Plagues and Riots - 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.



Theatreland/Covent Garden
Whores, Rakes and Greasepaint in the Stews of Covent Garden. Nell Gwynne, the little orange seller, was one of our very first English actresses. The arrival of women on the stage in the 1660s signalled the arrival of gratuitous sex and violence. A ribald age, headed by a monarch who was reputedly, ’well endowed in the gentleman department’.



Guy Fawkes' Gunpowder Plot/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.



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. (Reviewed in Time Out.)



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.



Shakespeare and Southwark
Welcome to Tudor London’s red light area. In 1600 you could get anything you wanted here, if you had the money. Animal fights - dogs versus bulls, dogs versus bears, dogs versus rats. And bordellos and theatres. Visit atmospheric Borough Market, a weekly fresh produce market but also the location for more movies than you’ve had organic-reared wild boar suppers. See the real site of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre and the ’other Globe’ - home to Bridget Jones.


The Great Fire of London Walk
Never live next to a baker! They were always catching fire. The fire in Farryner The Baker's that started on a Sunday night in September 1666 in Pudding Lane raged for the next four days. The Great Fire of London burned out most of the wooden and thatched London that Shakespeare knew. Strong winds fanned the flames, stones exploded in the heat, the ash was blown all the way to Oxford.

The walk follows the streets from Monument through the cramped alleys of Lombard Street. Ironically, the fire that destroyed so much laid the basis for The City, the modern powerhouse of global finance, raking in, each day, a cool £159 billion in insurance premiums.



Thames River Pirates Walk
The Thames has always been London's jugular, attracting it's fair share of blood-suckers. Stroll through Wapping beside old Father Thames, see where Captain William Kidd 'danced a jig' off Execution Dock in 1701. His tarred body hung creaking in an iron cage off Tilbury Point for years. And Mary Read, who served in Marlborough's war disguised as a man became a she-pirate, spared the noose only because she was pregnant? All you wanted to know about 'keel hauling' and much more.



Your London
Simon can prepare tours - and talks - for almost any group or interest.