The Peter Ackroyd Thames Pub Crawl 2025

I had done the monumental, in so many ways, Peter Ackroyd Thames Pub Crawl several times in the past (2013, 2015 and 2017) and loved it every time but was a little hesitant this year as age has caught up with me a little and my walking and drinking were both reduced. But it is such a great walk and talk that when invited I just had to do it again.

Our starting point, as usual, was St. Stephen's Tavern on Parliament Square. A good central location to meet but plagued by tourists which makes the service a little slow. Also on the plus side it is a Hall & Woodhouse pub which means Badger Beers and I could start the day with a pint of Fursty Ferret.

From there we made our way towards Sherlock Holmes by Charring Cross pausing along the way to here tales of the early Thames and how it came to be the river we know today. Not sure what I drank and my limited notes from the day just say "Pale Ale.

Our next stop was for lunch at Mulberry Bush on South Bank. They were expecting us, most of us had preordered our food yet we were still there for well over an hour. The exceptionally slow service was a shame as everything else about the pub was rather nice.

Our next stop was a pleasant surprise.

Our eloquent guide, Robert Kingham, took us on a small diversion into the place where he works which just happens to have panoramic views like this. We lingered for a while over a few glasses of bubbly to enjoy all of the views.

We all took many photographs, because we are all curious tourists too, and while I personally liked the less familiar views looking south I chose this one full of landmarks to help anyone less familiar with London.

 

Our next stop was The Rake South Bank, on the edge of Borough Market. It has an extravagant range of beers from which I selected Verdant This House IPA. A good choice. 

The walking and talking continued as we sauntered towards Tower Bridge and our rendezvous at Dean Swift for dinner. I went for some pretty good ravioli and a decent pint of Bermondsey Pale Ale.

For me the most interesting part of this walk is the section east of Tower Bridge, a path less trodden by tourists but they are spreading! The light was fading when I took this picture looking back towards the City.

Approaching 10pm we hit The Angel which was the one unexpected low point of the evening, it took absolutely ages to get served not being a local and having to try and work out their complicated indoors/outdoors bars and the pint of Sam Smith's Old Brewery was definitely not worth the wait. That was a real disappointment for me as I had lived off that beer when I first started work in London.

The next and final pub, The Mayflower, was much more like it! The pub was lively and offered up a jolly good pint of Juicy Golden Ale, which I drank on a bench by the river with my fellow travellers. It was the perfect end to a perfect day.

And for the record, we walked about 18km.

The Peter Ackroyd Charity Pub Crawl 2015

I have many interests and do many things related to each of them but in each category there are only one or two things that I call mandatory. For example, I like reading comics and I buy quite a few but the only books that I must get are those written by Warren Ellis.

Another interest is exploring cities on foot and I do a great deal of this by myself at lunchtimes and when on holiday. In this category the one mandatory activity is walks arranged by Minimum Labyrinth. I have been on several, some more than once, and they have all been brilliant.

And so I readily found myself on The Peter Ackroyd Charity Pub Crawl 2015.

It was a re-run of an earlier Peter Ackroyd Pub Crawl that the group had done, but not the one that I went on in 2013. One of the people travelling that day, Rebecca Taylor, had since died of cystic fibrosis and so the 2015 crawl was in her memory and also to raise money for a related charity.

We started at 2pm in Clerkenwell and spent the rest of the long day roaming towards Holborn on a delightfully circuitous route that took in a few sights, far more interesting places that are not really sights as not many people know about them, and quite a few pubs. And a chippie.

Unusually for these tours I knew something of some of the areas having worked in both Clerkenwell (for Charteris) and Holborn (for BT) in previous roles and also because I had been there at other times for other reasons, e.g. LIKE meetings used to be held in a pub on Clerkenwell Green.

I may have known some of the roads and a few of the pubs but the anecdotes that we were regaled with along the way were all new to me and they were what made the tour so special. It was also good to share the journey with other people keen to learn more about the places that they half-knew and wished to know better.

It was not the sort of event where I could take notes and, for some reason, my memories of that day are not all that clear, but I am helped in crafting this post by two useful pieces of technology; my camera captured the interesting places that we visited and FourSquare dutifully recorded all the pubs that we went to, starting with The Old Ivy House.

The pub in the top picture is The Crown Tavern on Clerkenwell Green which was our second port of call. With eight pubs to cover altogether I played safe and had just a half of Kolsch.

