London, February 23, 2024 — Today I am being a tourist in my own city. I am booked on a “Women of London” walking tour.
It is a sharply cold morning, but I’m not the only one interested in taking one of these tours as International Women’s Day on March 8 approaches. A mother and daughter from Southern California and a young woman from Rome have also bought a £25 ticket for the two-and-a-half-hour excursion titled “Working Women in the East End.”
The tour will wend its way from the world-famous Tower of London and a section of the old Roman city wall into hip Brick Lane, finishing at the popular Spitalfields Market.
The lives of women who lived and worked on this route over the past three centuries are much easier to visualize as we walk past some of their old stomping grounds and listen to Emily, our well-informed tour guide.
Here are some of the locations we go by, which I visited again later to make drawings for On the Spot.
At the end of Spital Yard, the house where Susanna Annesley lived in the early 1700s still remains, tucked away beneath towering glass blocks. Emily tells us that Susanna saw the value of education for both boys and girls when it seemed a radical idea. Her teachings are credited with inspiring the work of her children, the founders of Methodism.
Toynbee Hall has a Tudor-style design although it was built in the Victorian era by Henrietta Barnett and her husband. Their mission was to help and support the poor in the local area by offering education and legal advice. The building now houses a modern Community Center as the work of the charity continues.
At the corner of Princelet Street sits the home where textile designer Anna Maria Garthwaite lived in the mid 18th century. As someone who earns their living through painting and drawing, I particularly like learning about this remarkable woman. She created a successful business by using her watercolor botanical studies as designs for silk fabrics. These were incredibly popular at the time and hundreds of examples of her work can still be seen today at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was very unusual for a woman to run her own business at this time and she was scrupulous about only employing women — she knew that if any man got involved, they would be able to take over as women had so few rights in law.
Outside Hanbury Hall, we learn of the Match Girls. They were very young, many of them teenagers, mostly of Irish descent, working in terrible, life-threatening conditions at the Bryant & May match factory in the 1880s. They formed one of the very first unions and went on strike, successfully demanding better working conditions. A small round iron plaque, a coal hole cover, on the ground outside the entrance memorializes their struggle.
We walk to Old Castle Street, where a London wash house used to be. Only the facade of the original building remains but the fact that this little slither has been kept is good to see. It is the material remnants that play a huge part in the history that gets remembered.
Public wash houses were established around the country following the example of Liverpool resident Kitty Wilkinson during a cholera pandemic in the 1830s.Wilkinson had a boiler, creating a hot water supply, and offered her neighbors the opportunity to wash themselves and their clothes for one penny. Whilst great swathes of the city were affected by the disease, a little pocket around her home remained clear. Health officials soon realized this was an idea that should be encouraged.
We go past St Botolph without Aldgate, a church which our guide Emily describes as situated “on the corner of wealth and poverty.” It was known as the “church of the prostitutes” as it welcomed sex workers, offering practical advice and medical help where other institutions turned them away. The church continues community and charity work today.
The tour ends at Spitalfields Market where Mary Wollstonecraft, described as the first feminist, was born in 1759. A writer, philosopher and passionate advocate of women’s rights, she wrote an important text, “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” which went on, a century later, to inspire the Suffragette movement in their fight for women’s votes. She died at the age of 38, within days of giving birth to her second daughter, who grew up to be Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.
“Women of London” walking tours were started by historian Becky Laxton-Bass in 2018 as a way to celebrate Vote 100, the 100 years since the UK Parliament passed the law which allowed some women and all men to vote. “I began by hosting a few free tours and I enjoyed doing the research and hosting the tours so much I wanted to do it again and again,” she told me when I reached out to learn more about her inspiration for the tours.
Becky’s company currently offers four other walking tours that pay tribute to local women: Women of Westminster; Women of Bloomsbury; Women in Art; and Myths, Mothers and Matriarchs.
Next time you are in London, or even if you live here, skip that Jack the Ripper tour and consider adding a “Women of London” tour to your list of things to do. Or perhaps there are similar tours where you live. You may enjoy being a tourist in your own town as much as I did.
