SALISBURY
& STONEHENGE - Explorer Day Salisbury is the most spectacularly beautiful cathedral in Britain. Salisbury is the river Avon and mediaeval streets lined by half-timbered houses with high oversailing upper floors and tall gables and rejoicing in names like Ox Row and Silver Street and Fish Row. Salisbury is Thomas Hardy's Melchster and Anthony Trollope's Barchester and views over the meadows that Constable painted. That's for starters. In the afternoon we're heading back thousands of years...taking picturesque country roads past the ancient site of Old Sarum - past old churches and thatched cottages and country mansions. Yes, we're bound for Stonehenge. And this is the very best time to see it...because there are no crowds and we'll get very close, within three metres. Here on Salisbury Plain - under a sky like moving marble - we'll be face to face with primeval Britain...with strange Gods and ancient ghosts.
BEHIND
CLOSED DOORS Let's hear it for the life-giving shock of new experience. For the tonic of delightful discovery. For a walk that shakes you gently, like a sieve, and drops you into places of long ago…places that you probably wouldn't get into off your own bat. And into is the mot juste. Because this walk has cracked open some doors. We're going into these places. Into the room on which the grand salon of the Titanic was modelled. Into the Royal College of Surgeons to see an astonishing - and unique - collection bequeathed by the greatest surgeon of the 18th-century. Into a stunning early 17th-century room that Shakespeare may have frequented. Into the old Bank of England - be prepared to gasp with wonder! And to crown it all, we'll go into the Royal Courts of Justice to watch a trial (when the Royal Courts are in session). And here's the ace in the hole: Tom, who guides this walk, is a barrister. And Brian, the other guide, read Law at university.
SECRET
LONDON "I love a little
bit of secret history", said Dr. Johnson. He would have been well
served on this walk through his old neighbourhood. Its concealed courts
and alleys are keyholes into London's past, harbouring everything
from traces of Roman London to a forgotten Norman crypt; and from
the musty cells of an ancient prison to a beautiful but virtually
hidden 300-year-old courtyard and hall. Let alone some fine old churches
and a venerable inn or two. And betwixt and between Hilary
conjures up - out of the bend of a road, the shape of a doorway, an
old badge on a wall, a place-name, a custom or ritual, even out of
a turn of phrase - a millennium and more of London's history. Return to top
HISTORIC
GREENWICH - "Versailles with a riverfront" We begin with an overture: the best boat ride in London. The Tower, Tower Bridge, Docklands, and then, three miles downstream, the Thames bursts into one of the sublime sights of English architecture: "the most stately procession of buildings in England." Moments later, another frisson: the mast and spars, the web of rigging of the Cutty Sark, the hauntingly beautiful old tea clipper. As the poet said, "they mark our passage as a race of men; earth will not see such ships again." Welcome to Greenwich! Maritime Greenwich. Royal Greenwich. Greenwich the home of time and centre of space. The Greenwich of crooked lanes, bric-a-brac shops, and bustling antique and flea markets. Greenwich the "green village." Greenwich of the Queen's House, Old Royal Observatory, Gypsy Moth, Royal Naval College, the world's largest nautical museum, the Millennium Dome, and the Cutty Sark itself! Richard or Gillian or Nick or Chris or Hilary will turn the pages of its history for you. This walk takes place every Tuesday, every Thursday and every Sunday at 11:00am. N.B. The boat trip costs £4 (a good discount); Richard, Gillian, Chris, Nick or Hilary go with you on the boat.
"THE
WESTMINSTER NOBODY KNOWS" And now for the real gold - narrow streets, secret courtyards, and superb, old-fashioned shops - hidden away behind all the tinsel of the West End. The ingredients speak for themselves: the "Embassy of the Republic of Texas"!; a hideaway where the last duel in London was fought; Henry VIII's cowshed; Princess Diana's ancestral home; Christopher Wren's only West End church; the capital's finest Georgian shopping arcade; the Queen Mother's handsome old mansion; London's swishest, oldest and most exclusive gentlemen's clubs (including the one that boasts the most stirring American association in London); a splendid old stables and wine vaults; the "Queen's own grocers"; 18th-century shops lost in a time warp (but still trading); the Square that launched the West End. And that's not to mention London's most intimate palace. But don't expect the peerage - or the royals - to be on their best behaviour: the route is peppered with scandal! This walk takes place every Tuesday and Friday at 11:00am.
