Our writer, Nick Hennegan had the pleasure of meeting the Pogues frontman, Shane MacGowan - punk, traditionalist and perceived hell-raiser - who has passed away. They met in Soho, London. This is Nick's personal tribute on Bohemian Britain. Join us every Saturday on the Literary Pub Crawl at 5pm for a 'Rainy Night In Soho' and a 'Fairytale of New York... sorry... Soho!'

www.BohemianBritain.com

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It’s been a couple of months since I last posted here.  But I’m trying to sort a script and music for our national tour of A Christmas Carol later in the year.  I finally managed to get a group of international journalists together to come on the London Literary Pub Crawl, so we’re having our official opening 5 years after we started!  I’m working on a TV script; I’m trying to negotiate with a National Trust garden to present a WW1 play in November and so spending time on this blog ...

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It’s been great being involved with the new International Dylan Day. 14 May each year has been designated Dylan Day to mark the first time his play for voices ‘Under Milk Wood’ was performed in public in the USA. It’s a direct lift from Blooms Day, an annual event inspired by one of the lead characters in Ulysses, by James Joyce. We're going to celebrate it this year with an extra tour and extra Dylan content.  Book now for 13th May - the Saturday before the day.  We also have some id...

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As you know, life in the arts here in Soho is a constant financial struggle and I’ve been looking at an author Crowdfunding platform called Unbound as a way of helping out.  As I have both Charles Dickens AND William Shakespeare lined up to provide an introduction to my next book - more about that later perhaps - I’m thinking of using the service, if they’ll have me.
I was checking them out and came across this, from Raymond Briggs’ pitch of a book he’s hosting on the platform.  For ...
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The roots of the Literary Pub Crawl lie in the Fitzroy Tavern. I was doing my Masters at the University of London and looking for a cheap pint.  My mate from Birmingham, filmmaker Andy Bloom, suggested I could get a cheaper pint at the Fitzroy, as the pub was run by the Sam Smiths Brewery and they were considerably cheaper than other pubs in the area.  He also told me about the Writers and Artists Bar at the pub, which certainly appealed.

So I was nursing my cheap pint downstairs and couldn't ...
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We had a query this week from someone wondering what preparation they should make for the tour. Well, it is written assuming no previous knowledge, but works covered on the tour include A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas, 1984 by George Orwell, A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf and various Charles Dickens works. We've also some new work from the niece of Brendan Behan and we get to meet all the above, plus William Blake, Francis Bacon, Jeffrey Barnard a...
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If you've been on the tour, you'll know that the Fitzrovia leg is more theatrical than the Soho leg. We enact various scenes, including Anthony Burgess (Clockwork Orange, etc) meeting a knife gang in the Duke and Dylan Thomas meeting his wife at the Wheatsheaf. But then Soho becomes a more 'traditional' tour. That's about to change very soon. I've written a number of pieces around our Soho artists and writers and I hope its going to transform what we already have.

I'm very pleased with critica...
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It's such a privilege to be working on this tour, although quite scary in some ways. Although we started in July, for the Olympics - not that the Olympics had any relevance, it just seemed like a good time to start - and we had a brilliant write-up in The Guardian, we've already changed quite a lot. In fact I'm re-writing the whole thing. And it comes with some sense of responsibility. I've just written one of the final scenes with Virginia Woolf and realise that apart from the difficulty of ...
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