Prospect of Whitby. sightseeing in London. Charles Dickens in the Victorian era.

DIRECTIONS

Keep ahead, passing the old dock wall on your right. Go left into Raine Street and turn right after the former:-

Charity school, dated 1719. Be sure to look up at the first-floor niches from which the statues of a boy and girl resplendent in their smart uniforms look down. Note also the legend above the door, ‘Come in and learn your duty to God and man’.

DIRECTIONS

Just before the Church of St Peter’s, built in 1866, turn left into Farthing Fields, where the:-

St George’s-in-the-East Workhouse used to stand. Dickens wrote in The Uncommercial Traveller that having knocked at its gate he ‘found it to be an establishment highly creditable to those parts, and thoroughly well administered by a most intelligent master’. A few walls of the workhouse still survive behind the buildings to your left.

DIRECTIONS

Go right along Penang Street, right into Prusom Street and left onto Wapping Lane. The council blocks give way to old docklands warehouses, now converted into luxury apartments.

Keep going ahead between the walls that cast the pavement into perpetual twilight, and turn left along Wapping High Street. Having passed Wapping Station, you arrive at a modern block of flats on the right, follow the signs for the Thames Path.

Go up the ramp, push open the red gate and walk along the riverside. The massive tower of Canary Wharf looms ahead. A little way along, a gate bars your way, but just push the button on the wall to open it. A little further along pass through the large gate, where to your right steps lead down onto the shoreline, so if it’s low tide you might like to take a riverbank stroll.

Turn right onto Wapping High Street, go first right along Wapping Wall and keep ahead to arrive on the right at:-

The Prospect of Whitby, the oldest riverside inn in London. Built in 1520, it was originally known as the Devil’s Tavern, but its name was changed in 1777 after the collier the Prospect, from Whitby, North Yorkshire, which regularly moored alongside it. The pub doesn’t look that impressive from the outside, but once over the threshold you are pitched into a time warp that has changed little since the days when Dickens, amongst others, used to drop in for a tipple. Old prints and photos of the river adorn its walls. The flagstone floor and pewter-topped bar, perched on old beer barrels, are truly antiquated, and have witnessed both the low and high life of London’s docklands. Standing in its atmospheric interior you really do get the impresion that you have truly joined Charles Dickens in the Victorian era. As far as pub stops go this is without doubt a highlight of our London Walks.

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