You still have time to check out Open City and see a great building for free.
In 2012 we decided to do a Charles Dickens walk and when we got to the Guildhall square a guide asked people in the queue if we fancied seeing a Roman dig nearby, which would close at 11.30 a.m.
Archaeologists only get six weeks to excavate when a new building is going up.
So about 30 people follow him to a site at 8-19 Moorgate, where we put we on white hardhats and high-vis jackets.
We saw 80s foundations, Victorian foundations, and Roman artefacts and bones discovered there in the last four weeks.
Medieval turf-walled dwellings don’t survive, we were told.
Then we caught a tour of the Guildhall Art Gallery and got the run-down on William Pitt and his son William Pitt, who was PM at 24 but had gout. The cure then was port, which actually made it worse. Pitt the Younger never got old. He died at 47 of alcoholic poisoning.
Then we did the Charles Dickens tour, ending up inside a square bounded by 16-foot brick wall which survives from the Marshalsea, the debtor’s prison.
Dickens worked in a blacking factory when his dad was in that prison, became a legal clerk, then a court reporter, an athletic chap who walked to the suburbs and back averaging 4.5 miles per hour, and often rowed on the Thames.
Little Dorrit was born in the Marshalsea and married in St Georges church next door.
As our group walked over London Bridge, mixing in with the general public, I felt very soft fingers holding my left wrist. I looked down and saw a seven year-old blonde schoolgirl and said, “You can hold my hand if you want!”
Mum was walking just in front of us with another child. Her daughter must have been tired or daydreaming.
In the old days, London Bridge was so busy that it was impossible for stage coaches to go across it, so the south side of the bridge became the terminus and coaching inns proliferated.
These all have all disappeared except one : The George, which opened in 1646.
Long before Dickens was born, Shakespeare used to hang out in The George.
I didn’t know this: For seven or eight years you could get an underground train to go and see a public hanging.