Dickens's Holborn & Bloomsbury
London, United Kingdom
Walk through the London of Charles Dickens, where the city’s streets, courts, and slums became the raw material for his novels. The route links the legal and commercial world of The Old Curiosity Shop, Holborn Bars, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and Gray’s Inn with the harsher streets of Bleeding Heart Yard, Saffron Hill, and Hatton Garden. It ends at the Charles Dickens Museum, 48 Doughty Street, where his lived experience becomes literature.
The stops
- 01 The Old Curiosity Shop
The Old Curiosity Shop is a historic timber-fronted shop on Portsmouth Street near Lincoln's Inn Fields, long linked by tradition with Dickens's 1841 novel The Old Curiosity Shop.
- 02 Holborn Bars (site of Furnival's Inn)
Holborn Bars is a red terracotta office complex on Holborn built in the late nineteenth century for Prudential Assurance on the site of Furnival's Inn, where Dickens lived in the eighteen thirties.
- 03 Lincoln's Inn Fields
Lincoln's Inn Fields is a large seventeenth-century square in Holborn associated in Dickens's Bleak House with the lawyer Mr Tulkinghorn.
- 04 Gray's Inn
Gray's Inn is one of the four Inns of Court in Holborn, where Dickens worked as a solicitor's clerk in the late eighteen twenties.
- 05 Bleeding Heart Yard
Bleeding Heart Yard is a cobbled courtyard off Greville Street in Clerkenwell, used by Dickens in Little Dorrit as the home of the Plornish family.
- 06 Saffron Hill
Saffron Hill is a Clerkenwell street once notorious for nineteenth-century overcrowded slums and used by Dickens as the setting for Fagin's den in Oliver Twist.
- 07 Hatton Garden
Hatton Garden is a street and district in Holborn now known for jewellery trading, and in Dickens's Oliver Twist it was the site of the police court before Mr Fang.
- 08 Charles Dickens Museum, 48 Doughty Street
The Charles Dickens Museum is the preserved Georgian terraced house at 48 Doughty Street in Bloomsbury, where Dickens lived from 1837 to 1839 and wrote major early novels.
The narration at every stop is in the app — this is the map of where it takes you, with a line on each stop.
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Walk Dickens's Holborn & Bloomsbury with a voice in your ear.
Download Odyssey Guide on iPhone to start this walk.
Download on the App StoreiPhone · iOS 16 and later