This excursion will be back soon. In the meantime we’d be happy to organise a private tour for you. Please contact us on 020 7624 3978 | [email protected] to make a booking.
This excursion will be back soon. In the meantime we’d be happy to organise a private tour for you. Please contact us on 020 7624 3978 | [email protected] to make a booking.
Warren Street tube station, London
Guided by
Down to earth version: See an unexpected side to the historic region of Bloomsbury through its building stones. This walk will take you through ice age glaciations and the ecology of tropical seas without leaving the streets of London. From stones to build universities and museums to stone used from sculpture and memorials, we will walk through 200 years of Bloomsbury’s architectural history and over 2 billion years of geological time as we discover the natural history of the buildings stones. I guarantee this walk will make you look at architecture and buildings in a completely different way! The walk will finish at Russell SquareTube Station.
Diamond version: The Poetry of Landscape.
David pumped version: Building Bloomsbury. Yup, that’s right – another Urban Geology treat. Treat? Schmeet. Feast is the mot juste. And that’s all by way of saying, walking tours generally are old hat. They’ve been around a long time. People pretty much know the drill, know what they’re going to get: history, biography, some architecture, piquant details they’d never spot off their own bat, etc.
Urban Geology Walks – Reading the Stones – are not old hat. They’re brand new. And they’re different. More than any other walking tour they change the way you see London. Change the way you see it because – in this instance, for example – we Londoners, we all have some degree of familiarity with Euston Road and Tottenham Court Road and Gower Street. Know, for example about University College Hospital, the colour of a blushing seahorse, and, across the street, the magnificent main building of University College London – yes, UCL, home base for Ruth, that’s her Geology Department back in there. What we don’t know, what we don’t see is what a professional geologist sees when he or she looks at those buildings. We don’t know what those building stones are, what their properties are, what went into their formation. It’s jaw-dropping stuff. Aeons and tremendous drama and forces and strange creatures – the summoning up of which (sometimes it’s not solely a matter of verbal conjuring up, sometimes we see them – well, see their millions-of-years-old fossil remains) – it’s not a walk in the park, it’s bareback riding the waves of volcanoes and vanishing oceans and God knows what else. For anyone with at least a couple of digits in the IQ department and a smidgeon of imagination it’s a well-I-never, white-knuckle, over-the-falls ride into the strangest places and worlds and landscapes you’ll ever venture into. Yeah, bears repeating: changes the way you see London.
The Building Bloomsbury Urban Geology walk takes place at 2.30 pm on Sxxxxxxxxxxxx. To go on it – and start reading the stones – meet Ruth just outside the exit of Warren StreetTube.
“London Walks puts you into the hands of an expert on the particular area and topic of a tour…” The New York Times
“by far the most impressive series of walks that I have ever encountered are those offered by London Walks” Travel and Enjoy
“the unfailingly fascinating London Walks… If you can’t find one [of their tours] that captures your fancy, maybe you really are tired of life.” San Francisco Chronicle
“If you want to know London better, if you want to learn some things about the world’s most cosmopolitan city that most people who spend their lives there never learn… I can think of no better investment than London Walks” The New York Times
If you can’t make one of the regularly scheduled, just-turn-up, public Urban Geology Walks do think about booking one as a private tour. If you go private you can have any of the Urban Geology Walks – or any other London Walk – on a day and at a time that suits your convenience. We’ll tailor it to your requirements. Ring Fiona or Niamh or Peter or Mary on 020 7624 3978 or email us at [email protected] and we’ll set it up and make it happen for you. A private London Walk is good value for an individual or couple and sensational value for a group. And the clincher: a private London Walk makes an ideal group or educational or birthday party or office (team-building) or club outing.
A private London Walk makes a very special (and unusual) gift – be it a birthday or anniversary or Christmas present or whatever. Merchandise schmerchandise (gift wrapped or not) – but giving someone an experience, now that’s special. Memories make us rich.