Our Gin Lane trip Saturday 10th November 2018

In Georgian London the Gin Craze took hold. Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for two with fresh straw to fall on. In the rookery slums of St Giles in the Fields, where one in four properties sold cheap gin, every man, woman and child knocked back, on average, half a pint of gin every day! We explored the old rookeries immortalised in William Hogarth’s Gin Lane – St Giles and Seven Dials as we made our way on foot to the more upmarket neighbourhood of St Martin in the Fields. In the afternoon we enjoyed a tour of London’s oldest gin distillery. We met Martin our Blue Badge Guide at 10.00 am on the south side of Waterloo Bridge. We had time to buy morning refreshments before we began our day with a visit to the church of St Giles, which recorded the first victims of the Great Plague. Here condemned prisoners on their way from Newgate Gaol to the Tyburn Tree, stopped for a blessing and a beer. Trundling in big wheeled carts known as lurches out of the built up City into the fields around London (at this time there was a hedgerow along the length of Oxford Street!) the prisoners hoped their friends would be ready to spring them to freedom - otherwise they’d been well and truly “left in the lurch”. How extraordinary it is today to think that between commerce and trade in the City of London and Royalty and Government in Westminster there once lay little but open fields. We made our way on foot through these old fields (no sign of any grass now) from St Giles in the Fields at the Oxford Street end of the Charing Cross Road to St Martin in the Fields at the Trafalgar Square end of the same road. Along the way we were told the story of London in four drinks: beer, tea, coffee and gin. We discovered the original Tin Pan Alley, the once notorious Seven Dials and Flicker Alley where London’s film industry began.

We passed the famous upmarket Ivy Restaurant and St Martin’s Theatre where Agatha Christies Mousetrap is now in its 66th year before slipping into Goodwins Court, a secret alley still lit by gas lamps.

We had free time to buy lunch at Trafalgar Square where a number of us enjoyed lunch in the crypt café of the St Martin in the Fields church. We still had time to pop into the free entry National Portrait Gallery to see some of the cast of our tour. In the afternoon we had a tour of London’s oldest surviving gin distillery where the iconic Beefeater London Dry Gin is hand crafted to a recipe unchanged since the 1800s. We visited the heart of the distillery to experience a sensory understanding of the ingredients and yes, we did get to drink the finished product! The tour ended with a complimentary Beefeater Gin & Tonic. Non-drinkers were offered a soft drink alternative (a yummy chilled tea cordial) together with a gin miniature to take home for a friend.

It being 10th November, before heading home, we drove past The Tower of London and were truly in awe of the thousands of lit tea candles in the moat representing those that gave their lives in WW1. Having had a wonderful day we then set off for home. Chris Wright 10.11.2018