Scrooge's London - Visit the sights that inspired A Christmas Carol

A trick of the light inspired one of the creepiest scenes in A Christmas Carol, or so the story goes. Strolling down a West End street on a foggy afternoon, Charles Dickens is said to have believed a grotesque door knocker grinned at him, prompting the scene where the ghostly visage of Ebenezer Scrooge’s late partner Jacob Marley appears on his door knocker. “It became well known that he based it on a door knocker on Craven Street and people kept coming to look at it,” explains historian Richard Jones, who has been leading Dickens walks around London for over 35 years. “The owner put it into a bank vault and its whereabouts are now unknown.” Strapped for cash in 1843, Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in just six weeks. The novella was an immediate bestseller and has inspired countless film adaptations. In the latest, which is due to open in cinemas and theatres on 4 December, the characters are portrayed by dancers and voiced by Martin Freeman, Carey Mulligan, Andy Serkis and Simon Russell Beale. But while the phantom door knocker may have disappeared, it’s still possible to find fragments of Scrooge’s London amid the Square Mile’s gleaming skyscrapers, office blocks and sandwich shops. 

 

THE COUNTING HOUSE 

 

Scrooge’s counting house lies in a court off Cornhill, one of the City’s main thoroughfares, and it’s easy to imagine it tucked down the narrow lanes at the street’s southern end: St Michael’s Alley, Change Alley and Newman’s Court. “They’re time capsules,” says Jones. “Walk into those alleyways and you really feel you’ve gone back to Dickens’s London.” A church “whose gruff old bell was always peeping slyly down at Scrooge” looms over the counting house. This could be St Michael’s, which was rebuilt by Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London. Many who walk down Cornhill fail to notice the ornate entrance squeezed between offices, but step inside and you’ll find a flamboyant High Victorian interior and beautiful stained glass windows. 

 

SCROOGE’S GRAVE 

 

On the corner of Cornhill, just steps from St Michael’s, is another church. The little lane behind it, St Peter’s Alley, brings you to a rare oasis of green in the financial district: an old churchyard. This could be where the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge his grave. “It’s quite a creepy little churchyard,” says Jones. “Dickens described it as ‘walled in by houses’, and not many churches in the City are walled in.” Dickens mentions the churchyard in Our Mutual Friend, describing the graves as “conveniently and healthily elevated above the living”. While the churchyard in A Christmas Carol is overrun by grass and weeds, St Peterupon-Cornhill’s is now a well-maintained public garden. Across the road is one of London’s oldest markets, Leadenhall Market. Originally a meat, poultry and game market, it would have been just the spot to buy a turkey – as Scrooge does when he awakens, a reformed man, in the final chapter. The lovely painted roof dates from after Dickens’s day and now houses smart boutiques that twinkle with Christmas fairy lights.

 

 

MELANCHOLY TAVERN 

 

On Christmas Eve, Scrooge stops off for a “melancholy dinner” at “his usual melancholy tavern”, which may be based on the chop houses hidden down the other tiny alleys off Cornhill: Simpson’s Tavern, which dates back to 1757, or the George & Vulture, which was a favourite haunt of Dickens and pops up regularly in his first novel, The Pickwick Papers (he described it as “very good, old fashioned and comfortable”). For decades, his descendants have held their family Christmas lunch in the Dickens room. Diners still sit in cosy wooden booths to tuck into the hearty, old-school fare, which is best washed down with a porter. 

 

 

DICKENS’S HOUSE

 

For a taste of a Dickensian Christmas, head to the author’s former home at 48 Doughty Street in Bloomsbury, a Georgian terraced house that’s been lovingly restored to how it was in his day and is now the Charles Dickens Museum (dickensmuseum.com). Every December, the building is beautifully dressed for the season and this year is no different. “It’s the only one of his London houses from his successful period that has survived and you can feel the spirit of Dickens in there,” says Jones. Due to the pandemic, the museum’s festive events have moved online, including a candlelit performance of A Christmas Carol with puppetry, and the Dickens family discussing Christmas traditions. 

 

CLAIRE WEBB