More than 30 members of the Exploring London group met together on 9 December 2024 to review the year’s events — and the ten years since the group was first set up — which meant there were plenty of reminiscences to share! There will be a reduced programme of group ‘explorations’ between March and May 2025, followed by a day trip to Deal in June. Hopefully two or three more volunteers will step forward to join a ‘committee’ to continue the group programming as everyone present agreed that Exploring London was a wonderful way to meet new friends and learn more about our city — not to mention the Kent coast!

iu3a 'Exploring London' — the future.  After nearly 11 years coordinating this group Liz is stepping back from the detailed programming for this popular group. If you are interested in helping or taking over please contact Liz (contact details above).

Preliminary information for 2025:
24 March, repeated on 16 April: Jill Finch's new walk All Change at Kings Cross.
24 April, repeated on 16 May: Roman London, with Kate or David, our friends from Trinity House.
1 May: Legal London Part 1 with Jill. (NB Change of date)
29 May: Legal London Part 2 with Jill.
24 June: Rob Smith will help us 'explore' Deal for our day trip this year! Full details will follow, probably in April or May, when we know train times etc

The London walks will all begin at 11am, and will cost £10 per person, subject to any last minute changes.  All 'explorations' will open for booking approximately a month before each event and, as usual, you'll be notified by email when they are.

All listed visits will be open for booking approximately a month before the date of each event. Emails will be sent to members when booking opens — there is no link on the website to book events.

More information will be sent directly to Group members.

'Exploring London' group members also receive emails from time to time, with sources of information on virtual and live Explorations which can be booked individually, venues which are open to visit, and other events and topics of interest.

Wednesday 27 November: Apsley House at Hyde Park Corner Number One London (as Apsley House is also known) would be an impressive address for most people, but possibly not for the first Duke of Wellington, hero of the Battle of Waterloo and, later, Prime Minister! On a chilly day Explorers headed to Apsley House by Hyde Park Corner, for the last organised visit of 2024 to see round the building and discover the artworks — the Wellington Collection — on display there.

The public rooms of the House, originally built in the late 18th century, are now managed by English Heritage, while the private areas are still used by the Dukes of Wellington. For most of the group it was either the first visit or a return visit after several years and we were all impressed by the rooms — the photo shows Explorers dwarfed by the magnificence of the 90 foot-long Waterloo Gallery. The State Dining Room was laid out for a formal dinner and the main staircase was dominated by a huge statue of Napoleon! The real treasures are the paintings on display in each room, and they alone would repay return visits — especially if you are a member of English heritage or have an Art Card, both of which give you free entry. Have a look at the English Heritage website and see if you agree ...

November: The first of two scheduled events for November was a free visit to the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) on England’s imposing HQ building on Lincoln’s Inn Fields. We met up after lunch on 6 November in the building’s pleasant cafe (worth noting if you’re in the area – entrance on Portugal Street!). The RCS building has been recently redeveloped and the Hunterian Museum has been expanded and redesigned. Early arrivals had the opportunity to go round the exhibition on one of the curator-led tours, they were photographed by the statue of John Hunter as they waited for the curator. The rest of us went round at our own pace to learn about 18th century surgeon anatomist John Hunter’s collection and the development of surgery right up to the 21st century. It’s not an exhibition for the faint-hearted but it is free, so well-worth a visit to check it out! www.hunterianmusem.org for more information.

October: Visits to Livery Company halls in the City of London have been popular additions to the Exploring London programme over the years and our visit to the hall of the Worshipful Company of Armourers and Brasiers on 21 October was no exception. This Livery Company has been very lucky with its hall: the original building survived the Great Fire in 1666 and its Georgian replacement escaped the Blitz in 1940 with only minor damage. We met together for coffee in the ‘Drawing Room’ and our visit was led by the recently retired clerk to the Armourers Company, who gave us a detailed history of the Company itself, from its medieval foundation in the 14th century to the its current commitment to charities, education (it was one of the group of Companies which contributed to the foundation in 1878 of the City and Guilds of London Institute) and new research in materials science. It wasn’t all serious though, as we found out about  the private life of Sir Henry Lee and his mistress Anne Vavasour! The photograph of the group was taken in the Great Hall — you can find out more about the Armourers Company by checking out www.armourershall.co.uk  The building is open to group tours like ours but has also opened on Open House weekends.

