Publicity - The Travel Guidebook Gap

We'd love to hear from you!King's Cross sounds like it should have an ancient, heroic origin story, but the name comes from a mocked 1830 monument demolished fifteen years after it was built. This episode traces the incredible arc of one of London's great train station neighborhoods. From open countryside to Victorian industrial powerhouse, decades of post-industrial abandonment, street prostitution, and a fatal Underground fire that killed thirty-one people. Finally reinvigorated as a global benchmark for urban regeneration. Along the way, our story takes in, a lot! Boudica's alleged burial ground at Platform 9¾. The graveyard where Mary Shelley fell in love and modern science fiction was born. A Welsh drifter found near the station in 1943 who became a World War Two spy after his death. The poet laureate who saved St Pancras from demolition with days to spare. Shane MacGowan founding the Pogues in a local pub, and fifteen regulars who bought their own pub to stop it becoming a coffee shop. Oh — and Elvis is barred from one of them. The reasons are not recorded. We manage to stop at several historic pubs along the way, because as always it's the pubs that survive to tell the tales of evolving neighborhoods.

We'd love to hear from you!This bonus episode is our love letter to Ye Olde Mitre, one of London's most hidden and historically rich pubs. When we visited recently, the bar staff gave us one of the most friendly welcomes we've experienced in a busy city center pub. So, this episode is our return gift to you.Tucked down a narrow alleyway off Hatton Garden, accessible only through a passage barely wide enough for two people. We trace the site's remarkable 700-year backstory. From a medieval Bishop of Ely's palace that hosted John of Gaunt, King Henry VII, and King Henry VIII, through the story of Christopher Hatton (the dancing commoner who became Elizabeth I's Lord Chancellor and gave Hatton Garden its name), to the street's evolution into the world's diamond capital and the scene of the 2015 Hatton Garden Heist.We also explore Ye Olde Mitre's famous jurisdictional quirk. The the land belonged to the Diocese of Ely in Cambridgeshire, the pub was technically not in London for most of its existence, meaning Victorian criminals could outrun the Metropolitan Police by ducking through its alleyway. The episode closes with a practical guide to the pub's interior and a warm personal note from Host & Producer Expat Andy after a recent visit. 

We'd love to hear from you!The Lord Raglan pub recently proudly announced the launch of their new food menu.To congratulate the pub on this great news, we decided to gift them with a special, short, bonus episode featuring the history of their pub - The Lord Raglan, Holborn.Enjoy and share the joy! Send this episode onto your network. It's a great way to support British tourism, and the host of small businesses that are our historic pubs.

We'd love to hear from you!A preview of Episode 12 – King’s Cross, Up Down Up Again. The episode traces the neighborhood's arc from quiet rural crossroads to Victorian industrial powerhouse. We move through post-war decline and the grim decades of the 70s–90s, to the dramatic revival anchored by Eurostar's move to St Pancras in 2007. We end with Argent's massive £5 billion regeneration project. As always, the area's surviving pubs frame the whole story. We also make a broader announcement with a look ahead to Season 2. The show is rebranding as "Publicity – Your London Travel Toolkit" with the tagline "A signal in the travel information static". Season 2 will introduce rotating guest contributors including London tour guides and publicans. A reminder the show is a partner, not a competitor, to the London travel and tourism industry. 

We'd love to hear from you!Before craft beer, before the taprooms, before the Saturday crowds with their route maps, Bermondsey smelled of rotting hides, urine, and dog filth. In short, industry! Episode 11 of Publicity - Your London Travel Toolkit  pulls us south of the Thames to trace the evolution of one of London's most overlooked neighborhoods. From stinky medieval tanneries banished across the river by the City of London, the world's largest brewery, Victorian railway arches built of sixty million bricks, post-war council estates that held a community together through decades of industrial collapse, to the night a furious Irish cheesemonger returned from New York, rented an arch on Druid Street, and accidentally started a revolution. The Bermondsey Beer Mile gets decoded, Publicity style. Not just as a fun Saturday crawl, but as the latest chapter in a five-hundred-year story about what happens when a place is cheap enough and overlooked enough for the right people to do something important in it. The episode where a railway arch becomes the most honest expression of a pub in centuries, and where the smell of malt turns out derives from the same story as those nose curling tanning pits, except now we have Instagram.

We'd love to hear from you!Step into the bustling streets of old East London, where the air is thick with history and the scent of freshly baked pies, and discover the story behind one of the city’s most iconic comfort foods, now part of Britain's "Heritage Foods Movement". This bonus episode serves up more than just pie and mash—it’s a journey through generations of grit, flavor, and tradition, from eel-slinging street vendors to the tiled institutions still standing today. You’ll meet the legendary families who built this culinary empire, uncover the surprising origins of that vivid green “liquor,” and feel the pulse of a city that fed its people fast, cheap, and with heart. By the end, you won’t just be hungry—you’ll be planning your own pilgrimage to London, ready to pull up a marble-topped table, order a “two and two,” and taste a living piece of history. 

