London walks
nine districts, and the things worth stopping for in each one
Nine districts, 28 things to stop in front of, and the street each one is on. These are not routes with arrows on them. They are the parts of London that reward looking up, listed so that a walk can be assembled out of whichever of them you happen to be near.
How to use this
Each district below opens with the station to get out at and one paragraph on why the ground is the way it is, then lists what is still standing. Everything in the tables is outdoors and free to look at. Where a building has an interior worth going into, the entry says so and stops there, because opening hours change and a guide that prints them is wrong within a year.
What is deliberately not here: restaurants, pubs recommended as pubs, telephone numbers and prices. The district sheets this guide is built from carried plenty of all four, and every one of them is long out of date. A pub appears below only where the building itself is the reason to walk past it.
The nine districts
Smithfield
Nearest station: Barbican or St Paul's
The ground behind St Bartholomew's escaped the Great Fire of 1666, so the alleyways and the first floors that almost touch across them are the shape London had before it burned.
| Entry | What it is | Street |
|---|---|---|
| King Henry VIII over the gate | The only outdoor statue of Henry VIII in London, set over a gate of St Bartholomew's Hospital to mark the king sparing it when the monasteries went. The gatehouse itself dates from 1702. | West Smithfield EC1 |
| St Bartholomew's Hospital | The oldest of London's hospitals still standing on its original site, founded in 1123 by Rahere after he was cured of malaria caught on a pilgrimage to Rome. The only medieval fabric left is the tower of St Bartholomew the Less. | West Smithfield EC1 |
| Smithfield Market | Grade II listed, built in 1868 and put up over a railway line that is now the car park underneath. Meat has been sold on the site for at least eight hundred years. | West Smithfield EC1 |
| William Wallace memorial | The spot where Wallace was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1305, on the wall of the hospital. | West Smithfield EC1 |
Clerkenwell
Nearest station: Farringdon or Barbican
North of Smithfield and south of Islington, close enough to walk to both the West End and the City, and once known as Little Italy.
| Entry | What it is | Street |
|---|---|---|
| St John's Gate | A gatehouse of 1504, and the last remnant above ground of the Priory of Clerkenwell, once the richest monastery in England. Hogarth lived here as a child. | St John's Gate EC1 |
| The Museum of the Order of St John | Nine hundred years of the Knights of St John, including arms and equipment from the defence of Malta in 1565. | St John's Gate EC1 |
| The National Penny Bank | Founded in 1875 on the model of the Yorkshire Penny Bank and open in the evenings, it took deposits of less than a shilling so that working people could save at all. Its thirteen branches were all put on what The Times in 1879 called the main thoroughfares of the metropolis. | 33–35 St John's Square EC1 |
The City
Nearest station: Tower Hill
The Tower is actually outside the City. It was built on William the Conqueror's order between 1066 and 1087 to keep an eye on London rather than to defend it.
| Entry | What it is | Street |
|---|---|---|
| Trinity House | Trinity House began as a guild of pilots at Deptford in the fourteenth century and started running lighthouses in 1566. Samuel Wyatt designed this headquarters in 1796; it was rebuilt in 1953 after war damage. | Trinity Square EC3 |
| The Tower Hill execution site | Plaques beside the Merchant Seamen memorial mark some 125 deaths, most of them prisoners of the Tower executed for treason. Thomas More is among them, and Lord Lovat in 1747 was the last beheading here. | Tower Hill EC3 |
| The Tower Bridge chimney | A cast-iron chimney painted to match the lamp-posts, and easy to walk past: it is the flue of a former guardhouse under one of the piers. | Tower Bridge SE1 |
| Tower Subway | A small brick drum that is the entrance to the second tunnel driven under the Thames. | Tower Hill EC3 |
Borough and Bankside
Nearest station: London Bridge or Borough
Borough High Street ran to London Bridge and was the only road into London from southern England, Dover and the pilgrim route to Canterbury. The ground the coaching inns grazed their horses on became London's first railway station in 1836.
| Entry | What it is | Street |
|---|---|---|
| Crossbones Graveyard | Some fifteen thousand people were buried here before the 1850s, many of them women who worked in the Bishop of Winchester's liberty and so could not be buried in consecrated ground. The site is still dedicated to the Outcast Dead. | Redcross Way SE1 |
| Redcross Garden | Laid out in 1888 by Octavia Hill, co-founder of the National Trust, as a green space for one of the poorest parts of London. The model cottages she designed as an alternative to the tenements stand behind it. | Redcross Way SE1 |
| The King's Arms arms | The arms of George II were put on the gatehouse of old London Bridge in 1728. When the bridge was widened in 1760 they were moved, altered to read GIII, and ended up on the front of the pub. | Newcomen Street SE1 |
| The George Inn | The last of London's galleried coaching inns, on the pilgrim road to Canterbury, now owned by the National Trust. | Borough High Street SE1 |
Bermondsey
Nearest station: Bermondsey, or London Bridge on foot
Leather was cured here with alum made partly from urine and from dog faeces gathered in the streets, and the Thames tides were used to wash out the tanning pits twice a day. Dickens wrote about the smell.
