22/09/26 - On the Trail of...... William Blake

Poet, Artist, Prophet

One thing leads to another - The The make an astonishing comeback album Ensoulment. Talk about enhancing, rather than destroying a legacy. Track 2 is "Some Days I Drink My Coffee By The Grave Of William Blake".

Which leads me to want to know more about who William Blake is. 

This book will almost certainly be my book of the year 2026. Increasingly complex ideas and theories introduced to a man who left behind an incredible body of work. The art looks more suited to 1970s prog rock covers. The poems eminently quotable.

In London for a couple of days, I asked AI to highlight locations that had William Blake connections. 

I made use of the Oyster Card Cap.

Birth

A blue plaque - and high rise - in Broadwick Street, Soho.

Soho Birth

William Blake House

Living

A couple of locations - down in Hercules Road, Lambeth (to which we will return) and another William Blake house. Also in South Moulton Street in more salubrious Mayfair.

South of the Water

North of the Water

Baptism

St Jame's, Picadilly, on 11/12/1757

A religious man

Works

Under the arches in Lambeth, in Virgil Street and Centuar Street is a collection of mosaic representations of most of his famous artworks. Sketchy and difficult to photograph, due to the lighting. An unusual art gallery. 

The lad himself

And his representation of Isaac Newton

Death

Time for a coffee at Bunhill Fields cemetary.

It began as a Nonconformist burial ground in the 1660s, just outside the City boundary. Being independent of the established church made it particularly attractive to Dissenters, and over the next couple of centuries around 123,000 people were buried here. Among them were John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Isaac Watts and of course, the man himself.

There are, slightly confusingly, two Blake graves to find. The older memorial, erected in 1927, marks the spot where people believed William and Catherine Blake were buried. The actual grave was identified about 20 metres away in 2006, after painstaking research of the cemetery records. It was unmarked, as Blake's burial had never been given a headstone. A new memorial was eventually installed on the correct site in 2018. Two graves, one poet, and only one of them is actually his.

In the dappled light

Meeting place for the Blake Society

I give you the end of a golden string;

Only wind it into a ball,

It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate

Built in Jerusalem’s wall.”

21/09/26 - Drink like a Bohemian Fitzrovian

The London they knew is gone, long gone

A pub crawl inspired by a rather wonderful book (available for free on the Internet Archive) about a pub that named an area. The Fitzroy Tavern.

It documents the glory days of London's drinking dens - from the 1920s to 1940s - when the artists, poets, bohemians, knighted lords and politicians had to earn their booze. Most of the action takes place in the Fitzroy Tavern but a pub crawl is detailed. Lengthy, it dips into Soho to make the most of an extra 30 minutes of drinking time but incredibly, all the pubs still exist. 

It had to be done - but with rules. Half pints only. Not because I am going to the French House. Not because I am counting my units. No, we are at an average of £7.80 a pint and I am living off a pension.

Seeing my daughter the following day she stated "Has it come to this?" - in an attempt to get me to sell out my ideals and re-join the rat race.

The second rule - AI suggested I look for evidence of former patrons, artists and poets.

Strap yourselves in. I'll try and keep the text short but there is much work to be done.

The Fitzroy Tavern, Windmill Street

The natural, obvious starting point. It looks the part of a 1940s, although it is a sympathetic modern recreation. Lots of wooden panelling, multiple rooms and a delightful entrance mosaic. A Sam Smiths pub - seemingly run by a single member of staff both delivering food and manning the bar. This allowed for easy investigation and photo inside, where I was the only sign of life for a good 5 minutes.

AI Rule: Photos of the events described in the book, including the unique charity donations of firing paper money into the ceiling with darts to be collected by a celebrity and to pay for day trips for the poor and/or nutty kids of the area.

Bohemian Rating: 3/5 for looking how it would have been in the period.

Handsome

Richard Attenborough collecting the charity money

Lovely

The Duke of York, Rathbone Street

The author Anthony Burgess is said to have used a gang related incident in this pub in the 1940s as inspiration for A Clockwork Orange. Glasses were smashed and a menacing atmosphere created.

I'd have settled for any sort of atmosphere. I was the only internal customer in a smartly bland McMullens house - who have paid for a marketing firm for a rebranding exercise - with McM's on all their pump clips. It worked, I didn't recognise their beers and nearly ordered one by mistake.

AI Rule: No reference to the past.

Bohemian Rating: 1/5 - soulless.

Everyone out

Pretty Bar - with barhangers discouraged.

The Newman Arms (Formerly, the Beer House), Rathbone Street

What on earth have they done to this place? Checking my records, I have visited once every 10 years for the first three decades. This is the place that Orwell used as inspiration for the "Proles Pub" in 1984. Oh, the irony! Us proles cannot afford £8 pints.  It's had a rather garish makeover in red. The only punters were eating pies in the upstairs dining room. Even the alley used at the start of the 1960s film "Peeping Tom" has had all elements of seediness removed. 

