If you’re a book-lover, literary walking tours can be a fun way to explore the landscapes and landmarks that informed your favourite authors, and your favourite stories. As a writer, I find that visiting places rich in stories inspires you in your own quest to describe your environment, and your experiences of the world.
Literary walking tours can also be a way of gaining new perspectives on a familiar locale, and of uncovering the stories and legends that characterise a place and its residents.
Many books and their writers are commemorated in statues and plaques in significant locations, which become the destinations of literary pilgrimage. As a literary traveller you help to support institutions that seek to preserve the world’s cultural heritage, and add your own private chapter to the story of your favourite literary works.
If you’re going on holiday and want to find literary sites in your area, or if you would like to design your own literary walk, you might like to refer to this list of Books for Literary Pilgrims.
Self-Guided Literary Walking Tours
The following literary walks are available on this site:
- A Literary Walk Around Shrewsbury – this walk begins and ends at Shrewsbury Station, lasts around 1-2 hours, and includes the following authors:
- Charles Darwin
- Mary Webb
- Marianne North
- Charles Dickens
- Ellis Peters
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- William Hazlitt
- Philip Sidney
- Thomas Telford
- Wilfred Owen
- A Literary Walk Around Stratford – this literary walk around Stratford-Upon-Avon begins and ends at the railway station, takes 1-2 hours, and mentions:
- William Shakespeare
- Marie Corelli
- Washington Irving
- Mark Twain
- Elizabeth Gaskell
- A Literary Walk Around Bath (coming soon!)
From fellow literary travellers…
- A Lady in London offers this self-guided literary tour of London that begins at Daunt Books.
- Eternal Arrival has written this self-guided tour of Dublin.
- Bonjour Paris has put together a literary walk around Paris’s 14th arrondissement.
