The Urban Rambler

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The Urban Rambler

Walking tours and illustrated talks uncovering London’s layered histories — from forgotten streets to q***r heritage and everyday lives.

Created and led by historian and storyteller Nick Collinson. I am an informal, friendly, fully qualified City of London guide, offering tailor made walking tours of all parts of London to groups of all shapes and sizes. Whether it be a short tour for a couple, a family city break, or a corporate event to entertain your clients, get in touch and let me know what you want, and I will do my utmost to provide you with a service that exceeds your expectations.

21/10/2026

Le****ns, a red door, a basement dancefloor and a formidable Frenchwoman in diamonds. Welcome to Club Louise.

Opened in 1973 on Soho’s Poland Street, it was one of the area’s first major le***an clubs, presided over by the glamorous Madame Louise.

A black dress, diamonds, heavy eyeliner and a grey fur coat in winter. Louise had style - and a formidable door policy.

“Are you members?”

If she liked you: “Darlings - you must become members.”

Inside: red and black décor, mirrored walls, a spiral staircase leading down to the dancefloor, and DJ Caroline spinning everything from Bowie to Doris Day and Diana Ross. Dancing continued until 3am, fuelled by booze and some unappetising ham sandwiches and dry gherkins served to satisfy the licensing laws.

The clientele was suited, swaggering and gloriously unapologetic.

By the mid-1970s, Louise’s had also become a haunt of London’s emerging punk scene, attracting Siouxsie Sioux, the S*x Pistols and others. Not all the le***an regulars were particularly thrilled about that.

Camp, confrontational and gloriously unruly, Club Louise was a place to find community, flirt, dance and be yourself.

It’s just one of the places we explore on my Q***r Soho: S*x, Scandal & Subculture walk.

🏳️‍🌈 Sunday 22 November · 2pm · £25

🎟️ Bookings via the link in my bio.

***rSoho ***rHistory

08/10/2026

What connects a celebrated gender-nonconforming artist, a catering business famous for its tea and cakes, and a discreet meeting place for gay men in the heart of London?

The answer is the Lyons family.

Born Hannah Gluckstein into the wealthy Jewish family behind J. Lyons & Co., the artist Gluck rejected conventional titles, dressed as they pleased and insisted on being known by one name alone.

Meanwhile, inside the family’s enormous Corner House on Coventry Street, an area nicknamed the Lily Pond became a discreet meeting place for gay men.

Two very different q***r histories, connected by one of Britain’s most recognisable names in catering.

And they’re just a taste of the extraordinary stories hiding in Soho’s streets.

🏳️‍🌈 Q***R SOHO: S*X, SCANDAL & SUBCULTURE

Join me on Sunday 22 November at 2pm for a walking tour exploring Soho’s q***r past — from secret meeting places and scandalous encounters to nightlife, activism and the people who helped shape London’s LGBTQ+ history.

🎟️ Tickets £25 — booking via the link in my bio.

***rSoho ***rHistory

27/09/2026

A little introduction, for anyone who’s new here 👋

I’m Nick. I’m a London guide, q***r historian and heritage professional.

The thread running through most of my work is pretty simple: I’m interested in the stories history left out. The people, communities and places that have been overlooked, marginalised or sometimes deliberately pushed out of the story.

I spent ten years at English Heritage working in interpretation, essentially working out how to turn research into stories people actually want to engage with, whether through exhibitions, trails, films, audio, art or something else entirely. While I was there I also helped pioneer the telling of q***r history at English Heritage sites and pushed for more inclusive approaches to the past.

These days I work independently, creating and leading walks, talks and tours, as well as researching and developing heritage interpretation projects. I’ve worked with organisations including the Museum of London, Bishopsgate Institute, Sotheby’s and the Lloyd’s Banking Group. My recent work has ranged from a major LGBTQ+ heritage project in Wandsworth to helping lead a 10-day Q***r Tour of England.

Q***r history is at the heart of a lot of what I do, but I’m interested more broadly in the stories hiding in plain sight - and in finding engaging ways to tell them.

So that’s me. 👋

Walks · tours · talks · heritage projects

Follow along and if you’d like to work with me, get in touch.

24/09/2026

London, I’m coming back! 👋

I’ll be back for three weeks from 17 November–8 December, and obviously I couldn’t come home without getting out on the streets and doing some walks.

