Twists & Transformation

Join CoolTan Arts for a guided walk through the streets of old Borough, follows the 'Twists and Transformations' of Dickens's early childhood, revisiting early Victorian London in the streets of SE1.

By encountering the traumatic twists in Dickens's early years, as he took his first tentative steps into this new city of opportunity, the walk will reveal something of his restless spirit, manifest in his compulsive night - walking and his feelings of 'houselessness'.

Discover the debtors prison of Marshalsea and in the places Dickens frequented: the quiet graveyard of St George the Martyr, the bustling fruit and veg market and old London Bridge.

These places where his imagination grew, fed by the energy and incident of this rapidly growing city. We become aware of his acquaintance with Victorian 'low life', and with the twists in Dickens's life. All these grand themes – the events and unexpected hardships of life - that he later transforms into his fiction, creating some of the most vivid characters and plots in London's celebrated literature.