Walking Tour - Palaces, Potteries, Pubs and a Pleasure Garden: In Vauxhall

Vauxhall may be dominated today by soaring, glass and steel apartment blocks towering over the riverfront. But that belies a multi-layered history: a rural farming community and site of royal and aristocratic country mansions; a site of great London craft and industry; and which contained a great fashionable pleasure garden in the past and iconic centre of gay entertainment and culture in London today.

It is also an area blown about by waves of slum-clearance, bombing and redevelopment, meaning so much has been swept away. But Richard’s walk traces some terrific remains of industrial buildings with their histories of great manufacturers as Doultons, Vauxhall Motors and Coade stone; a curious collection of old pubs; a pioneering city farm; the fantastic former art deco London Fire Brigade HQ … and the site where Charlie Chaplin got his inspiration for his tramp.

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Host or Publisher Richard Watkins, Footprints of London