You name them, they were here. The measure of London's biographical centripetality isn't the fact that the likes of Shakespeare and Churchill were here. It's that exotic birds like Rimbaud, Verlaine and Lenin also had their day in London. London's Georgian squares and brick terraces are the groves of the famous. The place isn't a Field of Dreams, it's a Field of Dream-like reality. How does the line in the film go, "if you build it they'll come". A nice bit of silver screen fantasy. Except here, 5,000 miles from Hollywood, it ain't make-believe, it really did happen. London architects and bricklayers really did "build it" - and "they" really did come. Thousands of them. To walk these streets is to turn the pages of the World Dictionary of Biography - let alone the pages of history.
So the sequence runs: they built it, they came, we come. Which is by way of saying, wherever you walk in London you're walking with the famous. You just have to know where to go, where to look, have the eyes to see them, the ears to hear them.
And that's our cue. London Walks has many many walks that follow in the footsteps of the famous. Each one is The Tour of a Lifetime.
Here's a glance at the menu.
Charles Dickens. Of course. We do a
Charles Dickens' London walk
every* Friday at
2.30 pm. It goes from
Temple
Tube. And - the cherry on the cake -
Jean, who guides the walk, does it in Victorian costume. It's like being guided through Dickens' London by Miss Flite, straight out of the pages of
Bleak House.
The Beatles. We walk with the Fabs five times a week - Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. There are two different Beatles Walks.
See the Beatles Walks page.
The London of Oscar Wilde goes
every* Saturday at
11 am from
Green ParkTube,
north exit. And a very special "touch", guide Alan - he's the chief researcher for the Oscar Wilde Society - will be attired as Oscar himself, right down to the green carnation!
Gandhi's London goes once a month, always on a Saturday. It goes from
TempleTube. And something extra special about this one - students and seniors go free! Compliments of Ajay, the wonderful chap who came up with the idea, pushed for it to happen, made it happen! See the
Special Walks section - or
The Saturday Morning Tour du Jour list or
The Saturday Afternoon Tour du Jour list for dates and other particulars. Or type Gandhi's London in to the London Walks Search Engine and let it work its wonders!
Okay, stay tuned. This page is a "work in progress". There's a lot more to come: Churchill, Burns, surgeon John Hunter, John Betjeman, Chaucer, Virginia Woolf, Marx, Jane Austen, Princess Diana, Samuel Pepys, Ian Fleming, sundry spies, a rogues' gallery of criminals, etc. etc.
*Please be sure to check the main entry for any and all London Walks that fall, for example, on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day itself. Because on those two days the London Walks programme does not operate as per normal. Most of the regularly scheduled walks don't operate on those days. And there are a handful of other cancellations scattered throughout the year. On the day of the London Marathon, for example, there are a couple of walks that we can't run because they clash, route-wise, with the marathon. Ditto the St. Paul's Cathedral Tour on Good Friday, for example. For obvious reasons it's closed to tourism on Good Friday so we can't run that tour on that day. Over the course of the year it's just a handful of "exceptions that prove the rule" - but it is important that you check the main listing - the "day listing" - for any given walk. Because it's there that we spell out any and all cancellations.
And all of that said, I hasten to add that, famously, London Walks operates 365 days a year. In short, yes, there are walks on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day itself. They're usually "specials" that we lay on just for those days. We normally do three walks - one in the morning, one in the afternoon and one in the evening - on Christmas Eve. And two - one in the morning and one in the afternoon - on Christmas Day itself.