AI Rule: A rotating PowerPoint on a TV showing Orwell quotes and images of the past.

Bohemian Rating: 0/5 - Cleaner than a hotel bar.

Dread in Red

Peeping Tom Alley - in 1995, I was scared to walk down here

Marquis of Granby, Rathbone Place

How sad that a pub classed as too violent for most of the Bohemian crowd is now an identikit Nicholsons pub. With the exception of Dylan Thomas - who liked to come and fight off duty soldiers who had come cruising. It was also used as a location in the Iris Murdoch Book, Under the Net.

AI Rule: Dylan Thomas references etched as text on the walls.

Bohemian Rating: 2/5 - There were some spectacularly drunk after work office-types.

Standard Nicholsons

When he wasn't fighting and drinking, he was writing

The Wheatsheaf, Rathbone Place

You manage to go a night without a Nicholson's and then get two in a row. Augustus John brought his then girlfriend, Caitlin Macnamara, here and introduced her to a drunk Dylan Thomas. Come on Augustus, you must have sensed this wouldn't end well. Dylan put his head in her lap, proposed on the spot and they eventually married.

What a chap!

AI Rule: A whole upstairs room dedicated to George Orwell and the "Wheatsheaf Writers"

Bohemian Rating: 0/5 - So dull, I didn't stop for a drink.

Orwellian in name only

The Bricklayers Arms, Greese Street

 

Nestled in a little side street off the main drag, this looked particularly handsome. Short on stories and legend - presumably the Bohemian Set simply had a rule that no watering hole could be passed when gadding about. Another Sam Smiths pub, with a couple of tiny rooms. Looks like I missed out on exploring upstairs.

AI Rule: No references, but they might have been nothing to reference.

Bohemian Rating: 2/5 - In the nicest way possible, the landlady threw off 1940s vibes, polite but ever vigilant and looked like she would take no nonsense.

Nestled in a side street

Black Horse, Rathbone Place

This is the pub that banned Dylan Thomas - saying "we don't want your sort in here". Maybe Augustus had a word. It's gone through a number of closures - and one time squatted by The Really Free School - an anarchist/alternative education project. It now has "Cocktail Bar" in its title, so I (possibly) hastily decided it wasn't for me.

AI Rule: Unknown

Bohemian Rating: Unknown

Also says "Pub"

Nellie Dean of Soho (The Highlander), Dean Street

The Bohemians have crossed over to Soho. Those 30 minutes are important. This was known as the Highlander and renamed in 1967. Nellie Dean a name in a music hall song. Little of note in a small, single roomer but I'm pleased to say the Timothy Taylor Landlord was in decent condition.

AI Rule: No references.

Bohemian Rating: 0/5 - A very standard London pub.

Cannot complain about lack of footfall

The French House (The York Minster), Dean Street

Easily the pick of the pubs tonight and a bona fide classic that still maintains its Bohemian credentials. It's not the best place to drink - but it should be experienced. Getting in is tricky, as it is always packed. Standing outside is trickier, as you are corralled into a thin space behind a velvet rope and you really need to like the smell of Gauloises. Legends are plentiful and I've blogged on them before - the frontage ripped off by a doodlebug, the base of the free French resistance in the war. Old DT losing his manuscript for Under Milk Wood. Francis Bacon meeting Lucian Freud for halves of Chouffe (assuming they are Bohemian like me).

AI Rule: Photos and artistic representations of former punters everywhere

Bohemian Rating: 4/5 - It's still got it - proper looking booze-hounds in for long sessions sharing the space with American tourists and plenty of French voices overhead.

Meta Glasses could be the future (Joking!)

Summary

If you've got this far - well done. It was an interesting experiment and took me nearly as long to complete as to read the book. Things change, not always for the better, but certainly for the safer. As recently as 30 years ago, I was on edge when walking these streets. Now Soho has night-time tour guide leaders holding umbrellas aloft, dragging behind thrill seeking Japanese.

French House excepted - a collection of very pedestrian pubs serving expensively bland beers.

On an upbeat note - it's great to see all the pubs mentioned in a book from 70 years ago are still trading..... even the Swiss Cottage in Old Compton Street - now a lively disco, called Comptons.

Protecting Privacy - Comptons Cropped

21/09/26 - Soho

Searching for the previously undiscovered

Walk 3 in London's Hidden Walks finds me in probably my most visited part of town, Soho. How it changes - when I first came, 30 years ago, I can remember a pimp offering services, with me answering "no", until we both laughed. "Do I want a woman? Do I want a man? Well what do you want then?"

It's all sanitised now. The council refuses new alcohol licences unless there is table service to seated drinkers. After dark, I was surprised to see organised walking tours emerge, led by umbrella-wielding guides and followed by a posse of foreign thrill-seekers, presumably in search of London's darker side.

There's a job there for me, I am sure.

My guide-book runs to about 20 pages of descriptions, with every other building having a story to tell. I'll limit the blog to just the bits that are of interest and new to me. 

