Keeping Bob Cratchit company – a speculative photoblog by London Walks guide Adam…
A couple of Christmases ago, in honour of Bob Cratchit, I attempted to trace his footsteps.
Scrooge’s impoverished clerk in A Christmas Carol made his journey home from Cornhill to his humble abode in Camden Town on foot every day.
Here’s Bob (pictured) whooshing down the slide at Cornhill in a Tube doodle I made on the way to the start of the walk.
No precise details of his journey are listed in the text of A Christmas Carol, so here’s the route I planned before setting off…
It’s probably not as direct a route as that Bob himself would have chosen, but I tailored it to go through my beloved Clerkenwell.
On the way I snapped a few piccies of Bob Cratchit’s London Christmas past, present and yet to come. I hope you enjoy them. Happy Christmas!
Christmas Present: Bob would have known the Royal Exchange…
… and the Mansion House (without cranes, buses and vans, of course)…
… here’s a more contemporary view…
Xmas Yet To Come… 1 Poultry, which replaced the English Gothic splendour of the old Mappin & Webb building.
Mappin & Webb had yet to set up shop at Poultry in 1843 (when A Christmas Carol was published) but was already a going concern having been founded in Sheffield in 1775.
The view from London Wall looking toward Camden Town… slightly (ahem) obscured in the 21st Century…
St Paul’s – part of Bob’s Xmas Present surrounded by the architecture & transport of his Xmas Yet To Come…
Xmas past… 18th century headstones in Postman’s Park
Little Britain – and we nod to Great Expectations as we pass…
Given Dickens’s subject matter, was it a coincidence that I should happen upon the HQ of Save the Children in St John’s Lane EC1 along the route of my Bob Cratchit stroll?
Or was it my own version of a Christmas visitation?
To join in with Save The Children’s fundraising efforts click here: https://www.savethechildren.org.uk/
Onward to Clerkenwell Green…
Past AND Present – a father explains to his daughter what these weird red cupboards are all about on Clerkenwell Green
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Spirit of Xmas Past: Do you recognise this place?
Scrooge: Recognise it?! I was apprenticed here!
My own Christmas past… 34 Clerkenwell Close (pictured above) is the first office in which I worked in London. The building is a former ink factory and it was from here that I first explored London on foot, stumbling upon so many Dickens locations in my lunch hour wanders that golden hindsight tells me that every day was a literary fireworks display.
This is where I fell in love with London and I will find any excuse to pass through this most wonderful of London neighbourhoods.
A tree grows in Clerkenwell…
Scrooge asks: Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons? On the right of the shot above stood Clerkenwell Prison – or The House of Detention. Torn down in 1890, the vaults still exist, beneath what was the playground of the Hugh Myddleton School, now flats. In the 1860s, the prison looked like this…
Next, my route went via…
… and past George Gilbert Scott’s St Pancras hotel…
… via the British Library…
This excellent British Library film looks at The Origins of A Christmas Carol…
On to Somers Town…
… and St Mary’s Church, a building personally familiar to the young Dickens, who lived at Cranleigh Street…
… in conditions far from affluent. The plaque was unveiled in 2013 by actor Simon Callow.
All told it was a walk of some 3.7 miles. So Bob’s commute was at least 7 miles on foot every day.
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I’ll be visiting A Christmas Carol on my virtual Christmas music tour Last Christmas on Sunday 20th December 2020 at 7.30pm. You can book here: https://lastchristmastour.eventbrite.co.uk
Here’s a little preview of the tour…
