Tour Options
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 their letters and diaries
• Researched and created by guides
THE St james's jaunt -
Where mrs dalloway meets James bond
Available Saturday mornings and Wednesday afternoons
- or as a private tour on a date of your choice
3 hours
Swanky St James's has long attracted gents who relish luxury and indulgence, perhaps best epitomised by the inimitable Noel Coward and his friend Ian Fleming. Its gentlemen’s clubs have counted Evelyn Waugh and Siegfried Sassoon as members, and its residents have included Graham Greene and Aldous Huxley. Within the prestigious walls of the London Library they might well have run into Virginia Woolf, Edith Sitwell and Rose Macaulay.
All these writers' lives intersected, and we reveal their friendships and feuds -- and what they really thought about each other!
The price is £25 per person and pre-booking is essential. Click on 'Book Tour' to see available dates.
Gift cards for this and our Bloomsbury Blast are available via the gold buttons at the top and bottom of this page.
NEW: THE BLOOMSBURY BLAST - starring virginia woolf, T S ELiot & friends
Radical movements and revolutionary writers in "leafy literary land"
Available Saturday mornings and Wednesday afternoons
- or as a private tour on a date of your choice
3 hours
The leafy squares and characterful streets of Bloomsbury belie the hotbed of radical political and artistic movements it hosted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Numerous blue plaques commemorate artists and intellectuals, and ground-breaking novelists, poets and playwrights who lived and worked here.
Our Bloomsbury Blast will lead you in the footsteps of some literary giants, including Nobel Prize-winners W B Yeats, T S Eliot and Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore. We'll meet the famous 'Bloomsbury Group', including Leonard and Virginia Woolf. And there are other lesser known, but no less important collectives such as the one centred on a little bookshop where the leading poets of the day congregated. We'll also pay tribute some writers deserving greater recognition.
Enjoy a rich cast of characters, painful tragedies and hilarious antics as we wander beautiful Bloomsbury.
The price is £25 per person and pre-booking is essential. Click on 'Book Tour' to see available dates.
Gift cards for this and our St James's Jaunt are available via the gold buttons at the top and bottom of this page.
for student groups:
MODERNISTS IN MAYFAIR AND ST JAMES'S
Get to know the literary superstars of the early 20th century
Available by appointment and tailored to your needs
From 2 to 3 hours, as required
This tour, especially designed for students of Modernism, charts the avant-garde literary scene as it played out in Mayfair and St James's.
Among the sites we visit are clubs (some more decadent than others) where writers and artists hung out, venues for radical lectures and performances, the library where T S Eliot was President and that inspired Virginia Woolf to write a story, and the street where Mrs Dalloway shopped for flowers.
We meet dynamos like Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, as well as singular spirits like D H Lawrence, Edith Sitwell and Nancy Cunard.
And we visit a place Aldous Huxley called home and dreamed up a masterpiece, a seedy hotel satirised by Evelyn Waugh, and a venue that played host to Noel Coward who lampooned a landmark in Modernist poetry.
You'll hear about them all walking the streets, squares and alleys of Mayfair and St James's.
We offer a discounted private tour rate for student groups. Please get in touch by phone or email to discuss what we can do for you.
private Tours
We welcome enquiries for private tours
at times outside our scheduled public slots
For groups of 2 to 4 people, we offer a private tour for £50 per person. Larger groups (eg student groups or book clubs) can come at a discounted rate. Please contact us to discuss.
We can tailor tours to suit the needs and interests of our guests. Small groups may wish to take up our extended tour package, which includes refreshments at an establishment patronised by our writers and, if desired, visits to some of their favourite shops.
Whatever your wishes, we’d love to hear from you.
Coming Soon
THE SOHO STRUT
3 hours
Sexy and 'out there', Soho has been a home, a heaven and a refuge to writers and visionaries. Come join the (generally very bibulous) circle that at one time or another included Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Brendan Beehan and Jeffrey Bernard, and discover the Soho connections of women like Sylvia Plath and Dorothy L. Sayers.
WATCH THIS SPACE!