Into Soho

You'll be unsurprised that most are drinking related. Later in the night, I will be completing a Fitzrovian Pub Crawl - attempting to recreate the golden era of London drinking. Very much along that theme is the Colony Room - and it's more modern, still trading counterpart, the Groucho Club sitting side-by-side in Dean Street.

The Colony Room above Ducksoup

Groucho Club

The Colony Room was a legendary Soho drinking club at 41 Dean Street, founded in 1948 by Muriel Belcher. It became a bohemian refuge for artists, writers and assorted Soho misfits, with Francis Bacon among its most famous regulars, alongside Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Jeffrey Bernard. The atmosphere was famously louche, abrasive and alcohol-fuelled, with Belcher presiding over her clientele from behind the bar and cultivating an anything-goes attitude. Unlike the Groucho Club's later, more polished version of creative Soho, the Colony Room was resolutely grubby and disreputable. It finally closed in 2008, after six decades of serving as one of London's great drinking institutions; the original premises are now gone, but its reputation as the spiritual home of boozy, argumentative British art remains. 

Let's bring it to life.

On the booze theme, the guide starts the walk at Manette Street (renamed from Rose Street in honour of a Dickens character in A Tale of Two Cities) and the Pillars of Hercules. This was the watering hole for more recent writers, such as Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes. From the front, it's been rebranded as a cocktail bar - not my cup of Long Island Iced Tea at all - but the rear provides a reminder of its former glory.

Lovely Day

Peter Cook's influential Establishment Club - a 1960s comedy club in Greek Street is celebrated with a blue plaque. This doesn't tell the story that the famous picture of Christine Keeler naked on a chair was photographed in the same building. Or that Casanova lived in the building opposite.

Red Neon advertising a bar of the same name

Moving away from booze and clubs onto writers; 

Bill Bryson was so enamoured with Hazlitt's Hotel in Frith Street that he included a chapter on it in his book "Notes from a Small Island". Georgian, containing many original features, it was bound to appeal to people who live in a country that is not quite as old.

Since 1718

I had never heard of the recipient of the next blue plaque - John William Polidori, physician to Lord Byron, whose home was in Great Pulteney Street.  During the same writing competition in Geneva that spawned Frankenstein, he wrote the Vampyre. Initially mocked by Byron and subsequently accused of plagiarism, he returned to this house to commit suicide by drinking acid. 

I wonder who lives there now

This only scratches the guide book's surface, but there is enough to entertain tourists. As long as my umbrella is suitably gaudy and I deliver the tour with panache.

And if the punters want more trivia;

I liked this charity penny chute on the external railings of St Barnabas 

Future Inspiration

Book - Tales from the Colony Rooms - Darren Coffield

Walk Details

Previous Hidden London Walks;

Mayfair, 

Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury

Distance - 4 miles

Geocaches - 21

Walk Inspiration - London's Hidden Walks - Book 1 - Walk 3

21/09/26 - Balham

The Self-Styled Mayor of Balham

Time Out have two wonderful books of London Walks - all curated by writers/comedians/artists. This walk is a quick jaunt in Balham, created by the comedian Arthur Smith. The associated essay suggests that he lives at the visited Du Cane Court - as you may see him on the way to the shops. In his capacity as the self-styled Mayor of Balham, he promises a gold embossed certificate for those completing the walk. But we know he is a comedian, so it is unlikely to be true.

I like Arthur - he suggests stopping for a pre-walk livener at the Bedford Pub. And who am I to argue with that. An impressive looking comedy/music and food venue that has been smartened up considerably since it was known as a den of iniquity for prostitutes plying their trade.

Would probably be my local, if I lived here

Lots of pop music memorabilia 

Residential streets - spotting the new builds, presumably replacing the holes left from the WWII bombing raids - and into Tooting Bec Common. One of those surprising little pockets of countryside that can be found in London. Amidst the woodland, football pitches and tennis courts can be found the lido. Security lax enough that an urban rambler can enter for a discreet photo of the UK's largest freshwater outdoor swimming pool, holding one million gallons of unheated water.

London Walking

London Swimming

Back into civilisation and past Arthur's Mayoral home. Du Cane Court.

Du Cane Court on Balham High Road was built between 1935 and 1938 and, with around 677 flats and roughly two miles of internal corridors, was reputedly the largest privately owned block of flats in Europe when completed. Designed in a striking Art Deco style, it was intended as a complete 1930s lifestyle, with residents originally having access to a restaurant, bar, club, billiards room, rooftop garden, Japanese gardens, central heating, constant hot water and even piped radio. Its residents included a number of entertainers, among them Margaret Rutherford, Hermione Gingold and Tommy Trinder, giving the building strong connections with London's theatre and variety world. During the Second World War it survived the bombing of London, giving rise to the persistent local rumour that Hitler had earmarked Du Cane Court as accommodation for German officers after a successful invasion of Britain.

Just a sliver of Du Cane Court

Walk Details

Distance - 3 miles

Walk Inspiration - Time Out London Walks Book 2, Walk 3

Geocaches - 1