Please sign up for our occasional newsletter. (We NEVER share your information.)

Showing Tag: "fitzrovia" (Show all posts)

London. It’s about community, stupid! (Leave your baseball bat at home…!)

Posted by Nick Hennegan on Tuesday, June 29, 2021, In : London Life 

Love of the common people. Some of the team behind the Fitzrovia Arts Festival.



Full disclosure. I’m from Birmingham. And I love Britain’s Second City. But I’ve been flirting with London for nearly 40 years and I’ve been here full-time for over 15 years. When I first came to live in London – south of the river – I travelled with a baseball bat for security. Now this might sound extreme, but remember, no one from my family had ever been further from Brum than Wales for summer holida...


Continue reading ...
 

A Modern Dickensian Celebration this Christmas

Posted by Nick Hennegan on Friday, December 2, 2016, In : Nick Hennegan 
As you will know if you've been on the London Literary Pub Crawl, we are passionately enthusiastic about our unique bit of central London. Soho and Fitzrovia are arguably unique in the world. They are part city-centre, part artists enclave, part architectural delight and part hedonistic hot-spot.  




Fitzrovia, once known as East Marylebone or North Soho, is particularly attractive to us. One hundred yards from the busiest shopping street in the world I love the fact that some Saturday afternoon...

Continue reading ...
 

We've moved! The Fitzroy Tavern closes!

Posted by Nick Hennegan on Friday, July 17, 2015, In : Nick Hennegan 
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 ...
Continue reading ...
 

Dylan, my Dylan.

Posted by Nick Hennegan on Saturday, November 8, 2014, In : Nick Hennegan 

 
So the Dylan Thomas in Fitzrovia Festival is now over.  Although only really on the periphery of the organisation it's been a part of my life and certainly large in my thoughts for most of this year.  
Pub crawl walks were part of Griff Rhys Jones' original thinking for the festival which he conceived with Dylan's granddaughter, Hannah Ellis and actor Jason Morrell.  It became far more than a tour of Dylan Thomas' Fitzrovia Pubs of course. And I have to say the final, fantastic Gala Performa...

Continue reading ...
 

London Writers and Poverty. How the Lit Pub Crawl started. Part One

Posted by Nick Hennegan on Friday, August 15, 2014, In : Nick Hennegan 
It's me birthday!  Thanks!  Feel free to send cards. Or cash... :-)

Birthdays are often a time for reflection.  When I first got the idea for the London Literary Pub Crawl, it was because I was taking my M.A. and I was flat broke.  In spite of never having received a grant for education, for reasons known only to the Education Dept I had to fund everything myself.  It was tough - not only the fees, but living in one of the most expensive cities in the world.  But I don't think we'd have done t...
Continue reading ...
 

George Orwell on Writing - in the Newman Arms

Posted by Simon Plant on Monday, April 8, 2013, In : Writers 
One of the pubs we visit on the tour is The Newman Arms. It's a great pub and unusual in that it's one of very few pubs in the area still owned outright by a family, rather than a brewery. I'll go into more detail about the pub in a later post, but I love the place. And it's appeared in some famous films. But perhaps most famously it's where George Orwell used to drink and is widely believed to be the template for the Proles pub in his novel 1984. You can hear some of his description of the p...
Continue reading ...
 
 

About Us


Nick Hennegan Hello. I'm Nick Hennegan and I started the London Literary Pub Crawl. Most of the blogs on here will be by me. I've always written but my first theatrical success was an adaptation of Shakespeare's 'Henry V' (www.HenryVPlay.com) I founded Maverick Theatre in 1994. (www.MaverickTheatreCompany.com) This pub crawl is really more a promenade theatre performance than a tour and I'm running it with a bunch of enthusiastic local actors and writers. I love sharing my passion for the area and the artists. I also present a weekly radio show, 'Literary London' on Resonance 104.4fm - London's Arts Station and a podcast on our site. If you haven't visited us in London yet, I hope you'll come soon. Have a look at my new site, www.BohemianBritain.com. And feel free to leave comments or email me at nick @ LondonLiteraryPubCrawl.com - I reply to them all and I love to hear from you.

Tags

blog comments powered by Disqus