An Earl's Court Miscellany

To view the Earl’s Court Walking Tour, click here.

To view the Earl’s Court Walking Tour programme click here.

There’s a room for rent in the Earl’s Court area. With original features and a bohemian feel, the rent is reasonable and location ideal. Will you rent the room?

Walk with us in verse and song, guided by your future Landlady, and take in the spirit of Earl’s Court. Encounter its revolutionaries, poets, musicians and dancers. Its wartime and sporting heroes, inventors and romancers. Get to know your neighbours and their fetishes. And when day falls into night, witness our humanity – and the ghosts that haunt the place.

From the music hall to the coffee house, past and present collide as Rhyme & Reason trace the echoes left by those who lived, died or were buried in the Earl’s Court area. Those featured include children’s writers Mary Louisa Molesworth, and Beatrix Potter who was inspired by her walks in Brompton Cemetery to create some of her best-loved characters; Sir Henry Cole, founder of the V&A and Prince Albert’s right hand man in the creation of the 1851 Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace; James Bohee, a Canadian banjo player of Caribbean descent who introduced Victorian audiences to black American music and tutored the future King Edward VII;  John Wisden, the founder of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack; music hall singer Charles Coborn; universal suffrage campaigner Emmeline Pankhurst; and poets Ivor Gurney, Jean Ingelow, who came close to becoming our first female Poet Laureate in 1896, and Henry Austin Dobson (commemorating the centenary of his death in 1922) – whose good friend Lewis Carroll often came round to visit…