Oscar Wilde’s West End
Oscar said, ’The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork.’ Follow in the footsteps of Oscar and his boyfriend Bosey on their crusade to get London society to accept them as they really were. But then they ran into the Victorian Age’s most ferocious homophobe, the 9th Marquis of Queensbury. Pass the Savoy Hotel, The Café Royale, the Theatre Royal Haymarket.  (Reviewed in Time Out.)


Bridget’s Big Knickers Walk - Borough
What does come after happily ever after, Bridget? See where Hugh and Colin duked it out in Borough Market, pass the spot of the first ‘snog’, Bridget’s ’flat’ where she carries on her affair with her two best boyfriends Jerry and Ben, while taking in The Leaky Cauldron and the gangsters hide out in Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. [Article: Reviewed in Telegraph Travel.])


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’.


Kilburn High Road and the Abbey Road Studios
In the Middle Ages, an Abbey existed here beside the old road north from London, watered by a stream which today is the Serpentine in Hyde Park. Kilburn High Road still has four ancient taverns and today is home to a vibrant mix of London Irish and Caribbean. On the hill to the south east stands one of the world’s most famous recording studios.


Marylebone - The Portman Estate and the Wallace Collection
Tucked away behind the rumble of Oxford Street is one of London’s best preserved Georgian quarters. Elegant terraces stand with gems such as The Wallace Collection, Home House and mega-trendy Marylebone High Street with some of London’s most exclusive shopping. The home ground, too, of the world’s Greatest Detective, Sherlock Holmes.


Westminster - 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.


Temple - Gaslight
Come to The Temple - London’s 18th Century lawyers’ land. Still bathed in Victorian gaslight. You’ll get a healthy whiff of Dickens and a goodly smattering of the da Vinci Code. EC4 to WC2.


The City of London
The financial centre of London. And of the world. Known as The Square Mile, it is the world centre for foreign exchange and insurance. Here is where the modern Global Village began, kick-started in the 17th century, by noblemen and merchant princes and noblemen strolling into coffee houses keen to gamble on the safe arrival of a ship’s cargo. Soon there were London merchants all over the world doing deals speaking English. Walk its alleys. Feel its ghosts.


The City/Monument - 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.


The Ripper’s Whitechapel
The Victorian police were completely unprepared for a serial killer who took away body parts and returned them accompanied by gloating letters. The horror that London felt at Jack the Ripper’s gruesome murders still taints the alley ways of Whitechapel, today one of the trendiest places on earth, but in its time home to desperate immigrants like the Irish escaping the Potato Famine, or the Jews escaping pogroms in Eastern Europe. The current residents, Bangladeshis, invented that great British institution, the ’Indian’ Restaurant.


Rip Up the Street. Free the Fleet
Walk the bed of the most important of the 'Lost Rivers of London', the mighty Fleet. Archeologists have found a medieval anchor in Kentish Town. But by the 1800s the Fleet was choked with debris and excrement and eventually was buried as a sewer. No wonder it was lined with prisons and slums. Fagan lurked around here in Oliver Twist. Visit the Coldbath House of Correction and walk the course of the buried Fleet, and hear the waters still flowing, deep beneath your feet. St Pauls to King's Cross.


Blackfriars - Will On The Hill
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.


Westminster - The Retreat of Despotism
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.]

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.


Shepherds Bush
Here you’ll find leading London rock venue the Shepherds Bush Empire, and ground-breaking fringe theatre The Bush. Plus London’s most multi-cultural shopping street, Shepherds Bush Market. The Bush is where Hitchcock’s career took off, where Mod bands like The Who started out, hell bent on cheerful violence. In 1960, BBC TV settled in the world’s first purpose-built TV studio complex - in the shape of a question mark.   [Article: Review of Shepherd's Bush Tour.]


Brackenbury and Brook Green
Two islands of calm, tucked away on either side of the Shepherds Bush Road, with their eclectic mix of the grand and the humble. Here are two of London’s great public schools, Godolphin & Latymer, and St Pauls Girls School. A district with great stories to tell, from Oswald Mosely and Gustav Holst, to Alice Perrers and Ralph Fiennes.


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.  


Diana’s Memorial
Diana Spencer left high school with just one qualification - Best Kept Hampster. She went on to become one of the great personalities of the 20th Century. Pass her London home, her favourite restaurant, her memorial garden and the new Diana Fountain.


Fulham - Asparagus and Aristocrats
Fulham has roots going back to the Middle Ages and is now is an interesting mix of the grand and the humble. We walk through the long vanished Victorian market gardens and move from working class to upper class, ending in the polo fields of the Hurlingham Club. We hear the real reason why Diana was unhappy about Charles playing polo.

And see Simon Roday's recent article in the Hammersmith and Fulham News. Just why do so many of his walks seem to end up-going through Hammersmith and Fulham and why did he became a blue badge guide?


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.


Chelsea - Elizabeth David and Swinging London
The Chelsea few know. The Cadogan Estate, Sloane Square and Ebury Shopping Village. A foodie’s walk through the eyes of the great 1960's food and cookery writer Elizabeth David, guru to the likes of Nigella, Jamie or Gordon.


Hammersmith - River and Road
Busy, noisy, multiracial, Hammersmith is home to SchoolDisco.dot.com. Home to Queen Caroline of Brunswick, uncrowned Queen of England (her husband locked all the doors of Westminster Abbey and wouldn’t let her in to be crowned. The Princess Diana of her day). Behind the High Street, find tranquility beside the river Thames, in Ernest Hemingway’s favourite London pub, The Dove on the water’s edge.

Also, try our Hammersmith Terrace Tour, West London's Riviera. The walking tour focuses on the Thames, at Furnival Gardens, where the Boat Race is held each year. The walk passes riverside gems like Linden House and Kelmscott House and London home of revolutionary designer and agitator, William Morris, famous for his wallpaper. This gentle walk also joins characters such as Eleanor Marx, AP Herbert, Stamford Riffles, Joseph Bazalgette and the Hammersmith Ghost.


Royal Kensington
Kensington acquired its superior reputation in 1689 when asthmatic King William III abandoned smokey Whitehall for the clean air of Kensington. Kensington Palace became the London home and office for Princess Diana. Walk down the world’s wealthiest residential street, Kensington Palace Gardens, and pass the world’s most expensive private house. (asking price, a cool £80 plus millions).


London’s Beach, Fulham Reach
Beyond Putney Bridge, the Thames slows, forgetting the industrial river downstream. Here one encounters a better class of flotsam - champagne corks and half eaten strawberries. Here the annual University Boat Race is fought between Cambridge and Oxford universities. We’ll meet the Bishop of London and the man who said, ’The most beautiful thing about London is its river' - Lord Richard Rogers.


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 can shake a venison burger at. See the real site of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre and the ’other Globe’ - home to Bridget Jones.



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