Welcome to the first Camden Guides newsletter of 2024, and we have a selection of walks for you over the coming months that all illustrate the fascinating and varied history of this part of London, starting with:
Marx, Lenin and Anarchism
London was the destination for communists and anarchists to meet and argue over the form that the coming revolution would take. German anarchists had lived in London since 1848 and came to police attention after assassination attempts on the Tsar of Russia. Lenin knew London well, and the final split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks took place here in November 1903, with tragic consequences for the Russian Revolution in 1917. The communists had fled police spies in Brussels to meet in Charlotte St in the guise of an anglers club.
Successive waves of exiles from France, Germany and Russia made a home in Fitzrovia, 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 streets where the leading Communard Louise Michel lived and established a pioneering Fitrovia school, and revisit the site of the Autonomie anarchist club, linked by police to the Greenwich bomb of 1894 which inspired Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent.
This walks takes place on the Saturday the 13th of January at 14:00 and can be booked at this link.
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 Sunday the 14th of January at 14:00 and can be booked at this link, and also on Wednesday 17th of January which can be booked at this link.
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 14:00 and can be booked at this link.
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 at 11:00 and can be booked at this link.
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 at this link.
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 at this link.
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 Saturday the 2nd of March at 13:00 and can be booked at this link.
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 Sunday the 17th of March at 13:00 and can be booked at this link.
We hope you have found something of interest in the above selection of walks.
Our next newsletter will be on the first Saturday of February.