Our London walks usually take us to places adorned with blue plaques- the places where the literary celebrities of their day lived and worked. This time, although there were passing references to Dickens and Trollope and other writers, our focus was Peter Ackroyd’s medieval mystery, ‘The Clerkenwell Tales’.
Our leader, Charles Kay, transported us in our imaginations back to the London of monasteries and guilds, of flith and smells, of public executions and foul deeds.
Imaginations had to work hard in some areas due to the devastation of the Blitz of 1940 and the subsequent rebuilding but there were still some hidden byways and ancient walls to conjure up the past, as well as visits to some of the medieval churches which survived the bombing.