A Gin Tour of London

Join actors, musicians and Dr Matthew Green on an immersive gin tour of London, exploring the meteoric rise of the juniper berry from Dutch decadence to agent of mass oblivion, meeting a cast of ruined characters straight out of Hogarth along the way and visiting a wealth of spirituous haunts, from the lowliest Georgian gin shack to the most opulent Victorian gin palace.

Includes a lot of free gin.

Dr Matthew Green is the author of the critically acclaimed book London: A Travel Guide Through Time (Penguin), described by the Londonist as 'easily the most engaging social history of London for a decade'.

The gin tour will reveal how, in the late 17th century, the arrival of the juniper berry tore through the social fabric and transformed the face of the metropolis forever — right through to the so-called gin-naissance of our own day.

Beginning outside the Church of St Giles-in-the-Fields, we will begin by exploring the dark, twisting back-alleys and soot-smeared terraces of St Giles, the setting for Hogarth's Gin Lane, where an air of desolation and despair still lingers from the 18th century. In Phoenix Garden, one of the last remaining bomb sites in central London, we will drink gin Georgian style. From there, we will wend our way towards Holborn visiting The Angel Inn where condemned men and women dropped in for "one for the road" on their way to Tyburn, and many more sites soaked in gin's history, before finishing at one of the most spectacular Victorian gin palaces in London, The Princess Louise.

Along the way, you will meet some of Hogarth's characters from Gin Lane — in particular, the Mother in the centre of 'Gin Lane' who will deliver a harrowing soliloquy on the ravages of alcoholism in mid-Georgian London -- as well as Romantic authors and painters who were themselves also addicted to gin.

The performances will be woven into Dr Green's vivid stories of what life was like in Georgian and Victorian London, particularly for the labouring masses, and heartbreaking tales the human cost of Mother’s Ruin, something akin to the crack epidemic that afflicted American cities in the 1980s.

You will leave the tour with an insight into the remarkable impact of gin and, by exploring St Giles’s, Covent Garden and Holborn, a sharp sense of how 17th and 18th-century London evolved into "a great and monstrous thing" - the biggest city in Europe.

It's also a great opportunity to warm your spirits by drinking lots of gin.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

All our events are fully transferrable in the event of further coronavirus restriction measures. In the extremely unlikely event that tours are impossible in the longer-term, a full refund will be issued.

LOCATION

Meet outside the Church of St Giles in the Fields, WC2H 8LG

Event Venue

St Giles in the Fields, 60 Saint Giles High Street, London, United Kingdom