Rebels & Radicals walk the streets where ordinary people changed history from the Peasants Revolt to the Chartists.
How did we get the National Health Service, the working week, the right to vote? None of it happened by chance. It was won by ordinary people who stood up, organised, and refused to go away. Much of that story played out here, in the streets and squares of Smithfield and Clerkenwell — an area that has attracted radical thinkers, dissenters and revolutionaries for seven centuries.
This walk traces two extraordinary attempts to reset society. The Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 and the Chartist movement of the nineteenth century, alongside we meet a range of interesting rebels and visit plague pits, a market nearly a thousand years old, Victorian slums, a gatehouse dating back to the Crusades and the library where Lenin sat at a window dreaming of revolution.
Along the way:
- The plague pits of Charterhouse Square
- Smithfield market, site of the final dramatic day of the Peasant’s Revolt
- The Elms, place of execution through the middle ages
- Victorian sweatshops where the first stirrings of the labour movement began
- St John Gate, place of the Crusades, Shakespeare and Hogarth
- Clerkenwell Green, where crowds of thousands gathered and democracy edged forward
- Karl Marx Memorial Library, where Lenin planned revolutions and complained about the British weather
1.2 miles: approximately 2 hours Starts: Charterhouse Square