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The Retreat of Despotism - Westminster
Under the great bell of Big Ben, we visit a World Heritage Site, Parliament Square. Here, on the site of the long vanished Palace of Whitehall of the medieval kings of England, Parliamentary democracy slowly evolved. The stars of the walk are Oliver Cromwell, Simon de Montfort, Guy ’Guido’ Fawkes, Charles Barry the architect of today’s Houses of Parliament, Richard the Lionheart, Edward 1st and Mrs Pankhurst.
Suffragettes/Women Behaving Badly
In 1906 the battling Pankhursts arrived in London from Manchester ’to raise the South’. Few women before the First World War in Britain had the vote, so Mrs Pankhurst and her three firebrand daughters, with their genius for ’stunts’, took smug self-centred male-orientated London Society and shook it by its starched winged collars - by getting violent. Temple to Trafalgar Square. [Article: Reviewed in Time Out.]
The London Mob
From apprentice boys’ attacks on bawdy houses, to the Gordon Riots. London’s life is on the streets. London’s latest dust-up was 1990 when the city’s poor rose in revolt against Margaret Thatcher’s Poll Tax. The battle between police and demonstrators lasted all day and left a swathe of destruction across the West End. Six months later Margaret was being driven out of Downing Street, in tears. The Tory party grandees had decided the country wanted a softer approach. When the London mob roars, governments listen.
Old Clerkenwell
One of London’s oldest suburbs. Walk past four ruined priories, take in a plague pit from 1349, check out the second oldest building in London (one of the Four Weddings and Funeral churches) and ’the bloodiest spot in London’ where Scottish patriot William Wallace was hanged drawn and quartered.
Will On The Hill - Blackfriars
In January 1606 William Shakespeare (almost) certainly stood where the western steps of St Paul’s are now located, to watch the hanging, drawing and quartering of several of his friends involved in the Gunpowder Plot. We walk the alleys of Ludgate Hill, the location of the former powerful Blackfriars Priory and visit ’a Gunpowder’ pub, The Cockpit, where the conspirators might have used their old Friend Will, as a cover in their planning to blow King James and his Parliament sky high. We also visit The College of Arms, home to England’s Heralds, then cross ’the Wobbly Bridge’ to the reconstructed Globe Theatre in Southwark. Blackfriars to London Bridge.
Fascists in Mayfair!
The Mayfair Mitfords. 1920s High Society, seen through the eyes of an exceptional family. The Mitfords went on to become a national institution, producing writers, campaigners, socialites. Writer Nancy, the Duchess of Devonshire, revolutionary Decca, fascist Unity, saintly mother Stanley, mad Uncle Matthew, beautiful Diana and her fateful love for Oswald ’Tom’ Mosley - we try and get them all in.
Bohemians - Fitzrovia
Fitzrovia was Bohemia. Between the wars this was ’it’, the haunt of Dylan Thomas, Augustus John, George Orwell, Aleister Crowley and the rest. The Bohemians had only one purpose in life - to shock the Middle Classes. So they fought, they drank, they stole, they shagged. They called it Fitzrovia because it was the little world that surrounded the Fitzroy Tavern in Charlotte Street, their favourite boozer. This is where the war was fought, and won, to wrest control of the intellectual soul of Britain off the upper classes.
British Black History
There have been Black people in Britain since at least Roman times. Come and meet Slaver Sir Nicholas Crisp, and those abolitionist superstars William and Ellen Craft. We pass the Palais du Dance where Bob Marley sang, and where The Clash urged punks and rastas to throw off repression in ’White Man In Hammersmith’, Next, the world’s most multi-racial fighting force - General Montgomery’s victorious British 8th Army, including the Caribbean Regiment. We hear about the murder of Kelso Cochrane in the Riots of the late 1950s, a martyr whose death finally swung White Londoners behind their new Black neighbours, and we finish with that visionary statesman, Marcus Garvey, inspiration for the Rasta movement and the man who wanted a new start for Africa.
Your Personalised Tour
Simon can prepare tours - and talks - for almost any group or interest.
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