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Authors - The City Walking Tour
London

Behind the glass towers of the Square Mile lie the streets where Samuel Johnson, Pepys, and Milton did their best and worst work.

6 stops · 3.3 km

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Every Stop Has a Story

Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson spent more than a decade in this house compiling his Dictionary, and it is the only one of his seventeen London homes still standing.

Samuel Pepys

The plaque marking Samuel Pepys's birthplace on this spot gets his 1633 birth date wrong, but his diaries went on to become one of the richest records of everyday life in seventeenth century London.

John Milton

John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, was born in a house on this site and baptised at the nearby church, both destroyed in the Great Fire, with the area later flattened again in the Blitz.

William Shakespeare

In 1604 Shakespeare lodged near here with a family of Huguenot headdress-makers, and a 1612 lawsuit over their daughter's marriage preserved one of only six known Shakespeare signatures.

Pepys's Church

Samuel Pepys called St Olave's "our own church", and he lies buried here beside his wife Elizabeth, behind a gateway of stone skulls that Dickens loved.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer lived above Aldgate itself for twelve years, a perk of his job as a customs controller, and from his room he may have watched the Peasants' Revolt stream through the gate in 1381, wondering whether the rebels were coming for him next.

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