I'm really pleased to announce two new addition to my London self guided audio tours.

Called To The Bar is set in and around the area known as the Temple, one of London's legal districts. I've always used the area to take a bit of a break from tramping the streets researching my tours. It's a quiet oasis that sits between two busy main thoroughfares, Fleet Street and the Embankment and is a great place to sit and eat your sandwiches and rest aching feet. Over the years I've built up a portfolio of facts and anecdotes concerning the Temple and have combined them to bring you an audio tour of this historical and fascinating area. 

The other tour From Righteous to Wretched: A Clerkenwell Tale is set in the historic area of Clerkenwell, which has always existed in opposition to itself. Established by two holy orders, St. James’s nunnery and St. John’s priory, it flourished precisely because it was beyond the City’s jurisdiction, and allowed for a free and easy lifestyle. This lack of interference by the City later gave way to lawlessness, and parts of the area garnered a reputation for vice, crime, and some of the poorest housing conditions in London. On this walking tour, I’ll show you the key sites in Clerkenwell’s story, and tell you about the people that called this area their home. 

NEW FOR DECEMBER

In the words of the Duke of Wellington, "It was a close run thing", but on the last day of November I managed to iron out the last wrinkles and got the new tour of St James', CLUBLAND published on Voicemap. There's a lot of history and stories crammed into a very small area, so it's goes at quite a fast pace.

 

The focus on getting this finished has curtailed any other plans that I had and I've decided not to start on another tour until Christmas is out of the way, but I have two ideas on the drawing board.

 

There was also some welcome news from the publisher, VoiceMap. They approached me to see if I would like to write a new tour based on London's music history. I already have one that I wrote several years ago, but I always thought that the tour could be enhanced by the addition of music clips for each location. At present this isn't possible, unless you want to chance being taken to court by the license holders of these pieces of music, and recently there have been cases of of unauthorised publications attracting some pretty hefty fines. I explained that I thought the tour would be a little dull without them to be told that they are currently negotiating with Spotify to allow their entire catalogue to be accessed for VoiceMap's tours, so hopefully in the New Year I'll be able to dust the tour off and get it out there.