People in the past had better helmets.
Dark Side Walks plunge you into London's oldest neighbourhoods. Meet a whole gang of people-from-the-past, from the man who invented the word "gusto" to the woman who burned the Romans in London to a crisp*.
*William Hazlitt the nineteenth century art critic, who lived on Fleet Street, and Boadicea, who ran an entire tribe out of the back of a chariot
Walk like a Roman, and follow in the footsteps of London's earliest inhabitants, people like Tibullus, Freedman of Venustus, and his business associate Gratus, who wrote down their transactions on wooden tablets lined with blackened wax in the year 57AD. The tablets were thrown in the Walbrook Stream and were dug up by Michael Bloomberg (not personally) when he built his new HQ. The wax is gone, but we can read them because the metal stylus went through to the wood.
And follow the crowds who gathered for England's very last public hanging in May 1868.
London was being dug up to make way for the Holborn Viaduct and Smithfield Meat Market, and the crowd of 15,000 spectators had to pick their way through a massive building site to get a view of the gallows. Pubs opened early.
The condemned man, Michael Barrett, behaved with so much dignity in the face of a jeering mob, according to a Times correspondent, that public hanging was stopped in England.
London was being dug up to make way for the Holborn Viaduct and Smithfield Meat Market, and the crowd of 15,000 spectators had to pick their way through a massive building site to get a view of the gallows. Pubs opened early.
The condemned man, Michael Barrett, behaved with so much dignity in the face of a jeering mob, according to a Times correspondent, that public hanging was stopped in England.
Dark Side Walks are civilised by comparison. Really. Sometimes we stick our little fingers out when we drink our tea.
