Learn more about Greenwich mean time and London pirates on one of our self guided London Tavern tours!
If you’ve seen our last blog or two, you will know we’ve been busy working on finialising our London Tavern Tours and we agree with you, it is about time! We seriously cannot wait to release these today!
One of them is based around the ethereal and fluid timey-wimey stuff with plenty of fascinating facts about how and why we have Greenwich Mean Time based around Greenwich in the first place and how that all came about, whilst of course “sampling” a few choice ales along the way! Well, somebody’s got to test them, haven’t they!? More about that next week!
Pirate Themed London Self Guided Tour – The Wapping Tavern Tour
Our other London based Tavern Tour is themed around the Pirates of London and is based in Wapping. Everyone’s heard of pirates, but how many know how connected London is to piracy? It wasn’t all just Cornish or Caribbean. London is littered with beautiful old ships and our walk features a few opportunities for you to pirate around London too, with at least four stop-offs at beautiful London Taverns along the way and plenty of local recommendations based on lots and lots of sampling and testing, the best of what London has to offer – lucky us!
It is this pirate based London tavern tour that a friend and I happily tested a few weeks ago, and given that back in the 18th Century on the River Thames, there would have been full of thousands of ships, all waiting to be allowed to dock and unload their cargo which could be a lengthy old process lasting months at a time.
It has been estimated that at the end of the 18th Century over £79 million (in today’s money) worth of goods was on the river at any one time waiting to be unloaded. Given the number of ships still in London, this isn’t too hard to imagine whilst walking around on this tour and really taking everything in.
Even though this is my fourth trek along the banks of the Thames, going down some rather doggy looking alleyways – the tantalising taste of old London becomes so much more vivid and life-like. I am still noticing new things, even though I have completed this walk before. It’s amazing just how much of the detail of London you miss, especially when you’ve spent so much time walking around it before. Testing these walks has made me appreciate even more just how much we all miss in our day-to-day lives and I am determined to make sure when I walk and travel around in future, to pay more mindful attention.
So, 13,000 steps, goodness knows how many calories burnt and giving my brain some much needed exercise along the way by working out the answers to 52 clue and pirate based questions on a self guided London Tavern Tour, was made all the more enjoyable because I was with my oldest and closest school friend – Peter. Peter and I had a great time and a much needed social adventure, spending 3 hours unearthing new parts of this fabulous Capital and sampling the occasional ale.
Hilary the curator of these London Tavern Tours, has certainly found a number of interesting historical sites to see which culminated on the shores of the river Thames and we would like to take a moment to express our gratitude, so thank you Hilary for such wonderful work.
Next week I will be embarking on my next adventure – Greenwich and its plethora of taverns, the odd hill and reacquainting myself with Old Father Time!
All of our self guided walks and tours are now available for you to buy, and we’re doing more work on our website to ensure things go even more smoothly on the day, including improvements to our mapping feature and an update to our product pages. Hopefully you’ll like the design work by our marketing team, as much as we do.
If you have any questions or feedback, please do not hesitate to get in touch via email or social media info at beyond the map london.com and you can check out our reviews on our TripAdvisor Page.