Playing safe was forgotten at the next pub, the Dovetail, because they had Fruli Strawberry Beer. This was a Belgian pub and I was delighted to see the display of Tin Tin covers in their original language versions. So much so that I took a rare selfie standing in front of them and I used this later as my Twitter and Facebook avatars.

This photo of our main guide, the loquacious and affable Robert Kingham, was taken outside another pub. This was not on our drinking schedule but Robert found the "Idle Banter" sign too good to miss. We could not have gone in anyway as the pub was shut for the day having no office workers to serve. When I first started work in London, in the late 1980s, a lot of the City was like that and the pubs shut at 9pm during the week too. Now most of London is bustling 24x7 and the pubs stay open even longer than that.

Walking through Spitalfields brought back memories of when I worked for Charteris as we had an office just east of there in Cloth Street. We were a sociable bunch then so I knew most of the pubs and Indian restaurants nearby.

One of these known pubs was the Rising Sun in Cloth Fair and that was our fourth stop. This too was more used to office workers than tourists or residents and we were the only people in there at the time (about 4:30pm). I was pleased to be reminded that this was a Sam Smith's pub so I had a welcome pint of Old Brewery Bitter.

We then hit a series of grand buildings including the Old Bailey, St. Sepulchure's Church and St Bartholomew's Hospital.

It was the later that was attracting the most interest from tourists as this was the roof that Sherlock Holmes did not fall off to his death in the recent TV series, despite appearing to do so.

We had a little period of spotting TV and film locations at that time. The iconic Smithfield Market has been in lots of things and the underground car park on West Smithfield had been used as the entrance to the relocated MI6 headquarters in Skyfall.

We quickly regained our normal terrain and disappeared down narrow paths to find secluded squares, like Gough Square where we found Dr Johnson's house and a statue of his cat.

I had prided myself for having explored that area reasonably thoroughly but a lot of this was new to me, including Boswell House.  Also new to me, surprisingly, was the Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub in Fleet Street. This is something of a London legend but somehow it had eluded me previously.

The next pub was another London legend, the Cittie of Yorke, and this time it was one that I did know from my days working in Holborn. Another Sam Smiths pub called for another pint of Old Brewery.

The territory was a lot more familiar then as we skirted around Lincoln's Inn Field before popping into another pub I knew from my Holborn days, the Ship Tavern. This seemed to cater mostly for tourists or uncultured commuters and the best draught beer they had was Tribute. So I had a pint of that, it was too late in the tour to worry about pacing. This was pub seven of eight.

Something of a surprise next as we did something even more touristy and went for some fish and chips in The Rock and Sole Plaice in Endell Street, Covent Garden. Luckily they could accommodate both vegetarians and large groups and we settled comfortably into the busy basement. It was about 8pm by then, some six hours after our mission started, and some food was most welcome as there was a noticeable amount of alcohol to soak up.

After that there was just time for our final pub, the Museum Tavern in Great Russell Street, near to the British Museum, obviously. Another pub that I had been to before and an excellent end to the evening thanks to the draught Black Sheep Bitter.

Through all the walking, drinking and eating the curious tales continued, often to the bemusement of other walkers, drinkers and eaters. These tales were the glue that held our passage together as we traversed and explored the still surprising London.

It was a fantastic day out tinged with sadness at the memory of the fellow traveller who could not be with us.

Walking through The Grey Soul of London (July 2014)

For each of the last three years I have taken Minimum Labyrinth's walk through The Grey Soul of London and I saw no reason for 2014 to be any different. The Grey Soul is a great walk and talk, and so are their others, which is why I have been on a few of them.

All of the Grey Soul walks have been a little different; they have been at different times in different weathers and one ended at a different location and my fourth attempt was probably the one that best kept to the script. It also finished on time, 6pm, which the other attempts had spectacularly failed to do.

Being the fourth time also meant that, finally, I had some sort of handle on where we were and where we were going. It also meant that I had taken photos of the main sites before so this time I have tried to pick a few different ones. I've not always succeeded.

We started in the Shakespeare's Head behind Sadlers's Wells. The first thing that I noticed was that one of the other walkers was wearing a Zenith t-shirt, a promising omen for things to come.

We headed off south towards the former Finsbury Town Hall before wandering down Exmouth Market and along to the brilliantly named Coldbath Square before turning east along Warner Street.