September: The ‘Exploring London’ group started its 2024 autumn/early winter programme with guided walks on 11 and 17 September, when we headed ‘south of the river’ for a change of scene. Our guides were Kate on 11 September and David, who had a bigger group on 17 September as it didn’t clash with another iU3A visit! We knew both guides through previous visits to Trinity House and an associated walk in that area.

The two guides took slightly different routes for their ‘explorations’. On the 11th the group visited Guy’s Hospital (see our photo) and went into its charming chapel, before stopping outside the Old Operating Theatre (a group visit several years ago) and heading south down Borough High Street. On the 17th the group included a visit to Borough Market itself before walking down Borough High Street — they did manage to lose one group member in the Market, but they were lucky to find the historic church of St George the Martyr open to visit!

Along the High Street both groups learnt about the area’s industrial history and the many courtyards and inns leading off the road — the main road south out of London and the pilgrimage route to Canterbury. Dickens’ connection were not neglected as the walls of the Marshalsea Prison, with its ‘Little Dorrit’ links, are still standing. Crossing the main road, both groups visited the Red Cross Gardens (https://www.bost.org.uk/) and nearby social housing planned and built by Octavia Hill (1838-1912), housing pioneer and one of the founders of the National Trust — there’s plenty of information about her work on the National Trust’s website — and then had the chance to visit the ‘Cross Bones’ burial site, maintained by volunteers as a garden open space to mark the paupers' graveyard where the burials included — according to local legend — the ‘Winchester Geese’, medieval sex-workers who would not have been considered eligible for burial in a churchyard or consecrated ground (https://crossbones.org.uk/).  Nearby, as a result of the continuing development in this previously neglected part of London, developers have recently uncovered yet another significant Roman archaeological site and we were left wondering how it would be preserved and maybe added to the many interesting sites ‘south of the river’.

It was impossible to cover his life chronologically on our walking route but Jill kept us on track as we began at Bread Street (where John Milton was also born, which is marked by a plaque, though Donne’s birth isn’t!). Donne was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1615 though his family background, at least on his mother’s side, was strongly Catholic, so we then walked the short distance to St Paul’s Cathedral to see the site of St Paul’s Cross, where Donne, Dean of St Paul’s from 1621 to his death in 1631, would have preached, and the impressive John Donne Memorial by sculptor Nigel Boonham — site of our group photograph of course!

Our walking route then took us to the Old Deanery, down Carter Lane to Ludgate Hill and then along Fleet Street. Among the building sites on both side of the road it was possible to glimpse St Dunstan in the West, where Donne had the living for a time and where Isaak Walton, Donne’s first biographer, had been churchwarden. Busts of Donne and William Tyndale are featured on the facade. We headed into the oasis of calm provided by Inner and Middle Temple, to admire the Tudor Middle Temple Hall, and out again to the main road noting the references to the Earl of Essex and the Devereux family. And then we were at St Clement Dane’s church, where Donne’s wife Anne was buried in 1617 — they had married secretly in 1601  despite the resistance of both families, and had 12 children, of whom six survived. Anne must have been pregnant or nursing for almost all of her married life but there is little else known about her life: there are no images for us to even see what she looked like.

The final part of our walk took us through the streets behind the Royal Courts of Justice to Lincoln’s Inn, where Donne had studied law after leaving Oxford University. This is where we got some idea of the formative years he spent as a young man, writing his first poetry and making friendships which would last his lifetime. We went up into the chapel (possibly originally designed by Inigo Jones though much repaired and altered in later centuries) where Donne had laid the foundation stone and preached the first sermons as Reader in Divinity. A copy of Donne’s portrait in a black slouch hat is almost hidden in the shadows, and in the corner of one of the stained glass windows is a tiny inscription ‘Io: DONNE: Dec:5 Pavl:F.’ (more or less!). It — rather than the memorial he ordered himself, which survived the Great Fire of London to be installed in the post-fire Cathedral — would be our reminder of a fascinating life ‘explored’ through one of our group walks with Jill Finch.

