WALKING TOUR
Date: Saturday 28 October
Time: 12:30 – 18:30
Start: Soho Square (12:30)
Finish: Highgate Cemetery (18:30)
Difficulty: easy/medium
Highlights: London West End, Kentish Town, Hampstead Heath, Highgate Cemetery.
OVERVIEW
One of the first English translations of Marx’s Capital exhausted its 5000 copy print run in New York because the pirate publisher sent a circular to Wall Street bankers claiming that the book revealed ‘how to accumulate capital’.
Marx wrote his seminal critique of capitalism, a vast compendium of statistics and history, while living in London, where he spent the last 33 years of his life, dying in 1884 at home in a genteel north London suburb. He didn’t live in England by choice, it was his last refuge in the ‘land of the free’ after he’d already been chased out of Prussia, Paris, and Brussels by the secret police.
He didn’t particularly admire his adopted homeland, thinking it to be ‘snobbish, cant-ridden, fit only for philistines’ but he had no other choice and he couldn’t resist keeping up appearances with the London bourgeoise (he might sometimes struggle to put food on the table but his daughters went to the best ladies college in Hampstead).
Zig Zag Tours inaugural London trip will be a deep dive into Marx’s London life: starting at his family’s first humble lodgings in Soho, followed by a couple of West End pubs where Marx liked to drink (heavily); then a tube ride up to the site of his more salubrious residences in Kentish Town; finally a stroll over Hampstead Heath (a Marx family picnic favourite) to conclude the story at his place of rest in Highgate Cemetery.
There are enough anecdotes to fill up an entire week, never mind a one-day walking tour. Join us to celebrate the life of this ‘tremendous show-off and sadistic intellectual thug’, starting in the heart of the West End and finishing in the glorious Victorian suburbs of north London.
This tour will be led by Toby Ebbs of Zig Zag Tours; Karl Marx Apostle and Senior Lecturer in Heritage & Conservation at Nottingham Trent University.
ITINERARY, PRICING & BOOKING
The walking tour will start at 12.30 on Soho Square by the half-timbered hut in the centre, and will finish at Highgate Cemetery at 18.30.
The tour costs £15. To book your space please email info@zigzag.tours
If you are coming with us from Nottingham then book now for a bargain train + tour price as we have secured some discount train tickets (limited number so book early). For the tour and train tickets to London and back the cost is £50. Transport around London is not included.
We are getting the 09.12 train from Nottingham to London and returning on the 20.05
If you are already in London or making your own way to London then see you at midday on Soho Square to begin the journey!
To book a train + tour ticket or just the tour ticket please email info@zigzag.tours.