“SOMEWHERE ELSE” LONDON WALKING INTO SECRET

The British are great walkers and going on a walking tour of London is a great way to make friends and learn about a hidden London even most Londoners don't know much about, writes Moutussi Acharyya

Many visitors to London return home with a sense of anti-climax – the images of London burnt into our consciousness often fall short of expectations. Especially if we take the predictable tourist route of whirlwind coach or taxi tours where we see little and learn even less. Going shopping on Oxford Street and visiting the typical tourist cliches of Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace are not the only ways to see London. There are others who take the walking tours and come away raving about a secret London, where you can enjoy the beauty of a city hidden behind the glittering sprawl at a leisurely pace; places where buses and cars cannot go and where you are allowed to stand and stare and soak in the quirky British eccentricities of this damp and delightful metropolis. Many have seen London only through these walks and have returned again and again, because the variety offered is endless. To quote Dr Johnson, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, for there is in London all that

life can afford.

There are several walking tour firms but London Walks is the oldest and the best and has received many awards and glowing reviews from happy customers across the world. Described by Time Out as ‘London’s best guided walks’, it offers over 500 different walks. Its trump cards are its brilliant and sometimes eccentric guides (many of them well-known actors, lecturers and writers), who are experts in their own field and the best in the business. If you want to

learn some things about the world’s most cosmopolitan city, the one to pick is London Walks, because of its charming, knowledgeable guides who will make your day.

On the unique London Walks, you can discover the Chelsea river views

that inspired the painter Turner in his final years or find out where London’s first nude statue is. You can explore London’s finest country house in Charlton and unearth the secrets of the Mother of Parliaments. Spy out the village that gave its name to a car and the Russian word for railway station. Learn which church steeple gave us the design of the traditional wedding cake, where the sandwich was invented and where in Bond Street you can see London’s oldest artefact. Visit the house where musicians Handel and Jimi Hendrix both lived. Climb the famous 311 spiral steps of the Monument, the tallest and finest isolated stone column in the world, go from East to West and back again at Greenwich observatory or fly on the world’s biggest big wheel. There is pomp and ceremony and spectacle, but your quirky guides will also take you to a London that is intimate, with quiet corners, crooked cobbled streets, winding alleyways and sunny squares, and show you the most liveable of all cities, with more green spaces than any other metropolis, and gardens everywhere.

David Tucker owns London Walks with his wife Mary. Mary, the boss, an actress in the West End, guided me years ago on the Thames and Chelsea Pub Walks and endeared herself with her charm and unpretentiousness. David, her husband, is a literary historian, university lecturer and journalist and on all his walks, he is a mine of information and willing to answer even the silliest questions. London specialises in hiding the best of itself, said Pierre Maillaud, and you will realise this when those zany, adventurous guides show you a totally unexpected London. This walk is the distillation of the brilliant guides of London Walks’ many years of experience in probing the forgotten nooks of the world’s most elusive city. Exploring parts of London that few people know exist – up creeping lanes, round out-of-the-way corners, past secret islands of green, where you discover the most curious, unpredictable, eccentric aspects of London. London’s secret alleyways and courtyards gradually reveal themselves, including a monastery, a stretch of an old Roman wall with its bastion, a fort making a defiant last stand. Concealed courts are keyholes into London’s past, harbouring everything from a forgotten Norman crypt to the musty smells of an ancient prison, to a beautiful but virtually hidden 300-year-old courtyard. Venerable livery halls of the city guilds, quaint old inns and galleons lying at anchor – attend to business as they’ve done for centuries. Round the corner an ancient church or two – flinty signposts to the eternal landscape of the past – somehow keep the 21st century at bay. Nearby, London’s eeriest and most hidden graveyard weathers the centuries. And everywhere, the rustle of the shades and the voices – of Dr Johnson and residents of his old neighbourhood, Shakespeare and town criers, Bunyan and Ballad singers, Dickens and chimney sweeps – come back to haunt you. You learn the origin of London’s newspapers in Fleet Street and the walk ends with Dr Johnson and his favourite cat.

Elsewhere is always surprising. Especially when elsewhere is the dark side of the moon: the Victorian underside of 21st century London. A wonderful goulash of a walk, it gets you into streets that you’d never find off your own bat – streets that

look like an old movie set and a neighbourhood precious few Londoners have dared investigate. Yellow brick, perfectly preserved, all unselfconscious self-respect, real Cockney – unaltered Dickensian London. The miracle is it’s still there, screwed into the underbelly of central, modern London. And getting there is a bit of all right too – because there’s a dramatic river crossing, a stroll along the Thames, a visit to the world’s foremost arts complex, London’s best loved old theatre, a real London street market (instead of a tourist trap), a stunning bird’s eye view of the capital (and there’s a

lift, so you won’t have to climb hundreds of stairs!), and many forgotten corners of “the real London” just over the river. Everything from trace evidence – archaeological fragments – to the old, furtive, toil-worn, hard-scrabble, soon-to-be-passing, vil

lainous past: a paupers’ burying ground, a ragged school, ancient “model dwellings”, a prison, Octavia Hill’s cottages, etc. You hear those people speak through the guides: the beggars, the prostitutes, the soon

to-be-executed “Black

HIDDEN LONDON

Maria”, pickpockets, street sellers, the Body Snatching Borough Gang, etc. It is history as seance. And at the end of the walk you’ll be able to get into the Old Operating Theatre museum at half price!

