11 December at 11:00
Bring Your Baby Guided London Walk: "A Christmas Carol: Dickensian Alleyways at Christmas"
Winner of 'Best Parent Activity' at the 'Bablands Awards', 'Bring Your Baby' Guided London Walks are sensitively devised to suit parents and carers of even the tiniest babies to enjoy London’s history. We can stop whenever you like to feed and change - without the stress of feeling you are holding up the group. Because every participant brings their baby, patience and baby’s needs are at the forefront of each walk.
You are welcome to bring friends and family who do not also have a baby.
Walk Starts: Outside Bank Station, Royal Exchange exit.
Walk Ends: The Mansion House (a minute from Bank station).
We will visit the (always beautifully decorated for Christmas) Royal Exchange for toilets and baby change at the start of the walk. As this is a circular walk, you can return to The Royal Exchange at the end of the walk to use the facilities again.
We will stop for a half hour lunch break halfway at Victorian Leadenhall Market - another marvellously decorated location at Christmas! At this point you can stay with me at my chosen cafe, or go and get food of your choice before regrouping to resume the walk.
Walk description:
'A Christmas Carol' is Charles Dickens's best known and best loved work. The numerous adaptations of the novella that are being performed in London this Christmas show that the story is just as popular today as in 1843 when it was published.
Famously telling the story of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge as he spends Christmas Eve in the company of the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, on this walk we will visit numerous locations from the narrative.
What you’ll see and hear about on this Dickensian-themed Christmas walk:
- Victorian Leadenhall Market - decorated for Christmas - with many connections to Dickens (and Harry Potter!).
- Sites of Ebeneezer Scrooge’s Counting House and a possible contender for his home.
- Where Scrooge's clerk Bob Cratchit "went down a slide... twenty times in honour of it being Christmas-eve".
- The peaceful churchyard from ‘Our Mutual Friend’, described by Dickens as the church of ‘the Great Golden Keys', and where Scrooge may have been shown his own grave by The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come.
- Many atmospheric ancient courts and alleyways, where we encounter Dickens’ favourite chop house, a setting for The Pickwick Papers, and very possibly where Scrooge spends Christmas Eve eating "..his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern".
- The church "...whose gruff old bell was always peeping slyly down at Scrooge out of a gothic window in the wall...".
- The building where Scrooge observes acquaintances discussing his death.
- London’s 1st coffee house (1652), meeting place of slave traders, and mentioned in Samuel Pepys' diary!
- The spot where, each night, Dickens gazed at the home of his first great love.
- The building where the poor and hungry young Dickens stared longingly through its kitchen windows.
- Plus! Hear about the some Victorian Christmas traditions along the way, including making Christmas puddings, pulling crackers, sending cards and assembling a Christmas tree - and find out where in London some of these were invented!
