Welcome to the Camden Guides newsletter of walks and events for March, 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:
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.
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).
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 10th of March at 14:00 and the 24th of March at 11:00 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.
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 27th of April at 11:00 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 6th of April.