THE
BEATLES "IN MY LIFE" WALK "There are places I'll remember all my life", sang the Beatles in one of their most evocative songs. Many of those places are in the "London Town" of this walk...so get back with Richard, "the Pied Piper of Beatlemania" (The Miami Herald), to the film locations for A Hard Day's Night and Help, the registry office where two of the Fabs were married, and the apartment immortalised by Ringo, John and Yoko. We'll also see the house where Paul lived with his glamorous girlfriend, actress Jane Asher. Those were the days...for it was in that house that John and Paul wrote I want to hold your hand. And to cap it all we'll go up to St. John's Wood to see the legendary Abbey Road studios and crosswalk. As the Toronto Globe and Mail said of the walk, "A splendid time is guaranteed for all." This walk takes place every Tuesday and Saturday at 11:20am.
SHERLOCK
HOLMES 221B Baker Street "Shall
they not always live in Baker Street? Are they not there this moment?
Outside, the hansoms rattle through the rain, and Moriarty plans his
latest devilry. Within, the sea coal flames upon the hearth and Holmes
and Watson take their well-won ease....So they still live for all
that love them well: in a romantic chamber of the heart, in a nostalgic
country of the mind, where it is always 1895." And that,
in a nutshell, is the London this walk explores and evokes. N.B. This is a completely different walk from Thursday's Sherlock Holmes walk.
"SOMEWHERE
ELSE" LONDON What a wonderful goulash of a walk this is. It gets you into streets that you'd just never find off your own bat - into a neighbourhood that precious few Londoners have seen, let alone visitors. It's a thrilling discovery - the real deal. There's no better sense of place in London - and no finer architectural effect. Yellow brick, perfectly preserved, all unselfconscious self-respect, real Cockney - unaltered Dickensian London. And the miracle is that it's still there, embedded in central London - screwed in to the big city. That discovery alone makes this one of those bewitching "somewhere else" London Walks. But you've also got a dramatic river crossing, London's best loved old theatre, a real London street market (instead of a tourist trap), and buckets of character. Last but not least, there's a breathtaking bird's eye view of London (and there's a lift to it - so we won't have to walk up hundreds of steps!). This walk takes place every Tuesday at 2:00pm and every Saturday at 10:30am.
CHRISTOPHER
WREN'S LONDON And so we come to the great period. What a city it was, with every view inflected, the steeples bigger than the houses and St. Paul's much bigger than either - Wren ringing the changes infallibly. Three hundred years on a surprising amount of the classical city survives, but it's hidden - the pearl in the oyster. Come upon it unawares and you feel you've walked into another dimension: London cracks into poetry. It's that London we'll discover. Everything from a rare surviving mediaeval church - there's no better gauge of Wren's achievement - to St. Paul's itself. And betwixt and between we take in the church that's regarded as the world's most perfect building (if it doesn't stop you in your tracks nothing will - miss the Tower of London, if you have to, but don't miss this little church), let alone Hawksmore's masterpiece and alleyways that breathe history.
OLD
WESTMINSTER - 1,000 Years of History This is the cornerstone, the seminal London Walk. Miss it and you've missed London. For Old Westminster is London at its grandest: the place where kings and queens are crowned, where they lived, and often were buried. It's the forge of the national destiny, the place where the heart of the Empire beat, the Mecca of politicians throughout the ages. The past here is cast in stone and we take it all in: ancient Westminster Hall, the Houses of Parliament, the Jewel Tower, and Westminster Abbey. And to see it with a great guide is to have that past suddenly rise to the surface...like seeing a photographic print come up in a darkroom. It doesn't get any better than this. And embarras de richesse, we'll also explore the private face of Westminster - the London equivalent of Georgetown! Unlike the tourist hordes, we'll get to see the hidden and ever so picturesque Georgian back streets where all the political salons are! We end at the Cabinet War Rooms, the fortified bunker that housed Winston Churchill's centre of operations during the war. You'll get an extremely handsome discount on the price of admission if you want to visit the War Rooms. This walk takes
place every Tuesday and Thursday at 2:00pm;
THE
HIDDEN PUBS OF OLD LONDON TOWN "The History of London is the history of its taverns; to know one is to know the other." Welcome to cheek-by-jowl, higgledy-piggledy, quintessential London. To gnarled, brooding back-alleys, secluded courtyards and tortuous zigzag passages. Oh there are famous sights, but to get to them we have to walk crookedly, through a maze of curiosities. We set our course by the best old pubs in town - including the most famous London inn of all. Old pubs that are, as every English pub should be, a solace and a delight...and all the more special for being hidden away down this or that dark alley, like precious gems in rumpled velvet. Here, like no other place in town, we have 2,000 years of London and its inns in the palm of our hand. The echoes are of Roman tabernas and Shakespearean ale-houses and Dickensian coaching inns...of feasting and wine and song...of the souls of poets dead and gone...the very zeitgeist of London. And what better company to keep than the shades of Dr. Johnson, Oscar Wilde, and Dickens himself.
