Theatrical walking tours about famous writers in Bloomsbury and St James's
Come on one of our tours of literary sites and delight in tales about some of London's most illustrious writers - like Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, TS Eliot and Noel Coward - brought to life in their own words, and with performances of excerpts from their novels, plays and poems.
3 hoursWe tell the London story of Oscar Wilde, visiting places he stayed, dined, shopped, viewed art, got his books published and his plays put on. We give you Oscar with all his extravagance, exuberance, and decadence, filled with characters from high life, low life and theatrical life.
From his early days as an aesthete making pronouncements on art, through his controversial novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray and his four society plays culminating in The Importance of Being Earnest, through to his infamous trials, you'll meet his wife Constance and his lover Bosie Douglas, along with lovers who became friends and young men he paid for sex. You'll meet actor-managers who admired him, and jealous playwrights who never forgave his success -- as well as his nemesis, the bellicose Marquess of Queensbury.
We celebrate Wilde's brilliance, with in all its comic highs, and descend with him to tragic depths. Wilde's is a story that remains profoundly moving, while his freedom of perspective continues to inspire in all its independence and indomitability.
Key features of our tours:
- Limited to small groups
- Two guides, Mike and Cindy, working as a double act
- Performed extracts from novels, plays and poems
- Writers ‘brought to life’ with quotations from letters and diaries
- Researched and created by the guides
- ALL PUBLIC TOURS are £25 per person and pre-booking is essential. If we're not giving the tour you were hoping for on a given date, please join us on another tour. Click 'Book Now' to see our calendar.
- PRIVATE TOURS are available by arrangement, with discounts for larger groups and students. Get in touch.
- GIFT CARDS can be purchased if you'd like offer one of our tours as a present. Simply click here.
3 hours
With its clubs, shops and galleries, and a library at its heart, swanky St James's has been a magnet for writers over centuries. Scenes have been set here, plays performed here, and masterpieces penned here.
Our St James’s Jaunt ranges from World War 1 to the Cold War, from the poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon to the spy novels of Graham Greene and Ian Fleming. We celebrate brave, experimental women like Virginia Woolf, Nancy Cunard and Edith Sitwell, and we relish the biting wit of Noel Coward and Evelyn Waugh. The wry prognostications of Aldous Huxley and Rose Macaulay complete a picture of a St James’s bristling with intellect and intensity.
3 hours
Characterised by grand garden squares and streets lined with bookshops, cafes and pubs, Bloomsbury is synonymous with writers, commemorated in numerous plaques on their former residences.
On our Bloomsbury Blast you'll meet dazzling literary stars like Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot, WB Yeats, DH Lawrence and EM Forster, and unique, experimental women like Charlotte Mew, Dorothy Richardson and Hilda Doolittle. Joined by a giant of world literature in Rabindranath Tagore, and movers and shakers like Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis we'll reveal a Bloomsbury buzzing with radical ideas, progressive movements and literary pioneers.
For students and private groups only, we offer the VIRGINIA WOOLF VOYAGE OUT, a 2-hour tour of Woolf's Bloomsbury addresses.
AND FOR YOUR FRIEND WHO LOVES BOOKS...
Simply click on either the gold 'Book Tour' button at the top of this page, or the floating 'Book Now' button at the bottom and you'll have the option to purchase a gift card.
The recipient(s) can then get in touch with us to come on a tour of their choice, on a date that works for them.
WHY NOT MAKE A GIFT OF ONE OF OUR TOURS?
WELCOME
London Literary Tours exists to spread passion for brilliant writing on the streets of the city that we love and call home.
We follow in the footsteps of some of our greatest literary figures, tell scintillating stories about them peppered with extracts from diaries, letters and reviews, and perform extracts of their writing in places where they lived, loved, worked and unwound.
Regardless of what you've read or not read, there will be plenty for you to discover about both popular and lesser-known writers.
Expect to be wowed and have a good laugh along the way!
This tour is seamlessly crafted by the guides themselves who are passionate aficionados of the interwar literary landscape. Not only do they recite and perform excerpts that transport you to the London of that era, in so doing Mike and Cindy offer insight into the socio-political climate of the time. The warmth and charisma with which Mike and Cindy welcome us into this world nurtures a sense of connection and belonging irrespective of biblio-credentials, and when the tour concluded it felt like bidding adieu to family.
Róisín McGrogan
Never has learning been more fun! Cindy and Mike were amazing guides, their knowledge is extraordinary and the passion they have for their subject is infectious. Not only did they bring these incredible characters to life in the places they lived and worked, but they showed how their lives were interwoven and regaled us with scandalous stories of what they all got up to! They gave me enough of a taste of the writers' work, at times moving and at others hilarious, to make me want to go out and read, read, read...
Gunna Finnsdottir
Taking Stock
Five years of literary walking tours, from St James’s to Oscar Wilde Commemorations to mark the fifth anniversary of lockdown
Poetry Matters
How London writers featured on our literary walking tours valued poetry We love to relate how, in 1944, Edith Sitwell
Introducing Our Bloomsbury Tour
Two years ago – as we came out of lockdown – we launched our St James’s Jaunt. Now we’re thrilled
