After the Puritan Protectorate Londoners went wild. The sex industry became huge and public and London sex-capital of Europe. The walk starts with theatres at a time when all actresses were considered prostitutes and the stage a place for clients to find them. We see where street-walkers and bawdy houses were linked with playhouses, hear about bawdy-house keepers and women who worked in them, homosexual Molly Houses, Jelly Houses, Coffee Houses and Bagnios. Links with criminals are everywhere.
This itinerary can be customized to meet your needs and preferences. Send me a message with your requests!
Holborn Station
Meeting point
Near Lisle's Indoor Tennis Court that became an early theatre
Former Holywell Street, centre of pornographic books
Street-walking
The actors' church
Early police station
'Little Sodom'
Old bagnio
end of the walk
Holborn Station
This tour can be customized to meet your needs and preferences. Click below to send me a message with your requests.
Guide fee
Everything but the guide's fee
I'm a guide for walking tours; I don't have a car.
I'm a qualified London guide now offering History Walks with Gender, Sex and Class. Walks focus on the lives of poorer working people rarely described in historical accounts except as criminals or objects of charity. When there’s an opportunity to talk about women I’ll take it, and social class is always on the table. I've been a writer, researcher and critical historian all my life, and I've been a Londoner since the 1960s, although I've left to live in other towns and countries. Author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, for many years I've focused on getting the stories out of women and others marginalised because of being poor, foreign, ‘different’ or doing jobs some folks think are Wrong, in the present and in the past. I'm known as The Naked Anthropologist.
$450/ per group
Reserve