This Month-Long Walking Tour Festival Leads You Through The London Of Shakespeare, Ackroyd And The Roaring Twenties

London has played muse, backdrop and home to innumerable great writers. Some of these literary links are celebrated in a walking tour festival spanning most of March 2026.

Footprints of London — a collective of some of the sharpest, most adventurous tour guides on the London circuit — returns with Literary Footprints throughout March 2026, bidding you to join them as they explore the thoroughfares, buildings and sundry nooks and crannies that’ve inspired the city’s pensmiths.

Among the walks this year are:

🪶 Shakespeare for All in All (4 March): A two-hour stomp around the City and Southwark, in search of the man behind the legend, and how the Bard juggled his roles as poet, man of the stage and social climber.

🍸 Roaring Twenties Through Writers’ Eyes (7 and 20 March): Charleston your way into a dimension of cocktails, sports cars and jazz — and how this lightning-paced, swiftly-changing era influenced some of the smartest writers of their day, including Waugh, Coward, Christie, Sayers, Huxley and Woolf.

🐄 Cold Comfort Farm in Highgate (12 March): Venture to the handsome Holly Lodge estate, where Cold Comfort Farm author Stella Gibbons lived (she penned over 20 novels in her lifetime). Her neighbours included John Betjeman and J.B. Priestley.

📚 Literary Women of the City (15 March): Agatha Christie, JK Rowling and Mary Wollstonecraft make cameos in this walk led by Daniella King, but so too do lesser-known literary women, including Maria Hackett, who battled with St Paul’s Cathedral over the welfare of choristers; and ‘Mad Madge’ Cavendish, designer of her own clothes, and author of very early sci-fi stories.

💀 Peter Ackroyd’s Monstrous East End (24 March): David Charnick bids you into the gloomy depths of east London, by way of three Peter Ackroyd novels starring monsters of sorts: Hawksmoor, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem.

Most tours are in-person, although a handful will be virtual, including one on the rise and fall of Oscar Wilde (3 March). At time of writing, tours are still being added to the itinerary. In previous years, many have sold out in advance, so if something takes your fancy, go for it!

Literary Footprints 2026, throughout March 2026. Most full-priced tickets are £17.50 per in-person tour/£10 online. After purchasing one tour you get a code which gives you 20% off all subsequent tours throughout the festival.