London History, Up Close

Clouds gather over St Paul’s Cathedral. The west towers of St Paul’s Cathedral rise above St Paul’s Churchyard like a pair of sentinels, topped with gilded pineapples that catch the light on a clear day. They are, even by the standards of a city that has never been shy about reaching skyward, extraordinarily tall. And in the eighteenth century, extraordinarily tall meant extraordinarily vulnerable, especially to the one force of nature that no architect, however...

The steps of St Paul’s Cathedral spill down from a portico of paired columns onto St Paul’s Churchyard, the pedestrianised square that wraps around the building’s south side. Christopher Wren’s stunning dome looms above – the one that survived the Blitz, which you can see from half of London on a clear day. Tourists gather here in clusters. Office workers cut through on their lunch breaks. On most days, this part of the City of London is busy but...

The Queen Anne statue at St Paul’s Cathedral. At the top of the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, before you reach the great west doors, you’ll pass a statue. A queen in full regalia stands there, crown on her head, orb in one hand, sceptre in the other, gazing southward across St Paul’s Churchyard. Around her base sit four allegorical figures: Britannia with a trident, France with a helmet, Ireland with a harp, and America, depicted as a half-naked woman in a...

There’s a certain kind of writer who believes their best work comes from somewhere else. The muse, the subconscious, divine inspiration. W.B. Yeats took this literally. For nearly 25 years, he lived on Woburn Walk in Bloomsbury, and during that time he became convinced that some of his finest poetry was being dictated by the spirit world. Whether you believe in spirits or not, the results are hard to argue with. Yeats won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. And a significant...

On the picturesque Woburn Walk in Bloomsbury, there’s a blue plaque above the doors of numbers 6A and 8 commemorating Dorothy Richardson. Most people walking past have never heard of her. Those who have tend to think of her as a footnote in modernist literary history, someone who did something vaguely experimental before Virginia Woolf and James Joyce made it famous. This is profoundly unfair. Dorothy Richardson invented stream-of-consciousness narrative in English literature. She...

“Mum, did Anne Boleyn really have six fingers?” “Dad, why did Henry VIII kill his wives?” “Is it true there’s a ghost?” If your family’s been watching The Tudors on Netflix, reading Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, or your child’s studying the Tudors at school, you know the questions are endless. The challenge is moving from costume dramas and textbook diagrams to actually understanding what happened. The answer isn’t in a museum...

If you’re fascinated by betrayal, deception, and watching traitors at work – whether in reality TV or real history – the Tower of London’s Tudor century offers the original version. This wasn’t entertainment: it was political murder following a grimly predictable pattern. At the Tower Hill execution memorial, Thomas Cromwell was beheaded by the regime he’d built. Anne Boleyn was destroyed by the minister she’d promoted. Lady Jane Grey was abandoned by her own...

From her spectacular 1533 coronation to her execution three years later, Anne Boleyn and her life at the Tower of London is one of history’s most dramatic falls from grace. While most Tower of London tours focus on the chapel where she’s buried or Tower Green where she was executed, Cobble’s immersive audio walk takes you to the hidden locations where Anne Boleyn’s life story actually unfolded. See the Queen’s Stairs where she arrived as prisoner, the tower...

Looking for things to do at the Tower of London beyond the standard visit? While the Tower’s official audio guide covers the standard stories inside the fortress walls, Cobble’s Tudor Tower of London audio walk takes you to the hidden sites most visitors miss. See tucked-away stairs where queens arrived by barge, spot the unassuming memorial marking 125 executions, and look out for forgotten entrances that witnessed England’s most dramatic royal moments. At £9.99 for 50...