Footprints of London

History of working people in 18th-19th century Knightsbridge: Horse Guards, lodginghouse keepers, famous courtesans and Champagne Charlie. You’ll see the Hyde Park barracks from behind and from the front, where the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment leave for Changing the Guard ceremonies. Rotten Row was long the scene of high-society socialising, and you’ll hear about Skittles,…

Richmond is Sir David Attenborough’s favourite place on the planet, and the stretch of the river to Twickenham is the very best part. Your fantasy of classic English countryside come true in the city. This stretch of the River Thames will put you in mind of boating holidays with Mole and Ratty, unless your first…

Primrose Hill is now one of London’s desirable areas, but it was born with the blood, sweat and toil that built canals and railways. The neighbourhood radiates brilliant industrial solutions of Victorian engineers, but who built it? This walk puts hard-working navvies at the centre of the story and tells how the area developed in…

Runaway slaves, free blacks and white Londoners campaigned for a century to abolish slavery and the slave trade, against strong opposition. This walk reveals where many key London events took place in British campaigns against slavery and slave-trading between the mid-1700s and mid-1800s. Fugitive and former slaves, white lawyers, activists and orators along with black…

Thief and escape-artist Jack Sheppard sparred with thief-taker Jonathan Wild in streets thronged with gin-sellers, sex workers and beggars. Now it’s trendy and pretty, but 18th-century Seven Dials, in the parish of St Giles, was notorious for poverty and crime. With no organised police force, thieves, highwaymen and fences bribed those hired to catch them,…

From the 17th century Shadwell heaved with ship-suppliers, sailors on leave, pirates, runaway slaves, lascars, opium-eaters and sex workers. Shadwell was an early centre of Docklands, developed to supply both navy and merchant ships. Trades included sail makers, instrument makers, ship chandlers, ship brokers, victuallers, rope makers, glassmakers, sugar refiners, coopers, brewers, distillers and that’s…

In St John’s Wood Alternative Lifestyles were the norm, but nearby Lisson Grove saw the first sex-slave scandal, of young Eliza Armstrong. This walk begins 200 years ago in St John’s Wood, where family arrangements routinely diverged from Victorian rules of respectability. What did it mean to be a Kept Woman? Was it only disreputable…

People migrating to work in a city like London may begin settling together, but eventually they mingle and marry, while working and playing. Often maligned as ‘economic migrants’, working-class people have always come to London to do business, make families, invent objects, bring pleasures, help each other and sometimes fight each othher. One old area…

When the Puritan Protectorate ended in 1660, London’s sex industry grew wildly public and was linked to both theatres and the underworld. Charles II lifted the Puritan ban on theatre-going, and by 1700 London was sex-capital of Europe. This walk starts with the stage at a time when all actresses were assumed to be prostitutes…

How do we know how poor women lived in the Middle Ages when historians have ignored them? Walk the Thames and meet 6 medieval working women. Written history records only the rich and famous, because poor women do nothing interesting – right? No! Ordinary working women had interesting, varied lives in the Middle Ages, and…