is Bloomsbury but not as you know it!
This walk takes place on Saturday the 3rd of February at 2pm, and can be book by clicking here. with a second date on the 15th of February which can be booked by clicking here.
The smaller squares of Bloomsbury
Bloomsbury is world-famous for its Georgian garden squares. But today we will venture beyond the most famous squares to discover smaller ones, lesser known but no less charming.
Over the last 150 years the University of London has became a significant presence in much of Bloomsbury. Come on this walk to see what is left of some of the former residential areas, discover their history and enjoy the tales of some of their previous residents, a mix of literary giants, visionaries, and pioneers who found inspiration in these quieter corners of Bloomsbury.
The proceedings from this walk will be donated to the homeless charity The Connection at St Martin’s
This walk takes place on Monday the 5th of February and can be booked by clicking here.
London’s Sex Industry and the Stage in the Long 18th Century

When the Puritan Protectorate ended in 1660, London’s sex industry grew wildly public and was linked to both theatres and the underworld. 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 Baddely might appear. There are the bawds who kept houses, the women who worked in them, like Nell Gywn and Sally Salisbury, and Harris’s List, where they might advertise. We hear about homosexual Molly Houses as well as Jelly Houses, Coffee Houses and Bagnios. 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 women, flower girls and patrons of dance halls. The underworld called this red-light area where you might meet Edgworth Bess the Hundreds of Drury.
This walk takes place on Saturday the 10th of February and can be booked by clicking here.
Beating the Bounds’ from King’s Cross to Farringdon

A historic walk winding either side of the border between Camden and Islington boroughs – also the route of the now-buried River Fleet
‘Beating the Bounds’ around the borders between parishes, land ownerships and similar is an ancient tradition, where the boundary was literally paced out and marked with stones each year. This walk traces today’s border between Camden and Islington, with detours to explore nearby signs of previous boundaries of parishes, vestries, water conduits and historic landowners.
Along the way, we’ll see varied architecture from pretty Georgian and Victorian terraces to old burial grounds, narrow passages that were once slums and restored industrial buildings; see if we can spot historic boundary markers; meet mediaeval monks, Tudor and Victorian philanthropists, a dynasty of 19C architects and builders; and hear of lost wells and pleasure gardens.
This walk takes place on Saturday the 10th of February and can be booked by clicking here.
First and Quirky St Pancras and Kings Cross

A visit around the recently regenerated railway lands. The walk consists of some very interesting ‘firsts’, a lot are transport based, but also about the contrast in the life styles of the inhabitants. The area has recently undergone a massive transformation and is very much a ‘destination’ with so many new companies moving into the area. It is also a walk about the lives of the poor as well as the home of some iconic inventions and well-known traditions. We visit the old coal drops yard, now completely transformed and St Pancras Old Church graveyard, which includes John Soanes grave the inspiration for the telephone box
This walk runs on the 15th of February and can be booked by clicking here.
Primrose Hill and the Navvies

