Footprints of London

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…

Once shipbuilding centre for Colchester, now sailing-cum-commuter village, with bohemian and gay histories, a whale and The Essex Serpent. Wivenhoe on the River Colne once functioned as a centre for shipbuilding and commercial fishing for the port of Colchester — especially of oysters and scallops. Smuggling was another important activity, set in the folklore of…

Seamen were cosmopolitan world travellers during the Age of Sail, and Rotherhithe was a centre for both ship-building and ship-breaking. Historical accounts of the Age of Sail almost invariably focus on ship-captains and battles of the Royal Navy. This walk instead focusses on how the maritime working class — men, women and children — lived…

Diamond-polishing, ice-cream selling, pocket-picking, writing memoirs: Migrants to London have done them all while working to make a living. 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 of central London shows…

From the 17th century Shadwell heaved with ​the licit and illicit buying and selling of everything related to shipping and sailing.. 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…

Thief and escape-artist Jack Sheppard sparred with thief-taker Jonathan Wild in streets thronged with gin-sellers, sex workers and beggars. The Seven Dials area of St Giles is now pretty, but in the 18th century it was notorious for poverty and crime. Jack Sheppard was from Wych Street, an apprentice carpenter who gave up the straight…

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…

Saltmarshes, weatherboard houses, Nonconformist churches, Marian martyrs, a derelict mill and abundant seabirds along the River Roach. This tour around Rochford and the River Roach will pass Rochford Hall, once owned by oft-maligned Tudor courtier Richard Rich​. It’s now part of a golf course​, as is the old parish church. ​But Rochford was a hotbed…