We stopped several times to hear Robert's stories about the places we were passing through while I took the sort of photos that I would take if I was visiting the place on holiday. That means that there were two parallel tales, those narrated by Robert and those told to me by the buildings we walked past.

The distinctly different middle part of our journey took us in to the industrial zone dominated, but far from limited to, the Mount Pleasant Sorting Office. Just before we got there I was captivated by this collection of brick and metal in Eyre Street Hill.

That is where we had a set-back when the pub we were aiming for was closed and so was the fall-back. That meant we had to head for the Union Tavern where we were due to end our exploration later on. I found that very useful as it helped me to work out where the Union Tavern actually is in relation to the other places that we visited.

After our brief dalliance with industry we headed in to the Georgian squares in what may be Pentonville, or Finsbury, or Islington. This was also the world of Arthur Machen, one of the inspirations behind this walk.

Our entry to this new world was the Riceyman Steps, made famous in a novel of the same name by Arnold Bennett. At the top we found Granville Square, the first of several.

These houses are fairly typical of what we saw for that section of the walk as Robert dragged as down unknown streets and alleyways in a fairly successful attempt to get us all lost. And he kept telling us tales to distract us.

Water formed part of many stories that day from the wells that still live on to place names, the submerged and subjugated Fleet river, a shy reservoir in Claremont Square and a Thames Water pumping station in Amwell Street which was proud to show off some of its pipes.

Somewhere around there we found another pub. This time it was open but it was not the pub that we expected. The legendary Filthy MacNasty's was our intended destination but it was being turned in to The Fountain, a fairly standard gastro pub with little beer and fewer staff. It took a while but I did mange to get a pint of something drinkable.

Passing along an alleyway between Naoroji Street and Lloyd Square I could not fail to notice this green house covered in scaffolding. It was not part of the formal walk but was very much the sort of thing that I like to see, and photograph.

My final picture from the walk is another typical picture of the area we explored at the end. I think this is LLoyd Square but the precise location is not the point.

From there we headed back to the Union Tavern this time for a longer stay and some food. Robert had finished his tales by then so we had to fill the gap with our own conversations. This was considerably helped by finding other people who read comics, and not just the Zenith guy, and a woman whose boyfriend could not make the walk because he was off being a wizard somewhere.

This was another fine walk through The Grey Soul of London and another fine walk from those nice chaps at Minimum Labyrinth. As long as they keep doing them I am going to keep walking with them.

The Peter Ackroyd Thames Pub Crawl 2013

Days out in London do not get much better than this.

Having done the Grey Soul and Thin Veil walks a total of four times I was invited by the organisers to join the grand end of season celebration with the entirely correct title The Peter Ackroyd Thames Pub Crawl.

This took a group of around twenty of us Westminster to Rotherhithe via ten, yes ten, pubs. On the way we listened to many prepared stories and had a few unplanned adventures.

Thanks to FourSquare I know that the pubs we went to were St. Stephens Tavern, The Sherlock Holmes, Mulberry Bush, Doggett's Coat & Badge, The Anchor, The Rake, Liberty Bounds, The Bridge House, The Angel and The Mayflower. That was quite an eclectic mix from pubs where only tourists go to those where we got a funny look for not being regulars.

The unplanned adventures included photos with a hen party, a group of coloured animals, a wheelchair, the raising of Tower Bridge just as we were approaching the centre and  musical boats.

It was a rich and fascinating day and it was so good that I did not mind finding myself in Rotherhithe at 10pm having had seven pints. Luckily my iPhone knew the way home.

Walking from Vauxhall to Rotherhithe via ten pubs

There were several parts to The Peter Ackroyd Thames Pub Crawl including the walk itself, the tales shared with friends and the ten pubs we rested in. These are some of the pictures to go with the tales.

The walk started for the others at Westminster but I began my journey at Vauxhall after catching a train there from Richmond. This place has many memories for me.

For a while I worked at London Borough of Lambeth and that meant visiting the planning department who were in one of the blocks in the middle. Not one of those facing the river, obviously, but round the back facing the station.

After that I worked for a about a year for EDF Energy in Victoria and that allowed me to walk over the bridge every morning.

The EDF Energy London Eye is such a prominent feature on the Thames that it had to feature here.I like the construction of the Eye, rather than its plain circular shape, and a close-up shows that best.

We crossed the river several times including a north to south crossing on the Hungerford Bridge. I recall when this was a narrow bridge on one side only and the new bridge is one of the many things London has to thank Ken Livingstone for. Boris has given us a cable car that goes from nowhere to nowhere.

