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Shakespeare's London Walking Tour
London

Walk the taverns, theatres, and churchyards where Shakespeare lived, drank, and wrote the plays that remade the English language.

11 stops · 4.2 km

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GPS-guided · Works offline · No signal needed

Every Stop Has a Story

Blackfriars Playhouse

This was the winter home of Shakespeare's own theatre company after 1608, until the Puritans tore it down in 1655 as part of their crackdown on theatres.

Shakespeare's Gatehouse

Shakespeare paid £140 for a gatehouse here in 1613, the only property he ever owned in London, and two of his six surviving signatures are on the paperwork for the purchase.

Mermaid Tavern

Legend places Shakespeare among a club of great minds who met here monthly, though the only proven link is that he knew the tavern's landlord, a trustee on his gatehouse deed.

Heminge and Condell Memorial

This memorial honors the two actors from Shakespeare's own company responsible for the First Folio, preserving many of his plays for us today.

Shakespeare's Lodgings

One of Shakespeare's only surviving signatures comes from a 1612 lawsuit against his landlord here, a Huguenot wigmaker whose house he rented in 1604.

Shakespeare's Parish Church

Shakespeare's parish church survived the Great Fire, and local tax records from 1597 show the playwright had failed to pay his five shillings owed.

London Bridge

The 19th-century bridge that once stood here was sold and shipped all the way to Arizona, replaced by the crossing you're walking now in 1973.

The George Inn

London's last surviving galleried inn stands on a site that's hosted a tavern since 1542, when Shakespeare himself would have been a regular.

The Rose

London's first riverside theatre staged some of Shakespeare's earliest plays alongside Christopher Marlowe's, before closing for good in 1604.

The Globe

Legend says Shakespeare's company built this theatre from timber they stole from their old playhouse in Shoreditch, only for a cannon shot during a performance of Henry VIII to burn it back down in 1613.

The New Globe

When this reconstruction opened in 1997, on the 400th anniversary of the original, its thatched roof was the first built in London since the Great Fire of 1666.

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