Thameside Tales: A Guide to Southbank’s Wonky History

This isn’t your typical London walking tour. This is London through the lens of its most colourful characters: writers, rogues, royals, and ordinary people who became extraordinary through circumstance.

On this Thames-side adventure, you’ll explore the city’s most famous river walk with a twist, hearing about the time Shakespeare stole an entire theatre, and Samuel Pepys buried his cheese in the hope of it surviving the Great Fire of London.

The tour starts on the Southbank of the river on a path next to St Thomas’ Hospital, where you can enjoy spectacular views of Westminster Palace. As you walk, your irreverent guide Wonky Will will share funny, harrowing, and downright ridiculous stories behind the capital’s most iconic landmarks.

You’ll have the opportunity to soak up prime views of landmarks on both sides of the river while exploring the neighborhoods where Dickens found inspiration and Shakespeare attended church, with detours into historic streets and under bridges. The tour ends at Tower Bridge, where a heroic bus driver nicknamed ”Water-wings” jumped the opening bridge in 1952, breaking his leg but saving his passengers and earning a whopping £10 reward.

On this 75-minute tour, you’ll also:

• Learn about the connection between Margaret Thatcher shutting down the Greater London Council and the slanderous billboards that were hung directly across from her window
• Discover how Shakespeare and his ”merry chamberlain men” stole an entire theatre, piece by piece, rebuilding it as the Globe Theatre
• Visit the site of The Clink, a 12th-century prison so brutal that its Protestant inmates became the Pilgrim Fathers who sailed to America
• Find out how Guy Fawkes escaped having his intestines ”played with like tagliatelle,” and why Pink Floyd was banned from Queen Elizabeth Hall for life
• Explore Borough Market, London’s oldest fruit and vegetable stand, where body snatchers once sold exhumed corpses for medical research
• Hear Churchill’s stirring wartime speeches while standing near HMS Belfast, the warship that fired cover for D-Day landings
• Walk past The Anchor pub, where Pepys sat with a pint to watch the Great Fire of London consume the city across the river

Join Wonky Will for a Thames walk where every landmark has a story, and every story reveals something wonderfully human about London’s extraordinary past.