Another bridge but one we did not cross. The main point of this picture is the changing London skyline. I've taken similar pictures several times before but new this time are the Cheese-Grater and the Walkie-Talkie (a.k.a. the Fryscrapper).

Back on the north bank we passed this beauty in glass between London Bridge and Billingsgate. This is a part of London that not many people go to because, apart from offices, there is nothing there. I'm not even sure that I've been there before and I walk everywhere.

On the other side of the water, HMS Belfast is well disguised against the blue offices of More London behind it.

It was getting dark as we approached Tower Bridge and it was even darker when we finally crossed it as it was raised as we were just a few meters from the centre and we were sent back and had to wait for the ships opera to finish.

To get to Tower Bridge we had to pass the Tower of London with its steadfast wall of bricks. I like bricks.

It is hard to miss the Shard and I had taken a few pictures of it at various points along the river before this one. I like this one best because of the curved blocks in front of it, the office lights and the grey sky.

I took this picture on Tower Bridge while waiting for it to open. This is looking east towards the badlands. The floating lights in the centre are on cranes and are further evidence of the constant rebuilding and expansion of London.

Finally, in Rotherhithe in the dark and a look back towards the City on the north side.

I took lots and lots of photographs during the walk. It was a struggle to cut them down to just 96 for Facebook and even harder to cut that down further to 11 for this article. I love walking through London, especially by the river, and I hope that these pictures give some clue as to why that is.

LIKE 48: A spellbinding walk through The Thin Veil of London

This year's LIKE Summer Social was another walk and because last year's walk was so successful we again called upon Robert Kingham to guide us and this time he brought some friends along with him, including co-conspirator Rich Cochrane who I also know from the Big Ideas philosophy group that I dabble in and they run.

Last year we explored the Grey Soul of London, also known as Finsbury, and this year we tackled the Thin Veil of London lying somewhere in Holborn.

This is a part of London that I know quite well as I spent my first two years in London working on a project for BT in Red Lion Square and then, as now, I took every opportunity to explore the area in regular lunchtime walks.

So it was something of a surprise to spend more of the evening in unfamiliar territory than in places that I knew.

We started in the familiar Queens Larder on Queen's Square but after that it was mostly a mystery filled with dark stories.

We were told to expect a little more this year and that's what we got. As well as Robert we got a frequently passing actor (Will Barratt), Rich as a hermit asking questions on philosophy and signs along our route.

There were stories about Machen and doctors and poets and philosophers all conjured from the streets we passed.

As with the Grey Soul there was a lot to take in. Probably even more this time as there is less walking and more talking.

The other big difference this time round is the scheduling. There is some.

One the three times I went on the Grey Soul walk we overran by about 50% on average. The last time that meant that a 3 hour walk took 4.5 hours!

The schedule on Thin Veil is dictated by the other participants, especially the passing actor who we passed several times. We also had just the one beer break which gave us even more time for walking and talking.

The walk took us down many alleyways exposing the old industrial and commercial heart of Holborn that has generally escaped gentrification. The mix of buildings is incredible with trendy gastro pubs next to large blocks of social housing, a collection of current and former hospitals, including Great Ormond Street, and even a waste depot.

The beer break was taken at The Enterprise just off Red Lion Square which was one of my locals when I worked there. To be fair, all the pubs within five minutes walk were locals and got visited regularly. In those days a rather different view was taken of lunchtime drinking, it was almost mandatory, and we had the recent delight of afternoon opening to exploit.

This time the pub was a chance to rest, refresh and refuel. We ordered tapas to fortify the team and they went down very well. That was the part of the evening organised by LIKE, everything else was vanilla Thin Veil that anybody can go on.

We crossed and recrossed paths but that was only partially helpful in working out where we were (how did people survive before smartphones?). Occasionally we passed places I recognised, pubs mostly, but that was rare and I had a lot of fun discovering new places and new buildings.

The stories and the storytellers came thick and fast for two hours and it was a spellbinding evening. I went on the Grey Soul walk three times and I can see myself doing the Thin Veil again too. It was rather special.

The Grey Soul of London (extended version)

This was my third time exploring The Grey Soul of London, and for a good reason. It's an excellent walk that takes in exploration, history, architecture, pubs and a whole host of stories.

Bringing all those nice things together was the walk's guide and inventor, Robert Kingham.

