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Dickens London. Biogrpahy of Charles Dickens. London Walking Tour In Docklands.
DIRECTIONS
Exit the pub, and turn right along Narrow Street. Go left into Three Colt Street and pass through the gates of St Anne’s Church to proceed anti-clockwise around the church.
It was in this Nicholas Hawksmoor-designed church that Miss Abbey Potterson ‘had been christened… some sixty odd years before’. Its clock is the highest church clock in London. As you exit through the gates on the opposite side of the church, note the strange pyramid monument, originally meant to surmount the church itself.DIRECTIONS
Go out through the gates, walk along the short cobblestone street and keep ahead into Newell Street.
During Dickens’s childhood this was known as Church Row and it was at No 5 that Christopher Huffam, Charles’s godfather, lived. Huffam was a sail-maker and ship’s chandler, and John Dickens often brought Charles on visits here. Many was the time that the young boy would stand upon his godfather’s kitchen table and be urged to sing to an audience of admiring neighbours. On one occasion, according to Dickens himself, one witness declared the boy to be a ‘prodigy.’ Everything that Dickens saw hereabouts stayed with him, and his memories of the neighbourhood were such that he nearly always wrote of the docklands with affection.
An idea of the appearance of 19th-century Church Row can be gleaned from the line of houses situated to the left.
DIRECTIONS
However, your way lies to the right along Newell Street, and right onto Commercial Road, to go second right into Gill Street. Just before the railway bridge, go left along the pathway, left into Grenade Street, and first right, passing through the railway arch. Go left along Trinidad Street and keep going ahead to arrive at Westferry Station. From here you will be able to ride the Docklands Light Railway Back into central London where you may even have time to enjoy another of our London Walks.
Walk this way back to our main London walks
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