Sun Street Passage

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...