I love this wee book, it is slimmer and taller than a normal book, clothbound and perfectly fits in your pocket when imbibing the odd pint at one of the many old pubs mentioned in these pages. The maps are wonderful, nice full page spreads with the routes clearly marked out and if you don’t get on with paper maps or you don’t want to have to keep flicking through pages there is a QR code at the back where you can download digital copies of the routes…a genius idea that even Pepys would be impressed by.

As for the written part, I really enjoyed what I read, I know very little about Pepys other than he kept a diary like Adrian Mole did. I’ve learnt so much from this book, Pepys was quite a character, his long suffering wife had a lot to put up with, arguments, other women, being abandoned and violence. He was a real man about town, he knew everybody who was worth knowing. The 5 walks in the book follow him on common routes he would take throughout his life and Harvey is always getting you to use your imagination to picture the buildings, the bustling daily activities, the smells and of course the fire! The great fire of London is a big part of the narrative, Pepys account of the scenes and the devastation makes for some interesting reading.

It is difficult to share the areas of Pepys’s time with the reader as a huge amount of the buildings were destroyed by fire or the Blitz or gotten rid of to make way for a modern concrete boring building. Harvey’s writing is impressive and the descriptions help you to picture what was there, modern day events are also shared (buildings used in movies and a certain alleyway in that Potter movie) and there are still an incredible amount of smaller buildings still standing, old pubs and shops going back 100s of years, I hadn’t realised what was still around.

I have enjoyed this book immensely and will one day take a trip to London and do some of these walks…and some of the pubs!

Blog review: felcherman.wordpress.com/2021/05/20/walking-pepyss-london-by-jacky-colliss-harvey/