Celebrate Dickens with Citysteps audio walking guides

Jan. 29, 2012 - PRLog -- With over a dozen novels set principally in London, and the location where most were written, it’s little wonder that many of Citysteps’ audio walking guides in this most historic city are littered with Charles Dickens references. There are also mentions too in the Portsmouth guide, where the Dickens story all started with the birth of the great man himself.

If you’re looking for something different to do in London or are visiting the Dickens attractions in the UK, a Citysteps travel guide could be just the thing for you. These tour  guides are aimed at travellers who like to do their own thing rather than join organised tours or following a tourguide.   The audio guides can be started and stopped anywhere along the route, allowing for long lunch breaks, visits to attractions along the way, or even spreading the longer tours over a couple of days to fit in with other activities.

There are four London guides to choose from which reference Dickens; An Introduction to The City, South Bank, and coming soon, Westminster and Covent Garden. The London guides, and also the Old Portsmouth guide, which mentions Dickens, can be downloaded from http://www.citysteps.co.uk

The ‘South Bank’ guide makes mention of several places featured in Little Dorritt including The George Inn, Marshalsea Prison and St George the Martyr Church.  The guide also takes you past Nancy’s Steps, part of London Bridge, where in the film Oliver! Bill Sykes murders Nancy. Dickens appears to have based Nancy’s murder on a real-life Victorian murder which was never solved; the injustice of the case seems to have affected him profoundly and led to his untimely death. The South Bank guide can be downloaded here: http://citysteps.co.uk/index.php?main_page=product_info&c...

The guide ‘An Introduction to the City’ makes mention of Temple Bar which Dickens wrote vividly regarding the practice of displaying heads of executed traitors atop it.  The route also visits a supposedly Roman bath which Dickens mentioned in David Copperfield.  It also takes you around some of Dickens’ own history including The Olde Wine Shades on Martin Lane where he was a frequent visitor when it was called Henderson’s Shades, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Pub, Fleet Street where he was a regular customer when he worked as a Fleet Street journalist and St Mary le Strand Church on Aldwych where Dickens’ parents were married in 1809. The guide can be downloaded here: http://citysteps.co.uk/index.php?main_page=product_info&c...  

Each audio walking guide is downloaded from the website as an MP3 and saved to a computer, then  uploaded onto any MP3 player.  Along with the MP3 of the audio commentary, Citysteps walking guides come with maps and instructions that can be saved as PDF files onto a smartphone or printed out, as well as photographs taken around the routes and links to the websites of local attractions.