| Entry | What it is | Street |
|---|---|---|
| The Alaska Factory gates | Opened in 1869 for working seal fur; only the entrance gates with the seal carved on them survive of the original works. The art deco building behind is by Wallis Gilbert, who also did the Hoover buildings. | Grange Road SE1 |
| Manze's | Opened in 1902 and the oldest eel and mash shop in London. The family started next door at number 85, first as ice merchants and then as ice cream makers. | 87 Tower Bridge Road SE1 |
Shoreditch
Nearest station: Old Street or Hoxton
The roundabout is bleak, but there is a garden hidden in the middle of it, reached by a stairway from the shopping precinct underneath.
| Entry | What it is | Street |
|---|---|---|
| The St Leonard's Vestry bollard | London bollards often take the shape of a cannon because old guns really were used for the purpose, muzzle stopped with a ball. This cast-iron one is marked for St Leonard's Vestry, so it is a copy rather than a gun, and an unusually good one. | Charles Square N1 |
| Shoreditch Town Hall | The motto reads More Light, More Power, which is odd for a borough council until you know it refers to building a power station. The 1866 hall was made grander in 1902 and again in 1938. | 380 Old Street EC1 |
| Shoreditch Electric Light Station | Opened in 1896 to burn the borough's rubbish and light it with the heat. | Coronet Street N1 |
Highgate
Nearest station: Highgate
Winter snow could cut Highgate off from London in Georgian times. The railway ended that, but the village green and the pond are still there and the air of a country village with them.
| Entry | What it is | Street |
|---|---|---|
| Waterlow Park | Twenty acres left to the public by Sir Sidney Waterlow in 1889 as a garden for the gardenless. Lauderdale House stands inside it. | Highgate Hill and Swains Lane N6 |
| Highgate Wood | Declared an open space forever by the Lord Mayor in 1886, and a last remnant of the Middlesex Forest that once covered this ground. | Muswell Hill Road N10 |
| Pond Square | Behind the high street, down a set of steps, and said to be haunted by a chicken, a frozen one. | Pond Square N6 |
| The Flask | A pub going back to the fifteenth century whose floor, like that of St Michael's nearby, is said to be level with the cross on St Paul's. | 77 Highgate West Hill N6 |
Woolwich
Nearest station: Woolwich Arsenal or Woolwich Dockyard
Two hundred years of making guns and ships, on a stretch of river most walking guides stop short of. It is also the one place in London with three ways across the Thames on the same half mile, two of them free and one of them under it.
| Entry | What it is | Street |
|---|---|---|
| The Royal Arsenal | Ordnance was proofed, filled and stored here from the seventeenth century until the works closed in 1967, on a site that at its wartime peak employed tens of thousands. What survives is the front of it: the Royal Brass Foundry of 1717, the Grand Store and the Dial Arch, now standing among flats and a performing-arts venue. | Royal Arsenal, No 1 Street SE18 |
| The Woolwich foot tunnel | Five hundred and four metres under the Thames, designed by Sir Maurice Fitzmaurice and opened on the 26th of October 1912 by the chairman of the London County Council. It is free, it is open, and it comes up at North Woolwich on the other side. | Woolwich Church Street SE18 |
| The free ferry | A vehicle and pedestrian ferry that has crossed here since the 23rd of March 1889 and has never charged a fare. It is run today by London River Services, the maritime arm of Transport for London, which is the reason a free crossing still exists at all. | New Ferry Approach SE18 |
Hornsey
Nearest station: Hornsey, or Turnpike Lane
A high street rather than a sight, and worth the walk for one headstone.
| Entry | What it is | Street |
|---|---|---|
| The tomb of Harriet Long and Jacob Walker | A headstone of 1841 in St Mary's churchyard marking the grave of a Virginian woman and the man buried with her. | St Mary's, Hornsey High Street N8 |
Questions about walking these districts
Can these London walks be done in one day?
Not sensibly. Smithfield, Clerkenwell, the City and Borough sit close enough together to be strung into one long day on foot. Highgate and Hornsey are north of everything else and Bermondsey is across the river, so they are separate outings.
Which district has the most to look at?
Smithfield, by some distance, and it is the densest ground in this guide: the hospital, the market, the execution site and the gate statue are within a few hundred metres of each other.
Are any of these indoors or ticketed?
The entries here were chosen because they stand in the street and cost nothing to look at. Two of them, the Museum of the Order of St John and Lauderdale House in Waterlow Park, have interiors with their own opening hours, which are not listed here because they change.
Is there a guided version of any of this?
The original site recommended walks led by a Blue Badge guide. Those listings are long out of date and are not reproduced here; the entries below are written to be walked without a guide.