Editor’s Note: Westrow Cooper, who will lead the Mrs. Dalloway walking tour 
next Thursday evening, contributed this post.
It was a bright June morning when Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Setting off in her footsteps on a dark November evening may therefore seem a little perverse. But, after all, how many bright spring mornings can one count on in England? And when is not a good time to walk and talk about Mrs Dalloway?
So if you’re in London next Thursday evening, 26th November, come and do a bit of night walking, through a city getting ready for a party, in the footsteps of Mrs Dalloway and Virginia Woolf.
‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.’ But even as she steps out into the clamour and commotion of the street, the squeak of the hinges casts her mind back to her youth and the fateful summer at Bourton when she stood ‘on the theshold of her adult life.’ Just as the past is always present in the fabric of the city, so our own past reverberates throughout our lives as individuals.
Westminster, St James’s, Piccadilly, Bond Street, Oxford Street, Harley Street, Fitzrovia and then across to the famous squares of Bloomsbury. This walk takes us through the historic centre of the dynamic metropolis, brought to life on the page so vividly in Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece.
Few books convey the sheer wonder, the miracle of being alive, here, now and in the city as vividly as Mrs Dalloway. This walk, in the footsteps of Mrs Dalloway and Virginia Woolf, provides the opportunity to immerse ourselves in the city and the novel. To immerse ourselves in a London busy, crowded and lit up for Christmas; a London, in other words, getting ready for a party.
As Virginia Woolf wrote in her essay Oxford Street Tide – ‘The charm of modern London is that it is not built to last; it is built to pass.’
Meet at 6 p.m. outside Westminster Abbey Gift Shop. Details and booking here: https://goo.gl/odXuxG
Alice Lowe
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Paula Maggio
Stefano Rozzoni
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veronikakra
Vara Neverow
William Patrick Wend
Zoe Wolstenholme
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