Welcome to the October issue of the Camden Guides newsletter of walks and events, and we have a wide range of walks available over the coming months, that explore some very different aspects of Camden, starting with:
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 the 6th of October, and can be booked by clicking here.
A watery wander around King’s Cross and St. Pancras
An almost-circular walk around King’s Cross and St. Pancras stations and the extraordinary, vibrant redevelopment of what was a semi-derelict wasteland of railway lands. The area originally had a plentiful supply of water from the now-hidden River Fleet and associated lost springs and wells, then the man-made Regent’s Canal supplied more water from the early 1800s.
This walk explores how all things watery have influenced the development of the area, from lost pleasure gardens and an ancient church by a riverbank, to canal locks, steam engines and gas storage holders, then today’s inspiring water features and a tranquil nature reserve.
This walk starts outside King’s Cross Station, lasts 2 – 2 1/4 hours and ends near St. Pancras Station.
This walk takes place on the 16 October and the 3rd of November. Pre-book only via Eventbrite, click here to choose your date.
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 the 19th of October, and can be booked by clicking here.
Colours of Bloomsbury
Bloomsbury is such a lively area. On this walk through the streets and squares of Bloomsbury, Maggie Coates will tell the tale of some of the colourful humans who have helped to create it. From the people who made a “red” square to the architect of a black and white church, from Graham Greene to a black icon.
This walk takes place on the 24th of October, and can be booked by clicking here.
Camden Town Walk: a journey through history and culture
Discover Camden Town with Elena and Mike.
It’s lively, it’s quirky, it’s cosmopolitan and it’s packed full of history! Camden Town is all of these things. It’s a neighbourhood that has been shaped by many communities, from the Irish to the Greek-Cypriots, each leaving an indelible mark. Charles Dickens, a very unhappy former resident, immortalised Camden Town’s poverty, squalor and deprivation in his literary musings.
Camden Town was developed at the end of the 18th century with the aim to attract the wealthy middle classes, but the arrival of the railways put a stop to those ambitious plans. On the plus side, it now boasts the best-preserved railway heritage complex in the UK!
On this walk you will hear about the gin warehouses that once lined the Regent’s Canal, the Victorian ice-wells now hidden from view and the hundreds of horses working in the goodyards. You will also discover how Camden’s numerous pubs, ballrooms and warehouses have become a mecca for music makers and music lovers over the decades.
This walk takes place on the 25th of October, 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 the 9th of November, and can be booked by clicking here.
Gin Lane: Thieves and Thief-takers in the Night-Cellars of Seven Dials
Now it’s trendy and pretty, but 18th-century Seven Dials was notorious for poverty and crime. With no organised police force, thieves, highwaymen and fences bribed those hired to catch them, meeting in low-down dives where they spoke a secret language called flash. The notoriously corrupt Jonathan Wild captured thief Jack Sheppard more than once, but Jack made dramatic escapes from prison aided by his sexworker-partner Edgworth Bess.
With gin selling at a penny a glass, carousing was full-on in areas outsiders called rookeries, thieves’ kitchens, the Holy Land (because of the Irish presence) and, for Drury Lane’s red-light zone, Little Sodom. A range of middle-class spies, social investigators, reporters and slum-tourists came to look and sometimes participate in goings-on they found appalling and titillating. John Gay portrayed popular hero Jack Sheppard and Public Enemy Jonathan Wild in the characters of Captain MacHeath and Mr Peachum, in The Beggar’s Opera, London’s favourite theatre-piece throughout the 18th century. What fun!
This walk takes place on the 7th of December, and can be booked by clicking here.
Abolition! Anti-Slavery campaigning: Central London Landmarks
This walk reveals where many key London events took place in British campaigns against slavery and slave-trading between the mid-1700s and mid-1800s. Fugitive and former slaves, white lawyers, activists and orators along with black activists, 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 and slave-owners 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 getting by and even moving into the middle class. 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 11th of January, 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 25th of January, and can be booked by clicking here.
We hope that there i something to interest you in the above listing. Our next newsletter will be on the first Saturday of November.