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Authors - Soho, Mayfair, Bloomsbury Walking Tour
London

Byron, Shelley, and Dickens all lived within a short walk of each other here. Find out what Soho and Bloomsbury gave them that nowhere else could.

7 stops · 3.7 km

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Every Stop Has a Story

William Blake

Blake was never formally schooled, instead roaming the streets of London as a delivery boy before being apprenticed to an engraver at fourteen.

Percy Shelley

Shelley lived here in 1811, years before his best-known works, on a street that had already transitioned from an upper-class address to a working-class one.

Lord Byron

London's very first blue plaque marked Byron's birthplace here, but the house was demolished in 1889 and the plaque lost, and it now appears the plaque may not even have marked the right building.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Doyle ran his ophthalmic medical practice from this building, but after the Sherlock Holmes stories he published in The Strand magazine in 1891 proved wildly popular, he closed the practice for good to write full time.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

By the time Frances Hodgson Burnett lived here, this once-exclusive street had already lost its cachet, its grand single-family homes being knocked down for mansion blocks their owners could no longer afford to maintain.

George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf

This is one of very few London addresses with a double blue plaque, home first to George Bernard Shaw and later to Virginia Woolf, who began writing The Voyage Out while living here.

Charles Dickens

Dickens' 17-year-old sister-in-law Mary Hogarth died while living in this house with the family, a loss believed to have inspired both Rose Maylie and Little Nell.

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