This was the third version of the walk that I had been on. I did the original Museum of London version two years ago then last year he did a shortened route for LIKE and this year it was a longer route to include the Barbican who promoted the event.

The other change was that it was held on a Sunday afternoon which mean that it was light (good news) and that some of the pubs en route were closed (bad news). Luckily it was quite a long route with several pubs along the way and we managed to find one at the start and then two others to provide rest stops.

The other good news is that unlike last year it was not raining and the combination of the lack of rain and something approaching sunlight meant that I could take far more photographs than before.

We started behind Sadler's Wells, at the fairly dreadful Shakespeare's Head, where we heard the first of many stories about bring water to London.

The walk was very much in two halves. We began by taking in the urban mess that is Finsbury, a mess made by the tight coupling of residences, industrial properties, offices, shops and restaurants. It is a vibrant area with lots of good tales to tell but relatively few interesting buildings to tell them.

This part of the walk included Exmouth Market, Coldbath Square and Warner Street and we saw things like an angel, Finsbury Town Hall, an Italinate church, an organ manufacturer, the Mount Pleasant Sorting Office and the train station that serves it.

This part of the tour ended at the much appreciated Pakenham Arms that not only looked like a pub should look these days but served a choice of good beers too. From there we headed north, vaguely towards Kings Cross, and in to another world. A world of classic Georgian houses in quiet neat squares.

The first of these was Granville Square which we approached via Riceyman Steps, popularised by Arnold Bennett's 1923 novel of the same name.

From there we ventured to Percy Circus where Lenin once lived.

Robert did his best to confuse us after that and we changed direction regularly and took little paths that ran between streets and that can only be discovered, and used, by walking.

Some of the more distinctive buildings came in and out of view proving that we were, to some extent, going round in squares as we were led to the home of one story after another. Water featured again and we were shown a reservoir and a pumping station hiding amongst the houses.

There were schools and churches too giving evidence to the genteel nature of the area that the developers had in mind when they build it.

Among the unusual buildings that we saw was this block of flats built for policeman, made all the remarkable because their designer also designed teh Tardis, though he thought he was designing a Police Box.

This might be in Amwell Street (another water reference) though I was utterly lost at that time so that is not much more than a guess.

I only know that we visited Amwell Street as that is where we made our last pub stop at FilthyMacNasty’s. Another good pub and another welcome break as the walk headed in to its fourth hour (it was billed to last three).

Not long after we found ourselves back in one of the squares, LLoyd Square possibly, where the original tour ended but this was the extended version and we moved on towards Barbican.

This took us through parts of Clerkenwell that I knew a little of from my time working at Charteris (office just south of Smithfield Market) and from attending LIKE meetings at a pub on Clerkenwell Green.

The area is full of imposing brick buildings from when merchants were king. Now the bankers rule and they prefer glass and steel.

Clerkenwell, like a lot of Central London, has become more fashionable (i.e. expensive) in the last twenty years or so and there was even talk of renaming the rather industrial sounding Farringdon. That's not a bad idea.

Our final foray was in to the Barbican. I love this place.

When I worked for Charteris I often had to walk to a client in Finsbury Square and that was a welcome excuse to walk through Barbican.

There are many routes through and several levels to choose from, which only makes the exploration even more fun.

Barbican is dominated by its towers and fifty years on they still look magnificent.

And that was it, four and a half hours after it started our walk had come to an end. I was tired and delighted.

It was a fantastic afternoon that skilfully mixed the multiple joys of walking, London, exploration, architecture and good pubs.

Robert has moved on from the Grey Soul and this year will be doing The Thin Veil of London instead. You can be sure that I'll be going on that.

LIKE 37: Another walk through the grey soul of London

The London Information and Knowledge Exchange (LIKE) takes a Summer break from the monthly business meetings and has a bit of fun instead.

We had done a couple of walks previously, around the City and Kings Cross, and these had been very popular so it seemed sensible to do another one.

I suggested that we do a walk through the grey soul of London as I had done it before and had enjoyed it immensely. As it happens the guide, Robert Kingham, works for the same company and in the same building as a couple of LIKE stalwarts and they were able to sort out the details with him.

Sadly these details included aiming for a 8pm finish to allow reasonable time for a meal. When I did the walk the first time it went on until 10pm so Robert had to cut a lot out of the tour. More sad news is that the cuts included the two pub stops.

