TS Eliot The Waste Land Centenary Tour

Two-hour walking tour through the City of London beginning at Blackfriars tube station and tracing the locations mentioned in TS Eliot's The Waste Land, which was written in 1921 and is often called the greatest English poem of the 20th century. We start at Blackfriars tube and follow the music of the verse up Queen Victoria Street past the hyacinth garden to Threadneedle Street where the poet worked for Lloyds Bank. We'll see the clock at St Mary Woolnoth which kept the hours with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine, a bar on Lower Thames Street where fishmen lounged at noon and the walls of Magnus Martyr which still hold the inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold. We end at London Bridge over which flowed the crowd undone by death... Participants will learn the background of the poem and its intense, understated comedy.