Future Events

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Fire, Plague and 17C London Life CANCELLED – 3rd October 2020 at 10:30

Location: CANCELLED

Cost: £60.00, Members £55.00 (to include lunch near Tower Hill)

Book online. There is currently 1 place available for this event.

This tailor-made half-day walk with guide Diana Kelsey marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of John Evelyn, and 360 years from the start of Samuel Pepys’s diary. Both diarists, who became close friends, witnessed and chronicled some of the most turbulent years of London’s history and their diaries give an insight into both public and everyday life of mid-17th C London. However, the two men and their diaries were very different. Evelyn, aware of his position at the centre of English social and political life in the 17C and friend of Charles II, was more circumspect and restrained in his commentary on London. Pepys in contrast did not hold back from recording details of everyday high as well as low life including his own philandering!
The route of this walk is necessarily based on Pepys’s life (Evelyn lived downstream at Deptford), starting where he was born, weaving through the narrow alleyways along routes that he would have known, ending at the church where he is buried. Diana’s commentary will however draw extensively on both diarists’ eye-witness accounts of the Plague in 1665, the Great Fire of 1666, and the regeneration of the City after those cataclysmic events.

KGT contact Richard Stileman richstileman@btinternet.com 07968787950

Fire, Plague and 17C London Life (2) CANCELLED – 6th October 2020 at 11:00

Location: CANCELLED

Cost: £60.00, Members £55.00 (to include lunch near Tower Hill)

Book online. There are currently 10 places available for this event.

This tailor-made half-day walk with guide Diana Kelsey marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of John Evelyn, and 360 years from the start of Samuel Pepys’s diary. Both diarists, who became close friends, witnessed and chronicled some of the most turbulent years of London’s history and their diaries give an insight into both public and everyday life of mid-17th C London. However, the two men and their diaries were very different. Evelyn, aware of his position at the centre of English social and political life in the 17C and friend of Charles II, was more
circumspect and restrained in his commentary on London. Pepys in contrast did not hold back from recording details of everyday high as well as low life including his own philandering!
The route of this walk is necessarily based on Pepys’s life (Evelyn lived downstream at Deptford), starting where he was born, weaving through the narrow alleyways along routes that he would have known, ending at the church where he is buried. Diana’s commentary will however draw extensively on both diarists’ eye-witness accounts of the Plague in 1665, the Great Fire of 1666, and the regeneration of the City after those cataclysmic events.

KGT contact Richard Stileman richstileman@btinternet.com 07968787950