We'd love to hear from you!Join Publicity – The Guidebook Gap in our two-mile walking tour of Charlie Chaplin’s London neighborhood. Our walk maps how institutional poverty and family chaos produced the raw material of Chaplin’s art.We’ll visit pubs, music hall sites, residences, markets, and street art in Walworth, Kennington, Lambeth, and Camberwell. Discover how Chaplin’s character of The Tramp was not invented in California but assembled from lived experience on these specific streets. We begin with Chaplin's disputed birth on East Street in 1889, run through his parents' separation, mother Hannah's mental collapse, the workhouse, the pauper school at Hanwell, and the death of his alcoholic father.We then follow Chaplin’s professional growth from a childhood spent absorbing crowd mechanics at the Canterbury Music Hall, to Fred Karno's mime-based training at the Fun Factory in Camberwell, where the grammar of silent performance was drilled into him six years before Hollywood needed it. We pivot through Chaplin’s American ascent, The Tramp's debut at Keystone in 1914, the political courage of The Great Dictator, and the revocation of his re-entry permit at sea in 1952, before closing with his honorary Oscar, his 1975 knighthood, and that stolen coffin. At our final stop at the Chaplin Mosaics at Chandler Hall on Lambeth Walk where we consider that pub back rooms created music hall, music hall created Chaplin, and Chaplin by removing dialogue, turned a South London street education into a global art form.

We'd love to hear from you!In 1850, a Victorian journalist walked into Bermondsey and wanted to head back for the door. His senses assaulted by raw hides, tanning pits, human urine, pigeon and dog feces, slaked lime, and ground oak bark. The unmistakable fragrance of a neighborhood that had been turning dead animals into leather for five hundred years.Today it's barley malt over dead cows and dog feces, a significant upgrade for the community.How do you get from bovines to barley, cows to craft beer in one postcode? We’re going to decode that in this episode. Our story involves a cheesemonger who went to New York and came home furious. An Austrian general who made the catastrophic decision to tour a brewery full of people who despised him. And a working-class community that held an entire neighborhood together long enough for something remarkable to happen inside it.It's a pub crawl, of sorts. By the end I'll make the case that a taproom in a Victorian railway arch isn't a departure from the London pub. It's the most honest evolution of it in fifty years and built on a logic that's been running in this neighborhood for half a millennium. Find the space nobody else wants and do something essential in it.This is Publicity – The Guidebook Gap. I’m your host, Expat Andy, broadcasting from Miami in the Sunshine State. My job is to be your insider guide to the London that doesn’t make it onto the highlight reel - the London that’s hidden in plain sight, decoded through its pubs – if you know where to look.Pull out your walking shoes. Episode Eleven - The Bermondsey Beer Mile, Going The Extra Mile drops Monday April 20 wherever you get your podcasts.

We'd love to hear from you!A late 19th century South London childhood shaped by poverty, illness, and instability. These are the tough beginnings of a generational creative talent that would emerge into global stardom, and exile. On these South London streets, and in the backrooms of its pubs, the music hall begins.  Unruly, unforgiving audiences. If you wanted attention, you earned it. This is where Charlie Chaplin learned his craft – born out of survival.A performer at aged five. Workhouses at age seven. On stage again before age ten. By his twenties, Chaplin leaves for America to join a new start up industry - moving pictures. Within years, he becomes the most recognizable figure on earth, a self-made man. The Tramp. The walk, the resilience, the quiet defiance. It originated not in California, but South London. In the next episode of Publicity – The Guidebook Gap, we’ll walk Charlie Chaplin’s formative years through Walworth, Kennington, and Lambeth. The workhouse, music halls, eviction addresses, and the pub where he last saw his father. Every stop a chapter in how a South London kid in borrowed clothes became the most recognizable person on earth.Charlie Chaplin’s London - Poverty. Pubs & Music Halls, Episode 10 available Tuesday April 7 wherever you get your podcasts.

We'd love to hear from you!It's all about London's great street food in this episode. We start with a famous Earl who named the humble sandwich. John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich, is remembered not for his long career at the Admiralty, nor for giving Hawaii its first English name, but for a piece of bread with meat inside it. We follow that legacy into the broader story of London's street food - from Roman oyster shells in the mud of Londinium to the eel pie shops of the Victorian East End, the surprisingly global origins of fish and chips, and the foods that didn't survive long enough to be romanticized. We visit the George & Vulture Pub, Cornhill, home of the Earl of Sandwich's Hellfire Club, The Red Lion, Barnes - the pub running the world's biggest sausage roll competition. We trace the line from a jellied eel to the birth of British rock and roll, and ask why the oyster went from the food of the poor to the food of the privileged while the whelk just disappeared. Plus the best street food markets in London, and where to find the city's finest fish and chips.

