Victorian London

Holborn underground station, London (main exit, debouches onto Kingsway)

Guided by Anne-Marie

A walk that's like one of those Victorian zoetropes. (From the Greek root words ζωή zoe, "life" and τρόπος tropos, "turning".) In short, a wonderful mixed bag of life, loves, death and beyond from about 1840-1900

Item: A Music Hall which had been a Sunday School. Item: A home for Red-Lion Mary, housekeeper to a burgeoning pre-Raphaelite artist. Item: Insurance brokers offering funeral expenses if you paid 1d a week. Item: A high church offering spiritual succour to the poor with a workhouse just a few hundred yards away. Item: The hokey-kokey men proffering the best ices in the country before prostrating themselves in the first Catholic church to be built in London. Item: Not forgetting that almost any physical illness was catered for from childhood to the aged, disabled and those seeking alternative treatment. Item: To, er, top it all architecture to swoon over as the Waterhouse "cathedral" towers over High Holborn. Item: A star guide. Her name is Anne-Marie.