A Drift Through Limehouse:  Dickens, the Docks, Hawksmoor & the Opium Dens of the Original Chinatown

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Join award-winning author Travis Elborough on a tour of Limehouse, the riverside district that Charles Dickens knew well and wrote about in “Our Mutual Friend”. The birthplace of London's first Chinatown, the area was demonised as a den of  iniquity and vice in racist, sensationalist works by Thomas Burke and Sax Rohmer, who used it as the backdrop to his Dr. Fu-Manchu stories. Home to Nicholas Hawksmoor’s most extraordinary church, St Anne's with its sinister obelisk, and one of the ungodly houses of god making up the “Sign of Fear” in Iain Sinclair's visionary poem “Lud Heat”, and a haunt of the painter Francis Bacon and the poet Wilfred Owen, Elborough’s walk offer a chance to step between the past and the present of Limehouse's storied dockland streets. 


Described by “The Guardian” as “one of the country’s finest pop culture historians”, Travis Elborough is the author of many books, including “Wish You Were Here: England on Sea”, “The Long-Player Goodbye”, and “Through the Looking Glasses: The Spectacular Life of Spectacles”.