We'd love to hear from you!Bite Me – The Upper Crust & Underbelly of London Street FoodApril 1779. A man waits outside a London theatre with two loaded pistols. A lady he’s enamored with is about to leave the building. The problem is she’s the mistress of another, well known man. What happens next will scandalize the city.Who is this other well-known man? You probably had at least one of these snacks named after him already this week. This is Publicity – The Guidebook Gap. I’m Expat Andy, broadcasting from Miami in the sunshine state. My job is to be your insider guide to the London that doesn’t make it onto the highlight reel - the London that’s hidden in plain sight, if you know where to look… History, culture, pubs, and all.Our next Episode, Episode 9, is titled Bite Me – The Upper Crust & Underbelly of London Street Food. It’s about London street food – the portable kind you eat with your hands, on the go. It’s about John Montagu - the Fourth Earl of Sandwich. Hellfire Club member. First Lord of the Admiralty. The man who accidentally named Hawaii. The man who died broke. And the man whose defining contribution to human civilization may have been invented at a gambling table – or a desk - depending on which version of the story you prefer.It’s about the East End of London, and the eel. The only creature that could survive in the filthy Victorian Thames. And the food culture it produced that’s still - just barely alive today.It’s about Greggs. And Pret. And fish and chips. And why “as cheap as chips” no longer means anything.It’s about London’s famous food markets such as Borough Market. Their Cornish pasties, pork pies, sausage rolls, and scotch eggs.And it’s about a pub named after a food, that became famous for something else entirely. It launched the careers of the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, and Eric Clapton in the process.London’s food. London’s myths. London’s pubs.Launching wherever you get your podcasts Monday March 23.

We'd love to hear from you!We're off to Marylebone - using the neighborhood's dark origins as a launch pad for a story of spectacular reinvention. Our walk begins at Marble Arch, where a barely-noticed pavement plaque marks the site of Tyburn Tree - London's primary gallows for nearly six hundred years and the execution ground for over 50,000 people. From there, we traces how the area shed its grim "Tyburn" identity through a medieval rebranding around a church dedicated to St Mary, eventually becoming the elegant Georgian grid of Harley Street, Portland Place, and Baker Street laid out by the Portland and Portman estates in the 18th century. Against that backdrop, Expat Andy guides listeners through a carefully chosen set of historic pubs - including the 1791 Barley Mow on Dorset Street, one of the last free houses in central London, with its rare surviving Victorian drinking booths - weaving in characters ranging from executed highwaymen and Catholic martyrs to Charles Babbage and the piano player Tony "Fingers" Pearson, who has been holding court at the Golden Eagle on Marylebone Lane since 1988. Marylebone's pubs are the living memory of a neighborhood that reinvented itself so thoroughly it nearly erased its own history. Its pubs are the best place to find what was buried underneath. 

We'd love to hear from you!Trailer for Episode 8 - Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Marylebone StyleThis is Marylebone. Its story - told through its pubs - is one of execution and resurrection, bodysnatching and high society, muddy fields and marble halls. What? You expected Sherlock Holmes, didn’t you? Well, your guidebook will cover the detective, we’re going to be detective, as today, we decode Marylebone, the Publicity way… I’m Expat Andy, broadcasting from Miami in the Sunshine State. You’re listening to Publicity – The Travel Guidebook Gap. Episode 8 drops March 9. Until then catch up on former episodes at publicitythepodcast.com

We'd love to hear from you!In this episode, we rip the polished Instagram filter off Covent Garden and ask a far more interesting question than “Where’s the Apple Store?”We ask what scene this place is playing. Beneath the street performers and opera crowds lies a district that has shape-shifted more times than London itself. From monastic vegetable patch to aristocratic social experiment, from chaotic fruit-and-veg battlefield to theatreland playground of actors, rogues, and bare-knuckle brawlers. Designed as a pristine piazza for “Gentlemen and men of ability,” it veered way off script, and filled with market traders, taverns, gossip, vice, and spectacle. When you build a stage, London sends in a cast. Through pub lore, architectural ambition, market mayhem, and near-demolition drama, we trace how Covent Garden became a pressure valve between power and performance - a place that was never what it was supposed to be, and is far more compelling because of it. By the end, you won’t just see Covent Garden - you’ll decode it. 

