What are some other research methods people can use to get to know their own cities better?
Nearly everywhere will have a local bookshop with a local interest section. That’s a pretty good place to start, because there’s always going to have been someone interested in the history of your area and written about it. Or you can look for a local history society to see old photographs, for example. Then there’s social media: In London, there’s probably way more people posting about it than in a smaller town, but I know there’s a guy who does something similar in Melbourne.
Do you explore the same way when you’re abroad, too?
More so now that I’m doing it with London. Previously, I’d have gone on a walking tour and maybe gone to a museum, but not necessarily sought out those quirkier details.
But now, for example, I went to Paris at the beginning of this year, and bought a guidebook about ‘secret’ Paris. I found the oldest tree in Paris, and the oldest street sign. These days, I spend a lot more time looking down little alleyways. I dragged my partner on an ‘alleyways of Paris’ walk, peering down private driveways that were listed in my guidebook.
Where would you recommend visitors go in London, to see beyond the standard sights like Big Ben?
There is a lot in the City of London [the historic financial district]. People do the Tower of London and St. Paul’s Cathedral, but there’s so much more in the area, and often Londoner’s don’t go either. They think, “Oh, it’s the financial district, I don’t like that.”
But there’s the Guildhall, and while you can’t go inside it, there’s the beautiful Guildhall Art Gallery right there, with the old Roman amphitheater in the basement, which is well worth it. There’s All Hallows by the Tower, a really interesting church with a crypt museum. They’ve got an exposed bit of Roman pavement, a model of Roman London, and various Saxon, Roman, and Norman artifacts. You can literally almost see the layers of history going up through the crypt. And both of these are free.
St. Bride’s, just off Fleet Street, is one of the oldest churches in London and has a great museum. The Charterhouse is also an interesting museum. It started on the edge of a plague pit, then became a Carthusian monastery, later turned into an almshouse, then a Tudor mansion. Not many people have heard of it.
If you’re interested in literature, you might want to go to the Charles Dickens House, or the Samuel Johnson House. I always recommend churches, gardens, and pubs—they’re all free, at least to enter.
Do you see your hometown differently now, too, through this historic lens?
I’m trying to pay more attention now. I’ve walked down the high street so many times in my life in Leigh-on-Sea {Essex], but I’m trying to be more observant. Like, oh God, why have I never spotted that? Or why did I never go into this really old church in the village? Churches can be amazing receptacles of history and are usually the oldest building in the town or village.
There’s one my friend told me about recently, outside the town I grew up in. There’s a grave outside the church and it has these big grooves on the top of it. It’s probably an urban myth, but it’s still a fun story—they say it’s because of the press gangs who’d wait outside church after a Sunday service and sharpen their knives on top of this gravestone. Then they’d grab people to press gang into the Navy, or whatever they were doing. And then, because of that, I noticed another grave that said the woman died at the age of 130. It’s probably not true—she probably, obviously, didn’t die at 130. But I’d never spotted that before…