THE
LONDON BY GASLIGHT PUB WALK - A Historic Pub Walk This is a great pub walk. It's vintage London. It's the centre of London at its best. It's 18th-century gas-lit lanes and an ancient square and the oldest theatre in London. It's tucked-away, much-loved - and very old - pubs. It's where Londoners come to play. It's where visitors searching for the holy grail of Newsweek's "coolest city on earth" come closest to finding it. It's where high spirits and history rhyme. It's where the heart of this great city beats. It's where, more than anywhere else, you're going to feel London in your veins. (Food is available.) Guided by David B. or Corinna.
"The lamps
of London uphold the dark as upon the points of burning bayonets."
GHOSTS
OF THE OLD CITY At night the ancient City is deserted...and eerie. Exploring its shadowy back streets and dimly lit alleys we might be in a medieval citadel, in overpowering stone. The very street names - Aldersgate, Cloth Fair, Charterhouse, Threadneedle - take us far back. We're alone...or are we? For this is the hour when the She Wolf of France glides through the churchyard, the hour when the dark figure on Newgate wall rattles his chains, the hour when the Black Nun keeps her lonely vigil, and something inexpressibly evil lurks behind a tiny window. We're on their trail...or are they shadowing us? This walk takes
place every Tuesday and Saturday at 7:30pm. Return to top
JACK
THE RIPPER HAUNTS Please tread carefully
and keep away from the shadows - you are about to enter the abyss... He came silently out of the midnight shadows of August 31, 1888. Striking terror at the hearts - and throats - of raddled, drink-sodden East End prostitutes. Leaving a trail of blood that led...nowhere. Jack the Ripper! We evoke that autumn of gaslight and fog, of menacing shadows and stealthy footsteps as we inspect the murder sites, sift through the evidence - in all its gory detail - and get to grips, so to speak, with the main suspects. Enroute we'll steady our nerves in "The Ten Bells", the pub where the victims - perhaps under the steely gaze of the Ripper himself - tried to forget the waking nightmare. This walk takes place every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at 7:30pm. This walk will not take place on December 24 or 25. N.B., Let's call a spade a spade. Going on Donald Rumbelow's walk is as close as you're going to get to nailing the Ripper. Donald is the author of the best-selling The Complete Jack the Ripper, the definitive book on the subject. In the words of The Jack to Ripper A to Z (the bible of Ripperology studies): "Donald Rumbelow is internationally recognised as the leading authority on the subject". The former Curator of the City of London Police Crime Museum and a two-time Chairman of the Crime Writers' Association, Donald is Britain's most distinguished crime historian. And I hasten add, he's not some dry-as-dust academic. He spent 25 years on the City of London Police Force - which in effect means you'll be taken over some of the most famous crime scenes in the world by a law enforcement professional. Oh and I almost forgot - he's also a professionally qualified Blue Badge Guide! But a word of warning: never part with your money or set off with anyone until you're absolutely certain you're with Donald or - if it's another night - one of his London Walks colleagues. Donald (and co.) will be holding up copies of the distinctive white London Walks leaflet. And remember, Donald and his colleagues never ever start the Jack the Ripper walk before 7:30pm. In short, don't let anyone mislead you. |
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