I have two great travel loves that are really the same love: the bookshops of Paris, which I have written about with something close to devotion, and the literary streets of London.
Reading is the thread that runs through my whole life, from fifteen years spent in opera houses, where every night was somebody’s story set to music, to the slow solo trips I take now, which almost always have a book in the bag and a bookshop as their secret destination. London, more than any city I know, rewards that. It is a place where you can stand outside an ordinary Georgian door and know a fictional family lived behind it, drink in a pub Shakespeare drank in, and buy a novel from a hundred-year-old barge on the water.
So here is my reader’s London: the houses, the shrines, the bookshops and the bars, with exact addresses and the practical details, arranged so you can walk them rather than just admire them from a list. Pack a notebook.
The writers’ houses and haunts
The George Inn
77 Borough High St, SE1 1NH
London’s last surviving galleried coaching inn, drunk in by Shakespeare’s contemporaries and name-checked by Dickens in Little Dorrit. The panelled rooms and cobbled courtyard genuinely feel plucked from the seventeenth century, and it is still a working pub, so you can have your pint where four centuries of Londoners have had theirs. It is now owned by the National Trust, which is why it survives at all.
Charles Dickens Museum
48 Doughty St, WC1N 2LX · dickensmuseum.com · Tue to Sun 10:00 to 17:00 · around £12.50
Dickens’s only surviving London house, where he wrote Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, laid out with his own furniture, his writing desk, his library. It is the most intimate of all these places, because you are in the actual rooms where the work happened. Do stop in the little ground-floor café, which is lovely.
Sherlock Holmes Museum and the Sherlock Holmes Pub
221B Baker St, NW1 6XE · sherlock-holmes.co.uk · daily 09:30 to 18:00 · around £15 The pub: 10 Northumberland St, WC2N 5DB
A faithful recreation of Holmes and Watson’s rooms at the address that did not properly exist when Conan Doyle invented it, and now does, largely because of him. I took a themed walking tour on my last visit and loved it enough that it deserves its own post, which I will write. Afterwards, the Sherlock Holmes pub near Trafalgar Square is stuffed with Conan Doyle memorabilia and does a good job of the atmosphere.
Shakespeare’s Globe
21 New Globe Walk, Bankside, SE1 9DT · shakespearesglobe.com · tours from around £17
A painstaking reconstruction of the Elizabethan playhouse, a few hundred metres from where the original stood. Take the tour, but if you possibly can, come back in season for a performance, ideally standing as a “groundling” in the yard, which is how most of Shakespeare’s audience saw these plays and is still the best five pounds in London theatre.
31 Kensington Park Gardens, the Darlings’ house
Kensington Park Gardens, W11
Often said to be the model for the Darling family home in Peter Pan. It is privately owned, so this is a façade to admire from the pavement rather than a visit, but for anyone who loves the book it is a small thrill. The deeper Peter Pan pilgrimage, though, is Kensington Gardens itself, where J.M. Barrie walked and met the Llewelyn Davies boys who inspired the story, and where the Peter Pan statue still stands.
Keats House
10 Keats Grove, Hampstead, NW3 2RR · Wed to Sun 11:00 to 17:00 · around £7
The Hampstead villa where John Keats wrote some of the greatest odes in the language, including, under a plum tree in the garden, “Ode to a Nightingale”. It is quiet, it is moving, and Hampstead around it is worth the whole afternoon. Of all the places on this list, this is the one that undoes me a little.
Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf
Around Gordon Square and Tavistock Square, WC1
The squares where the Bloomsbury Group lived, wrote, argued and loved: Woolf, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Keynes, the whole brilliant, complicated set. Look for the blue plaque at 46 Gordon Square. This is a wander rather than a single site, and it is one of the loveliest walks in central London, all garden squares and plane trees and plaques.
Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey
Westminster Abbey, SW1P · westminster-abbey.org · check current opening and prices
The literary shrine of the English-speaking world, where Chaucer, Dickens, Hardy, Tennyson and Kipling are buried, and where the rest, from Shakespeare to Austen to the Brontës, are commemorated. The Abbey ticket is not cheap, so treat it as the price of the whole Abbey rather than of the corner alone, and go in with time to give it.
The bookshops
This is the part I would really cross a city for.
Word on the Water, the floating bookshop
Regent’s Canal towpath, King’s Cross, N1C 4LW · wordonthewater.co.uk
My favourite, and the one that makes me daydream the moment I catch sight of it. Word on the Water is London’s only floating bookshop, a hundred-year-old Dutch barge moored on the canal at King’s Cross, its deck stacked with books and a wood stove going inside. It is not the best-stocked shop in London and that is not the point: it is romantic and beautifully run, with jazz on the roof, poetry, and easy conversation with whoever is aboard. After years of being forced to move every two weeks under the old canal rules, it finally won a permanent mooring in 2015, which feels like justice. Hear the music, walk down to the towpath, and give it an hour.
