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David Copperfield Walking Tour
London

Retrace the most personal story Dickens ever told, from the blacking factory where he worked as a boy to the streets where David found his feet.

9 stops · 4.9 km

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GPS-guided · Works offline · No signal needed

Every Stop Has a Story

Traddles and Sophy's Newlywed Home

Dickens loathed this place, calling it 'one of the most depressing institutions in brick and mortar, known to the children of men,' even though its hall once hosted the first known performance of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors.

David Visits Agnes

This street was once the private grounds of the Bishops of Ely, complete with a vineyard, meadow, and orchard, until the English Civil War left the Bishop imprisoned and his estate seized.

David and Aunt Betsy's Walk

The famous clock David and Aunt Betsy stopped to watch dates from 1671 and still has its giants, Gog and Magog, striking the bells every quarter hour.

Young David's Wanderings

Young David stared longingly at pineapples here, the fruit that gave Covent Garden its symbol after it became the first place in England where pineapples were grown.

David Meets Steerforth Again

David reunites with Steerforth at the Golden Cross Inn, a coaching inn demolished in 1830 to make way for the very square where Nelson's Column now stands.

David's First London Home

Dickens lived on a street once home to Samuel Pepys, a stretch of riverfront grand enough that its later loss of river access, cut off by the Embankment in the 1860s, helped doom the neighborhood to demolition by the 1930s.

David Works in the Blacking Factory

The warehouse David Copperfield describes as 'literally overrun with rats' was drawn directly from Dickens' own memory of working here as a boy, on a street then still called Hungerford Stairs.

David is Robbed

This obelisk, built in 1771 to mark distances for travelers crossing the new Blackfriars Bridge, moved to the grounds of the Imperial War Museum in the 19th century before returning to its original spot in 1998.

Micawber's Crisis

Mr. Micawber's crisis lands him in a debtors' prison so lax that those who could pay were allowed to live outside its walls altogether, right up until Victorian prison reform closed it in the 1880s.

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