Welcome to the September newsletter from Camden Guides, and we have a selection of intriguing and fascinating walks taking place over the coming months, starting with one of the big events in the London guiding calendar::
Local London Guiding Day
This year, Camden Guides will be participating in Local London Guiding Day, where, on the 5th of October, five London guiding organizations provide free walks that explore their local area.
Local London Guiding Day is an annual event to offer free walks around London by local guiding organisations, same theme, in their own area … how many walks can you complete in 1 day …
All walks begin and end either at or near an underground, to enable you to get to the next walk as quickly as possible.
This years’ theme Local Heroes of Camden offers a circular walk to discover London’s largest public garden square, an oasis in the capital, with stunning buildings and memorials bringing to life our past heroes. Who would believe such a peaceful walk would include a Catholic refuge … in a pub, an execution point, home of possibly the greatest judge in history, being overlooked by the stunning Lincoln’s Inn.
The walk leaves every hour on the hour, beginning at 10:00 until final walk departing at 16:00.
Duration of walk – 1 hour
Meeting point – Holborn Underground Station. The walk will also end close to the station.
To reserve a free space, please click here to visit our Eventbrite page
This year we are supporting our Lord Mayors charities
Scene&Heard – Celebrating young imaginations – a unique mentoring charity that partners the inner-city children of Somers Town with volunteer arts professionals, boosting confidence to raise aspiration through realising young imaginations on and off the stage.
www.sceneandheard.org
@SceneandHeardUK
We are also supporting the New Horizon Youth Centre – raising the awareness of the issue of young homelessness, key areas including housing, health, life skills and safety.
www.nhyouthcentre.org.uk@NHyouthcentre
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 at 13:00 and can be booked by clicking here.
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 at 13:00 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 at 13:00 and can be booked by clicking here.
Our next newsletter will be on the first Saturday in October.