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

24/08/26 - Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury

All Manner of Artist

Second "Hidden Walk" in an attempt to reacquaint myself with Central London. This time it is Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury - the land of the Bohemians. I have so much future inspiration from this walk, I can hear my other projects weep. It's not every area of London that is named after a pub. I am rather enjoying reading "The Fitzroy: An autobiography of a London Pub". To the extent that I have a 1950s-themed pub crawl planned for another day.

An overview of the area;

Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury form a historic swathe of central London immediately north of Mayfair and Soho, with a character that is noticeably more literary, bohemian and intellectual. Fitzrovia developed as a mixed residential and commercial district, becoming particularly associated with artists, writers and musicians, including George Orwell, Dylan Thomas and Augustus John, while its pubs, workshops and small streets retain something of that unconventional past. Bloomsbury, by contrast, was largely shaped by the Russell family from the 17th century onwards and is renowned for its garden squares, grand terraces and intellectual associations, particularly with the British Museum, University College London and the Bloomsbury Group. Together, the two neighbourhoods offer a fascinating mixture of Georgian town planning, literary history, medicine, academia, pubs and bohemian London, stretching from Oxford Street north towards Roughly bounded by Great Portland Street to the west and Gray's Inn Road to the east.

A uniform layout of streets and impressive squares, mainly Georgian and early Victorian. The Post Office Tower dominates the skyline.

From the Euston Road

This is a morning walk, so too early for watering holes. The Fitzroy is important to comment upon, responsible for the naming of the area in its bohemian glory years of the 1920s to the 1940s. I am part way through the previously mentioned book, reaching the start of the decline in 1955. A court case for running a house of ill-repute, when homosexual men were observed "fingering sailor's buttocks" by undercover detectives. The people and their other haunts have provided much future reading material and a new pub crawl for me to follow.

The next big source of inspiration is Hawksmoor. St George's, one of his six London churches, is on route. The distinctive tower featuring in the background of Hogarth's Gin Lane. 

Looking forward to exploring in September

Don't miss the more upbeat "Beer Street".

Google Maps suggests the church is open daily from 9am. It appears that the church opening times are as inconsistently vague as pub opening hours. Gates are padlocked and access to the Hawksmoor (and suffragette) exhibitions are out of reach. Further research into the potential satanic layout of the six churches, via Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, will be required – and another walking route will be born.

Hawksmoor - St George's

Charles II in Roman Garb, atop Hogarth's Tower

For the quirky - again, I am too early for the most famous (how many are there?) of London's Umbrella shops - James Smith and Sons. It saved me from myself. I fancied a heavy-topped walking stick to fight off phone thieves.

Summer of 2026 - Worst trading conditions ever

And inside University College - one of the most bizarre sights in London. The corpse of Jeremy Bentham on display in a glass cupboard in the reception area. He died in 1832 and his will requested that his dressed body should be put on display as a "self-statue". Of course, the medical students have been messing around with it over the years. The head now a wax replacement.

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That's plenty for a blog - more photos of pubs, squares, Coram Fields, St George's Gardens and Tracy Emin artworks hidden in plain sight on a railing on the Komoot map below.

Future Inspiration

Book - The Fitzroy: An autobiography of a London Pub, Sally Fiber

Book - The Laughing Torso, Nina Hamnett

Pub Crawl - 1950s Bohemian Fitzrovia

Book - Queens of Bohemia and other Miss-fits, Darren Coffield

Artist - Augustus John

Book - Lud Heat, Iain Sinclair

Book - Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd

Walk Details

Previous Hidden London Walks - Mayfair

Distance - 5.5 miles

Geocaches - c20

Walk Inspiration - London's Hidden Walks - Book 1 - Walk 2

12/04/26 - London's Hidden Walks - Mayfair

Rock and Roll, Suicide

5 years of walking in London, on an ever more distant spiral. It's time to reacquaint myself with the City.

I know just the resource to use.

There are four volumes of London's Hidden Walks. I start posh. Book 1, Walk 1 is Mayfair. The guide is superb - packed with information, with pages of data on a relatively short tour of the capital's most opulent area. 

Mayfair is one of London’s most affluent and fashionable districts, occupying roughly the area between Oxford Street, Regent Street, Piccadilly and Park Lane. Developed largely from the late 17th century onwards by the Grosvenor family, it became associated with aristocratic townhouses, exclusive clubs, embassies and grand squares such as Grosvenor Square and Berkeley Square. Today, its elegant Georgian streets sit alongside luxury shops on Bond Street, art galleries, expensive restaurants and some of London’s most famous hotels, while a handful of old pubs and historic buildings provide reminders of its less polished past. Despite its reputation for wealth and exclusivity, Mayfair has a surprisingly colourful history of aristocrats, artists, writers, politicians, gamblers and notorious characters.

Mayfair

I'll pick out the bits from the book that are of most interest to me, otherwise I will have the world's longest blog. The streets of London are paved with stories and Hidden London likes to tell them.

I emerged from the tube at Piccadilly - finding my bearings at Eros.

Eros - was meant to be Anteros, the Greek God of unrequited love

At the edge of Park Lane, I hunted for the flat at Number 9 Curzon Place. In 1974, Mama Cass died in a flat there, to be followed four years later - but incredibly in the same bed - by Keith Moon.

Behind the window at the top right hand corner

A little further on at Audley Square - an innocent enough looking lamp post was a dead drop location for Soviet spies in the 1950s. Letters stored behind a little opening at the rear, with chalk marks on the pavement indicating that there was a hidden message. WhatsApp is more efficient, but not as quaint.

Spy lore - now home of not one, but two Geocaches

Around Berkeley Square to find the nightclub that provides the redtop with so much ammunition. Annabel's used to be in the basement of 44, with the Claremont Club (Lord Lucan's gambling den) above. Number 50 is rumoured to be London's most haunted house - with tales of suicides, madness and toffs with shotguns.

Annabel's is now at 46

And this is as close as I will get to a Private Club

For reasons that may make it into a future blog, I am having an Evelyn Waugh cultural moment. In preparation for a visit to Madresfield Court, I am working my way through Brideshead Revisited. Smack bang in the middle of Mayfair is the Church of the Immaculate Conception. Mr Waugh converted to Catholicism there in 1939. Much like Rex in Brideshead. 

As pretty as a picture

To give you an idea as to how much material route planners have to work with in the Smoke, two adjacent houses in Brook Street both have blue plaques. The first, the home of Handel and next door, a couple of centuries later, Jimi Hendrix.

Jimi - Left; Handel - Right

And finally, Heddon Street - a little alley off Regents Street - was the location for the cover shot of Bowie's Ziggy Stardust. A little imagination is required to make the connection.

Ye, Who was K West? 

A Sunday morning too early for pubs, but there were some beauties along the route. Ye Grapes in Shepherd's Market needs a revisit.

Every pub's a beauty in London

Walk Details

Distance - 4.5 Miles

Geocaches - c30

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