We'd love to hear from you!What if the secret to understanding a London neighborhood and its pubs… were the grocery stores?In this episode of Publicity – The Guidebook Gap, Expat Andy takes us to the City of London - where historic pubs and modern finance meet. We reveal a travel planning superpower - The Publicity M&S Litmus Test. By learning to decode the type of Marks & Spencer nearby, we’ll know exactly what kind of neighborhood we're in - and what kind of pub experience to expect.This isn’t about lists, or lectures. It’s about reading the city, and going beyond your guidebook.We'll walk Fleet Street, duck into Leadenhall Market (pun intended), and sip stout in historic cellars. Most importantly, we’ll understand why certain pubs feel like neighborhood living rooms… and others... boardrooms with beer.

We'd love to hear from you!Brutalist estates, haunted pubs, Roman temples, and a river you've never seen—Part 2 of our world exclusive Walbrook walk dives deep into the hidden heart of London. Join Expat Andy as he traces the true, long-lost path of the Walbrook to its mouth on the Thames. Along the way: buried tributaries, literary ghosts, the city’s first coffee shop, and a riverside mystery that ends at a freight terminal. This isn’t just history—it’s a revelation beneath your feet. 

We'd love to hear from you!Beneath London’s bustling streets flows a river you’ve never seen—and until now, we’ve all been walking it wrong. In this world exclusive, Publicity uncovers the true path of the lost Walbrook River, hidden for over 600 years. Join Expat Andy as he follows this buried waterway from Roman Londinium through plague pits, pubs, and surprising side streets. From Islington’s ghostly springs to Shakespeare’s stomping grounds, this is history with a pint in hand and a story around every corner. 

We'd love to hear from you!A guided walk through 275 years of urban failure, reinvention, and the long, slow gentrification of Notting Hill - told through the pubs that developers built first (usually before they went bankrupt). From gravel pits and pig farms to punk gigs and overpriced pints, we trace how these buildings reveal the neighborhood’s real story. Featuring forgotten racetracks, bad drainage, Joe Strummer, Tsarist Russia, and one wildly confident pub that stood alone on a muddy hillside. Welcome to the pubs that built Notting Hill - and survive to tell the tale.

We'd love to hear from you!Why did Bermondsey’s working-class pubs serve up pints to tanners reeking of dog poo. While Hampstead boasts literary haunts filled with poetry and spa visitors? It’s not luck. It’s topography - for the answer is buried deep. From glacial gravel, to wandering water, to the winds of fortune, this episode takes you on a rollicking ride through the forces that shaped London’s pub map long before the first pint was pulled.From gravel terraces and Victorian fogs to posh mews pubs and riverside alehouses, we’re mapping the city through sediment.You’ll learn why there are more Tube lines north of the river (hint: mud), why Belgravia even exists (money and dirt - literally), and how pub names like The Flask or The Woolpack are basically geological signposts in disguise.This isn’t trivia. This is the secret decoder ring for understanding where pubs are, what they meant, and why your pint tastes different in Hampstead than it does in Bermondsey.Listen before you plan your next trip - because the ground beneath your feet might just tell you more than your guide book.

We'd love to hear from you!Welcome to Publicity - London By Pub - the travel podcast that helps you actually experience London, not just tick off landmarks.In this debut episode, we crack open Chelsea - London’s posh-meets-punk neighborhood -where our host Andy (a British expat now based in Miami) retraces a trip that should’ve been epic… but ended in full-on travel regret. With Expat Andy on board, we’ll get to revisit Chelsea but with a walking tour of five iconic pubs, each one a portal into the stories guidebooks don’t tell - from royal scandals to Rolling Stones auditions to a still-unsolved murder in the cellar.From bohemian past to posh present, Chelsea's pubs are more than just pretty pints - they're cultural cornerstones. From The Cross Keys to The World's End, each stop reveals a different side of Chelsea - art, royalty, punk, pottery, and that unsolved murder.You’ll also learn why British pubs are disappearing fast, and why visiting them now isn’t just fun - it’s urgent.This is trip planning meets storytelling. A podcast to listen to before you pack your bag.

We'd love to hear from you!Ever traveled only to realize you walked past everything that mattered? Hosted by British expat Andy from Miami alongside an American traveler and a London local, Publicity explores London's neighborhoods through their historic pubs - not as drinking destinations, but as silent witnesses to the culture, revolutions, and stories that shaped each area. With a balanced perspective added by two co-hosts – an American traveler, and a London local, and through conversations with architects, historians, interior designers, publicans, and local travel guides, the show uses pubs as decoder rings to help you actually experience London's neighborhoods rather than just recognize them. Whether you're planning your first trip or your fiftieth, Publicity helps you avoid coming home with a suitcase full of FOMO and regrets, ensuring you remember what you felt and contributed to these living, breathing communities.