Literature Animals & Folklore
Bloomsbury Literature Walking Tour
Lived in squares, read in circles and loved in triangles! Bloomsbury has much more to be scared of than the Woolfs. There is Arthur Machen prowling the fringes, Ben Aaronovitch's wizard HQ in Russell Square, Disraeli in Bloomsbury Square not to mention messrs Orwell, Betjeman, Gorky, Yeats and Eliot.
Peckham Literature Walking Tour
Literary giants to classic genres Peckham has a wealth of writing talent associated with it spanning 400 years. Poets and novelists have written in it, about it and around it and whilst Blake saw angels, King saw stars and Dickens his mistress! Muriel Spark wrote a ballad of the Rye and John Donne a sonnet and Evie Wyld about whales. Join us on a stroll across the Rye and through the heart of SE15.
Southwark Literature Walking Tour
"The man who is tired of reading Borough writers is tired of life, for there is in the Borough all that literature can afford!" But Dr Johnson is just one of a stellar collection in an area which has more world class writers than anywhere else on the planet! Tour starts at Southwark Tube Station and ends at Borough Tube Station.
Nursery Rhyme Tour
This tour runs from Monument (London's Burning) over London Bridge linking location -sometimes tenuously- to some of the most popular nursery rhymes and returns to Monument over Southwark Bridge (Turn again Whittington) and back through old Walbrook Stair site of the original St Clements. The tour was created as promotion for the 2005 best selling book Heavy Words Lightly Thrown.
Animals Tours (family focused) & Folklore / Ghosts
London Animals Walking Tour East
Geese tethered to the Monument, mice and camels on buildings, lions and bears at the tower, horses everywhere, an "immortal" cat not to mention dolphins, elephants and birds of prey. Lovely stroll along the banks of one of the world's cleanest urban waterways, after all 130 species of river wildlife can't all be wrong.
London Animals Tour West
Horses, pelicans, lions and camels not to mention the grave of a "nazi" dog, the famous Brown Dog riots, an elephant running amok on the Strand and buried dinosaurs under Trafalgar Square. Both animal tours come with "spot the animal" score cards and prizes.
Folklore & Ghosts
Chris has a longstanding interest in the folklore and ghost tales of London and once edited a publication ( One Eye Grey) that retold old London folktales in the 20th Century. Several of these (including this one about a mermaid in Brixton) were recorded for the BBC.
In the video opposite (which is some years old and made by Martha Henson for Transport for London) he explains the legend of Queen Rat.
Please ask about the folklore / spooky tours of Blackfriars, Bankside or the Victoria Embankment.