It’s a boat ride – and a walk – into the birthplace of modern London, under three Brunel bridges and over two Brunels’ tunnels to the best-kept secret in London. There are icons, and several secrets. A secret gateway for the Russian Czar. Six dead men on a haunted ship. Broken bones by the silent Harpy. Broken slipways on the Isle of Dogs. Shattered columns, shattered dancers, magic at the Tunnel Club. A monster ship. And the world’s most important tunnel.

The 8th Wonder of the World is the underground cathedral and the Grand Entrance Hall to Brunel’s tunnel under the Thames. In Brunel’s Thames Tunnel, you’re only a 7-minute tube ride away from the Houses of Parliament, yet 500 years away in time. This place still looks and feels like what it once was. The Mayflower – the Pilgrim Father’s pub – is here. The Thames foot tunnel built by the Brunels to Wapping was the first underwater tunnel in the world. You can sneak right down into the underground cathedral – even though it’s locked and closed to the public, because your guide is the Curator of the Brunel Museum and he’s got the key! Be warned, access to the Grand Entrance Hall

is severely restricted – you stoop down through the short tunnel to descend by temporary staircase into a huge chamber, half the size of Shakespeare’s Globe, but hidden underground. That low tunnel is not unlike the entryway to a bomb shelter; and it’s about the same height as the tunnel into Egypt’s Great Pyramid (this tunnel also takes you into a kind of “Great Pyramid” – oh okay, an enormous silo – that opens downwards). Visitors with claustrophobia or any concerns can contact the Brunel Museum beforehand. The Brunel Museum waives its £6 admission charge for us. But asks for a £3 donation to help the museum charity look after the underground cathedral.

The Famous Square Mile is the classic London walk where, along with your guide, you chronicle 2,000 years of London’s history in the heart of the city. From St Paul’s Cathedral broadly covering the Jubilee Walkway, the walk explores many rarely visited parts of the City of London including gardens, churches, hidden courtyards, and cutting-edge modern architecture, set against a splendid Medieval backdrop. Threading your way through an intricate network of narrow alleys and cobblestone lanes, you visit the ruins of the Roman temple of Mithras, the Bank of England, the Lord Mayor’s mansion house and ancient Guildhall. Your guide enthrals by blending historical commentary with bizarre anecdotes and wild, mildly scurrilous gossip about past and present celebrities and defunct royals. An area of extraordinary richness and density, the “one square mile” is the oldest part of the capital, with continuous development since the founding of the Roman town in the first century AD, reflecting the vibrancy of a mercantile centre whose architecture contains examples of remarkable survival.

This is the tour-de-force of London walks, especially for bookworms. For many Indians, fed on a diet of English classics since childhood, it is London’s literary claim to fame which holds the most attraction. Follow in the footsteps of Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick Watson along with scenes of their exploits – Baker Street; bustling Charing Cross; the Strand’s gas-lit alleys; Covent Garden with its Opera House and colourful market stalls, ending at the superb re-creation of Sherlock Holmes’ study. Housed in the building immortalised in The Hound Of The Baskervilles and featuring many artefacts donated by the Conan Doyle family, it’s a place where fiction turns into fact.

On another evening literary soiree, you can enjoy company beyond compare – shades of Oscar Wilde and G B Shaw; Dickens and Thackeray; Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Circle (who lived in Squares and loved in triangles); George Orwell, W B Yeats and T S Eliot. The venue’s a moveable feast: a procession of handsome Georgian squares; the humming little warren of streets in the Museum quarter; and a couple of the best old pubs in London.

TIME WARP LONDON

FAMOUS SQUARE MILE

ROCK ‘N’ ROLL LONDON

If you’re tired of history and the ancient then there’s rock n’ roll London. It’s all aboard the night train for Rock ‘n’ Roll and a bit of Booze. Head to the rockstars’ haunts and hangouts where they riffed and let rip, displaying their wealth and their wild antics. The Rolling Stones, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, David Bowie, The Sex Pistols, The Clash, Blur, Oasis... the Who’s Who of the music world strung along a London trail where each act has a naughty London tale to tell. Very often a tale so decadent – so down and dirty – that the present-day musicians couldn’t hold a candle to them.

Another popular tour is the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, showing you where they lived, loved and played, down to their Apple offices and their last impromptu concert together on a rooftop, to the Abbey studios where they composed their greatest hits, walking down memory lane with the Fab Four on the zebra pedestrian crossing featured as the