Walk 15: City of London Building Blocks

Date: Monday 21st November
Route: Tower Hill to Mansion House via a very winding route!
Distance: 4 miles-ish

Life, live music and laziness seem to have got in the way of walking recently so a rare day off on a Monday seemed the perfect opportunity to start wandering again (especially as we are going to be walking the West Highland Way next year and we really need to get a few miles of training under our belts).

A very murky November day, complete with stereotypical pea-souper style fog, sent us into the City of London, following a walk called Building Blocks from the Time Out Book of London Walks (until it got even darker and murkier and we retreated to the pub, to be honest). The walk was put together by Dan Cruickshank - of many BBC2 and BBC4 programmes about architecture fame - and is described as "a potted history of British architecture" within the Square Mile.  

If you're looking to cover lots of ground this probably isn't the walk to do, but if you don't mind a lot of map-reading and meandering up and down roads and alleys with names like Savage Gardens, Bevis Marks and Pudding Lane, this is an interesting wander, with some interesting juxtapositions of old and new, churches, chop houses and Costa Coffees.

The walk starts at the Tower of London and the nearby Roman wall (see photo of the impressively skirted Trajan above), before heading up to the first of many churches on the route - St Olave's, with some pretty nasty skulls above its gate, referenced by Dickens (who seems to crop up time and again on this walk) and the burial place of Pepys and his wife.

It then continues past a number of other churches, early merchants' buildings, an 18th century synagogue tucked away in a courtyard, the modern architecture of the Lloyd's and Swiss Re ("Gherkin") buildings and the very pretty and Christmassy Leadenhall Market.

After a couple of Wren churches, the walk leads to The Monument to the Great Fire of London, also designed by Wren and well worth the trek up the spiral staircase on a less foggy day (also a contender for "world's stickiest hand-rail" when we climbed it a couple of years ago - hopefully the recent renovation will have included the liberal application of Mr Sheen!).

Once you have taken a look at the 18th century houses of 1&2 Laurence Poutney Hill, the walk continues on to the narrow alleys of Ball Court and Castle Court for Simpson's Tavern and the George & Vulture, two of the oldest chop houses in the capital (and still both serving food and drink in well-preserved surroundings). The slightly-less-than-lovely architecture of the NatWest Tower and the Barbican Centre (without wishing to sound too Prince Charles) is followed by the huge symbols of banking, commerce and power of the Bank of England, the Royal Exchange and the Mansion House.

If you do the whole walk, as described, you continue on to The Guildhall, St Paul's Cathedral, Dr Johnson's House and The Temple (of Da Vinci Code fame) and walk something like 7 miles in total - probably a more appealing idea when it's not so foggy and chilly and if you're not as out of practice as we are. A lot of the churches and buildings on the route are open for you to look around, if you don't mind feeling like a character in a PD James novel, but even if you don't go into any of the buildings, this is an interesting walk, where you're never sure if the next corner will bring you a 17th century church, an over-priced sushi bar, a narrow alleyway, a coffee chain or a marble-covered multi-national bank HQ.