Primrose Hill is now one of London’s desirable areas, but it was born with the blood, sweat and toil that built the canal and railways.The neighbourhood radiates brilliant industrial solutions of Victorian engineers, but who built it? This walk puts hard-working navvies at the centre of the story and tells how the area developed in the face of the railway’s soot and smoke. The walk follows a beautiful stretch of the Regent’s Canal, and from the top of the famous hill you have great views over London. You’ll see railway landmarks as well as the artists’ studios and pastel-painted streets that came later, in one of which lives Paddington Bear. Primrose Hill cherishes a high street largely free of chain shops and numerous good pubs. It’s all minutes from Camden Market but feels miles away.
This walk takes place on the 2nd of March and can be booked by clicking here.
Street Haunting: the Female Flaneur
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Charlotte Mew, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf all drew inspiration from walking alone in London; observing and enjoying street life. Woolf called it “street haunting”. The sights and sounds of London run through their novels, stories, essays and poetry. On this two hour walk through the streets and squares of Bloomsbury we see where they lived and walked and how walks influenced their writing.
This walk takes place on the 2nd of March and can be booked by clicking here with a second date on the 14th of March which can be booked by clicking here.
Brave, bold and brilliant: remarkable women of Hampstead
Join Elena on a guided walk in the footsteps of Hampstead’s inspiring women.
To celebrate Women’s History Month we move North to the quaint and historic neighbourhood of Hampstead.
On this meandering walk through cobbled streets and winding alleyways, up and down the hills of Hampstead, we will discover the lives of remarkable and inspiring women who made their mark on history and culture.
Dissenting novelists, iconic musicians, social reformers, eccentric poets, medical trailblazers and all-round extraordinary women: they all made Hampstead their home at different times of their lives and changed the world in a multitude of ways.
This walk takes places on the 3rd of March and can be booked by clicking here.
Rebel rebel: the women medical pioneers of Bloomsbury
Follow in the footsteps of the female trailblazers at the forefront of medical history
For Women’s History Month we are celebrating a bunch of determined women who, overcoming huge hurdles, excelled in the male-dominated world of medicine, smashing multiple glass ceilings along the way.
From the 18th century onwards Bloomsbury was central to medical progress, thanks to its long association with universities, hospitals and pioneering activities. It’s in these streets that we will meet a number of trailblazing women who paved the way for today’s women in medicine and will discover which institutions supported them, while others put obstacles in their way.
Whether they were pioneering surgeons, determined dentists or brave nurses, they all played an important role in improving the standards of care not only for other women, but for the population as a whole.
This walk takes place on the 7th of March and can be booked by clicking here.
Conrad’s Secret Agent and Anarchism in Fitzrovia
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.
Successive waves of exiles from France, Germany and Russia had made a home in Fitzrovia and Soho, close to the British Museum where Marx and Lenin studied, yet in an area where foreigners ran the bookstores and shops. On this walk we will find the street housing Verloc’s pornographic bookshop and revisit the site of the Autonomie anarchist club, raided by police after the Greenwich bomb. We will also learn more about the actions of Chief Inspector Melville, who was the model for Chief Inspector Heat.
This walk takes place on the 12th of March and can be booked by clicking here.
All change at King’s Cross

Join Mike Marriott’s walk for a look around the “new” King’s Cross.
The area formerly used for goods yards behind King’s Cross station has now been transformed. Come and see how on this walk!
200 years ago King’s Cross was a rather desolate place, marked by brick kilns, rubbish heaps and slums. The arrival of the railways changed the area forever: on this walk we will discover the traces of King’s Cross past – pioneering stations, model dwellings, splendid hotels and many historic building and structures which have been beautifully reimagined and repurposed for 21st century living.
The proceedings from this walk will be donated to the homeless charity The Connection at St. Martin’s.
This walk takes place on the 14th of March and can be booked by clicking here.
Dodging the Blitz: Bloomsbury Second World War Novels
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.
This walk takes place on the 16th of March and can be booked by clicking here.
Historic Working-class Migrations: Irish, Italian, African, Jewish
People migrating to work in a city like London may begin settling together in ghettos, but eventually they mix. 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.
This walk takes place on the 17th of March and can be booked by clicking here.
Dorothy L Sayers Bloomsbury
Dorothy L Sayers, one of the “golden age” crime writers between the first and second world wars, lived and worked in Holborn and Bloomsbury – as did her alter ego, Harriet Vane and other familiar characters from the novels and short stories.
See places from which she took inspiration for her detective fiction; find out more about Sayers’ characters and about the woman who brought them all to life.
This walk takes place on the 29th of March and can be booked by clicking here with a second date on the 30th of March which can be booked by clicking here.
Duels, Druids and Dalmatians: a stroll in charming Primrose Hill
Discover a very cosmopolitan “urban village” in North London with Elena.
We will explore historic Primrose Hill, one of London’s prettiest “urban villages”, and its magnificent park: from the top of the hill you can enjoy clear views of London’s skyline.
The area, with its continental cafés and independent shops, has been and still is a highly desirable place to live among the rich and famous, attracting a very cosmopolitan (and sometimes mystical) crowd. On this walk we will discover the stories of many famous international residents from the past: a tragic American poet, a Welsh bard, a German philosopher, the hero of the Philippines and even a little bear from Peru. It doesn’t get more cosmopolitan than that!
Today its high street is full of charming independent restaurants and boutiques, but some of these pretty pastel-coloured facades hide haunting stories from the past.
And, as a bonus, you might even spot a celebrity or two!
This walk takes place on the 4th of April and can be booked by clicking here.
We hope that there is something of interest in the above list, and look forward to seeing you on a walk in the coming weeks.
Our next newsletter will be on the 2nd of March.