Hard Streets - A Talk by Jacqueline Riding

An enthralling journey through some of London's hardest streets, in the company of a writer of integrity and passion - Lucy Worsley

Welcome to the hard streets: working-class London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the author of Hogarth and Peterloo

Charlie Chaplin rose from the hard streets of Edwardian London to worldwide fame. But his work and outlook were always shaped by the world he came from, a place of cheap entertainments and the threat of the workhouse, radical politics and desperate poverty.

Framed through the life of this iconic success story, acclaimed historian Jacqueline Riding reveals working-class London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Breathing life into forgotten stories of mothers and sons, labourers and actors, vagrants and sex workers, of suffering, survival and success against the odds, this compelling social history paints a striking portrait of a vanished city.

Dr Jacqueline Riding is a historian and art historian specialising in British history and art of the long eighteenth century. Former curator of the Palace of Westminster and Director of the Handel House Museum, she is an award-winning author as well as a consultant for museums, galleries, historic buildings and feature films. She was the adviser on Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner (2014), Peterloo (2018) and Wash Westmoreland's Colette (2018).

This talk is in-person only and won't be streamed or recorded. Doors to the Cathedral Library will open at 7pm.