Welcome to the June newsletter from Camden Guides, with a list of walks taking place during the coming month, as well as details of our next Meet the Guides event, which provides an opportunity for anyone interested in learning about becoming a qualified Camden Tour Guide, to meet guides and learn about the course.
If you would like to apply, please visit the page on our website with full details and the online application form. This page can be found by clicking here.
Living on the Edge: Hidden Holborn and Little Italy
Some of the most interesting areas around the City of London are places lived in and worked in by people who were not based inside it but needed to be near it. A great example is the area just north of Holborn, on the north-western edge of the City.
A medieval bishop’s palace (you can still go into the crypt, built in the 1270’s): a Tudor-era pub down a narrow alley: multiple diamond dealers and the site of a famous heist by geriatric thieves (the “diamond wheezers”): London’s first social housing project: a half-timbered Tudor hall which survived the Great Fire: we see all these on the walk.
We also focus on exploring “Little Italy”: not much recognised now, in the 1800’s a few streets here were teeming with Italian immigrants, both middle-class artisans making barometers and poorer people selling ice cream and playing barrel organs.
This walk takes place on the 2nd of June, and can be booked by clicking here.
A second date for this walk is the 20th of June, which can be booked by clicking here.
Slums and Squares and Rock n’Roll
You will probably know lots of bits of the St Giles’ area: Tottenham Court Rd tube, Centrepoint, Shaftesbury Ave, Seven Dials…but you probably don’t know how the area came to be as it is. A fascinating story of ancient roadways meeting, a medieval leper colony, a failed posh residential district, a notorious Victorian slum and the most unspoilt Georgian square in London. I would be delighted to help you explore all this (and see the street where Elton John worked as a tea boy and the Rolling Stones and Genesis recorded their earliest singles).
This walk takes place on the 2nd of June 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 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.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 the 8th of June and can be booked by clicking here.
Hampstead: the village on the hill
You probably know Hampstead as a very attractive area of very posh houses and very famous people. But why is it so lovely to walk around?
It’s a lot to do with a hill which prevented major roads and any railways being built: so uniquely in London it preserves a Georgian village streetscape. It also had many springs which supported a Tudor laundry business and then a fashionable Spa attraction in the 1700’s.
And its healthy air and great views have always made it an attractive place for the wealthy, and for artists, writers and entertainers. So there are plenty of lovely houses to see: but this walk also explores buildings such as old workhouses and bath houses which remind us that plenty of “ordinary” people lived there too!
But above all its a beautiful old village on a hill: do come and explore it!
This walk takes place on the 8th of June and can be booked by clicking here.
A second date for this walk is on the 29th of June, which can be booked by clicking here.
Campaigning for the Abolition of Slavery: Central London Landmarks
This walk reveals where many key London events took place in British campaigns against slavery and slave-trading between the mid-1800s and mid-1900s. Fugitive and former slaves, white lawyers and activists, black activists, orators, authors and musicians come alive in a walk from Chancery Lane to Fleet Street, Lincoln’s Inn and Covent Garden ending at Embankment Gardens. The capture in London of escaped slaves led to legal cases espoused by campaigners. Slaves were given as gifts by West Indies travellers to wealthy Londoners who often considered them fashion-accessories. There were small communities of free blacks, many working as servants, and blacks made free by fighting on the British side during wars thronged to London, some becoming beggars but others got by and even moved into the middle classes. On the walk you meet Olaudah Equiano, James Somerset, Granville Sharp, Billy Waters, Sarah Parker Remond, Thomas Clarkson, Mary Prince, Ottobah Cuguano, Elizabeth Heyrick, Samuel Johnson, the Fisk Jubilee Singers and more names now usually forgotten.
This walk takes place on the 15th of June and can be booked by clicking here.
Meet the Guides – Camden Tour Guides Association FREE walk
This FREE walk is aimed at anyone who is interested in learning about becoming a qualified Camden Tour Guide, offering an opportunity to meet existing Camden Guides, go with them on a tour around the King’s Cross area and have a chance to talk to them about the course and what it’s like to be a tour guide in Camden today.
The next course starts end September 2024. If you are unable to come on this date but are interested in the course, then please email course@camdenguides.com or visit our website for information at https://camdenguides.com/training.
This free event takes place on the 19th of June, and a place can be reserved by clicking here.
Primrose Hill and the Navvies
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 6th of July and can be booked by clicking here.
Our next newsletter will be on the first Saturday of July, but please check our online calendar as new walks are being added between newsletters. The calendar can be found on our home page by clicking here.