Sun Street Passage

In this episode we ask: why do some places seem to have a soul, and others don’t? The setting for this theological enquiry is a little wedge of land with an extraordinary history, on the south bank of the Thames, only a short stroll from the Houses of Parliament. Vauxhall, where we’re starting our journey, has a big, beery, beary, rainbow-tinted soul, secretive and savage. From here we’re going to...

In this episode a Bronze Age goddess guides us to Breach Lane RM9 – a name, as we’ll see, with watery resonances, a memorial to the unruliness of the Thames, its unwillingness to stay within the bounds that men have built up around it. As we go we’ll tell a story that is at once ancient and thoroughly modern, shaped by the river but also by the Industrial Revolution and the storms and calms of glo...

In this episode we visit one of the few truly American roadscapes in London. The Euston Road NW1 is the place where London’s modern mass transport system was invented, and where the city began to stitch itself together and reach out to the rest of the country. As we walk its grubby pavements, we’ll witness controversial demolitions and constructions - London working out what it should look like, a...

In this episode we visit a blueprint for modern living which is also a visionary fantasia on the English past. The Avenue W4 crosses the heart of Bedford Park – a pioneering late-Victorian garden suburb, a revolution in city life disguised as a blackberry way, where the lesser bohemians of Wilde’s and Yeats’ day came to rest their eyes in shades of green. Sun Street Passage will be taking a summer...

In this episode we spend the afternoon in a most unlikely Arcadia. Three Mill Lane E3 leads us through a magical landscape, in which an isolated marsh becomes an East End factory, which becomes in turn an East Anglian village green. Essex grain breeds oblivion and then misery for the inhabitants of Hogarth’s and Dickens’ London. Conkers are transformed into high explosives destined for the Somme....

In this episode we take a ride in Fitzrovia’s very own time machine. Hanway Street W1 is not much more than a quiet little alley, but it echoes with the shouts of Victorian schoolchildren, and the choruses of music-hall songs, and the murmured conversations of New Women taking tea without a chaperone, and ‘Rock Island Line’ belted out over the hissing of a Gaggia machine. Join us on a journey into...

Welcome to the first episode of Sun Street Passage – a new monthly podcast with historian Richard Barnett, telling the story of London one street at a time. Richard introduces the themes, places and people that inspired the podcast, before taking a walk around Trinity Square on the eastern edge of the ancient City. As we’ll discover, this quiet little garden has remarkable historical and global co...