Tracks Travel have teamed up with The
Original London Walks Company to offer some of the best historical London walks available.
Jack the Ripper HauntGoing on this walk is as close as you're going to get to nailing the Ripper. Because this is the Ripper walk that was devised - and is frequently guided - by Donald Rumbelow, who is
"internationally recognised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper". Britain's most distinguished crime historian, Donald is the author of the definitive book on the Ripper, the best-selling The Complete Jack the Ripper. He's been the chief consultant for every major film and television treatment of the Ripper for the last 25 years. The former Curator of the City of London Police Crime Museum, he's twice been the of the Crime Writers' Association. For good measure, he's a Freeman of the City of London and a top flight professionally qualified Blue Badge and City of London Guide. And not to put too fine a point on it, London Walks has an exclusive because
ours is the only Ripper walk where you'll get the benefit of the very latest research into the Autumn of Terror. Donald normally guides our Ripper walk every Sunday night, every Monday night, every Tuesday night and alternate Friday nights.
Classic Thames pub strollIf you only have time for one walking tour, this is the one to go on - it's the classic London pub walk. It takes in London's last remaining galleried coaching inn, its best riverside walkway, its oldest market, the finest art nouveau pub in England, the most sensational art gallery in the world (on Fridays we pop inside for a quick look!), the church where Harvard University's founder was baptised, and an 18th-century pub that brews its own beer - plus lashings of Shakespeare, a jot of Dickens, lots of pub lore, and London's best skyline panorama.
It gets better. Because there's also the recently discovered remains of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre (and its sister playhouse The Rose)...and the thrilling, thatch-roofed reproduction that's risen, Phoenix-like, only a stone's throw away. Let alone the astonishing replica of Sir Francis Drake's Golden Hinde, the ship that the great Elizabethan mariner sailed around the world over 400 years ago. Anchored there in the murky Thames, its timbers creaking eerily in the misty London night and The Globe just yards away...it's a ghost ship lost in time. Go on this walk. (Food is available.)
Darkest Victorian LondonWe make some thrilling - and chilling - "finds". Everything from trace evidence - archaeological fragments - to the whole kit and caboodle. Stuff from the old, furtive, toil-worn, hard-scrabble, soon-to-be-passing, villainous past: a paupers' burying ground, a ragged school, "model dwellings", a prison, Octavia Hill's cottages, etc. We see the stones. And hear the people. Really hear them. Because they speak through Jean. And she does them in character: chimney sweeps, prostitutes, the soon-to-be-executed "Black Maria", pickpockets, street sellers, the Body Snatching Borough Gang, etc.
This is history as a seance. And for added value...at the end of the walk you'll be able to get into the Old Operating Theatre at half price! It's well worth seeing...it's the only Georgian operating theatre in the world!
