6 EMBARK ON A BOOK WEEKEND IN LONDON
While Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre and Stein had the literary cafés of Paris, the headquarters of London writers has always been the pub. Pepys and Chaucer plucked their characters from the pubs of London. John Dryden was beaten up in the pub. Dylan Thomas famously drained the kegs of the capital. To find out more about the long and fruitful association between the pen and pint, join a literary pub crawl in Fitzrovia and Soho, led either by the habitual pub-goer ‘Charles Dickens’ or else the less commonly found in the pub ‘Virginia Woolf’. Continue a literary weekend and assuage a hangover by heading eastward to Hackney Wick and enrolling on a course at the London Centre for Book Arts. Here, courses centre on the pursuit of making books beautiful beyond the words on the page: with activities like linocut printing, binding and paper marbling (pub crawl £24; londonliterarypubcrawl.com; Book Arts courses from £40; eventbrite.co.uk).
● ARRIVE Fitzrovia’s nearest tube stations are Warren Street, Goodge Street and Great Portland Street, while Hackney Wick is served by Overground services (tfl.gov.uk).