London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead.
Story time. History time.
Hogarth time. Because today we’re going to have a little chat about the greatest 18th century of them all. And his London. And indeed our London. William Hogarth. Georgian London. London Walks’ London.
Fact of the matter is there are some artists who paint pictures. And there are some artists who create entire worlds. Dickens did it. Shakespeare did it. And Hogarth did it.
You don’t just look at Hogarth. You enter him.
And once you’re in there, good luck getting out again.
I’ve recently realised something. Or perhaps “stumbled upon” is the better phrase. We may already possess, hiding in plain sight, one of the great London cultural adventures.
A Hogarth Trail.
Now there’s a phrase.
A Hogarth Trail.
It sounds right, doesn’t it? Atmospheric. Slightly dangerous. A little wicked. A little knowing. You can almost smell the tobacco smoke and spilled gin.
And the marvellous thing is this: the ingredients are already there.
Monday afternoon, Rick Jones at Tate Britain.
Tuesday morning, the Hogarth Stair and the great Hogarth paintings at St Bartholomew’s Hospital.
Tuesday afternoon, Sir John Soane’s Museum and A Rake’s Progress.
Wednesday afternoon, Ronnie Haydon’s Gin Lane walk.
Forty-eight hours in Georgian London.
And what’s so satisfying about the sequence is that each stage deepens the previous one. By the time you arrive at Ronnie’s walk on Wednesday afternoon you’re no longer merely walking around London. You’re seeing London through Hogarth’s eyes.
And what eyes they were.
Hogarth saw everything.
The vanity. The swagger. The corruption. The greed. The drunkenness. The lust. The ambition. The comedy. The misery. The absurdity.
He saw London as a giant human theatre.
And crucially, he made it entertaining.
That’s why Hogarth is such a gateway drug into history and art. People who would normally run a mile from “an art history experience” absolutely love Hogarth.
Because he’s funny.
Rude.
Dramatic.
Cinematic.
Moralistic but also mischievous.
Intensely London.
You don’t need to “sell culture” with Hogarth. The stories do the work.
Because suddenly a baby is falling out of a window.
Somebody’s cheating at cards.
A politician’s drunk.
A dandy’s getting arrested.
A woman’s stealing gin.
A dog is weeing on something.
There’s a corpse in the next room.
Somebody has syphilis.
It’s Netflix Georgian London.
And perhaps the best way into that world is through Rick Jones.
Now Rick is one of those guides who doesn’t merely “know stuff.” London has plenty of people who know stuff. Rick brings paintings alive. He animates them. Suddenly what looked like “old art” becomes gossip, scandal, politics, theatre, sex, money, ambition and catastrophe.
Here’s what one walker said about Rick’s Tate Britain and Tate Modern tours:
“I’ve been to a lot of great museums (Met of NY, MOMA, Guggenheim, Louvre, Uffizi, Prado, National Gallery, to name a few) and Rick Jones is the BEST tour guide I have ever had. Period. Full stop.”
That’s some praise.
And entirely deserved.
Then Tuesday morning comes one of London’s hidden marvels: the Hogarth Stair at St Bartholomew’s Hospital.
Most Londoners have never seen it.
And yet there it is, tucked away in Smithfield, one of the great surviving Georgian interiors in London. Monumental paintings by Hogarth climbing the staircase. The Good Samaritan. The Pool of Bethesda. Huge, dramatic canvases painted for the hospital. Hogarth gave them free of charge because he believed art should be available to ordinary people, not just aristocrats and collectors.
That alone tells you something important about him.
He was not a powdered, aloof grandee painting flattering portraits of dukes. Hogarth was engaged with the city. Obsessed by it. He wanted to capture London in all its roaring vitality and ugliness.
And Hogarth would have known this territory intimately.
Smithfield.
St Bartholomew’s.
St Paul’s.
Not St Paul’s Underground station, mind you, though that’s where you get off for Barts. I mean the cathedral itself. The great dome looming over eighteenth-century London. Hogarth knew these streets. He walked them. Observed them. Absorbed them. The city was his raw material.
And then Tuesday afternoon comes Soane.
Now there are few more atmospheric places in London than Sir John Soane’s Museum. It’s not really a museum at all. It’s a magician’s cabinet. A labyrinth. A fever dream. Mirrors, shadows, hidden panels, ancient fragments, impossible spaces.
And before you go into Soane’s there’s another lovely touch. Coffee in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Which somehow feels exactly right.
Hogarth would certainly have known Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Coffee-house London and Hogarth’s London overlap everywhere. Sit for half an hour in the square with a cup of coffee and you begin to feel the centuries folding in on each other.
Then cross the square and step into Soane’s astonishing house museum.
And there, at the heart of it, hangs A Rake’s Progress.
Eight paintings.
One catastrophic life.
Tom Rakewell inherits money, plunges into extravagance, gambling and vice, spirals downward through debt and disgrace and ends up in Bedlam.
And what makes the sequence so modern is the storytelling. Hogarth understood narrative momentum. Cliffhangers. Character arcs. Visual jokes. Background details. Running themes. You keep noticing things. The longer you look, the more the pictures yield up.
People often think eighteenth-century art is going to be worthy and improving and a bit of a slog.
Then they meet Hogarth and discover he’s basically directing Georgian television.
And finally comes Ronnie Haydon’s Gin Lane walk on Wednesday afternoon.
Ronnie, former Time Out Books editor, knows this world inside out. The gin craze. Crime. Prostitution. Debtors’ prisons. Coffee houses. Pleasure gardens. Georgian low life. The London of alleyways, taverns and sharp practice.
And by now the extraordinary thing has happened. Hogarth has colonised your imagination. You’re walking through modern London but seeing another city superimposed upon it. A city of sedan chairs, powdered wigs, shouting street sellers, print shops, gaming houses and gin shops.
You start to realise that Georgian London wasn’t quaint.
It was wild.
Violent.
Energetic.
Commercial.
And astonishingly modern.
Which perhaps explains why Hogarth still feels alive in a way many painters do not.
His London is recognisably our London. Ambitious. Unequal. Noisy. Money-mad. Spectacular. Corrupt. Funny. Restless.
A city perpetually on the make.
A city forever reinventing itself.
A city that cannot sit still.
In other words: London.
And that, I think, is why this idea of a Hogarth Trail feels so promising. It’s not just about art. It’s about entering the bloodstream of the city.
Forty-eight hours in Georgian London.
What a way to start your week.
See you tomorrow.