LIVCOM TOUR OF THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS ON 13 OCTOBER 2022
14 OCTOBER 2022
The Stationers' Company has been fortunate to have had the opportunity to undertake some private walking tours in the City and beyond. Here is a report of the latest undertaken by Freeman Ulrike Murphy who generously donated her time and fee to the LivCom.
Freeman Bev Steele writes:
19 of us congregated at Covent Garden underground station to meet Ulrike Murphy (see photo) our guide for the day’s walking tour. The weather was mercifully kind and the rain that threatened did not materialise. Ulrike called us together and the nature of these sins was then described. She warned it might get a bit salacious. Nobody in the group demurred at that! These sins, we were told, were originally defined by Pope Gregory in the 6th century. Today we would be walking through the London of the 17th and 18th centuries and in the parlance of those days these sins were, and in no particular order, Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, Envy, Pride, Wrath and Sloth. Ever remembering this News Letter is a family show the more salacious details of the tour will be obscured.
We started in Covent Garden under the arcades of Inigo Jones's elegantly pillared piazza also known as the Square of Venus and heard all about its shady past.
We then weaved our way through Covent Garden and listened to stories of a variety of themes each connected to a different sin, encountered many characters of the past and all interspersed with stories of Lust, the top sin of the day. The salacious nature of so much of it was the salt in the stew!
We discovered little known alley ways, crossed Trafalgar Square and walked along the Mall. All the while Ulrike kept us entertained with yet more stories of sins until we came to our final stop just above St. James’s Park and met the biggest sinner of all.
Ulrike had asked us at the beginning of the Tour, whom did we consider had lived a life most driven in the pursuit of the full seven. My own guess was wrong but she has asked me not to reveal the identity of the one that she described during this our last stopping point. In deference to that I must close here on a cliff-hanger though to us fortunate few all was revealed.
So ended our Tour. We thanked Ulrike fulsomely for her encyclopaedic knowledge and her unamplified voice which coped so well with the surrounding noise. It was a very special experience indeed.