I’ve got two q***r history walks on sale for now:

🌈 Q***r Soho: S*x, Scandal & Subculture
Sunday 22 November · 2pm

🩷 Q***r Bloomsbury: Art, Affairs & Arrests — After Dark
Friday 4 December · 5.30pm

Soho is one of the first walks I ever wrote - it’s 10 years old next year! While Bloomsbury is brand new, plus it’s an after-dark version of the walk, finishing inside the British Museum during its Friday late opening.

Both walks are £25 and booking is open now - link in bio.

I’ll also have some availability for private walks while I’m back, so drop me a message if you’d like to arrange one.

See you in London! ❤️ 🌃 🏳️‍🌈

20/09/2026

And that’s a wrap on Q***r England! 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ ⚧️

10 days, 17 guests from the USA, and an enlightening journey through England’s q***r past - from ancient objects and medieval monks to stately homes, scandal, s*x, art, activism and a LOT of very complicated relationships 😂

It was an absolute joy helping to lead this tour with Oscar Wilde Tours and sharing some of the stories from it here. I hope to explore more in different ways over time…

I’ll be back in London this November and December, and am always up for more adventures like this. So if you’re looking for a London guide, a q***r history and interpretation specialist, or someone to help lead a tour around England - give me a shout! 🏳️‍🌈

15/09/2026

Shibden Hall 🏳️‍🌈

Our final day in Yorkshire - and finally, one of the most fascinating and well-known le***ans in British history - Anne Lister.

We’d already encountered her on our walking tour in York, where we visited Holy Trinity Goodramgate, the church where in 1834 Anne and her partner Ann Walker took communion together and privately considered themselves married 👩‍❤️‍👩

Now we headed to Shibden Hall, Anne’s ancestral home near Halifax.

Anne left behind millions of words of diaries, with the most private passages written in her own code. And they are remarkably explicit by 19th-century standards - recording her relationships, arguments, break-ups, s*x life (and even or***ms ✨ ) with women in extraordinary detail. They give us an intimate glimpse into the life of a woman who refused to conform to what was expected of her in the early 19th century.

Her story is now much better known thanks to the TV series Gentleman Jack, much of which was filmed right here at Shibden. It was great fun spotting familiar rooms - and some remnants of filming! 🎩 🎬

Then back to York for one final pub lunch (pie and chips, obvs 😂) before getting the train back to London 🚂

And just like that… it was all over. 10 days of q***r history across England had come to an end 🌈

14/09/2026

Castle Howard & Rievaulx Abbey 🏛️🏳️‍🌈

Day two in Yorkshire began at the magnificent Castle Howard, better known to many as Brideshead. It played the fictional estate in both the 1981 TV adaptation and 2008 film of Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited.

The story is full of q***r subtext, particularly in the intense and ambiguous relationship between Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte. So it was a very fitting stop for our tour - not least because there seemed to be depictions of naked men EVERYWHERE 😜

After lunch at a quaint country pub, we travelled back in time into a very different medieval q***r world at Rievaulx Abbey.

Here we explored Saint Aelred of Rievaulx, the 12th-century abbot who wrote extraordinarily passionately about love and friendship between men. Was Aelred “gay”? We simply can’t apply modern ideas of s*xuality so neatly to somebody who lived 900 years ago – but his writings give us a fascinating way into discussing same-s*x love, intimacy and desire in the medieval world. St Aelred has become a bit of a patron-saint for LGBTQ Christians the world over.

And Rievaulx itself is absolutely stunning 🤩

Quite the day of q***r contrasts…

10/09/2026

Q***r York 🏳️‍🌈

After a free day in London we took the train and headed north to York…

First stop was York Minster - one of the finest examples of gothic architecture in Northern Europe.

Then we went on a q***r walking tour of the city with the eminent historian , exploring over 700 years of q***r history.

At Clifford’s Tower we heard about King Edward II and his relationships with Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser; elsewhere, King James I and his succession of handsome male favourites – in a pub that claims to be the birthplace of Guy Fawke - King James’s would-be assassin.

There were darker stories too. In 1843, Edward Rayner and Thomas Sykes were convicted of so**my at York Assizes and sentenced to death – later commuted to transportation for life.

The walk also brought us into the 20th century, with York’s connections to CHE and the Gay Liberation Front, and eventually to the rather more cheerful sight of rainbow flags and The Gay Shop in the middle of the historic city. 🏳️‍🌈

We did encounter Anne Lister along the way – but there’ll be MUCH more of her later…

We also found time for dinner in a sunny b**r garden, and the Shambles after dark...

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