Persephone Books
59 Lamb’s Conduit St, WC1N 3NB · persephonebooks.co.uk
An independent publisher and shop reviving forgotten fiction and non-fiction by women, mostly from the 1920s to the 1960s, in beautiful uniform grey covers with patterned endpapers. If you care about the writers who slipped out of print, this is a pilgrimage, and Lamb’s Conduit Street around it is one of the most charming small streets in Bloomsbury.
Hatchards and Daunt Books
Hatchards: 187 Piccadilly, W1J 9LE · hatchards.co.uk Daunt Books: 83 Marylebone High St, W1U 4QW · dauntbooks.co.uk
Hatchards is London’s oldest bookshop, opened in 1797, all wooden staircases and knowledgeable booksellers and royal warrants. Daunt’s Marylebone shop is the one you have seen a thousand times in photographs: a long Edwardian gallery with a stained-glass window at the end, its books shelved by country, which for a traveller is the most seductive way to arrange a bookshop there is.
Libreria
14 Endell St, Covent Garden, WC2H 9PB
A small, deliberately Wi-Fi-free reading haven, books arranged by mood and theme rather than category, with quiet corners and good light. A refuge in the middle of the city.
The British Library
96 Euston Rd, NW1 2DB · bl.uk
Not a museum of writers but the home of writing itself. The free Treasures gallery holds Beowulf, two of the four surviving 1215 Magna Carta manuscripts, Shakespeare’s First Folio, the Lindisfarne Gospels, Leonardo’s notebook, handwritten Beatles lyrics and Jane Austen’s tiny writing desk, all in one room. It is one of the great free hours in London, and a natural pairing with Word on the Water, since both sit beside King’s Cross.
Library bars, for a bookish evening
Combine the reading with a cocktail among the shelves:
- Scarfe’s Bar, at Rosewood London (252 High Holborn, WC1V 7EN), lined with Gerald Scarfe’s caricatures and a thousand antiquarian volumes.
- The Library Bar at The Lanesborough (Hyde Park Corner, SW1X 7TA), plush armchairs and an encyclopaedic gin and whisky list.
- The Library Bar at The Ned (27 Poultry, EC2R 8AJ), hidden behind heavy drapes, for champagne and martinis.
- Swans Bar at Maison Assouline (7 to 8 Pall Mall, SW1Y 5LA), cocktails named for writers among the art books.
- BookBar (282 Blackstock Rd, Finsbury Park, N4 2DW), a genuine bookshop-bar with wine-and-words evenings and live music.
How to walk it
You cannot do all of this in a day, and you should not try. It clusters naturally, so pick a district and let it lead you:
- A Bloomsbury day: the Dickens Museum, Persephone, the Woolf squares, Libreria, ending at the British Library.
- A King’s Cross morning: the British Library and Word on the Water, ten minutes apart on the canal.
- A South Bank afternoon: the Globe and the George Inn, with the river between them.
- A Hampstead escape: Keats House and a long walk on the Heath.
Book ahead for the Dickens Museum, Globe tours and the library bars. And there are excellent literary walking tours, many of them free with a donation, if you would rather be led.
Bring the notebook. In this city, you will want to write something down.
Further reading
- My beloved bookshops of Paris, the companion to this piece
- Walking Regent’s Canal, which takes you past Word on the Water
- Where to stay in London, for a base near the bookish bits
FAQ
What is there to do in London for book lovers? A great deal. You can visit writers’ houses such as the Charles Dickens Museum and Keats House, pay homage at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, browse historic bookshops like Hatchards and Daunt Books, visit the floating bookshop Word on the Water at King’s Cross, see literary treasures at the British Library, and drink in book-lined library bars. The sights cluster by area, so they are best explored on foot district by district.
Where is the floating bookshop in London? Word on the Water, London’s only floating bookshop, is a century-old Dutch barge moored on the Regent’s Canal towpath at King’s Cross, postcode N1C 4LW, a few minutes’ walk from King’s Cross St Pancras station. It is open daily, sells new and second-hand books, and hosts live jazz and poetry on its roof stage.
What can you see for free in literary London? Several of the best experiences are free. The British Library’s Treasures gallery, with Magna Carta, Beowulf and Shakespeare’s First Folio, is free to enter. Wandering the Bloomsbury squares where Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group lived costs nothing, browsing Word on the Water and the historic bookshops is free, and many literary walking tours run on a donation basis.
Is Poets’ Corner worth visiting? Yes, for anyone who loves English literature. Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey is where Chaucer, Dickens, Hardy and Tennyson are buried and where writers from Shakespeare to Austen to the Brontës are commemorated. It sits within the Abbey, so entry is via the full Abbey ticket, and it is best treated as part of a wider Abbey visit rather than a quick look.
How do you plan a literary London walking tour? Group the sites by district rather than trying to see them all at once. Bloomsbury links the Dickens Museum, Persephone Books, the Woolf squares and the British Library. King’s Cross pairs the British Library with Word on the Water. The South Bank combines Shakespeare’s Globe and the George Inn. Hampstead offers Keats House and the Heath. Book ahead for the Dickens Museum and Globe tours.
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