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Dickens & Shakespeare Highlights

DIRECTIONS
Leave Monument Station via the Fish Street Hill exit. Turn right and walk to the:-
Monument itself, which is 202 feet (61.6 metres) high, and the tallest isolated stone column in the world. Dickens mentions the Monument several times. In Martin Chuzzlewit,

Continue down Fish Street Hill. Cross Lower Thames Street, bear right and pause alongside the church of:-
St Magnus the Martyr, which was constructed between 1671 to 1676. In Oliver Twist, as Nancy heads for her secret meeting with Mr Brownlow and Rose Maylie on London Bridge. A few remnants of the old bridge can be seen in the churchyard, whilst a detailed model of it is displayed inside the church.
Exit left from the churchyard. Walk under the bridge. Go left up the steps and follow the signs marked ‘London Bridge West Side’. Arriving on the bridge, go right at the bus stop and cross the bridge, about which Dickens wrote many times, sometimes referring to the old one and sometimes to the 1832 reconstruction.

It was over the former that Pip in Great Expectations walked in agonies of despair upon hearing that Estella was to marry Drummle.
On arrival on the opposite side, take the stairs on the right (an arrow points to Glaziers Hall), and at the bottom, pause to look at the only remaining arch of John Rennie’s 19th-century bridge.
The rest was shipped off to America when the present structure was built between 1967 and 1972.

Go right off the steps. Keep ahead and go left through the gates into:-
Southwark Cathedral. Once inside, go left along the side aisle and pause alongside the tomb of John Gower (d.1408). The church did not become a cathedral until 1905, so Dickens would have known it as St Saviour’s.

With your back to Gower, cross to the opposite aisle and, having paused to admire the memorial to William Shakespeare and the window above, resplendent with sundry characters from his plays, go right and exit the church through the glass doors.

Ascend the steps to the right. Go left along Cathedral Street and, opposite ‘Fish’ restaurant, go right into Borough Market, said to be the oldest fruit and vegetable market in London. Take the first passage left and walk between the fenced-in stalls.
The market has retained its steel and glass structure, dating from 1851, and still has a decidedly Victorian air.

Continue through Borough Market and exit left onto Borough High Street. Go right at the traffic lights into St Thomas Street, and enter the red brick tower of:-
St Thomas’s Church on the left. Ascend the winding wooden stairway to the roof space of the church, which was once used as the herb garret of St Thomas’s Hospital, and from 1822 until 1862 as its female operating theatre, where Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) founded her School of Nursing. It also provides a lot of detail on the surrounding area when, in the 19th century, it was one of the capital’s worst slums.

Thankful that you were born into a more medically advanced age, go left from the church, and continue along St Thomas Street. Go over the crossing. Bear right and turn left through the gates into Guy’s Hospital, where a statue of the founder, Thomas Guy, greets you. Cross to the covered passage ahead, and pause by the quad on the left, where you will find one of the recesses from the old London Bridge, in which David in David Copperfield was wont to sit. A brief history is displayed.

Continue down the steps. Go right, then right again. Pass left under the arch; bear left, and turn right into:-
White Hart Yard. Nothing, save the name of the yard, survives of what was, until its demolition in 1889, the largest of the coaching inns that lined Borough High Street. It was to the White Hart Inn that Mr Pickwick followed Alfred Jingle and Rachel Wardle, following their elopement, and in so doing first met with Sam Weller in Pickwick Papers.

Exit the yard left along Borough High Street.
Long ago, the voracious appetite of the railways swallowed up the character of this busy thoroughfare, and it is to Dickens we must turn to recapture it. ‘In the Borough’ he wrote in Pickwick Papers ‘there still remain some half dozen old inns… Great rambling, queer old places… with galleries, and passages, and staircases, wide enough and antiquated enough, to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories…’

However, all is not lost, for if you turn in through the sturdy black gates next on the left, you will find London’s only surviving galleried coaching inn:-
The George, which was built in 1677. Although Dickens only makes one very brief mention of the pub in Little Dorrit, ‘if he [Tip Dorrit] goes into the George and writes a letter’, the place itself is a true time capsule. Turning into the yard from the busy rush is to be transported back to a bygone age. You can picture the long ago travellers and forgotten inn-workers, gazing down from the one surviving gallery as the coaches clattered into view. You can almost hear the whinnying of the horses, the cursing of the stable-hands and the banter of the coachmen. The inn’s interior is as antiquated as its exterior, and on the wall to the right of its middle bar, Dickens’s life insurance policy is displayed.

Having passed the John Harvard Library, turn immediately left into Angel Place, lined on the right by a dismal brick wall, which is all that remains of:-
The Marshalsea Prison. It was here that John Dickens was incarcerated for debt in 1824. For the rest of his life Dickens was haunted by Marshalsea Prison. It dominates Little Dorrit, the heroine of which is a debtor’s daughter, born and raised within its confines.

Backtrack to go left along Borough High Street and, on the other side of Tabard Street, is the church of:-
St George the Martyr. Built between 1734 and 1736 it is also known as ‘Little Dorrit’s Church’, since it was here that the heroine of Dickens’s novel was christened. It is also in this church that, on returning to the Marshalsea Prison, she finds herself locked out and so spends the night in the vestry of the church, using the church register as a pillow. Later, she marries Arthur Clennam here. There is a depiction of Little Dorrit in the church’s east window, behind the altar, on which her kneeling figure is shown wearing a poke bonnet.

Exit right from the church. Go right into Tabard Street and, towards the end on the left, go through the gates into the gardens, where opposite is the other side of the Marshalsea Prison wall, which has a truly sinister air when viewed on a cold, wet, winter’s day.

Turn  into Great Suffolk Street, first right into Toulmin Street, passing Pickwick Street on the right, and go next right into Lant Street.

The Charles Dickens Primary School, immediately on the right, stands on the site where the 12-year-old Charles lodged in the house of one Archibald Russell, an agent for the Insolvent Court, during his father’s incarceration in the Marshalsea. ‘A back attic was found for me,’ he later recalled, ‘A bed and bedding were… made up on the floor… and when I took possession of my new abode, I thought I was in paradise.’

With these utopian thoughts of a bygone age, go left along Borough High Street where a little way along is Borough Station and the end of this walk.

How to Book >
Duration: approximately 1 hour 45 minutes – 2 hours
Meeting Point: Barbican Underground

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