Rebels and Radicals and a brief history of English activism

How did we get the NHS, the working week, the right to vote? None of it happened by chance. It was won by ordinary people who stood up, organised, and refused to go away. Much of that story played out here, in the streets and squares of Smithfield and Clerkenwell — an area that has attracted radical thinkers, dissenters and revolutionaries for seven centuries.

This walk traces two extraordinary attempts to reset society — the Peasant's Revolt of 1381 and the Chartist movement of the nineteenth century — alongside plague pits, martyrs, Victorian slums and the library where Lenin sat at a window dreaming of revolution.

Approximately 2 hours. Starts: Charthouse Square, outside Florin Court

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Host or Publisher Tim Lewis The London Walker