Dark London: Macabre, Hidden, and Literary Places to Visit

I love London. I lived there in the 1990s and again from 2011 to 2015, and I still go back every few months. A city doesn’t exist for centuries without attracting the macabre, the eccentric, and the downright strange, and those are the layers I go looking for.

London is the muse for my Dark London crime thrillers, where Detective Jamie Brooke and psychic Blake Daniel work cases through the city’s real landmarks: the Hunterian Museum, Cross Bones Graveyard, the old Bedlam, and the South Bank.

This page gathers everything on Books and Travel about the darker, hidden, and literary side of the city, so you can walk it with me, then read the novels it inspired.

Start with the unusual

25 Quirky and Unusual Things to See in London. The Hunterian Museum, the Old Operating Theatre, Jeremy Bentham’s skeleton, the crypt gallery at St Pancras Church, Barts Pathology Museum, the Hardy Tree, and a book barge on the canal. My own list, built over years of wandering.

Southwark and the South Bank

The south side of the river is the dark heart of my novels. Everything below sits within a short walk of London Bridge.

Walk the South Bank from Tower Bridge to Westminster. Five kilometres along the Thames Path past Borough Market, Southwark Cathedral, the ruins of Winchester Palace, the Globe, Tate Modern, and the London Eye. An hour if you don’t stop. A week if you do.

Southwark Cathedral. The oldest Gothic church in London, with a medieval cadaver tomb, roof bosses showing the Devil devouring Judas, and windows for Shakespeare and Chaucer. The Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury starts at its door.

Cross Bones Graveyard. The unconsecrated burial ground of the Winchester Geese, the medieval sex workers licensed by the Bishop of Winchester, now a memorial garden for the Outcast Dead. It features in my crime thriller Deviance.

Walking the Pilgrims’ Way from Southwark to Canterbury. Day one takes you out of the city through Peckham, Oxleas Woods, the ruins of Lesnes Abbey, and the Thames Path at Erith. Six days and 180 kilometres to Becket’s shrine.

Bones, bodies, and burial grounds

The anatomical museums. The Hunterian at the Royal College of Surgeons and the Old Operating Theatre in a garret above St Thomas’ Church. A body in the Hunterian opens Desecration.

Walking Amongst the Dead. My solo podcast episode on graveyards, cemeteries, and ossuaries, with a stop at Kensal Green and Cross Bones. For the great Victorian cemeteries, Highgate above all, listen to Loren Rhoads on cemetery travel.

The rest of the macabre, from the Paris Catacombs to the Capuchin mummies, is on my Dark Travel page.

Literary London

7 Literary Landmarks for Book Lovers in London. Independent bookshops, the British Library, Senate House, Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, Dr Johnson’s House, and four burial grounds with literary ghosts.

London: A Personal History. A solo episode on three decades in the city, from Cool Britannia in my twenties to writing in the London Library, and the real places behind every scene in the Brooke and Daniel books.

Victorian London with David Morrell. The creator of Rambo on researching the “chasms and sunless abysses” of the 1850s for his Thomas De Quincey mysteries, and the first British serial killer.

The Dark London trilogy

Three crime thrillers, one city. A detective who has lost everything, a psychic who sees too much, and cases that run through the places on this page. Available in ebook, paperback, and audiobook.

The research behind the trilogy and a walkable map of its locations are on the Dark London world page. You can hear more London episodes on the Books and Travel podcast.

Wherever you walk in the city, look down as well as up. London keeps its best stories underground.