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December 2025

Cold Comfort Farm in Highgate

Discover the life of Stella Gibbons, who published over 20 novels as well as Cold Comfort Farm, her first novel, which achieved widespread success. She lived on the Holly Lodge Estate, Highgate, which had been built on land once owned by Angela Burdett-Coutt. John Betjmann and J.B. Priestley lived nearby, both of whom wrote about single professional women making their own way, often in flats like those on Holly Lodge Estate.

6 December 1.30pm

Guide: Oonagh

Politicians, Physicians and Philanthropists

This walk behind Holborn’s main roads takes us through garden squares and tree-lines streets. Queen Square with its many hospitals and educational associations, Red Lion Square, laid out by the first professional, female landscape gardener. We pass architectural gems including the John Soane Museum, and through Sicilian Avenue; see monuments to social reformer Margaret MacDonald, radical politician Fenner Brockway, and the church with a king on its spire close by early social housing and the hotel that started life as a hostel for young women before finishing at the British Museum.

20th December 11am

Guide: Sue

Suffragette Line : Leyton Midland; fields to firsts

A 16th Century house, a hidden river, the first Asian policewoman in the UK, the man who invented the Underground map and more. Our walk from Leyton Midland station (on the Suffragette Line) to Leyton tube station takes us along the course of a hidden river, past a 16th Century house hiding in plain sight, through residential streets and green spaces. We meet the UK’s first Asian policewoman and the first black footballer to play for England in a competitive international match and the man who invented the tube map.

28th December 2pm

Guide: Sue

January 2026

Suffragette Line: Upper Holloway -Whittington, Workhouses and Birth Control

Discover Upper Holloway on this entertainng historical walk. Marie Stopes established her first birth control clinic locally; a local workhouse held German civilians during the First World War; the Royal Northern hospital was a mainstay of local health provision, and the Manor Gardens children’s health centre was groundbreaking in its ambition to improve the awful child mortality statistics. Learn about the goblins of Tavistock Terrace, the topiary cat in Whittington Park and the origins of the Beaux Arts residential complex – all a short walk from Upper Holloway.

17 January 1.30pm