Our starting point was The Harlequin pub in the shadow of Sadler's Wells where the theme for the evening was set.

There was light but steady rain so we all cowered under our umbrellas while Robert (who proved to be water-proof) started the evening of many fascinating and unusual stories.

Here we learnt that at one time Sadler's Wells had a large water tank and featured an act where a baby was thrown in to the water and was rescued by a dog.

We also learnt why words like "wells" and "bath" are common in the area and that this used to be a main route for driving cattle in to London.

Our confusing route then took us through the side streets of Finsbury, now relegated to history in preference for the less descriptive Islington, where we kept coming across water, things underground and Finsbury's place in literature.

Robert regaled us with many stories along the way, the whole point of the walk being to hear stories about London in situ. These were stories of people who lived there and how it was gradually colonised by an eclectic mix of buildings some of which have already become redundant.

We ended up at The Union Tavern not that late where food and wine was waiting for us.

Then it was time for Robert to take a well earned rest and for the rest of us to tell our own stories, and LIKE people need to encouragement to talk.

Only the presence of a few rolled-up umbrellas gave any indication that it had rained at all. It certainly had no impact on our enjoyment of the walk or on our mood in general. People who are used to moaning about the English weather had hardly noticed it.

The buzz from the walk was intense and infectious and time fizzed past in unseemly haste. We moved around a little and shuffled a long a little as the early-birds left to catch trains to distant parts. Each move nudged the conversations in new directions and strengthen the already strong connections in the community. And LIKE is a proper community.

Eventually even those of us who live not that far away had to drift off to be sure of getting home and I am sure that I am not the only one who was still buzzing three hours after the walk ended.

I knew that a walk through the grey soul of London could be good and I was worried a little about the rain but it proved to be even better than I expected. It was simply a fantastic evening.

Walking through the grey soul of London

I've spent many a happy hour walking through the unfamiliar streets of London just to explore and discover. Over the years I have learnt a little more about the various parts of London that I have worked in and about the routes between there and the places I visit regularly.

It can come as no surprise then that I found myself on a walk organised by the Museum of London with the theme Walking through the grey soul of London.

I learnt about the walk at a Big Ideas meeting but dallied a little before booking my place and was lucky to get the final ticket for the night that I wanted to go. Clearly there are quite a few people like me out there.


The heart of the tour was Finsbury, the evocative Borough that got swallowed up by Islington in 1965 leaving behind a few faded reminders of its claim on London.

We met in The Harlequin in Arlington Way, just South of The Angel. I thought that the area was new to me but soon in to the walk I realised that we were just behind Saddler's Wells which I have been to several times.

Within a few minutes we had found a brick wall etched with the signs of policemen, learnt that a long wooden pipe brought water from Hertfordshire to a reservoir there and the little gardens were once the New Tunbridge Wells.

After that the journey took many twists and turns and the stories flew at us as we stopped briefly by each strange landmark.

We encountered Finsbury Town Hall, a road settled by Italians, the house where a woman lived to a ripe old age simply by never cleaning anything and a concert hall that became a church.

Pubs were and advertised feature of the walk and a stop at the Coach and Horses in Ray Street let us refuel and rest a little.

It also allowed some of us (not me!) to lie in the road and listen to the vestiges of the Fleet River heading south towards the Thames.

We also learnt that we had been following the route taken by the Artful Dodger when he first me Oliver.

A little further on we met the recently abandoned Post Office train, a collection of spoons stuck to a wall and various other oddities that I failed to note as we headed towards our next rest at the Pakenham Arms on the borders of Bloomsbury.

Flesh was flagging a little then and it was clear that the advertised 9pm finish was impossible and the suggested 9;30 finish was unlikely.

But that mattered little as we embarked on the final and most interesting part of the evening as we headed back towards The Angel before taking an even more convoluted route than before that took us through parks, past workers' cottages that now cost a fortune, to Lenin's former home and other such delights.

By then it was dark but still our guide, Robert Kingham, kept us enthralled with his stories.

By then it was almost 10pm and even though we were all a little tired and hungry it was with some disappointment that we made our final stop of the evening at the Union Tavern, carefully chosen, it seems, to be as far away from any tube station as it is possible to be in London leaving me with a fair walk back to Kings Cross and the Piccadilly Line home.

It was a fabulous evening rich almost to excess with discovery and delights. It could have been tailor-made for me and the rest of the group seemed to enjoy it just as much.