Basic HTML Version
16
City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
Food Glorious Food -A
Celebrate a Dickensian Christmas to mark the writer’s
bicentenary. With morning coffee and a fish & chip lunch
included in the tour fee and visits to the Burlington Arcade
and Fortnum & Mason Food Hall this is a very sociable
and entertaining day out for Christmas available weekdays
throughout November and December 2012.
Dickens invented an idea of Christmas that has been
exported around the world. It’s a Christmas of foggy
streets and hearty feasts with the red faced, plump rich at
table and the skinny, ragged poor with their noses pressed
to the frosted window. We begin in the City at 10.30am
for morning coffee and biscuits, included in your tour fee.
During the morning
we are going to show
you the meat, fish
and game markets
and pockets of an old
London that Dickens
knew well. This is the
people’s Christmas of
Turkey clubs and pie
& mash with eels and
whitebait straight
from the River
Thames. Lovely!
Back to the pub for a fish & chip lunch included in the tour
fee. Your members can sort themselves out on the day for
bar drinks, hot drinks and desserts as desired.
In the afternoon we are going upmarket to see how the other
half would have celebrated a Dickensian Christmas with a
visit to Mayfair and the 'dilly.' We visit the marvellous and
opulent Burlington Arcade built to allow the ‘toffs’ to shop
unmolested. You can chat to the Beadles clad in top hat and
tails employed to chase off Artful Dodgers! And we will
visit the sumptuous and world famous Food Hall at Fortnum
& Mason where impeccable young men in red tail coats
stack the shelves - there are wonderful pickings for
Christmas presents and stocking fillers to really thrill your
family and loved ones. Fortnum’s claim to have invented the
food hamper and if you really want to push the boat out you
could buy one of the famous F&M hampers which have
been a part of the London Christmas scene for 200 years.
Prices start from £40 and
continue to infinity!
In 1705 Hugh Mason had a
small shop in St James’s Market
and a spare room in his house.
The Fortnum family had come
to London from Oxford as
high-class builders in the wake