The incredible stories of Fleet Street
Fleet Street walking tour – one of the most famous streets in London. This continues the series on the Churches of the City of London.
Our walk starts in Clement’s Lane passing through the grounds of the London School of Economics and behind the Royal Courts of Justice. We then visit St Clement Danes Church and look for the medieval holy well. After looking at the statue of Samuel Johnson we go to Temple Bar the ancient western gate of the City of London. From here we visit St Dunstan-in-the-West with its statues of Gog and Magog and recount of the story of Brutus of Troy, Albina founding Britain and Corineus defeating the giant Gogmagog in Battle leading to Brutus becoming the first king of Britain and founding London. We also talk about the 14th Century statues of King Lud and his sons in the porch of the church. We continue along Fleet Street and go into Inner Temple and visit Temple Church, Middle Temple Hall and Fountain Court before going along Whitefriars Street to St Bride’s Church with its fantastic spire designed by Sir Christopher Wren. Our walk ends by looking for the site of Bridewell Palace first built by Henry III.
Filmed December 2021
Our walking tour of the churches of the City of London starts at St Vedast Foster Lane then takes in: St Leonard’s (lost church), St John Zachary (lost church), The Goldsmiths’ Garden, St Anne and St Agnes, French Protestant Church (lost church), St Botolph Aldersgate, Postmans Park, St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Smithfield, St Bartholomew the Great, and finally St Sepulchre-without-Newgate. We also find a beautiful section of Roman pavement in a hidden courtyard, explore some of the beguiling alleyways of the City of London, hear the story of William Wallace’s end at Smithfield and also John Rogers the Martyr and the vision of Rahere, Jester to Henry I that led to the foundation of the Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great. Credits: Image of St Martin’s Le-Grand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Mar…
Filmed October 2021
A walk around some of the historic churches of the City of London
In this first episode of my series exploring the churches of the City of London: starts at St. Botolph Bishopsgate, first mentioned in 1212. We then pass St Ethelburga, St Helen’s, the site of St Mary Axe, St Andrew Undershaft, St Micheal Cornhill, St Peter Cornhill, St Edmund King and Martyr, St Clement Eastcheap, St Mary Abchurch, the London Stone, St Stephen Walbrook, site of St John the Baptist Walbrook, the site of Dick Whittington’s House, site of St Thomas Apostle, St Michael Paternoster Royal, and finally St Paul’s Cathedral.
More info about the Lost London Churches Project www.lostlcp.com
Filmed September 2021
New Years Day. Evening home alone. Spontaneously absconded on the Overground to Crouch Hill. 25 minutes from the sofa to a new reality. Down Crouch Hill, Ally Pally glowing luminous green on the other side of the valley. The clock tower draws up the energy radiating from the ley line junction (according to legend) on Crouch End Broadway. Flashback Records. Late night newsagents with window full of drug paraphernalia. The Kings Head where I did stand-up (twice at least). Back up Crouch Hill to a decent pint in The Robin and back on the train to Leyton.
What an incredible year of walking 2024 was. From the ancient Black Path linking Walthamstow to Shoreditch to the various secrets of the City of London, the London Loop and the Capital Ring, the Suffolk and Sussex coasts, the Essex and Buckinghamshire countryside, the Eastern edge of London and the inner West at Paddington. I walked Roman Stane Street and Tudor London, lost rivers at Islington, Clerkenwell, Kensal Green to Chelsea and so much more. And we even went on a trip to Northampton to see the great Alan Moore with Iain Sinclair.
Thank you so much for all your support throughout the year. Here’s to a great year of walks in 2025.
Some Talks and Events in 2024
I have to confess to being a late convert to the writing of Virginia Woolf. But she captures the spirit of London walking perfectly. Here’s the opening page of Street Haunting: A London Adventure.
“No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner. As the foxhunter hunts in order to preserve the breed of foxes, and the golfer plays in order that open spaces may be preserved from the builders, so when the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: “Really I must buy a pencil”, as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter — rambling the streets of London.
The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room. For there we sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experience.”
Five Leaves Bookshop Occasional Paper 9
It’s been brought to my attention that there’s also a new riso press edition published by Burley Fisher Community Press