If anyone is interested in reading more about John Donne, the recent book by Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: the transformations of John Donne is really good — it was published in a Faber paperback in 2023.

June: Broadstairs: A day-trip outside London has become a  fixture of Exploring London’s summer programme and this year’s visit to Broadstairs proved so popular that we asked our guide Rob Smith (who has led walks for us in St Albans, Margate and Whitstable) to lead two group walks around the town this year because of the demand for places. Our route through Broadstairs —  a more ‘genteel’ neighbour to Margate and other Kent resorts — offered a wealth of stories. At the Crampton Tower near the station we learnt about neglected Victorian engineer Thomas Crampton, whose achievements included bringing a water system to the town, designing steam engines and laying the first international submarine cable from Dover in 1851. Then we walked through pleasant gardens surrounding Pierremont Hall, built in 1792, where the young Princess Victoria stayed in 1829 — there’s a single storey ‘music room’ close by.

Cutting through streets of small flint-faced houses towards the seafront we passed the house where Oliver Postgate lived, and reminisced about Noggin the Nog and the Clangers — happy days! Once on the seafront our group (the first of the two groups) paused in the sun for the obligatory group photo before continuing around Viking Bay towards the Old Boathouse, the end of our walk. En route we found out how the news of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo finally reached London (via Broadstairs where Major Percy first landed!) and noted all the Dickens connections including Fort House (later renamed Bleak House) which the author used as a holiday home, the Albion Hotel where ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ was completed and the Dickens House Museum, the home of Mary Pearson Strong, inspiration for Aunt Betsey Trotwood in ‘David Copperfield’.

After a walk which we all agreed had revealed far more about the town than we could have expected, we headed off separately for more ‘explorations’ involving reviving drinks, fish lunches and — for several Explorers — delicious Italian ice-cream in Morelli’s ice-cream parlour, first opened in 1932. Personally, I can’t think of a better way to finish a day at the seaside, and I plan on returning very soon!

May: Trinity House: On 24 May, twenty four Explorers met up outside Trinity House for a walking tour titled ‘Sailors, saints and Samuel Pepys’, which had been suggested as a follow-up to the visit we made earlier this year to Trinity House itself. We divided into two smaller groups and headed off for our ‘explorations’ after a brief introduction to the history of Trinity House. Sailors, saints and Samuel Pepys indeed figured prominently in our walks. The photo shows the group led by David at our first stop, the monuments to the merchant navy personnel who lost their lives during the first and second World Wars and the Falkland conflict. From there it was just a few steps to the execution site on Tower Hill with its list of victims from 1381 to 1747 — including Thomas Cromwell, familiar from Hilary Mantel’s novels, James Duke of Monmouth (one of Charles II’s illegitimate children) and Lord Lovat, the last person to be executed on Tower Hill, after the Jacobite rebellion.

Although the walk did not cover long distances, it served to remind us all how much there is to learn about our city on our ‘explorations’. Behind the impressive building, formerly the Port of London Authority and now a hotel, we found a newly created garden (look for Pepys Street on a map) where there are references, on stone plaques set into the pathways, to Samuel Pepys and his life and career — even the parmesan cheese he buried in his garden for safety during the Great Fire in 1666! Then it was on to the quiet churchyard of St Olave’s, Hart Street, where both Samuel and Elizabeth Pepys were buried — the church is open for visiting Tuesday to Thursday. Modern office developments overshadowed the remains of All Hallows Staining, and Minster Court with its three statues of horses referencing St Marks in Venice dates from the late 1980s. But I think we all agreed with our guide that the garden which was designed around the picturesque ruins of St Dunstan in the East was an absolute delight and a haven of calm for City workers.

And then it was back on the busy Byward Street, passing the old Custom House building and we were at All Hallows by the Tower Church, reputed to be the oldest church in the City, dating from 675CE. Pepys — again — and his friend William Penn climbed its tower to view the devastation of the 1660 fire. It’s full of maritime references and a brief visit to the museum in the crypt was not enough — I’m sure several of us will be back! An almost circular walking tour ended with an opportunity for some of us to walk over to see how the wild flower planting in the Tower of London moat is looking, three years after SuperBloom. It’s looking great at the moment — what a pity one now has to pay the full entrance price for the Tower to walk through it!


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