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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

On this walk we will start at the impressive new developments around King’s Cross and St Pancras including two magnificent railway gateways to London. We will see impressive monuments to Victorian enterprise and engineering in the beautifully restored and revived Granary Building and the extraordinary Coal Drops now the home to London’s thriving University of […]

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 […]

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 […]

Join Elena to discover the fascinating history of St. Giles. We will delve into the darker chapters of London's past as we uncover the secrets of this infamous neighbourhood. We will wander through the alleys where tales of poverty and crime once echoed (Dickens will get a mention or two, of course...) and discover the […]

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 […]

Join Elena to discover the fascinating history of St. Giles. We will delve into the darker chapters of London's past as we uncover the secrets of this infamous neighbourhood. We will wander through the alleys where tales of poverty and crime once echoed (Dickens will get a mention or two, of course...) and discover the […]

Starting at the western end of the Suffragette Line on the edge of Parliament Hill we see where fields gave way first to Victorian cottages and later to award-winning modernist Council housing. On our way to Chalk Farm, we discover how the area got it's name, hear about some runaway elephants and wonder at he […]